Ph.D. Candidate

Department of Political Science

The Ohio State University

Curriculum Vitae  

2014 Derby Hall, 154 North Oval Mall

Сolumbus, OH 43212-1373
Phone: (614) 292-0511
Fax: (614) 292-1146

sokhey.3@osu.edu 

In my dissertation, Market-Oriented Reforms and the Role of Private Actors: Social Policy Formation in Post-Communist Countries, I address the following empirical question:  Under what conditions do private businesses play a determining role in market-oriented reforms? In Russia and across the post-communist countries private businesses played a central role in the formation of pension systems, but were much less involved in the design of healthcare. To explain this, I draw on 54 personal interviews with public and private experts on pensions and healthcare in Russia including bureaucrats, politicians and the heads of insurance companies and private pension funds. I also utilize several unique datasets tracking the adoption and implementation of market-oriented reforms in pensions and healthcare across the post-communist countries. In healthcare post-communist governments focused on the adoption of a single policy option (establishing a national health insurance system), while in pensions the government was faced with a wide array of possible policy options. I find that the unique expertise of private actors made them useful in reducing the technical difficulty of pension design resulting from many possible policy solutions, but not the government’s deliberation over whether and how to adopt a national health insurance system. This dissertation challenges traditional interest group research by explaining how a group’s influence depends on issue-specific characteristics, not group traits or political institutions alone.

This web page was last updated in December 2008.                                       

My dissertation committee consists of the following professors:

Professor Timothy Frye (co-chair)

Professor Sarah Brooks (co-chair)

Professor Irfan Nooruddin

Professor Marcus Kurtz