The Tessler Fellows Fund
The Tessler Fellows Fund will support a graduate student at the University of Michigan in Political Science who is being mentored by faculty in the Center for Political Studies, with a preference for those who study comparative politics and need funding for fieldwork and data collection. Multiple types of data collection are eligible, including dissertation-related fieldwork to gather quantitative or qualitative information. This fund provides awards up to $6,000.
Application Process
Information about the competition, award amount, and eligibility, along with links to apply, will be available on this website at the end of the calendar year.
Please email any questions to [email protected].
Award Winners
2024: Revisiting the power of distributive policy under dictatorship: Does autocratic distributive policy strengthen its legacy?
By Hanna Lee
Project Description
Thinking that authoritarian legacy can be one powerful source of many citizens’ support for illiberal elite behavior, my academic pursuit has focused on understanding the influence of authoritarian legacy on the calculus of when and why people abandon democratic values. Specifically, my current research examines, both theoretically and empirically, 1) different channels of authoritarian legacies, and 2) factors explaining heterogeneity in legacy effects.
2023: Maybe in my Backyard: How Refugee-Host Cooperation Promotes Peace and Prosperity
By Rebecca Wai
Project Description
I am working with a development program funded by the Danish embassy called, “Northern Uganda Resilience Initiative” to evaluate their farmer group program. Most of their evaluation focuses on agricultural productivity, so my dissertation will add value by helping them understand how farmer groups influence peace and cooperation between refugees and hosts too – which is also a goal of NGOs but is usually targeted with separate programs. I hope that with my work, I will help inform the design of NGO farmer group programs and show that these programs can both increase peace and economic productivity.
My educational pursuits would not be possible without the generous support from this scholarship. Thank you for enabling me to pursue my dreams of researching on authoritarian legacy and democratization.
This award is vital to funding my survey of refugees and host communities in Uganda about their cooperation through farmer groups. With this help, I can expand my sample size and add survey experiments to understand attitudes towards refugees of different ethnicities and nationalities. I am interested in cooperation between refugees and host communities. However, as I have spent more time in the field, I have also realized that ethnic conflict between refugees in their home countries are carried over and are another factor to consider in fostering cooperation. Therefore, I am grateful that this award allows me to explore the intra-refugee ethnic dimensions of refugee-host cooperation too.