About

Professor Kent H Eaton is a member of the faculty in the Politics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The department is part of the Social Sciences Division and is committed to scholarly excellence and social impact. Faculty members, including Professor Eaton, have received multiple teaching awards and prestigious fellowships from organizations such as the Guggenheim Foundation. They actively share their research through top academic journals and conferences and participate in globally important policy efforts, including organizing for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The department fosters a vibrant community of faculty, staff, and graduate students dedicated to innovative research and teaching in the field of politics.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Artificial Intelligence
• Political economy
• Economics
• Computer Science
• Public administration
• Law and economics
• Development economics
• Market economy

Selected publications

• Self-rule vs. Shared Rule: The Design and Evolution of Federal Institutions in Colombia

  Perspectives on Federalism · 2020 · 18 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law and economics

  In 1991, Colombia shifted from a territorial regime that combined shared rule with limited self-rule to the opposite configuration: extensive self-rule without shared rule. The radical shift between these two hybrid configurations generates two distinct but related theoretical puzzles. First, why did the 1991 constitution simultaneously empower Colombia’s constituent units with self-rule only to disempower them by eliminating their representation in the Senate? I argue that the same democratizing forces that sought to strengthen territorial units via self-rule also had the effect of undermining shared rule by transforming the Senate into a body that would be elected in a single nationwide district. Second, what explains the instability of self-rule without shared rule in the years after 1991 when the opposite configuration had achieved such stability in the century before 1991? This paper shows how, once they lost their representation in the Senate, regional actors had few institutional levers at the national level they could use to veto recentralization and defend their newfound self-rule.

• Bogotá's Left Turn: Counter‐Neoliberalization in Colombia

  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research · 2020 · 15 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political economy

  Abstract For the political left, decentralization has increased both the appeal and the importance of governing the city, and yet sharp constraints limit the left's transformative potential when it controls that level of government alone. Bogotá is an important case in point under the recent mayoral administration of Gustavo Petro (2012–15), a demobilized guerrilla leader who sought to implement a series of urban policy reforms that together represent one of the most substantively radical and intellectually coherent attempts to challenge neoliberalism in all of Latin America. Focusing on the four policy arenas through which Petro hoped to transform the city (environment, housing, transport, and trash collection), the article documents the veto power of the firms whose privileges he threatened, as well as the tools through which they derailed reform. In contrast to the failure of his political economy agenda, Petro was indeed able to enact a number of progressive social policy reforms precisely because they did not threaten the profitability of the city's entrenched growth machine.

  DOI

• Territorial Peace Without Territorial Governments: The Centralising Logic of the 2016 Colombian Peace Accord

  Journal of Peacebuilding & Development · 2020 · 20 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Colombia’s 2016 peace accord emphasises the concept of “territorial peace” but denies meaningful roles for territorial governments—a design decision that is especially puzzling given the recent prominence of local governments in peacebuilding initiatives around the world. This article argues that the pursuit of territorial peace without territorial governments can only be understood by broadening the temporal frame in ways that problematise the evolution of these governments over time. Decentralising reforms were at the heart of an earlier failed effort to end Colombia’s armed conflict in the 1980s and 1990s, leading both sides in the 2016 accord to draw different, but similarly negative, lessons about decentralisation. Guerrilla and government negotiators alike eschewed local governments but not for the reasons emphasised in the peacebuilding literature. Furthermore, Colombia’s earlier experience with decentralisation also exposed serious capacity deficits at the local level, raising questions about territorial governments as viable partners in building peace.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kevin O’Brien

  Intel (United States)

  36 shared

• Timothy J. Colton

  36 shared

• John Waterbury

  36 shared

• Barry Eichengreen

  University of California, Berkeley

  36 shared

• Robert L. Tignor

  36 shared

• Deborah J. Yashar

  36 shared

• George W. Downs

  36 shared

• Charles Lipson

  36 shared

Awards & honors

• Martin M. Chemers Award for Outstanding Research in the Divi…
• Daniel Elazar Distinguished Scholar Award from the American…
• Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship…
• Golden Apple Teaching Award in the Division of Social Scienc…

Similar researchers at University of California, Santa Cruz

• Jonathan J Fortneyh-125
• Jason Xavier Prochaskah-125
• Piero Madauh-108
• Jin Zhong Zhangh-106
• Carol Greiderh-100