Dania Arayssi – University of Colorado Boulder

When economic crisis hit Lebanon in 2019, millions of families began relying on money sent home by relatives working abroad—called remittances. My research explores a fascinating question: Does receiving this foreign money make people more or less likely to participate in politics? 

You might think families with extra income would be less interested in politics since they’re financially better off. But it’s not that simple. The relationship between remittances and political engagement depends on several factors, making this doctoral dissertation fascinating as it intersects political psychology, political behavior, and political economy. 

Among the key factors is how individuals assign blame and experience guilt. If someone feels guilty for relying on money from abroad, they may lose their sense of agency to engage politically. Conversely, if they blame their economic struggles on government failure, they feel empowered to take political action. Other factors include how much families depend on this money for basic needs and their country’s broader conditions. 

Some recipients feel empowered to demand better governance because they’re less dependent on corrupt government services. Others withdraw from politics, either because they’re ashamed of needing outside help or can now afford private alternatives. Still others become more politically active when they realize their situation reflects deeper systemic problems. 

By surveying Lebanese families during this unprecedented crisis, my research reveals how global migration and money flows are reshaping domestic politics. Understanding these dynamics is crucial as more countries face economic instability and increasing numbers depend on support from relatives abroad.

Alex Avery – Washington University in St. Louis

In times of ethnic conflict, women’s reproductive choices can take on profound political meaning. My dissertation examines how ethnic violence affects women’s fertility preferences, challenging the common assumption that conflict uniformly suppresses fertility due to insecurity, displacement, or economic strain. Instead, I argue that ethnic conflict heightens the salience of group identity, encouraging some women to view childbearing as a way to preserve their community and resist erasure.

Using a global dataset of civil conflicts and fertility trends across more than 100 countries since 1960, I find that ethnic civil wars are uniquely associated with increases in fertility rates. A case study of Mali, using nationally representative Demographic and Health Survey data, provides additional insight into how fertility preferences shift during periods of ethnic violence. To further explore the mechanisms behind these patterns, I am conducting a survey experiment in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and in-depth interviews with Bosnian women who resettled in St. Louis following the 1990s war.

By centering women’s voices and examining fertility as both a personal and political act, this research reveals how conflict transforms family-making into a response to group trauma and existential threat. My dissertation contributes to broader conversations in political science about gender, identity, and the long-term consequences of violence. In doing so, it highlights how women’s reproductive decisions—often overlooked in studies of war—are central to understanding how communities navigate survival amid conflict.

Souradeep Banerjee – Temple University

In times of ethnic conflict, women’s reproductive choices can take on profound political meaning. My dissertation examines how ethnic violence affects women’s fertility preferences, challenging the common assumption that conflict uniformly suppresses fertility due to insecurity, displacement, or economic strain. Instead, I argue that ethnic conflict heightens the salience of group identity, encouraging some women to view childbearing as a way to preserve their community and resist erasure.

Using a global dataset of civil conflicts and fertility trends across more than 100 countries since 1960, I find that ethnic civil wars are uniquely associated with increases in fertility rates. A case study of Mali, using nationally representative Demographic and Health Survey data, provides additional insight into how fertility preferences shift during periods of ethnic violence. To further explore the mechanisms behind these patterns, I am conducting a survey experiment in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and in-depth interviews with Bosnian women who resettled in St. Louis following the 1990s war.

By centering women’s voices and examining fertility as both a personal and political act, this research reveals how conflict transforms family-making into a response to group trauma and existential threat. My dissertation contributes to broader conversations in political science about gender, identity, and the long-term consequences of violence. In doing so, it highlights how women’s reproductive decisions—often overlooked in studies of war—are central to understanding how communities navigate survival amid conflict.

Rebecca Bell-Martin – el Tecnológico de Monterrey

From Africa to Latin America and Eurasia, exposure to wartime or criminal violence is associated with future political activism and civic engagement. Some accounts suggest personal victimization transforms apolitical individuals into political activists. Yet, these cannot explain the curious cases of non-victims. Why do non-victims take up risky political action to address violence experienced by others?

I investigate this question through a survey experiment in two Mexican cities where organized crime violence is ongoing. The experiment tests my theory that non-victim activists are not motivated by the trauma of victimization, but instead by empathy for the victimized. I expect that imagining oneself in the place of a victim sparks a cognitive and emotional chain of events that generates a sense of shared vulnerability to violence among non-victims. Non-victims, I anticipate, pursue anti-violence activism to address this collective vulnerability.

This research contributes to our understanding of the political consequences of violence. In particular, while much attention has been paid to the political power of victim activists, this research explores the political potential of non-victim allies.

Lucas Borba – Vanderbilt University

This project investigates how segregation in our cities — when people of different income levels live in separate neighborhoods — affects the strength and effectiveness of local governments. In the unequal contexts of middle- and low-income countries, segregation shapes local job markets by limiting low-income residents’ access to formal employment, pushing many into informal work to meet basic needs. Because segregation also hides these informal arrangements from wealthier residents, it reduces broad-based demand for the state to act as a fair enforcer of rules and agreements. As a result, local elites face less pressure to invest in enforcing tax laws or building administrative capacity, trapping cities in a cycle of informality, weak governance, and underdevelopment.

With support from one of the APSA Centennial Center Research Grants, I am conducting interviews with local politicians and bureaucrats in Brazilian municipalities to understand what drives — or discourages — their efforts to strengthen the administrative and fiscal capacity of local governments by voluntarily participating in a federal capacity-building program that provides transfers to municipalities. By showing how residential segregation shapes both the economic lives of citizens and the decisions of political leaders, this research highlights why inequality can undermine democracy and development, and why building effective state institutions is so challenging in divided societies.

Christopher C. Graham – Boston University

The relationship between ecological security and environmental migration is becoming increasingly crucial to national security but is under-examined in contemporary policy, practice, and political literature. Over the years, there have also been increasing demands from lawmakers and the public, especially in border states, for more policies and resources that address this critical nexus. Why and how such policies are formed, their impacts, and resource allocation determinants need further examination. This scientific study contributes to bridging that gap. Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), document analysis, and expert interviews, this study examines the factors influencing the development of ecological security and environmental migration policies concerning the U.S. Southern Border regions. Preliminary findings indicate that increased attention to ecological and environmental issues has not consistently translated into increased resource allocation. Additionally, successive administrations have found it challenging to effectively develop policies that balance national border security concerns with the protection of fragile ecosystems.

Alena Gross – Northern Arizona University

Rideshare drivers, delivery couriers, online freelancers and other platform workers often face the same challenges: low pay, unstable work, and decisions made by algorithms instead of people. Yet despite these shared struggles, efforts to organize and advocate for better conditions are often fragmented and uncoordinated. This project explores why collective action among platform workers remains fragmented, even when their interests align and they have a common target- platform.

Drawing on interviews with organizers and advocates in the U.S. and Europe, as well as analysis of campaign materials and organizational documents, the research reveals how legal uncertainties, institutional gaps and representation surplus weaken solidarity with a specific focus on cross country differences. Different labor laws and rules shape whether worker groups can gain recognition or exert influence. At the same time, a growing number of small organizations compete to represent the same workers, often duplicating efforts rather than building collective action.

By highlighting the organizational and legal barriers to gig worker organizing, this project offers new insight into what it would take to build stronger, more unified movements in an economy increasingly governed by algorithms.

Lois Matthew – Cornell University

Your country’s military takes over the government, promising to fix everything—better security, less corruption, more jobs. People dance in the streets. Five years later, nothing’s better, and another coup happens. Same promises, same celebrations. Why do people keep believing?

That’s what I’m studying in Sub-Saharan Africa, where military takeovers in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have become a repeating cycle of hope and disappointment. Through conversations with citizens from vibrant youths to teachers to farmers, I’m learning that this isn’t about people being foolish or forgetful.

Instead, imagine living where armed groups threaten your village, politicians steal aid money meant for your children’s schools, and foreign countries still treat your nation like a colony. Suddenly, a general who promises to fight terrorists, kick out corrupt elites, and stand up to France doesn’t just represent better policies—he represents dignity, safety, and hope itself.

My research aims to uncover how people facing genuine crises make sense of political choices that seem irrational from the outside. Do broken promises matter when each military coup resonates as a symbolic reenactment of independence—tapping into collective memories more powerful than any material failure? Understanding this helps explain why democracies collapse—not through force alone, but because ordinary people stop believing in them. That’s a warning relevant far beyond Africa.

Isabella Montini – University of California, Berkeley

My project examines how people living in Brazilian favelas decide who to ask for services/help when they need access to different services (things like street repairs, water access, or protection). I am trying to understand how people navigate places where there is more than one kind of authority in charge–whether they go to the state, a local leader, or even a criminal group. The project focuses on the case of Brazil, looking at São Paulo and Maranhão to leverage variation in state capacity and strength of criminal organizations.

Wataru Onishi – University of California, Riverside

Over the past decade, Americans have grown increasingly hostile toward members of the opposing political party. Many people not only disagree with the other side but also feel anger and distrust. This emotional division is called affective polarization, and it has become a serious concern for democracy. Research has shown that political leaders such as presidential candidates play a crucial role in deepening this divide. But what about the many lesser-known members of Congress? Do they also shape how citizens feel about other parties, or is the problem mainly caused by party leaders? My research explores whether ordinary members of Congress, who are not in leadership positions, can help reduce affective polarization. I focus on one possible way this could happen: when these politicians show a diversity of their political stances and within-party disagreement. To test this idea, I conduct a survey experiment where participants are given information about a lack of party unity that implies disagreement within political parties. In addition, I test whether party leaders exert much stronger influence by showing information to a part of respondents that they can control politicians in Congress. By examining how people respond to this information, I aim to understand whether highlighting disagreement and diversity within parties can reduce negative feelings toward the opposing party. This study sheds light on the role of rank-and-file politicians in mitigating political hostility in the United States.

Caroline Pippert – Northwestern University

Americans receive messages about voting from a variety of sources including the government,  media, and campaigns. These messages can affect people’s behavior, including their likelihood of voting and their vote choice, as well as their feelings about voting and democracy. This is especially true for messages about voting restrictions like voter ID laws designed to make it harder for people to vote. Understanding the psychological effects of voting restrictions and the ways they are discussed is critical for understanding how these laws affect people’s feelings about government and their own place within the political system. This is especially important for groups disproportionately affected by these laws like Black Americans. In a survey experiment varying how voting restrictions are discussed, either emphasizing their disproportionate effects on Blacks alone or in combination with language on collective mobilization against discrimination, I will test the impacts of messages about voting restrictions on Blacks’ reactance, stereotype threat, and sense of political efficacy. Studying the impact of messages about voting restrictions is important for understanding people’s potential for continual engagement with democracy. This research could help those who are interested in encouraging voter turnout in response to voting restrictions identify effective messaging that does not damage political efficacy.

Jean-Marc Pruit – University of Virginia

In the decades after World War II, many newly decolonized countries dreamed of the economic self-determination that formal political independence had not delivered. But by the 1980s, debt, austerity, and global market pressures had upended those dreams of true national independence. This project explores how three Black thinkers—Cedric Robinson, Sylvia Wynter, and Stuart Hall—responded to this loss. Each believed that culture could help explain why those dreams had failed. They were not just interested in art or media; they saw culture as the space where people wrestled with power, identity, and survival when political and economic systems broke down.

Often, people think of “cultural studies” as something that emerged from elite universities in the United States or Europe. This project shows instead how key ideas about race, capitalism, and culture were shaped by thinkers rooted in the Caribbean, Africa, and Black America—people who saw firsthand how global shifts in power were playing out on the ground.

By uncovering their stories and ideas, the project sheds new light on how the unequal yet interconnected world we live in today came to be, and how others once tried to imagine something better.

Nicolás Riveros Medelius – Harvard University

This study is centered in exploring two deceptively simple questions: What issues do adolescents care about? And with whom do they talk to about these issues? To answer them, I draw on semi-structured interviews and survey data from 9th grade students attending public and charter schools in Bogotá, Colombia. I analyze this data in two complementary ways. First, I map students’ discussion networks and examine their size, frequency of conversation, levels of perceived expertise, and exposure to divergent viewpoints. I then investigate how these network features relate to key indicators of democratic citizenship, including measures of civic self-efficacy, openness to diverse perspectives, and civic and political engagement. Second, I examine how adolescents describe their own experiences engaging in conversations about the issues they care about: how these conversations unfold, what they are about, and what young people seek and find in them. Ultimately, this project contributes to the literature on political socialization by offering new insights into how everyday interpersonal exchanges shape adolescents’ understandings of the political world and their roles within it.

Rocío Salas-Lewin – Cornell University

The crisis of representation in Chile and Spain has deepened the gap between citizens and political institutions and mainstream parties, generating three key behavioral responses: contentious protest, support for populist and outsider parties, and electoral abstention. This study explores how these responses emerge from a common representation deficit that restructures political cleavages along anti-establishment and inclusionary-exclusionary lines. Using a mixed-methods approach–including historical analysis, electoral and protest event data, public opinion surveys, interviews, and observation–this research examines why individuals channel their discontent through different participation alternatives. By integrating perspectives from social movements, electoral behavior, and populism, the study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of how representation crises reshape cleavages and political participation in contemporary democracies.

Ariana Schmidt – American University

Despite the rapid growth of urban refugee populations in the Global South, research on their informal integration remains relatively limited. In the past decade, global refugee numbers tripled to 43 million. The majority of refugees reside in urban areas in the Global South and, if trends hold, will remain there for many years or even decades (UNHCR 2024a). To date, forced migration literature has focused more on the Global North or, if in the Global South, on encamped populations. As such, little is known about how refugee households navigate the complexity of the urban environment and, in some cases, even become self-reliant, defined as being able to sustainably meet the household’s needs. My proposed mixed-methods dissertation addresses this gap in the understanding of unlikely success by researching the relationship between the household’s livelihoods strategy and self-reliance outcomes in four key hosting countries in Sub-Saharan Africa: Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. My research asks: How do some urban refugee households become economically self-reliant in protracted displacement?   

Shatakshi Singh – University of California, Santa Cruz

Across Indian cities, government-led evictions are displacing low-income communities as part of efforts to promote urban development. My research examines how affected residents respond by engaging with the legal system to assert their right to remain in the city. Although the law often enables dispossession, it also becomes a key resource through which the urban poor seek recognition, protection, and justice. 

This project focuses on how time shapes legal resistance. It considers how bureaucratic delays, sudden demolitions, and extended court cases influence both the possibilities and limits of legal action. Drawing on interviews, archival records, and ethnographic fieldwork in New Delhi, I study how legal strategies are formed in neighborhoods, legal aid clinics, and everyday community organizing. The research also explores how past experiences with legal mobilization continue to inform present-day claims. 

By analyzing the intersection of legality, temporality, and political agency, this project offers new insights into how marginalized groups navigate urban governance and reimagine their place in the city.

Miranda Sullivan – University of Texas at Austin

How does respectability politics impact the individual and collective political behaviors of Latinxs, women, and Asian Americans in the United States today? I argue that the study of respectability politics should be extended beyond its robust application to the Black community because Black Americans have a more cohesive shared history, lower rates of immigration, strong indigenous organizations, and durable political behaviors than my three groups of interest, and therefore might exhibit and experience respectability politics differently.  In my analysis of an undergraduate student sample, I find that respectability politics is politically demobilizing for Latinxs and potentially demobilizing for women, too; however, I find preliminary evidence of mobilizing effects for Asian Americans.  With the generous support of the APSA Centennial Center, I am looking forward to fielding a survey experiment to a sample of 800 Asian Americans to further disentangle the impact of respectability politics on Asian Americans’ political participation.  

Mart Trasberg – Tecnológico de Monterrey
Christopher Chambers-Ju – The University of Texas at Arlington

This research explores how labor unions can build public support for strikes, focusing on the differences between public and private sector protests in Latin America. Using surveys and focus groups in Mexico and Colombia, the study examines how media messages—either highlighting workers’ grievances or exposing union corruption—affect public opinion. It also investigates whether strikes against multinational companies generate more sympathy than those against domestic firms, considering historical and political contexts. The findings aim to reveal strategies unions can use to foster solidarity and support, especially as labor movements face increasing criticism and political hostility in today’s political climate.

Agustin Vallejo – University of Houston

Every election season, millions of Americans donate money to political candidates—but what makes someone decide to give? And what kind of candidate is more likely to receive support? My research explores why people open their wallets for political campaigns, focusing on how a candidate’s identity (like their gender or race) and their policy positions (such as views on immigration or climate change) influence donations.

To study this, I plan to use an online experiment where people are shown pairs of fictional candidates with different traits and asked to choose who they would rather support financially. This approach will help me isolate what voters really value when it comes to campaign giving.

I’m especially interested in whether donors care more about what a candidate stands for or who they are—and how that varies between frequent donors and people who have never donated before. The results will help us understand how money in politics works on a personal level, and whether certain candidates face unfair fundraising challenges based on their identity.

Robert W. Williams – Bennett College

W.E.B. Du Bois, the civil rights activist and scholar (1868-1963), is recognized also for his teaching at Atlanta University (1897-1910, 1933-1944). Scholars research his professorial career via examining his numerous writings. 

What has not been researched is a 1910 photograph titled “Dr. Du Bois’ Classroom”. The photo has remained virtually unknown to scholars—perhaps because it is located at The Henry Ford museum (Dearborn) and not within the network of archives typically containing Du Bois materials. 

The photo depicts a classroom with tables and chairs, as well as maps, chalkboards and a book case. Sculptures flank each side of the frame, one in an Italian Renaissance style, the other an Egyptian pharaoh with a broken headdress. Questions about the photo abound, not the least because Du Bois only briefly described the room in which he taught. 

The APSA 2025 Centennial Center Research Grant enables me to travel to the Atlanta University Center, an important repository, and to seek answers to several central questions. 

• How and why was the photo taken? Who was the photographer? 

• What were the curricular, architectural, and historical contexts of the classroom and its location within Stone Hall? 

• What do the objects depicted in the photo tell us about Du Bois’s humanistic pedagogy within a classroom setting? 

The photograph of the classroom is 115 years old; the pedagogical themes of that room still resonate today.