CPS News

Posted March 13, 2023. This week, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University announced its 2023-24 fellows class, 37 scholars and practitioners representing 22 U.S. institutions and nine international institutions and programs. CPS Faculty Associate Ceren Budak, who is an Associate Professor of Information (School of Information) and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (College of Engineering) was named among them. Professor Budak’s research interests lie in the area of computational social science– and particularly in the use of large scale data sets and computational techniques to study problems with policy, social and political implications.

Members of the 2023-24 class conduct research in a variety of fields in the social and behavioral sciences and cognate disciplines, including anthropology, architecture, communication, economics, education, history, information science, law, medicine, organization studies, philosophy, political science, psychology, public health, sociology, and urban studies and planning. Since its inception in 1954, CASBS has brought together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future.

Posted July 27, 2022. Arthur Lupia will serve the Bold Challenges initiative as Executive Director, leading U-M collaborative research efforts addressing social changes intersecting with equity, health, infrastructure, and sustainability. His two-year term begins in September. “I am committed to doing all that I can to help the University of Michigan act with urgency and integrity to serve today’s, and tomorrow’s, generations with maximum impact and unrelenting humanity,” said Lupia.
Read more in the University Record

Posted July 25, 2022.  Rosemary A. Sarri, a long-time University of Michigan researcher and professor, passed away on Monday, July 25. She was 95. A leading expert in child and family welfare policy and the criminal justice system, Sarri worked to improve social welfare programs throughout the world. She collaborated with universities in Australia and Korea and worked to strengthen and develop educational standards and curriculum guidelines in social work education programs in Russia. You can read more about Sarri’s life and impact here.​

Posted June 22, 2022. Seeing Us in Them: Social Divisions and the Politics of Group Empathy by Cigdem V. Sirin, Nicholas A. Valentino, and José D. Villalobos will receive the American Political Science Association (APSA) best book award at the 2022 APSA meetings. This award is given annually for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs.
Read more about this book.

Posted June 22, 2022. Ted Brader’s book, Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work, will receive the Philip E. Converse Book Award for his book at the 2022 American Political Science Association (APSA) meetings. The Converse Award recognizes the author(s) of an outstanding book published at least five years ago. Congratulations, Ted!

Posted May 4, 2022. Vincent Hutchings is among the most recent inductees into the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest distinctions for a scientist or engineer in the United States. Congratulations, Vincent!
Read more in the University Record

Posted April 29, 2022. Yuen Yuen Ang is the 2022 recipient of the Tronstein Award, which is given in recognition of innovative and outstanding teaching of undergraduate students in the University of Michigan Department of Political Science.​ Congratulations, Yuen!

Posted April 25, 2022. Josh Pasek’s was one of the recipients of the Provost’s Teaching Innovative Prize for his project “Simulating Interactions Between Science and Policymaking.” Congratulations, Josh!
Read more about this work in the University Record

Posted March 25, 2022. Vincent Hutchings will receive the Rackham Distinguished Graduate Mentoring Award. This award recognizes tenured faculty from any discipline who are outstanding mentors of doctoral students, who have a sustained record of mentoring and advising doctoral students, and are active in the direction of dissertations. Congratulations, Vincent!

Posted March 8, 2022. Jule Krüger and Ragnhild Nordås won the 2021 Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) Reproducibility Challenge for their work “Data Processing Principles for Auditable and Reproducible Research.” Learn more about the challenge. 

Posted September 27, 2021. Skip Lupia will receive the Merriam Award at the 2021 American Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting. The Charles E. Merriam Award was established by the Association to recognize a person whose published work and career represent a significant contribution to the art of government through the application of social science research. Congratulations, Skip!

Posted July 8, 2021. Mai Hassan’s book, Regime Threats and State Solutions: Bureaucratic Loyalty and Embeddedness in Kenya, is the recipient of the 2021 Robert A. Dahl Award. The Dahl Award is given annually by the American Political Science Association to an untenured scholar who has produced scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy. Congratulations, Mai! Learn more about this book from the CPS Blog.

Posted July 8, 2021. Edgar Franco Vivanco, whose article, “Killing in the Slums: Social Order, Criminal Governance and Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro,” is the recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award. The Eulau Award is given annually by the American Political Science Association for the best article published in American Political Science Review in the previous calendar year. Congratulations, Edgar!

Posted May 17, 2021. Our faculty conduct research to explore the role of race in politics and society. Their work examines attitudes about social justice movements, policing and protest, and voting behavior. You can read more about CPS faculty expertise on race here.

Posted May 11, 2021. Ronald F. Inglehart, 86, died on May 8, 2021, after a long illness. One of the world’s most cited political scientists, Inglehart published over 400 peer-reviewed articles and authored or coauthored fourteen books during his career. His books have been translated into many languages, and his theories have been analyzed and studied in most global and regional contexts. You can read more about Ron’s distinguished career here.

Posted February 24, 2021. Minority representation would drop sharply if states equalized the adult citizen population rather than total people when redrawing legislative districts, according to research by Jowei Chen and Nicholas Stephanopoulos. They describe their research on gerrymandering in The Washington Post. Read Chen and Stephanopoulos’s piece here. 

Posted February 24, 2021. A unique panel survey conducted in 24 countries reveals the dual impact that the COVID-19 crisis has on values, emotions and the economy. Four decades of research by Professor Ronald Inglehart show that usually crises make people more authoritarian and xenophobic, but in the unique case of the global COVID-19 pandemic with lockdowns and freedom restrictions the effects are very different.

Read more about the results of this survey.

Posted February 22, 2021. Christian Davenport has been appointed as the Mary Ann and Charles R. Walgreen Professor of the Study of Human Understanding by the Regents of the University of Michigan. This professorship was established in the late 1960s to support the study of political and sociological factors that are relevant to the subject of human understanding, and to emphasize the study of the underlying causes of lack of understanding between people. Congratulations, Christian!

Posted February 9, 2021. Because of her award-winning work on treaty design, Barbara Koremenos has been asked by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to participate in some small-group meetings on Cooperative Responses to Common Threats as part of the Project on Rethinking the Humanitarian Health Response to Violent Conflict. Over the past couple of years, she has also served on two National Academies of Sciences panels, using her research as the basis for policy recommendations.

Posted August 31, 2020. Mai Hassan and Thomas O’Mealia won the best article award from the African Politics Conference Group of the American Political Science Association (APSA) for their article, “Uneven accountability in the wake of political violence: Evidence from Kenya’s ashes and archives,” Journal of Peace Research, 55(2), 161-174. Congratulations!

Posted July 17, 2020. “Professor Lupia has been hailed as one of the leading political scientists of his generation,” Rackham Graduate School Dean Michael Solomon wrote in his recommendation. “He has contributed path-breaking and highly influential research in a wide variety of topics, including electoral behavior, public opinion, direct democracy, legislative organization, institutional design, policy implementation, and the impact of electronic media.” Read more in the University Record.

Posted June 6, 2020. Jenna Bednar is the 2020 winner of the Daniel Elazar Distinguished Federalism Scholar Award. This award is given by the Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations section of the American Political Science Association. It recognizes Jenna’s “distinguished scholarly contributions to the study of federalism and intergovernmental relations.” Congratulations!

Posted June 6, 2020. Mara Ostfeld received the award for her paper “The New White Flight?: The Effects of Political Appeals to Latinos on White Democrats”. This article extends work focusing on the increasing identification of blacks with the Democratic Party to appeals to Latinos. Ostfeld identifies several key mechanisms for the relationship between such appeals and changing white attitudes toward the parties, and then develops experiments to test those mechanisms. Congratulations!

Posted May 26, 2020. Kenneth Lowande and Chuck Shipan received the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Founders Award for “Where is Presidential Power? Measuring Discretion with Experts and Laypersons.” The award is given annually for the best paper on the presidency and executive politics.noreferrer”>Read more in the University Record.

Posted May 1, 2020. Vincent Hutchings received the 2020 Tronstein Award for his innovative and outstanding teaching of undergraduate students in the U-M Department of Political Science. Congratulations!

Posted March 31, 2020. James Morrow is the recipient of the inaugural Distinguished Scholar in the Scientific Study of International Processes (SSIP) section of the International Studies Association. Read more.

Posted June 26, 2019.  Angela Ocampo’s dissertation, The Politics of Inclusion: A Sense of Belonging to U.S. Society and Latino Political Participation will receive the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Race and Ethnic Politics Section’s award for the best dissertation in the field at the fall 2019 APSA meetings. Congratulation Angela!

Posted May 7, 2019. Christian Davenport was elected to the was elected to the Peace Science Society (International). Davenport co-directs the Conflict Consotrium at the Center for Political Studies and is a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. His primary research interests include the conception, causes and after effects of political conflict — such as human rights violations, genocide/politicide, torture, political surveillance, civil war and social movements — measurement, racism and popular culture. Congratulations Christian!

Posted Sept. 26, 2018. Christian Sandvig was named the H. Marshall McLuhan Collegiate Professor in Digital Media by the University of Michigan Board of Regents. This is a newly-created professorship, which honors H. Marshall McLuhan, who is best known for the theorization of digital media. Congratulations, Christian!

Posted Sept. 12, 2018. Brian Weeks, along with Homero Gil de Zúñiga and Alberto Ardèvol-Abreu, received the award for Best Information Technology and Politics Article at the 2018 APSA Annual Meeting. Their article “Effects of the News-Finds-Me Perception in Communication: Social Media Use Implications for News Seeking and Learning About Politics” was published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Congratulations Brian!

Posted May 14, 2018. Anne Pitcher won the 2018 Dudley Seers Memorial Prize for best article in The Journal of Development Studies for 2017. The article is “Party System Competition and Private Sector Development in Africa”, The Journal of Development Studies, vol. 53, no. 1 (2017): 1-17. Congratulations Anne!

Posted May 1, 2018. Arun Agrawal was elected to the National Academy of Sciences for his research and teaching emphasize the politics of international development, institutional change and environmental sustainability. He has written critically on indigenous knowledge, community-based conservation, common property, resource governance, and environmental beliefs and identities. Congratulations Arun!

Posted April 30, 2018. Yuen Yuen Ang was named to the 2018 class of Carnegie Fellows. Ang’s project proposes to study economic development from an unconventional perspective: how new markets emerge in poor, weak states despite constraints or by turning constraints into strengths — rather than by first achieving good governance in first-world forms. Ang wrote How China Escaped the Poverty Trap,” which won the 2017 Peter Katzenstein Book Prize and was named “Best Books of 2017” by Foreign Affairs. Congratulations Yuen!

Posted April 18, 2018.  Christian Davenport was elected to the was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Davenport co-directs the Conflict Consotrium at the Center for Political Studies and is a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. His primary research interests include the conception, causes and after effects of political conflict — such as human rights violations, genocide/politicide, torture, political surveillance, vicil war and social movements — measurement, racism and popular culture. Congratulations Christian!

Posted January 1, 2018. Mara Ostfeld has won the Midwest Political Science Association’s (MPSA) Lucius Barker Award for her paper, “The New Racial Realignment: Democratic Appeals to Latinos and White Support for the Democratic Party.” The Lucius Barker Award is given to the best paper on a topic investigating race or ethnicity and politics and honoring the spirit and work of Professor Barker. Congratulations Mara!

Posted May 2, 2017. Donald Kinder was elected to the National Academy of Sciences for his path-breaking contributions to the study of American politics. He has spend his professional career at the Center for Political Studies in the Institute for Social Research, which has been the academic home of many members of the National Academies. Congratulations Don!

Posted August 16, 2016. Yuri Zhukov received the Bruce Russett Award for best paper published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution during 2015, for his paper “Population Resettlement in War. Congratulations Yuri!

Posted August 8, 2016. Rocio Titiunik won the prestigious Society for Political Methodology’s 2016 Emerging Scholar Award. She was enthusiastically and unanimously commended for her excellent contributions to the field of political methodology. Mentioned as impressive is her Econometrica paper on RD methods. Congratulations Rocio!

Posted June 14, 2016. Andrew Martin won APSA’s prestigious Lasting Contribution Award from the Law and Courts section. Andrew D. Martin, University of Michigan & Kevin M. Quinn, University of California, Berkeley, “Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953-1999.” 2002. Political Analysis 10:134-153. Congratulations Andrew!

Posted June 8, 2016. Robert Mickey won APSA’s J. David Greenstone Prize for the Best Book Published in the Past 2 Years in Politics and History: Paths Out of Dixie. Congratulations Rob!

Posted May 23, 2016.  Special congratulations to Arun Agrawal who was named Samuel Trask Dana Professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment. This is a well-deserved recognition for Arun.

Posted February 15, 2016. Stuart Soroka gave his Michael W. Traugott Professor of Communication Studies and Political Science Inaugural Lecture on February 10, 2016. The lecture was entitled “Bad News Good Democracy”. Congratulations Stuart (and Mike)!