This profile was current as of May 2022, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.
Alix Basden is working with Professor Illenin Kondo, who studies the interactions of infrastructure and democracy through an economic perspective. Basden has formatted and standardized a poll taken by over 40,000 citizens called the AfroBarometer, hoping to interpret ways that roads and connectivity to society can change social and public opinion. Basden also works with Professor Katie Jarvis, who is in the process of writing a book about French society in the wake of the French Revolution. Together, they are studying the democratization of forgiveness in everyday French society at the time, and ways in which the state, the church, and other institutions created new protocols for forgiving in a culture being built on rubble. Primarily, the work has focused around local justice of the peace positions, which sought to repair community relationships through voluntary adjudication, and the revolutionary cult of Théophilanthropie. This study of peace-building can be analyzed and applied to small-scale conflict resolution around the world today. Basden is writing an economics thesis on transparency and its effects on health outcomes in francophone West Africa under the direction of Professor Lakshmi Iyer.
Basden received a Gary Lyman Internship Award in the summer of 2019 in order to complete an internship with Louisiana Medicaid. She served as a researcher and legislative tracker in the office, which is a pioneer in health technology, and returned in the summer of 2020 amid the COVID-19 crisis. Over the summer of 2021, she interned at Catholic Mobilizing Network, focusing on anti-death penalty legislation and community organizing, along with completing the Congregation of St. Joseph’s Internship in Leadership through Ministry.
Thesis Title: Transparency and its Effects on Health
Thesis Adviser: Lakshmi Iyer
I am interested in how institutions shape outcomes for people, especially in cases of weaker institutional frameworks affecting the quality of life for everyday people. This translates into a desire to work on evidence-based policy recommendations to strengthen governmental institutions.
Right now, I am helping Prof. Jarvis compile primary source documents on Théophilanthropie using ARTFL, along with helping Prof. Kondo with a book review for JEL about a potential African monetary union. My thesis is still early stages, but I am looking at Access to Information laws in the region, along with DHS datasets and Afrobarometer waves.