2014 APSA Africa Workshop: Distributive Goods and Distributive Politics
With a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Political Science Association (APSA) is organizing a workshop on “Distributive goods and distributive politics” from June 30th to July 11th, 2014 at the the Higher Institute of Public Administration (ISAP) in Maputo, Mozambique....
Principal Investigator(s):Anne Pitcher, Brian K Min
Arab Social Scientist Visitor Program
The University of Michigan will host a number of Arab social scientists. At a time of transition in the Arab world, when hope and uncertainty intermingle, U.S. engagement in general and collaboration between Arab and American scholars in particular are more important than ever. CPS recently hosted...
Principal Investigator(s):Mark A Tessler
Collaborative Research: An Organizational Approach to State Repression: The Northern Ireland Research Initiative and the Troubles, 1968-1998
This project will greatly improve our understanding of state repression/human rights violation and the circumstances involved with their use as it steps away from the largely invariant structural characteristics highlighted within the existing literature. The potential impacts of the findings are...
Principal Investigator(s):Christian Davenport
Collaborative Research: Measuring Apparent Race and Ethnicity with Applications to the Study of Discrimination
Literature suggests that darker-skinned, less European-looking Blacks and Latinos face greater discrimination and experience worse socioeconomic outcomes than their lighter, less racially or ethnically “prototypical” counterparts. Attesting to the importance of this line of research, the U.S....
Principal Investigator(s):Christian Davenport
Comparative Digital Politics and Democratization
The project on Comparative Digital Politics and Democratization surveys the broad intersection of information-communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure adoption and long-term processes of democratization, and in particular the impact of digital media use on political change in developing...
Principal Investigator(s):Christian Davenport
Development of an Election Forensics Toolkit: Using Subnational Data to Detect Anomalies
Current efforts to promote the integrity of elections around the world are multi-pronged. They include promoting the development and capacity of independent election agencies, ballot reform, and on-the-ground monitoring of elections by domestic and foreign observers. Social scientists have been...
Principal Investigator(s):Allen D Hicken
Disaster Recovery in Nepal
This project addresses the theoretically and practically important question of how sustainable development interventions affect the ways that rural households recover from disasters. The study is set in Nepal, where the PIs have been involved for several years in an analysis of the...
Principal Investigator(s):Arun Agrawal
Do Institutions Affect the Attitudes and Behavior of Constituents? Evidence from an Environmental Management Program in India
This project investigates some of the most basic puzzles in the social sciences: How and to what extent do institutions affect individual attitudes and behavior? The central aim is to examine how individuals’ exposure to and involvement in a new local resource governance program in rural northern...
Principal Investigator(s):Arun Agrawal
Economic Empowerment of Women through Entrepreneurship in the MENA
The primary goal of this program is to provide economic empowerment fellowship opportunities to women and minority entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, small business owners, and business development activists from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The main objective of this program is to...
Principal Investigator(s):Arun Agrawal
Elite Communications and Racial Group Conflict in the 21st Century
In the past few decades, the racial and ethnic composition of the United States has undergone dramatic changes. This project studies the ways that co-ethnic political elites and interest group leaders can shape the attitudes that African Americans, Latinos, and Whites have about one another. The...
Principal Investigator(s):Vincent L Hutchings, Rob Mickey
Evaluation of the Juvenile Justice Prevention Programs for the Michigan Department of Human Services
Rosemary Sarri provides consulting and technical expertise for the Michigan Public Health Institute. Her area of expertise is the Bureau of Juvenile Justice. She is responsible for consulting with MPHI project staff, providing technical assistance to DHS-BJJ, reviewing grant proposals, creating...
Principal Investigator(s):Vincent L Hutchings, Rob Mickey
From Fareej to Metropolis: A Social Capital Survey of Qatar
The objective of this project is to assess the level-amount of social capital in Qatar. Broadly defined, social capital refers to connections within and between social networks; it is usually a measurement of social interaction, political participation, readiness for critical incidents and social...
Principal Investigator(s):Mark A Tessler
Games Theory, Culture and Institutional Path Dependence
There has been a prolonged effort in political science to understand the force and weight of history. This project uses an interdisciplinary effort involving ideas from political science, economics, game theory, and complexity theory that seeks to gain insight into the relationship between...
Principal Investigator(s):Mark A Tessler
Human Development and Political Leadership: The Influence of Personal History on Foreign Policy Decision
Academics, policy makers, and the electorate all take as given that the life experiences of presidents, prime ministers, and other executives profoundly affect the way they will behave once in office. Somewhat surprisingly, most international conflict research focuses primarily on system and...
Principal Investigator(s):Mark A Tessler
Inspiring and Accelerating Entrepreneurship in MENA Youth
To provide fellowship opportunities to young entrepreneurs, nongovernmental organization (NGO) leaders and business educators from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The main objective of this program is to expose entrepreneurs, small business owners, private sector development specialists...
Principal Investigator(s):Mark A Tessler
Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Effectiveness of Aid-Funded Programs: Spatial Analysis of Developmental Outcomes
Much of development aid devoted to poorer countries is organized into projects with specific goals. Evaluating the effectiveness of aid projects in the developing world presents a challenge. Credible evaluation plans can be difficult to institute for ethical, logistical, financial and other...
Principal Investigator(s):Ken Kollman, Allen D Hicken, Brian K Min
Management of Complex Data Structures: Upgrades to EUGene data software
EUGene is a Windows based data management tool for creating data sets with the country-year, directed-dyad-year, non-directed-dyad-year, and directed-dispute-dyad-year as the unit of analysis. EUGene makes a number of cumbersome tasks easier, especially data sets created with the directed dyad-year...
Principal Investigator(s):Ken Kollman, Allen D Hicken, Brian K Min
Mapping Forest Cover and Poverty Globally
Although some recent research has sought to identify the nature and degree of overlap between forest cover and levels of poverty, much of this work has been constrained to a small number of countries. Relatively little is known about how forest-poverty relationships vary across countries, or how...
Principal Investigator(s):Arun Agrawal
Mass Political Attitudes in the Arab States of the Gulf: Administering the Arab Democracy Barometer in Qatar and Kuwait
The objective of the project is to conduct the Arab Democracy Barometer (ADB) survey in Qatar and Kuwait. The ADB is a rich, multi-country survey research project that collects data for theory-driven and policy-relevant inquiry in order to provide a broader and more accurate understanding of...
Principal Investigator(s):Mark A Tessler
Micro-Foundations of Conflict Escalation (MiCE)
Micro-Foundations of Conflict Escalation (MiCE) will improve understanding of how and why conflicts escalate. Previous research has, for the most part, treated conflict as an either-or phenomenon. If it has shown any interest in escalation, it has confined itself to pointing to very broad...
Principal Investigator(s):Christopher Jennings Fariss
Natural Experiments on the Relationships Among Drug Legalization, Crime, Violence, and Political Mobilization
This project studies law, police activity, and citizen reaction through studies of two particular situations – the killing of a suspect by police and the resulting public protests; and the effects of marijuana legalization upon the occurrence of crime in neighboring regions. Both studies involve...
Principal Investigator(s):Christopher Jennings Fariss
Positive Empirical Models of Election Frauds
Election forensics describes a growing body of work devoted to using statistical methods to try to determine whether the results of an election are accurate: whether the results are the collective choice implied by citizens’ intentions given the election rules. Building on previous models, this...
Principal Investigator(s):Walter R Mebane Jr
RAPID: Quasi-Experiment on the Effect of Disaster-induced Displacement
This project examines the political consequences of Hurricane Harvey by studying post-Harvey migration patterns as an event with serious political and economic consequences. This framework examines variations in the decision of displaced individuals to move to different areas and how this affects...
Principal Investigator(s):Christopher Jennings Fariss
Regional Integration in the Gulf: A Survey of Citizen Attitudes toward the Gulf Cooperation Council
In May 2011, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) created an international stir when it openly discussed a possible expansion of its membership, which has remained stable in the thirty years since the organization’s founding in 1981. Yet this initiative, if perhaps the most dramatic, is but the...
Principal Investigator(s):Mark A Tessler
Russia and the ‘normal country’ debates
Is, was, or will Russia ever be a “normal” country? Writers and public figures, West and East, have been staking out their position on aspects of this theme for more than a century. For scholars, the question whether Russia is a normal country subsumes several questions that have seized...
Principal Investigator(s):Mark A Tessler
Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI)
This project is a multi-year partnership between Qatar University and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Under the partnership, faculty and staff from the Institute for Social Research collaborate closely with Director Darwish Al-Emadi of Qatar University to establish,...
Principal Investigator(s):Mark A Tessler, David Anthony Howell
Support for Conferences and Mentoring of Underrepresented Groups in Political Science
This proposal requests resources to continue efforts by the Society for Political Methodology to support under-funded graduate students, expand mentoring and networking efforts for women and under-represented minorities, and to develop new inclusive programs for making the subfield more...
Principal Investigator(s):Rob Franzese
The 2016 Election Research Preacceptance Competition
This competition is for scholars who want to conduct research on the 2016 election. With generous support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, we are offering an award of $2,000 and placement on a panel at a major political science conference to scholars who publish an article in which…
Principal Investigator(s):Arthur Lupia
The Conflict Consortium
The Conflict Consortium endeavors to bring together two groups of 18 scholars for the purposes of solidifying relationships in the field of subnational conflict, developing a list of best practices as well as most commonly utilized variables to assist in field development and to provide...
Principal Investigator(s):Christian Davenport
The Data Access & Research Transparency (DART): A Joint Statement by Political Science Journal Editors
This project is a new way for social scientists to achieve greater data sharing and research transparency. Transparency requires making visible both the empirical foundation and the logic of inquiry of research. The goals of this project are to 1) Require authors to ensure that cited data are...
Principal Investigator(s):Arthur Lupia
The Measurement and Identification of Media Priming Effects in Political Science
Media priming has been established as one of the most important ways in which the information about campaigns affects public opinion. By changing the criteria citizens use to evaluate policies and politicians, the media conditionally affect public opinion. Recently concerns have been raised about...
Principal Investigator(s):Nicholas A Valentino
The Political Control of U.S. Federal Agencies and Bureaucratic Political Behavior
This project develops and presents three substantively new hypotheses concerning congressional strategies of delegation, the policy outputs of agencies, and bureaucrats’ motivations for serving as federal employees. To test these theories, the project presents a method for using federal employee...
Principal Investigator(s):Jowei Chen
The Political Economy of Power Outages in Ghana: New Measures and Analysis
Access to reliable energy is crucial for economic growth. Yet while global attention has focused on increasing access, an under-recognized constraint in many countries is poor reliability of electricity supply. In Ghana, despite heavy investments to expand access to 80% of the country, an ongoing...
Principal Investigator(s):Brian K Min
Tracking Light From The Sky
For the 1.3 billion people estimated to lack electricity around the world, the World Bank plays a critical role in financing rural electrification and lighting improvement projects. While these projects are regularly monitored and evaluated, no mechanism exists to track the sustainability and...
Principal Investigator(s):Brian K Min
Training a New Generation of Russian Social Scientists and Diffusing Social Science Expertise of Russian Regional Universities
This project’s central aim is the training of the next generation of international social scientists. Working in conjunction with the European University of St. Petersburg, Russia, there have been three major components to the program: the placement of young scholars from the European University...
Principal Investigator(s):Brian K Min
Understanding and Designing for User Expectations of Algorithmic Media
This research will study human and machine co-curation of online news feeds and develop new software to compare the user’s intent with respect to idealized feed curation, when algorithms filter what appears in online news feeds. This will be combined with research that investigates the user’s...
Principal Investigator(s):Christian Sandvig
Understanding Marginalized Communities in the Arab World through Social Science Research: Gaining Insight, Enhancing Capacity, and Building Collaborations to Impact the Region
This project addresses two primary gaps in knowledge: insufficient practical solutions for improving the lives of marginalized groups in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and a skills gap facing junior Arab social scientists in MENA that limits their ability to produce rigorous, data-based,...
Principal Investigator(s):Mark A Tessler
Workshop on Genes, Cognition and Social Behavior
This project organizes a one-day interdisciplinary workshop, to be held at NSF and attended by approximately ten faculty members from around the United States. The purpose of the workshop is to specify concretely how and where research on genetics, cognition, and social behavior will generate...
Principal Investigator(s):Arthur Lupia
Workshop on the Analysis of Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY) Data
The Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY) has followed a national probability sample of 7th and 10th grade public school students for the last 25 years and is the largest and most comprehensive data set available to examine the factors that contribute to student and young adult interest in...
Principal Investigator(s):Jon Miller