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
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.