Quinn Albaugh
Spring 2018 Bobst Dissertation Graduate Grant Recipient
Quinn is using her Bobst grant to conduct research on her dissertation on political parties and group representation. She conducted an in-depth field study of political parties in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Her grant supported travel to 25 local district nominating conventions and to in-person interviews with party insiders and candidates, along with the hiring of research assistants in Canada to construct an original historical dataset of local candidate nominations based on newspaper coverage of party nominating conventions. These materials allow her to trace how parties control their nominations and shape how women, ethnic minority groups and the working class enter elected office.
Elizabeth Baisley
Spring 2018 Bobst Dissertation Graduate Grant Recipient
Elizabeth’s work examines polarization on sexuality politics in the US and Canada. The dissertation focuses especially on how interest groups spur party position change by working through federal party nominations, leadership races, and party policy conventions. Bobst funding assisted with the collection of materials to both document and explain polarization. These included restricted materials from private archives, interviews, roll call voting records, and public opinion data.
Megan Brand
Fall 2018 Bobst Dissertation Graduate Grant Recipient
Megan is using her Bobst support to access archival documents maintained by UNHCR and by British and Egyptian sources. Her dissertation examines how political leaders use legal tools, both international and domestic, to classify, aid, and resettle refugees. Her research compares state negotiations that take place as an international refugee agreement comes into existence with actual state responses to refugees from Hungary, Palestine, Kosovo, and Iraq.
Julian Dean
Spring 2018 Multi-Center Graduate Grant Recipient
Julian’s research focuses on special interest litigation against regulatory agencies in the United States. Funding from the Bobst Center has enabled him to work with a team of research assistants to create new data for empirical research. When completed, this research will allow us to better understand how private actors can influence public policy and how courts act as a venue for political competition.
Noel Foster
Fall 2018 Bobst Dissertation Graduate Grant Recipient
Noel Foster has drawn on Bobst Center support for his dissertation on hybrid threats, with an emphasis on influence and information operations in the Baltic countries of Estonia and Latvia from 2007 to 2019. Noel’s work explores the connections between inter-state competition and efforts to shape preferences and attitudes among domestic audiences. Noel has conducted interviews of Estonian opinion leaders, think tank specialists and academics focused on regional security concerns, as well as public opinion formation. He is also running a survey-embedded experiment to test an original theory of the mechanisms behind information operations, namely how messaging efforts serve to polarize rather than to persuade, targeting disparate societal groups with the same content.
Alexander Kustov
Spring 2018 Bobst Dissertation Graduate Grant Recipient
Alexander’s dissertation examines under what conditions most voters would accept increasing immigration. Widespread opposition to immigration among educated and racially egalitarian voters is hard to explain using existing frameworks of self-interest or prejudice. He addresses this puzzle by developing a theory of parochial altruism, which argues that many people are willing to help others at a personal cost, but they want to help their fellow citizens first. As a result, voters tend to favor harsh immigration restrictions that they perceive as necessary to secure the well-being of compatriots. To test his theory against alternative explanations, Alex is using his Bobst grant to conduct an original survey in the UK.
Alexandra Mayorga
Fall 2018 Bobst Dissertation Graduate Grant Recipient, Spring 2018 Multi-Center Graduate Grant Recipient
Alexandra’s dissertation explores the relationship between hostility, identity and political behavior among immigrant-minority populations in the European context. She will use her funding to carry out an original survey to experimentally manipulate exposure to hostility on targeted minority groups in the UK. These data will become essential empirical material in assessing the degree the political incorporation of immigrant-minorities is affected by the attitudes and behaviors of the native-majority.
Tanika Raychaudhuri
Spring 2018 Multi-Center Graduate Grant Recipient
Tanika’s dissertation explores why Asian Americans, a growing immigrant group with some Republican predispositions, vote for Democrats in U.S. national elections. This research considers existing theories and develops a novel theory of “social transmission” grounded in partisan influence from peers rather than the family. She is using her Multi-Center Graduate Grant to conduct a methodologically innovative experiment that provides a direct causal test of this theory. The experiment simulates partisan interactions on social media between the friends of 650 Asian American and white college students, testing for the effects on partisan preferences. This research has important implications for understanding the political behavior of new immigrant constituencies in the United States.
Anatoly Levshin
Spring 2018 Bobst Dissertation Graduate Grant Recipient
Tolya’s dissertation examines the creation of the League of Nations and United Nations as organizations of collective security. Drawing on extensive archival research, he will retrace the evolution of official thinking about international security cooperation during the World Wars in the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia as the three great powers that played the most substantial roles in rebuilding the postwar orders. The inclusion of Russia is particularly valuable, because little is known in Western historiography about the development of policy thinking there during the World Wars. The grant provided by the Bobst Center enabled Tolya to travel to Moscow and, through on-site work at the Archives of the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation, examine previously unpublished documents bearing on the evolution of the Soviet Union’s leadership’s conceptions of international security during the Second World War.
Patrick Signoret
Fall 2018 Bobst Dissertation Graduate Grant Recipient
Patrick used his Bobst dissertation grant to study how relative order and peace have been maintained—or reclaimed—in some Mexican cities even as large-scale criminal violence has persisted in surrounding areas. With Bobst funding, he has carried out fieldwork in several Mexican cities and hired research assistants to help code local- level criminal group presence and security apparatus attributes over the last decade.
Daniel Tavana
Spring 2018 Bobst Dissertation Graduate Grant Recipient
Daniel is using his Bobst grant to conduct research for his dissertation on the origins of electoral oppositions in the Middle East, using the Kuwaiti opposition as a paradigmatic case. Daniel spent the last academic year and this fall semester in Kuwait interviewing roughly 100 current and former MPs and candidates who participated in elections to the Kuwait National Assembly (KNA). He is currently working with a team of research assistants to create a dataset of roll call votes in the KNA from 1963 to the present. The dataset is currently being developed from parliamentary minutes obtained from the Kuwait National Assembly archives. Roll call votes, aggregate election results, and interview material will form the basis of the dissertation project’s empirical chapters.
Erik Wang
Fall 2018 Bobst Dissertation Graduate Grant Recipient
Erik’s dissertation studies the unintended consequences of efforts to fight corruption for the bureaucracy and the state. It argues that anti-corruption efforts could have a negative effect on bureaucrat’s productivity by frightening bureaucrats away from informal practices that would otherwise help them accomplish daily tasks. The project combines an original dataset for anti-corruption inspections in China with various measures of productivity by bureaucrats. He is currently working on developing another measure of bureaucrats’ productivity, which relies on the quantitative targets specified in land development plans released by Chinese local governments. The grant helps him recruit research assistants to digitize and record information from these previously untapped documents.