Brendan McElroy

Brendan McElroy is Assistant Professor (Tenure Stream) of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His research explores the intertwined processes of state formation and elite transformation in early modern Europe and Russia, with an emphasis on representative institutions as sites of interaction between government and society. He is currently preparing a book manuscript under the provisional title Enlisting Cooperation: States, Landed Elites, and Agrarian Reform in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Europe. The book explores the causes and consequences of state intervention in the lord-peasant relationship, seeking to explain why some governments were so much more successful than others in enlisting the support of established elites and corporate groups for agricultural "modernization" and other development goals. My findings, based on archival research carried out in Estonia, Germany, Latvia, and Russia, challenge prevailing theories of state formation and of the relationship between representation, property rights, and long-term economic growth.

Before joining the Department of Political Science, Brendan was a Postdoctoral Fellow (2020–22) at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.