Aaron Schneider
Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar
Assistant Professor
Tulane University
Aaron Schneider received a Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar award in Fall 2009 to support research about On the Wealth of States: Fiscal Federal Sociology in Brazil and India. At the time, he was an Assistant PRofessor in the Department of Political Science and the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University.
Schneider's work focuses on the intersection of wealth and power, and he has conducted research in Latin America, India, and Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, he emphasizes the study of public finance as a window into the political economy of development and democracy. The way governments secure contributions from key social groups, and how they decide what to do with the money tells a story about the nature of national political communities – who is in, who is out, and who will enjoy what benefits of membership. Among other projects, Schneider's main ongoing enterprise is a comparative project on India and Brazil, examining the political impact of similarly successful but quite divergent strategies of insertion into international markets. The project explores emerging markets in global capitalism and how domestic political institutions of federalism and political parties respond to distinct macroeconomic constraints.
Title of Research : On the Wealth of States: Fiscal Federal Sociology in Brazil and India
While at UNM, Schneider's research emphasized an approach rooted in the experience of developing countries, where externally induced fiscal challenges press upon governments still negotiating the challenge of building capable states. In particular, he drew upon library archives to focus on the historical evolution of Brazilian federal fiscal sociology from colonialism to the present, examining the collections of Brazilian government documents and records of revenues and expenditures from the 1800s to the present.
