About the Center for Political Studies



				Center for Political Studies Institute for Social Research University of Michigan P.O. Box 1248 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248 Voice: (734) 763-1348 Fax: (734) 764-3341
		Archived Announcements 2008 Organski Award Winners The Center for Political Studies is pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 Kenneth Organski Scholars Fund award: Papia Debroy and Barb Koremenos for their project, "Achieving Breadth and Depth in International Multilateral Agreements: The Strategic Design of Membership Provisions." In this project, Papia and Barbara are trying to better understand the conditions under which states form and find success in multilateral agreements, especially those with both depth and breadth. They will test the fundamental hypothesis that due to the types of cooperation problems that states face, as well as different payoff structures for cooperation across issue areas, actors will design deliberate and strategic membership provisions to achieve deep cooperation. They plan to use case studies and large scale statistical analysis of economic and environmental agreements to test his hypothesis. View the Koremenos/Debroy 2008 Winning Organski Proposal Congratulations to Papia and Barb! The Kenneth Organski Scholars Fund supports graduate students doing quantitative research in international politics and or political development. A.F.K. Organski was a distinguished scholar and a legendary teacher for many years at the University of Michigan. He is best known for his theoretical and empirical work on political capacity and demographic and power transitions. In prior years, Organski Scholar funds have also been used as matching funds allowing several graduate students to compete for funding to support their doctoral research. 2008 Pierce Award Winners The Center for Political Studies is pleased to announce the 2008 Roy Pierce Scholars Fund award winners. Thanks to the generosity of the donors, we were able to make two awards this year. The first award went to Kenichi Ariga and Rob Franzese. Their proposal is titled, "Empirical Estimation of the Electoral Value of the Party Label in Developed Democracies." Most current research in comparative politics and political economy emphasizes the impact of political institutions (parliamentary vs. presidential, federal vs. unitary, etc.), but misses the critical roles that parties and the intensity of party identification play in the electoral process and on policies and policy outcomes. Kenichi is currently creating a complex dataset of district- and candidate- level election results across 18 countries over the post-war era. The Pierce Award will enable Kenichi to analyze the data and develop appropriate statistical models over the summer. Importantly, this project is central to his dissertation and the Pierce Award will enable him to complete his dissertation on a timely basis. View the Franzese/Ariga 2008 Winning Organski Proposal The second award goes to Johannes Urpelainen and Jana von Stein. Their proposal is titled "International Non-Governmental Organizations and Government Repression: When is Campaigning Effective?'' As you know, International Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have become increasingly visible actors in world politics in recent years. Their activities blur the line between "domestic" and "international" in interesting ways. Indeed, NGOs lobby not only in Washington, but also in New York and Geneva; they monitor behaviors that have traditionally fallen within the purview of nation-states but now have important international implications; and they push both for the international creation of agreements and for domestic ratification. Although NGOs are only now beginning to attract widespread interest in the International Relations literature, some research has for a number of years been interested in what these groups do and what effects they have. With few exceptions, these scholars concur that NGOs "matter" - i.e., they have an impact on important outcomes such as human rights, economic development, and/or environmental protection. Domestic activists can channel information and provide evidence of "bad behavior" to powerful NGOs such as Amnesty International. The latter, in turn, can exert pressure on powerful democracies to sanction the very governments that are engaging in "bad behavior." Johannes and Jana will combine their substantive interests and respective methodological skills to produce research that sheds light on some of the most pressing questions about NGOs. They are both interested in how NGOs work and whether they "matter"; Johannes's comparative advantage is in game theory, whereas Jana's is in statistical methods. By collaborating on this project, they will: (1) develop game-theoretic models of NGO/state interactions, with observable empirical predictions; (2) test those predictions quantitatively. They will use the Pierce Award to support Johannes over the summer and to hire an undergraduate research assistant to assist with his research project. View the von Stein/Urpelainen 2008 Winning Organski Proposal Congratulations to these four scholars! The Roy Pierce Scholars Fund provides summer support for two graduate students in the University of Michigan Political Science Department to work with a member of CPS faculty. The Pierce Fund honors Roy Pierce, who for almost 50 years was associated with Michigan's Department of Political Science. He became a researcher in the Center for Political Studies in the 1960s and remained active there until his death. Roy was a leading scholar of French politics and a creative practitioner of genuinely comparative research. Von Stein Awarded CICS Human Rights Fellowship The Center for International and Comparative Studies has awarded two faculty fellowships for 2007-2008, one in the area of human rights, and one for work on international development and security. The Fellows will offer an undergraduate seminar for students enrolled in the International Studies Minor, and will deliver a public lecture. Jana von Stein, Assistant Professor of Political Science, has been named the 2007-2008 Human Rights Fellow. Her primary field of interest is International Cooperation (particularly compliance with international agreements), and her work more generally covers International Relations, Quantitative Methods, and Comparative Politics subfields. She will teach a course for the International Studies Minor in the fall of 2007 (CICS 401) entitled International Law and the Politics of Human Rights. She will deliver the Human Rights Lecture in October 2007 on The Origins and Effects of International Human Rights Law. Sarri Receives Mentoring Award Rosemary Sarri, Professor Emerita of Social Work and Research Professor Emerita at the Institute for Social Work, has been selected to receive a 2007 Rackham Distinguished Graduate Mentoring Award. Sarri completed her graduate work at the Universities of Minnesota and Michigan. Her research focuses on juvenile justice and child welfare, as well as on the impact of federal and state policy on the well-being of children. She has been involved in international social work education for many years in Asia, South America, and Australia. She is curently assisting in the development of graduate social work education at the University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. Her most recent book, co-authored with Josefina McDonough, is Women at the Margins: Neglect, Punishment and Resistance. Lupia to Receive Innovation Award Skip Lupia (along with co-PI, Diana Mutz at the University of Pennsylvania) will be recognized at the annual meeting of the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) as recipient of the Warren Mitofsky Innovators Award, (formerly the the AAPOR Innovators Award). The award recognizes accomplishments in the fields of public opinion and survey research that occurred in the past ten years or that had their primary impact on the field during the past decade. Lupia and Mutz are being recognized for the creation of TESS (Time-sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences) an NSF-funded infrastructure project that offers researchers opportunities to test their experimental ideas on large, diverse, randomly-selected subject populations. Bednar and Page Awarded Fellowships Jenna Bednar has been awarded a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, CA for the 2007-08 academic year. She will focus on her research on the coevolution of culture and institutions. Scott Page will be visiting the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences for the 2007-2008 academic year. While at CASBS, Scott will be working on his institutions and culture project that is part of the Air Force MURI grant that he and Jenna Bednar received along with scholars from UM, MIT, and Northwestern. This project applies agent based modeling, game theory, and learning theory to the study of institutional performance and choice. Lupia Wins 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship CPS Research Professor Arthur "Skip" Lupia has won a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship and will use the award to complete a book on political knowledge and civic engagement. The 2007 Fellowship winners include 189 artists, scholars, and scientists selected from almost 2,800 applicants for awards totaling $7,600,000. Decisions are based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisors and are approved by the Foundation's Board of Trustees, which includes six members who are themselves past Fellows of the Foundation. Page's Book, The Difference, is Published The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (Summary From Princeton Press) In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to each other. The Difference is about how we think in groups, about how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity-not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities. The Difference Web site Princeton University Press site, including Podcast interview with Page NCID Faculty Fellows The National Center for Institutional Diversity is very pleased to support the work of five distinguished faculty fellows during the 2006-2007 school year: Deborah Carter, Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education Rosie Ceballo, Psychology and Women's Studies Greg Markus, Political Science, Center for Political Studies (ISR) Ian Robinson, Sociology, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations with community practitioner Elena Herrada Toni Villarruel, School of Nursing, Center for Health Promotion with faculty members Lynn Wooten, Richard Redman, and Ricardo Guzman The National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID) aims to prepare people for active engagement in a diverse society and works toward building productive inclusive communities at the University of Michigan and beyond. Each NCID Fellow will be expected to work on a significant project of data gathering and analysis, or other creative activity that furthers the mission of diversity at Michigan and beyond. The participants will work with a team that consists of either graduate or undergraduate students, U-M staff, and/or community partners. Burns and Kollman Awarded CASBS Fellowships Nancy Burns will be a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Palo Alto from September, 2006 through May, 2007. She will be writing a book, coauthored with Donald Kinder, examining the consequences of gendered and racial ideas for political thought and action. Ken Kollman is also on sabbatical at CASBS from September, 2006 through June, 2007. He will be researching and writing a book on leadership in federations. The book project includes studies of leadership accession in a variety of historical time periods and settings, including the modern European Union, 19th Century United States, the Roman Catholic Church, the Plains Indian federations, and the AFL-CIO. 14 July 2006 Robert Franzese Named Acting Director of CPS Robert J. Franzese, Jr. has been appointed Acting Director of the Center for Political Studies for 2006-2007, beginning in late August, while Nancy Burns is on leave. Professor Franzese's research interests center on the comparative and international political economy of developed democracies. His work has focused on how political and economic (a) institutions (e.g., electoral & governmental systems, central bank independence, labor-market organization, etc.), (b) structure (e.g., income distribution, party-system polarization and fractionalization), and (c) circumstances/events (e.g., elections, terms-of-trade shocks, etc.) affect macroeconomic policymaking: its character and its efficacy. His research agenda has produced several journal articles and conference and working papers on the monetary-, fiscal-, and other economic-policy effects of, for example, participation, representation, veto actors, delegation, central bank independence, wage bargaining institutions, and international context and institutions. It has also produced his book on the democratic (mis-)management of the Keynesian Welfare State: Macroeconomic Policies of Developed Democracies, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2002. From this central agenda in macro-, positive, political economy, Professor Franzese's research and teaching interests branch into related issues in the comparative and international politics of developed democracies and quantitative empirical methodology. 10 July 2006 CPS Welcomes Koremenos and von Stein Barbara Koremenos joined Michigan as an Associate Professor of Political Science in September 2005. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1999. She also received an M.P.P. from Chicago in the early 1990s. Much of her research applies game theory to issues of institutional and agreement design. She has published in International Organization, Journal of Legal Studies, Rationality and Society, and American Political Science Review. She is co-editor of a special issue of International Organization (Fall 2001) entitled, "Rational Design: Explaining the Form of International Institutions," in which she co-authors the theoretical framework article as well as the conclusion. She is the second political scientist ever to receive a National Science Foundation CAREER Award ($250,000) for her project entitled, "Designing International Agreements: Theoretical Development, Data Collection, and Empirical Analysis," which addresses the continent of international law from a political science perspective. Jana von Stein's broad areas of research and teaching interest are: international cooperation and institutions; the relationship between domestic politics and international relations; and statistical methods. Jana's current research seeks to understand when and why states comply with the international legal commitments they make. To understand what impact international law might have on state behavior, she also examines why states initially sign international agreements. The research project examines the questions of why states commit and why they comply in three areas of international cooperation. In the realm of economics, the study looks at the relationship between commitment to the International Monetary Fund and current account restrictions. In the realm of human rights, the project examines the relationship between ratification of the International Labor Organization (ILO) Minimum Age Convention and child labor; and the relationship between ratification of the ILO Equal Remuneration Convention and gender wage equality. Finally, in international environmental affairs, the study looks at the relationship between commitment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and greenhouse gas emissions. Jana von Stein joined the faculty at Michigan in September 2005.