Recall Elections in America

PI: Brandon Rottinghaus, Professor, University of Houston

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,000, Second Century Fund

Project Abstract: Recall elections allow citizens to remove incumbent elected officials at the state or local level.  Is this good or bad for democracy?  In one view, these recall elections are a corrective measure, used to remove a corrupt official or due to abuse of the public trust.  Incumbents who fail to represent their constituents’ best interests can be removed through a democratic process.  In another view, recall elections may circumvent the will of the voters by allowing a smaller group of citizens to remove an elected official already selected by a majority of the voting electorate.  This “excess of democracy” lessens the independents of elected officials and raises the possibility that special interest groups game the system.  Although the number of recall elections nationally is increasing, the political fallout from successful and unsuccessful recall elections is unknown.  If a small number of voters can overturn elections at the state or local level, the impact of recall elections will be profound as polarization spreads across the nation and even at the local (sometimes non-partisan) level.  This project charts recall rules across states and explores the impact of these elections.

Immigration and Deportation: Attitudes in Brazil and the United States

Zoila Ponce de Leon

PIs: Zoila Ponce de Leon, Assistant Professor, Washington and Lee University; Gabriele Magni, Assistant Professor, Loyola Marymount University

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,500, Marguerite Ross Barnett Fund

Gabriele Magni

Project Abstract: Immigration has become an increasingly relevant political issue. This project examines a topic that has received limited attention in existing scholarly work on immigration attitudes, but that is central to the political discourse of various countries: the deportation of immigrants who are illegally in the country. What determines attitudes toward deportation? We focus on two countries where immigration is a key political issue and where populist right-wing politicians have been successful in recent years: the United States and Brazil. We explore what role economic, cultural, security, and health concerns play in driving attitudes toward deportation. Furthermore, we analyze how immigrants’ characteristics influence natives’ attitudes on deportation, focusing on three attributes: country of origin, religious denomination, and sexual orientation. We study these questions with original surveys conducted in the U.S. and Brazil with samples mirroring census quotas on key socio-demographics and use both observational and experimental items to measure attitudes toward deportation.

Armed Radical Queer Politics: A Descriptive and Normative Framework

PI: Layla E. Picard, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Virginia

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,346, Warren E. Miller Fund in Electoral Politics

Project Abstract: The United States of America is home to more firearms than people. While many gun owners keep pistols and rifles purely for recreational purposes, Americans also use guns as tools of political action. Social scientists have described some of the ways that Americans bear arms for political purposes, but these accounts tend to attribute practices to particular cultural or ideological positions. For example, scholars have shown that straight white conservative men bear arms in ways that reinforce the political status quo, which privileges people like them. But aside from research on violent revolutionary movements, we know very little about how minoritized and marginalized groups use arms in their political efforts, or how bearing arms changes the person who bears them and their politics. Even more importantly, we lack a normative framework for the role that arms ought to play in political life. My dissertation focuses on the practices and discourses of armed queer activists involved in radical leftist political projects. I explicate the meanings and values that queer radicals associate with arms, and the actual practices of bearing arms in which they participate, in order to provide a descriptive theory of subaltern militancy. I also draw upon the examples provided by queer militants to develop a normative argument about whether and under what conditions arms may play a positive and beneficial role in liberatory politics.