Akshay Govind Dixit is a PhD student of Political Economy & Government at Harvard University. He studies beliefs about inequality and preferences for redistribution, with a focus on South Asia. Much of his ongoing research is motivated by two observations. First, despite living in societies where the poor are likely to stay poor, people often believe that effort or hard work determines their economic outcomes more so than family background or luck. Second, in lower-income countries, those who believe that hard work determines economic outcomes—merit-oriented individuals—are more likely to support welfare spending. This is in contrast to the literature from high-income countries, which documents how merit-oriented individuals tend to be less supportive of welfare. What explains the prevalence of merit-oriented beliefs despite low upward mobility? And why is it that merit-oriented individuals often support welfare programs in lower-income countries but oppose them in high-income countries? These questions speak to a broader inquiry into the determinants of political ideology. Akshay’s work in the coming year will focus on answering these questions, utilizing a combination of natural and survey-based experiments along with qualitative interviews in India. Prior to graduate school, Akshay worked as a Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. He holds a Master’s degree in International & Development Economics from Yale University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Presidency College in Kolkata, India.

Anna Mikkelborg is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation seeks to explain the motivations behind and locate the limits of white allyship by studying the identity politics of white Democratic voters. First, she studies the content of white identity among racial liberals to understand the extent to which they understand this identity in the same way that racial conservatives do versus deriving some other significance from it that might motivate their political behavior. Second and relatedly, I focus on the emotional aspect of white identity politics by studying the effects of white guilt and white shame on behavior. Her final paper suggests that white Democratic voters support Black candidates in part because they wish to address racial inequality, but also because they perceive these candidates to be more progressive. Broadly speaking, her work seeks to understand the motivations that underpin white Democrats’ growing racial liberalism, as well as in testing the limits of that liberalism. Answering these questions will contribute to broader research agendas, in the United States and beyond, that focus on why and when members of dominant groups mobilize to dismantle the group hierarchy. She holds a BA in Law, Societies and Justice & Political Science from the University of Washington.

Deepika Padmanabhan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. Her research focuses on the politics of language ideology, state responsiveness and internal migration. In her dissertation project, she uses mixed methods — including interviews, archival research, and experiments — to study how national and subnational political elites use state machinery to influence the everyday linguistic choices of citizens in multilingual contexts. Consequently, she examines how everyday linguistic choices go on to shape the identities and ideologies of multilingual citizens. In particular, she argues that these choices are constrained by the specific histories of linguistic nationalism, which shape how languages are perceived and the kinds of politics that they are associated with. Apart from her interest in language, she conducts research on the politics of non-news media, fandom, and celebrity politicians. She holds a BA in Political Science from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai and Master’s degrees from the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University and the Department of Politics, New York University.

Erika Ricci is a PhD Candidate in Security Studies and Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) at the University of Central Florida’s School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs (SPSIA). Her dissertation research asks why do some people engage in political violence, but others remain peaceful? How do judges respond to terrorists? She addresses these questions by explaining the experience of the Italian leftist Red Brigades during the 1970s. While most studies focus on dead or former militants, her research is based on interviews with former militants and “almost members”. Almost members are people who could have joined militant groups but decided not to. Including them in the study is important because it is hard to know exactly why people become terrorists if we only talk to them. They might be very similar to people who did not become terrorists in many ways. She holds a BA in International Relations and a MA in European and International Policies at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.

Esra Gules-Guctas is a PhD candidate at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Public Policy. Her study examines how legal consciousness is produced in the context of algorithmic harms and the grounds that enable perception of injuries/algorithmic harms resulting from the use of technologies of poverty management (e.g., disability benefits determinations, unemployment fraud determinations, and food assistance) . Data collection will consist of in-depth semistructured interviews, court opinions, trial transcripts, witness testimony, and discovery materials from existing legal challenges involving these technologies. In addition, the study will examine the extent to which automation bias and presumed fairness (i.e., the tendency to assume technological tools are reliable and neutral) interfere with individuals’ recourse to law. The study draws upon insights of literatures on public administration, critical data studies, human-computer interaction, procedural justice, legal mobilization, and legal consciousness. In doing so, it addresses the need for sociolegal scholars to develop more holistic perspectives concerning how individuals engage with and resist algorithmic decision-making systems. Understanding the factors that influence citizens’ decisions to mobilize the law have important implications for understanding the current state of judicial scrutiny of automated decisions; the judiciary may be the first to address the novel challenges posed by algorithmic governance.

Eui Young Noh is a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University. Her project aims to understand how schools shape citizens. Political scientists have long argued that schools teach students to be engaged citizens and more education means more civic activity but the evidence for this is mixed. As opposed to previous research that views schools as a place that nurtures active citizens by teaching civics, her project views schools as a formative social experience for citizens. She argues that education happens in social settings among teachers and peers, and individuals learn politically relevant self-conceptions from the nature of social interactions in school. Exploring civic effects of the social experience of education helps us understand how schools matter for shaping citizens even in the absence of civics content. This broadens a limiting view of education as relevant for political life only to the extent that it deals with civic issues. More broadly, she investigates the civic effects of a major shift in education policies around the world from teacher-centered to student-centered models. Doing so helps us understand how such global shifts to student-centered learning will affect what kind of citizens are nurtured in schools and in turn, help societies make informed choices about education policies.

Fred Shaia is a Presidential Fellow and PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Brown University, specializing in international relations and political theory. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Equity in a Warming World: The Global South and the Making of the International Climate Regime, 1972—2022,” explores the role of developing states in UN climate negotiations. International relations scholars have long characterized great powers as rule-makers and small states as rule-takers: the former set the terms and impose them on the latter. According to this narrative, negotiations within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are shaped not by demands from the periphery, but by great powers’ international and domestic interests. Against this view, “Equity in a Warming World” shows how members of the Group of 77 and China (G77) have influenced the political outcomes of the UNFCCC far more than mainstream scholarship acknowledges. Drawing on archival records, interviews with UNFCCC experts, and other primary sources, he traces the mechanisms through which developing states achieve their goals in international climate negotiations. In other words, how the supposed “rule-takers” act as “rule-makers.” On one level, the project provides a new perspective on the origins and evolution of the international climate regime. On another, it seeks to uncover the conditions under which actors who advocate for equitable climate outcomes succeed in international negotiations. Fred holds a Master of Arts (A.M.) in Political Science from Brown University and a Master in Public Policy (M.P.P.) from Harvard University. Before graduate school, Fred spent several years working for international organizations.

Furkan Cakmak received his PhD in Political Science at the Washington State University, where he also received his MA. His research interests are political psychology and political communication in the context of American politics. His dissertation, “When Losing Matters: Emotional Choice of Media and Affective Polarization” examines how partisans’ emotional reactions to political events impact their media choice as well as their views of each other. As affective polarization gains momentum, the need to define the role of media on this phenomenon becomes more evident. While this relationship is still debated, he offers a fresh perspective by bringing in theories from psychology and communication. He claims that the effect of media on affective polarization is conditioned on the emotional reactions of partisans and how they use media as a result of these reactions. Thus, rather than focusing on which media outlet people choose, he argues that we should investigate the role of emotions behind those choices to grasp the relationship between media and affective polarization. This research contributes to the existing literature on media choice and affective polarization while also offering practical solutions which could be applied to real-world issues such as extreme group hostility. Prior to WSU, he received his undergraduate degree in Political Science and International Relations from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Guoer Liu is a PhD candidate in Political Science and Scientific Computing at the University of Michigan. She studies Chinese political institutions, focusing specifically on how interactions among the central and local governments affect policymaking, delegation strategies, and the collection and provision of official statistics. My dissertation project, ‘‘From Oversight to Overlook’’ investigates how political determinants distort the technology infrastructure and create seemingly credible but inaccurate information. She argues that the automation process is more than a technical mission. It is a political endeavor in disguise: Strategic interactions among players with competing interests determine whether to automate and how to automate. The analysis also cautions citizens and policymakers against automatically generated government data and statistics: they should be examined with care nonetheless. As long as political incentives persist, technologies cannot eliminate actors' inclination to deliver numbers in their favor. Her prior research examines institutions that incentivize truthful reporting of decidedly unfavorable information like workplace accidents and deaths in the Chinese bureaucracy. She has a separate strand of research in political methodology, with particular interest in causal inference, survey and field experiments.

Hannah Early Bagdanov is a PhD Candidate at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on state and non-state governance, conflict, and social networks in the Middle East, particularly in Israel/Palestine. Her dissertation, “Everyday Forms of Engagement with the State: Contested Territories, Social Networks, and the Pursuit of Welfare in Israel/Palestine,” examines the political behavior of civilians in contested territories and contexts of conflict. She focuses on the case of East Jerusalem, where Palestinians must make choices regarding when and how to engage with the Israeli state in pursuit of public goods and social services, despite considering Israel’s sovereignty over East Jerusalem to be illegitimate. She asks, how do Palestinians make choices regarding which goods, services, or institutions to engage with and which to avoid, if possible? What makes engagement with certain state-provided goods, services, or institutions controversial, while engagement with the state in other sectors is widely accepted? She argues that choices regarding when and how to engage with the state are influenced by community-wide social norms and the extent to which individuals are embedded in neighborhood social networks.

Hannah holds an MA in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame as well as a BA in Political Science from Westmont College. Hannah will use the DDRIG to support her original survey on Palestinian attitudes towards the Israeli state and patterns of engagement with state institutions.

Hilary Izatt is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the psychological impacts of suppressive electoral institutions. Her dissertation, “The behavioral effects of institutional manipulation and electoral suppression: Political inequality, emotion and mobilization” uses survey experiments and observational natural experiments to show that emotion is key to understanding how and when people participate in collective action in suppressive institutional contexts. Through a unique comparative study based in the United States and Malaysia, Hilary traces how manipulated (gerrymandered) district lines condition anger and spur mobilization among disparate groups. Her research lies at the confluence of institutions and behavior and bridges an important gap between the two paradigms. She shows that even in democratic contexts, like the United States, people who benefit from electoral suppression are less likely to politically engage because they are content with the status quo. Hilary holds a B.A. in Political Science from Brigham Young University, an M.A. in Asian politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and an M.A. in Political Science from Georgetown University. Before pursuing her PhD, Hilary taught undergraduate courses in comparative and American politics as a lecturer at the State University of New York.

Jeremy Siow is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, where he studies the factors shaping political attitudes and social identities during a person’s formative years. Using a combination of observational and experimental designs, a large portion of his substantive research examines how different aspects of the education system influence intergroup prejudice from an early age. These education policies include (1) the language of instruction, (2) the content of civic education, and (3) the types of books covered in literacy classes. In his project funded by the APSA-DDRIG, Jeremy investigates the paradoxical effects of civic education, arguing that the promotion of national identity in civics classes likely reduces animus toward domestic ethnoreligious minorities while simultaneously exacerbating xenophobic sentiments toward immigrants. In so doing, his dissertation provides a nuanced account of the effects of education on intergroup prejudice by calling into question the conventional wisdom that more education always reduces prejudice.

In addition to the APSA-DDRIG, his research has received generous support from the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2) and the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to his PhD program, Jeremy graduated with an M.A. in Political Science and International Studies from Yonsei University, as well as a Bachelor’s degree (B.Soc.Sci) in Political Science from the National University in Singapore.

Jiaqi Lu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science and Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies (joint Ph.D. program) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In his dissertation and ongoing book project, he theorizes and test how policy actors affect China’s decarbonization process through networks. He contend that the composition of the climate policy network and the government’s structural position in it jointly determine the state’s capacity for decarbonizing its energy system. The structure of policy networks provides policy entrepreneurs a platform through which individuals connect and attempt to influence decision-makers, and specific forms of state-societal linkages determine state agencies’ knowledge about and preference for policy choices. As such, China’s decarbonization path demonstrates that the diverse preferences and common ground among stakeholders—including those with internationalties—coexists in the policy arena. It is their intricate interactions in different stages of the policymaking process that determine the state’s ability to deliver on its international pledges. This study systematically identifies the structure of, and individuals in, the energy and climate policy communities in China using social network analysis.

He received a BA in Sociology and MA in International Public Affairs (2014) from UW-Madison. Before coming back to Madison for his PhD in 2018, he was a research analyst at the Brookings Institution (2015-2018), where he worked on energy and climate policy.

Jiseon Chang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, focusing on international relations and methods. Her project examines how we can combat misinformation in countries that receive foreign aid. How are (mis)perceptions of aid created, and how and when are they corrected or worsened? Misinformation and misperceptions regarding aid in recipient countries can impact political outcomes such as voting behavior, aid effectiveness, and perception of state legitimacy. She argues that correcting misperceptions depends on the type of perceiver, especially in developing countries, where there is a relatively large variation in individuals’ educational and informational environments. This project takes a mixed-methods approach including online surveys, survey experiments, field experiments, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions. By researching how accurate information and misinformation are spread, how they establish (mis)perceptions, and how misperceptions are corrected, this project can provide a guideline for policymakers on how to combat misinformation in vulnerable developing countries.

She completed two degrees from Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea): a bachelor's in economics and international studies in Underwood International College, and a master's concentrating on international development cooperation and international trade and economic development in the Graduate School of International Studies.

Julian Gerez is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Columbia University. He studies the political economy of criminal justice policies and their enforcement with a regional focus on the Americas. His dissertation research is on the political causes and consequences of supply-side counternarcotics efforts in Latin America—particularly in Colombia—and argues that incumbent politicians can strategically target and time drug enforcement actions like crop eradication or product seizures to reap political benefits while minimizing electoral costs. The project combines evidence from fine-grained statistical analyses of electoral data, survey experiments, and interviews with key stakeholders to understand these dynamics and has important implications for our understanding of equity in law enforcement and justice, as well as electoral accountability. Additionally, Julian's other projects have examined COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and diplomacy in Latin America and how electoral factors affect capital punishment commutations in the United States. Originally from Colombia, Julian graduated with a B.A. in political science from Northwestern University.

Keng-Chi Chang is a PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests lie in the realm of computational social science, the political economy of information technology, and political methodology. He uses statistical and computational models to study large-scale human behaviors in online communities. Substantively, he is interested in how authoritarian regimes utilize informational tools for control and influence. His project examines how visual memes can be useful for repeating group identity-related contentious narratives. Political actors can use visual memes of misperceptions to reinforce in-group/out-group distinction. Individuals overestimate the popularity of misperceptions, increase their willingness to share/express inaccurate misperceptions. To test this, he first uses computational techniques on Tweets of memes to provide quantitative evidence about what kinds of visual topics are being strategically amplified by state-linked actors on social media. Second, he implements an online survey experiment to quantify the effects of visual media frames. He received a BA and a MA in Economics from National Taiwan University.

Mahesh Acharya is a PhD candidate at the University of Mississippi. His project analyzes the personality of global leaders from their speeches using the recent computational advances as opposed to the existing works that are mostly US-centric and rely on expert ratings. He use the machine learning model to estimate personality scores on the framework of cross culturally validated `Big Five' that is described in terms of five dispositional traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). The second component of his project examines how personality traits influence the political behavior and policy outcomes with a focus on populist leaders. He expects that populist leaders score low on agreeableness compared to the non-populist peers, and the negative facets of this trait| less cooperative, conflict leaning, tough-mindedness, antagonism toward outgroups, etc. can predict populist behavior. He received a MA in Rural Development from Tribhuwan University, Nepal, and a BS (Physics) from Tri-Chandra College, Nepal.

Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Harvard University and a USIP-Minerva Peace and Security Scholar at the United States Institute of Peace. He studies contemporary challenges to democracy, with a focus on Latin America. His dissertation examines what he calls criminal electioneering—deliberate attempts by criminal organizations to influence elections—in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. To explore criminal electioneering, he leverages data from a wide range of sources, including large newspaper archives, voter surveys, elite interviews, social media reports, and administrative datasets. He argues that different criminal electioneering outcomes are driven by three key variables: (1) the level of competition between criminal groups; (2) the relationship between criminal groups and local communities; and (3) the organizational strength of political parties. His findings invite us to reconsider how democracy works—and how it can be strengthened—in places where elections are held in the shadow of organized crime.

Michael Auslen is a PhD candidate in political science at Columbia University. His research in American politics focuses on responsiveness in state and local politics and role of the media. His dissertation examines the role of local news organizations in shaping elite behavior, responsiveness, and electoral accountability in subnational politics. Informed by three years working as a newspaper journalist covering state politics in Florida and local governments in Indiana, his dissertation seeks to understand the mechanisms by which local news affects the behavior of state and local politicians. He also uses text analysis to measure the amount of attention that journalists at local newspapers, TV stations, and online news startups pay to local governments and state officials in their communities. By matching this data with public opinion and administrative data from states and cities, he examines how monitoring by journalists changes the policy outputs of subnational governments. In addition to contributing to our understanding of the effects of media, this research helps us understand how rapid changes in local media environments and declines in traditional news outlets affect subnational politics. His other research projects explore the origins of “culture war” issues as partisan cleavages in American politics and develop methods for using historical surveys to understand state public opinion.

Michael Kriner is a PhD candidate at Cornell university. His dissertation project seeks to understand how peacekeepers from authoritarian regimes impact peace operations' outcomes. He employs a mixed-methods approach to explore how security forces are trained and utilized in authoritarian countries, and how this translates to performance in peace operations. While the literature on un peace operations suggests that, on average, peacekeeping missions do more good than harm, peacekeepers are still accused of engaging in sexual abuse, mistreatment of host-country citizens, and other inappropriate behaviors. Even when peacekeepers are deployed, combatants and civilians can still be at risk, as in the infamous examples of Rwanda and Srebrenica. His research contributes not only to the academic discussion of the composition effects of peace operations, but also to policy debates about how best to stand up un peace operations. His related work assesses how political elites from authoritarian countries, who deploy as part of the political wing of peace operations, affect outcomes like elections in the host country.

Moritz Bondeli is a PhD candidate at Yale University. He studies the political economy of democratization and democratic erosion, with a particular focus on western Europe and the United States. His dissertation research explores the effects of politically motivated violence on the willingness of citizens to run for elected office, the nature of political campaigns, and the in-office behavior of elected politicians. He argues that violence targeting political elites has deeply problematic consequences for democratic life. On the one hand, violence reduces the number of citizens competing for office, induces extremists to enter politics at the expense of moderates, and limits opportunities for representation of women as well as ethnic and sexual minorities. On the other hand, the threat of violence limits politician engagement with everyday citizens during electoral campaigns. this means that citizens have limited opportunities to tell candidates what matters to them and will find it more difficult to learn where candidates stand on important issues. He tests his argument using contemporary and historical data. His work underscores the importance of violence as a cause of adverse selection in politics. In doing so, his research informs broader debates regarding the consequences of rising partisan animosity, the value of a pacified political space and the importance of content moderation for robust yet respectful democratic debate.

He holds a BA in political science from the university of Lausanne (Switzerland), and an MPhil in European politics and society from Brasenose College, Oxford.

Nicole Wilson is a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her dissertation research examines urbanization in Africa. While much of this growth is in informal settlements, middle- and upper-class Africans increasingly reside in private, often gated, communities. In these neighborhoods, services that we typically understand as being under the purview of the state – such as security, water, and electricity – are instead privately provided by an estate developer or management company. What are the implications of this privatization for the relationships between citizens and their government? While moving into a private community is typically seen as a way to avoid dealing with the state, the state is still present in these spaces in various ways. For instance, while receiving private substitutes for basic services should erode willingness to pay taxes, she finds that citizens in gated estates are actually more likely to have paid their property taxes. In some cases, the leaders of the private community may even take on the role of an intermediary, facilitating the relationship between citizens and the state. In short, private residential estates shape citizen experiences not only as an alternative to the state but also as a conduit for it. Understanding more about how the growing group of middle-class Africans engages in politics – and how that engagement is conditioned by the type of neighborhood in which they live – has implications for urban policy and the future of democracy more broadly.

Peter McLaughlin is a PhD candidate in the department of political science at the University of Oklahoma and a research fellow at the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center. His research focuses on the US congress, representation, and public policy. His dissertation, “The Nature, Determinants, and Consequences of Congressional Distributive Politics,” explores the intersection of congressional representation and federal budgetary policy. Using a combination of spending data analysis and survey experiments, the project sheds light on the forces determining where federal money flows and how voters interpret congressional spending decisions. Peter will use the APSA DDRIG to support a national survey experiment that explores how constituents respond to legislators’ efforts to bring home federal spending projects. He argues that members of congress from both parties stand to electorally benefit from bringing home federally funded projects to their districts, but the degree to which legislators are rewarded for such projects depends on how well the projects align with constituent demand. In other words, electoral support is granted to legislators for securing the right district spending rather than securing the most district spending. The survey leverages a two-wave experimental design to test this claim and clarify the role of priority alignment in determining constituent support for legislators’ efforts to secure federal spending projects.

IN addition to the APSA DDRIG, Peter’s research is supported by the Carrie Chapman Catt center for Women and Politics and OU's Dodge Family Research Fellowship. Previously, Peter served as the research director for Vote Smart, a nationwide voter education nonprofit. He holds a BA in government and international studies from Dartmouth College and an MPA from Drake University.

Salih Noor is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University. He studies political development, institutions, and long-run postcolonial development in Africa. In his dissertation, “The Legacies of Liberation in Southern Africa,” he develops a comparative-historical explanation of political change in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe following violent anti-colonial liberation struggles in the second-half of the twentieth century. In efforts to explain divergent institutional legacies of these struggles, political scientists, sociologies, and historians very often emphasize otherwise similar historical structures of settler colonialism in these countries or politico-organizational factors associated with the revolutionary political parties that came to dominate the national political arenas since the dissolution of settler-colonial domination in the region. Through systematic cross-case comparison, in-depth case analysis, and the use of extensive archival data, he carefully traces that the causes of contrasting political systems, with varied patterns of social polarization, in today’s Southern Africa—i.e., inclusive semi-democracies (Angola and Mozambique), militarized semi-authoritarianism (Zimbabwe), and inclusive multi-racial democracies (South Africa and Namibia)—lie in different reform choices that liberation elites pursued with the transition from colonial/white-minority rule.

Additionally, he studies Italian colonialism and its postcolonial development legacies, the political economy of settler institutions, and historical and contemporary forms of indirect rule and their implications for state-building, democracy, and public goods provision in Africa. His research has also received support from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and, at Northwestern University, the Buffett Institute for Global Studies and the Program of African Studies. Previously, Salih earned a B.A in Politics Science (distinction) from University of Asmara, Eritrea, and an M.A. in Political Science ( mit Auszeichnung) from the Osnabrück University in Germany.

Soohyun Cho is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Ohio State University. Her research lies at the intersection of international political economy (IPE), gender politics, and political methodology. In broad terms, she investigates the linkages between economic globalization and workers’ experiences in the domestic labor market, with a special focus on the political consequences of economic and gender inequality in the labor market . In particular, her interests focus on (1) gender gaps in attitudes toward economic policy , (2) firms’ social responsibility in supply chains and workers' experiences in the labor market, and (3) the globalization backlash . She explores her research agenda through a mix of large-N quantitative analysis, causal inference, survey experiments, Bayesian statistics, and text analysis. Her dissertation, Three Essays on the Political Economy of International Trade and the Domestic Labor Market , focuses on firms’ and workers’ responses to economic globalization and the diffusion of social responsibility norms .

In her one of dissertation projects, Protectionism Reconsidered: Economic Insecurity and the Gender Gap in Trade Attitudes, she investigates why women are generally more protectionist, but also why this gender gap in trade attitudes may be closing in the United States. She argues that economic insecurities, such as women's experience of gender discrimination or men's experience of trade shocks, explain trade attitudes. She tests her argument using a survey experiment and structural topic models. She plans to expand on this project by investigating how economic insecurity affects gender gap in trade attitudes across countries. She focuses on economic insecurity in South Korea and Japan, both of which have higher levels of gender discrimination than the rest of the OECD. She plans to conduct survey experiments in these two countries and compare their results to those of the United States and other OECD countries.

Before joining Ohio State University, she received a B.A. and an M.A. in Political Science from Seoul National University, South Korea. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Fellowship, the Presidential Fellow at Ohio State University , and the APSA Centennial Center Research Grant.

Warren Snead is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at Northwestern University. His work investigates how the Supreme Court affects the operation and development of federal policies, and the normative implications of the Court’s role for U.S democracy. His dissertation examines how the Court uses its powers of statutory interpretation to reshape important federal policies, including the National Labor Relations Act, Voting Rights Act, Clean Air and Water Acts, and Social Security Act. He finds that the Court acts as a powerful agent of policy development and that its role has only increased in an era of partisan polarization in Congress. He argues that the Court has exerted undemocratic influence on policy development in several important domains as the Court has thwarted the operation and development of important policies in ways that are out of sync with public sentiment, elected majorities, and the enacting coalition.

The funds awarded from the APSA DDRIG will support archival visits to the records of organized interests and federal agencies. By examining the records of organized interests, Warren hopes to gain a better understanding of how interest groups perceived Supreme Court decisions and the extent to which Court decisions affected the advocacy strategies of leading policy-demanders. These records will supplement existing public statements made by policy advocates. In addition to interest group records, Warren will also use DDRIG funds to visit federal agencies. Examining federal records will better illuminate how administrative agents incorporated Supreme Court decisions into their rulemaking and enforcement of regulatory statutes.

Before attending Northwestern, Warren received his BA from Sewanee: The University of the South in political science and taught history and civics in Virginia Beach, VA.