Natalya Adam-Rahman – Stanford University

My research examines the relationship between women’s labor force participation (LFP) and their political agency. Previous research has highlighted the connection between women’s autonomous political preferences and their engagement in the labor market. However, this body of work about women’s political behavior is incomplete in its account of the different paths women can take as they enter the labor market. Prior work assumes that women “select” into or choose to be in the labor force, which ignores two theoretically important aspects of working for pay. First, women’s decision to enter the labor force is often a joint decision in the household, implying that labor force participation might be “imposed by the family” on women. Second, women’s decision to enter the labor force is often due to economic deterioration or the absence of a patriarch (e.g., widowhood or divorce), implying that labor force participation might be “imposed by circumstance” on women. These forms of imposition account for a large proportion of the way that women get into the labor force in South Asia, where one in four of the world’s women lives. I use multiple methods to understand the causes and political consequences of women’s various paths into the labor force.

Clara Bicalho – University of California, Berkeley

My research investigates how collective property rights affects beneficiaries in terms of two overarching outcomes: governance and political participation. Specifically, I ask how collective land rights impact local governance among beneficiary communities — do reforms erode or strengthen existing reciprocity institutions and do they enable more democratic decision making? Secondly, I ask how collective land right policies impact political participation among beneficiary communities. I study the questions above in the context of quilombos in Brazil. I consider possible mechanisms related to political preferences and behavior and examine outcomes such as participation in community meetings and elections, vote choice, and level of coordination on collective demands of local politicians. This research also seeks to shed light on the different political dynamics that underlie collective (rather than individual) land regimes, therefore building on the growing literature of the political effects of indigenous land rights and other contexts of collective land ownership, especially along politically marginalized identities.

Stephanie Bonnes – University of New Haven

While a military career has the potential to positively shape the economic and social mobility of those who serve, these benefits are constrained by interactions and experiences with harassment and discrimination within the organization. Using in-depth interviews with U.S. service-members, this study seeks to understand service-member experiences with a specific form of workplace harassment, bureaucratic harassment. Understanding that the military is a gendered organization (Acker 1990) and a racialized organization (Ray 2019), I explore how this form of harassment intersects with social location such as gender, race, class, and sexuality as well as the effects of this form of harassment on military careers and post-service opportunities. This study also explores how service-members understand and navigate bureaucratic harassment and its consequences. Further, the study uncovers the conditions and mechanisms in place that hinder or assist individuals in challenging these discriminatory workplace dynamics and make policy recommendations on how to address and change these issues.

Kayla Canelo – University of Texas at Arlington
Melissa Baker – University of Texas at El Paso

How do scandals involving judicial figures affect public perceptions of judges and the court? There is no shortage of political figures engaging in personal or professional misconduct, including judges accused of sexual misconduct, acts of physical violence, and judges who have made derogatory or hostile remarks towards certain groups of people. These controversies are particularly concerning given the important role judges play in shaping policy pertaining to individual rights. We posit that scandals involving a judge lead to decreased confidence in the judge and an increased view that the judge will issue rulings that harm marginalized groups. This project builds on our prior work that finds people view judges accused of sexual misconduct as a bigger threat to women’s rights. In the proposed project, we will use a survey experiment to examine whether public perceptions of discriminatory misconduct extend beyond women’s rights and vary based on the gender, race, or ethnicity of the judge who is engaging in said misconduct. The results of this study will shed light on ways in which judicial trust erodes, particularly during a time where trust in the Supreme Court has plummeted among Americans and several SCOTUS Justices have been wrapped up in enough financial and personal misconduct that the United States Senate is debating a SCOTUS ethics bill.

Julieta Casas – Johns Hopkins University

Julieta is a scholar of comparative political development. She studies the long-term causes of state-building and democratization in Latin America and the United States. Her work seeks to bridge the gap between the subfields of comparative and American politics to address canonical questions about political and economic development, such as why countries in the Americas diverged significantly in political stability and economic development after independence. Her research and teaching agenda takes a hemispheric perspective, comparing the sociopolitical trajectories of the U.S., Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Political Science Department at Johns Hopkins University.

Her book-style dissertation, titled Building Bureaucratic Capacity: The Political Origins of Civil Service Reforms in the Americas, accounts for the success and failure of civil service reforms—laws aimed at professionalizing the bureaucracy—across the Americas. The dissertation presents a novel theory where the type of predecessor patronage regime is crucial in explaining the success of civil service reforms. All countries had some form of patronage, but not all patronage systems were the same: they varied in hiring and firing practices. The theory innovates by emphasizing how consequential firing practices can be in the success of civil service reform efforts.

Estefania Castañeda Pérez – University of Pennsylvania

Every day, thousands of Mexican border residents travel to neighboring U.S. cities through land ports of entry along the Mexico-U.S. border. Through their mobilities, transborder commuters are exposed to structural and state violence, including detrimental health effects from waiting in hours-long border traffic and experiencing discrimination from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers. Multi-layered violence is a normalized part of transborder mobility, leading to health and emotional consequences. My book explores how transborder commuters experience the state through negative contact with CBP officers. Furthermore, it examines the sociopolitical and emotional effects of routine violence endured through transborder mobility. In my book, I analyze how racialized populations who regularly interact with carceral institutions become disenfranchised from contesting state power.. My book is poised to make significant contributions to literature on the conceptualization of systemic violence, discrimination, minority sociopolitical behavior, and political institutions.

Juan Corredor Garcia – City University of New York

The renewed global efforts to contain climate change have meant a gateway for states to wage environmental conflicts by adopting a green militarization approach. My research analyzes the international realm of this approach by focusing on the role that the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) is seeking to play in the Amazon Basin. The attention of the American Armed Forces to environmental issues is not new since the U.S. Department of Defense has included climate change in one of the top priorities for the hemisphere since 2010. Critical military studies have found that there are currently two trends of green militarization: the first has largely taken a hard approach to addressing wildlife crime while the second is a softer approach based on counter-insurgency doctrine that promotes community engagement and development through international organizations funding this militarization of conservation. While existing studies focus on anti-poaching green militarization efforts in African countries, scholars have unobserved other expressions of the military role over the environment. My research explores the international militaristic involvement by focusing on a new trend: the interventionism in pursuit of the foreign environmental protection.

María Ignacia Curiel – Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University

Political parties with origins in violent groups sometimes enjoy institutional safeguards such as reserved seats, quotas, cabinet positions or other types of political affirmative action. How do these guarantees shape the commitment of individuals in the party’s base? Theoretically, safeguards may hinder the consolidation of a rebel party organization by generating counterproductive incentives for members of the party base. Because safeguards mean that the party can achieve power with less popular support and organizational capacity, such safeguards may demotivate the members from investing in party building. This paper investigates the case of the former FARC-EP party Comunes in Colombia, where the peace agreement guaranteed them 10 legislative seats. I implement a randomized priming experiment with ex-combatants and civilian Comunes base members and evaluate the impact on their intended investments in Comunes. The intervention design accommodates major challenges inherent to studying difficult-to-reach populations. On average, participants that were randomly assigned to a detailed reminder of the Comunes party’s reserved seats were less likely to report interest in investing in a range of party-building and campaigning activities with Comunes. However, heterogeneity by ex-combatants reveals that former combatants respond very differently than other members of the party’s base. While the reservations prime depresses civilian commitment to Comunes, they do not substantively shift ex-combatant willingness to invest in Comunes upon reminder of the reserved seats. These findings suggest that institutional safeguards for rebel parties may come at the cost of reducing effort from civilian grassroots, and may further concentrate party activism among ex-combatants.

May Darwich – University of Birmingham
Adham Saouli – University of St Andrews / Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

This project seeks to overcome the gulf between International Relations (IR) theory and the Middle East through the lens of teaching. The goal is to produce the first IR textbook that explores the connections between IR approaches and empirical cases and issues from the region, one that would encourage future scholars to develop theoretical frameworks from and for the Middle East region. Existing textbooks offer rich analyses of various historical and contemporary thematic issues, but lack an in-depth engagement between IR theories and case studies from the Middle East. This project will fill this gap; it will offer a thorough examination of the full spectrum of theoretical perspectives in IR, ranging from mainstream approaches such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism to critical ones, including feminism, postcolonialism, and green theory. Each chapter will assess the strengths and limitations of a theoretical perspective and will offer a detailed examination of a case study or topic, including the cases of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, and topics like special economic zones, sectarianism, revolution, war, and climate change. The project draws on an exceptionally diverse group of leading scholars in the field who are based in the Middle East, Europe, United Kingdom, and North America.

Megan Dias – University of Texas at Austin

My research examines the causes and consequences of local immigrant integration policies in the United States. I seek to understand why different cities adopt different policies, and the impact these varied policies have on immigrants’ civic participation and senses of belonging. I use a multi-method approach in my research, combining time-series quantitative analysis of city-level policy and demographic data, with individual survey analyses, and interviews and process-tracing.

This project looks at four new immigrant destination cities. I am interested in understanding why these cities – Austin, TX, Charlotte, NC, Columbus, OH, and Indianapolis, IN – have each taken a different approach with regards to immigrant integration policies. In some of these cities, policymakers have taken an active, inclusive approach to immigrant integration. In others, policymakers are more passive, letting non-profits drive most of the work. Using elite-interviews and process-tracing, I seek to explain why these different cities, with similar demographic characteristics and political dynamics, have adopted different such different policies. I pay close special attention to the role that interest, and advocacy groups play in the local policy processes and how they shape the understandings of immigrants and their deservingness within each city.

Ultimately, this project will further our understanding of the local policy processes that underpin cities’ responses to immigrants in an increasingly polarized political environment. It has implications for our understanding of local policy adoption, especially for policies that affect historically marginalized groups, and will be of practical interest to local policy actors pursuing such policies.

Juan Espindola – National Autonomous University of Mexico
Tom Donahue-Ochoa – Haverford College

This project seeks to advance engaged political theory from and for the Americas. The aims of engaged political theory are: to expand political theory’s global reach, by partnering with ideas, voices, and movements that have been most affected by injustices; to foster the use of engaged approaches to theorizing; to re-center “marginal” ideas and practices within political theory; and to engage broad publics. The project will address how the Global South is being remolded by new technologies. Digital platforms have transformed the world; and as artificial intelligence (AI) is added to them, they will continue to do so. The Global North has seen much debate over how these tools can spur advances in many areas while causing harm in others. But what of the South? This question has hitherto been neglected by American political theory. We think that some impacts will parallel those felt in the North. But not all; and it behooves engaged political theory to study these differences. The workshops would aim to reveal how the impacts differ from their Northern counterparts; how the South’s experiences offer new insights into those counterparts; and how these impacts reshape the plurality found within each region.

Alexandra Filindra – University of Illinois Chicago

The purpose of this project is to investigate the prevalence and consequences of threats of harm and actual violence by members of the public against American state legislators and mayors. Extant reports by government and academic sources suggest that high rates of threats and violence exist at all levels of government), both Democrats and Republicans are targeted, and women appear to be more heavily targeted than are men. Furthermore, there is evidence that exposure to threats and violence has psychological and political implications. We have conducted 106 in-depth interviews with sub-national elected officials, candidates, and staff in which we investigate exposure to threats and actual violence, and how people respond to these experiences both on a personal and a professional level. In addition to analyzing these interviews, our goal is to develop survey instruments for large-N studies of elected officials and staff and to develop a set of best practices meant to help elected officials increase their resilience. Another part of the project uses survey experiments to explore partisan responses to stories about threats and violence targeting elected officials.

Aarika Forney – The University of Oklahoma

Black bureaucrats operate in a workforce that regularly claims to value diversity and equity yet are often the lowest paid and least likely to experience mobility. I suspect this is especially likely to occur in racialized spaces, where racialized expectations exist about which clients’ Black bureaucrats will serve, issues they should focus on, and what types of work they are expected to perform. It is reasonable to expect that many Black bureaucrats are joining these organizations with some interest in pursuing these goals. Still, assuming that all Black bureaucrats have the same goals, priorities, strengths, and interests in equity-focused spaces would be problematic. Whether involving specialized client groups, committee memberships, or community engagement initiatives, it is reasonable to expect variations in levels of interest and competence within any group. My research hopes to shed light on the dynamic interplay between lived experiences, professional inclinations, and the intricate representation landscape within bureaucratic systems.

Through a combination of interviews and a comprehensive survey, my research project examines the lived experiences of Black employees within the public sector. The primary goal is to unravel how these experiences shape their perspectives and actions concerning representation and their roles in the workplace. Specifically, I look to discover how engagement in identity-based representative work varies for Black bureaucrats and how engagement influences their professional growth and personal lives.

Rongbo Jin – University of Arizona
Frank Gonzalez – University of Arizona
Elizabeth Theiss-Morse – University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Affective polarization is a defining feature of contemporary American politics that has toxic political and nonpolitical consequences. However, the jury is till out on how to depolarize Americans and stimulate support for democratic norms. This project investigates the complexity of national identity and its potential effects on partisan animosity and support for democratic norms. We propose an online experiment priming different dimensions of national identity to examine the effects of each on partisan animosity and support for democratic norms. Our treatment groups will respectively prime Ethno-culturalism, Multiculturalism, American Exceptionalism, Democracy, Rule of Law, and Civic Republicanism. We hypothesize, (1) priming Ethno-culturalism, Multiculturalism, and American Exceptionalism will increase animosity and decrease support for democratic processes; (2) priming Democracy, Rule of Law, and Civic Republicanism will reduce animosity and increase support for democratic processes.

Parichehr Kazemi – University of Oregon

My research explores the use of digital media in Iranian women’s protests against gender discrimination and violence. Circulating pictures and videos on social media showing women engaged in subversive acts from walking unveiled to dancing in public (both of which are banned for women under the Islamic Republic) have formed a part of Iranian women’s resistance efforts for the last decade. I look at the ways this content enacts a form of protest to the state in lieu of opportunities for institutionalized dissent by visualizing and publicizing resistance to public laws and gender norms. Drawing on feminist studies, media studies, and social movement studies, my dissertation develops the concept of “visual protest movements,” taking the Iranian women’s movement as exemplary of the kind of mobilization fusing social media images with public defiance. I historicize this form of protest in Iran by placing it along a continuum of prior women’s activism, having taken shape around the state barriers to free expression, and use image, video, and discourse analysis in my interpretation of its content.

Boram Lee – London School of Economics and Political Science
Jongwoo Jeong – Washington University in St. Louis

Do people prioritize cultural considerations or geopolitical factors in determining their support for international trade with strategic partners? International relations scholars argue that countries prefer to trade with allies than with enemies due to geopolitical considerations. But we know little about how people update their attitudes on trade when they experience cultural differences with their allies. We propose and test two mechanisms – learning and priming – by which individuals shape their attitudes towards trade cooperation when there is a misalignment between geopolitical needs and cultural values. We test our theories in the context of gender norm compatibility (e.g., feminism and legalization of same-sex marriage) between the US and South Korea, conducting a survey experiment on the South Korean mass public and interviews with experts and activists. We expect to find that individuals with strong gender norms will decrease their support for trade with the US if their prior gender norms deviate from the ally’s preferred gender norms, rather than learning from the ally and updating their own gender norms. This study supports the view that low and private political issues of gender may have significant consequences on international cooperation in high politics.

Young-Im Lee – California State University, Sacramento

Existing studies have examined how political dynasties in Asia facilitate the election of women to top national leadership positions by leveraging their predecessors’ legacy and social capital. However, little attention has been given to the influence of the heirs’ performance on public perception of both their predecessors and the future of the dynasties – in other words, what happens after their exit. When these women end their political careers amidst scandals does the nostalgia for their father or husband also die? This study answers these questions by examining the case of Park Geun-hye’s presidential impeachment in South Korea in 2016. I will use qualitative content analysis of focus groups with about 30 voters in three major cities in South Korea to answer this question. Despite South Korea’s economic and democratic success, many voters still embrace authoritarian nostalgia. Moreover, authoritarian nostalgia has resurfaced in numerous democracies in the last decade. By centering on ordinary citizens’ voices and narratives, this study will provide empirical insights and advance theories about democratic backsliding and democratic recession worldwide. Findings from this study will be published as a chapter in my book examining the political legacy of the first female president of South Korea, focusing on women’s political empowerment and authoritarian nostalgia. 

Debra Leiter – University of Missouri Kansas City

Democracy has many different definitions and, much like the political system itself, the definitions have evolved and changed over time and context. Yet these differences can be hard to reconcile and if these differences are not addressed, may weaken support for democratic foundations. How, then, can we bring people together to consider what democracy is in a way that promotes listening, conversation, and understanding? Music is a powerful medium for encouraging communication across many different individuals, and we believe that this is an important tool for holding this type of conversation. We plan to hold a public concert presented by the Mid America Freedom Band, Kansas City’s LGBTQIA+ and ally community band, on different conceptions and ideas of democracy. This educational concert will interweave musical portrayals of democracy, representation, and key liberal democratic ideas with readings and discussions that tie the musical messages together. The cornerstone of this concert will be a newly commissioned piece that will interweave these concepts of democracy together and help identify the core harmonies that exist among the many different melodious definitions and ideas of democracy. The public concert will conclude with a talk-back session and discussion with the audience about their own concepts of democracy, using the music as a key shared experience to allow important, if challenging, conversations to occur. Our goal is not to create a single definition of democracy, but instead to demonstrate that the many views of democracy can be harmonized together.

Jose Ciro Martinez – University of York

What do borders look like when seen from below? At a time when countries are increasingly committed to facilitating international trade while curtailing the illegal flow of people and things, research on those who live and labour amidst and across national boundaries remains limited. Smuggling, in particular, is under-explored, portrayed as a threat or misdeed, rather than a socially embedded activity that can aid subsistence and garner local support. Focusing on Spanish-Moroccan borderlands, and honing in on two very different goods (tobacco and hashish), this project explores the ways local communities in contraband corridors conceive, navigate and relate to national boundaries and illegal (but not always illicit) modes of exchange. Through archival work, it seeks to transform research on and popular understandings of borders by examining how political membership and authority transpire in places where law-making, law-breaking and law-enforcement practices come most forcefully into view.

Jittip Mongkolnchaiarunya – The George Washington University

Climate science shapes how we govern the climate. Yet, climate science has a diversity problem. Why, given the espoused scientific commitment to pluralism as well as the interdisciplinary and global nature of climate change, do scientific perspectives from the Global South get excluded from mainstream climate science? This paper uncovers how the exclusion of Global South perspectives occurs systematically in climate science and explores the consequences at the global and local levels. I argue that “credibility capitalism” – a system of knowledge production that rewards research and practices that utilizes prior knowledge that has already been recognized as “credible” – poses a structural impediment to incorporating certain kinds of knowledge into what gets considered as legitimate climate science in the first place. Drawing from interviews with climate scientists in Southeast Asian countries and their interlocutors in the Global North, I identify important sources of credibility capital in climate science – such as “universal knowledge” as embodied in scientific models – and process trace how they exclude knowledge that privileges “local perspectives” from the Global South. As such, under credibility capitalism, diversity can at best be justified as “fairness” based on country representatives, but not for the sake of diversifying epistemological perspectives to knowledge production.

Tamara Ortega-Uribe – University of California Santa Cruz

The research aims to problematize the green transition narratives, analyzing the political/theoretical implications of lithium development in California and Chile during the last decade, their associated development projects, their narratives, and management techniques. Lithium extraction offers a promising alternative to developing countries like Chile and developed ones like the US to build national economic strategies based on green projects. The energy transitions field has been widely studied from different perspectives and disciplines, especially since 2010; the increasing number of publications has been dramatic (Stefani et al., 2022), demonstrating the topic’s relevance in scholarly publications and political debates. However, the rational choice perspective predominates in the field, while social sciences and humanities disciplines are underrepresented, focusing less on critical theories (Sovacool, 2014). While political and social science research on lithium has focused on its socioenvironmental impacts (Liu and Agusdinata 2020), resource governance (Obaya 2021), or imaginaries associated with lithium (Barandiarán 2019), there is scarce research on the Global North and the US (Riofrancos, 2023), or focusing on comparing countries in the Americas. Therefore, this research project aims to contribute to these underdeveloped fields.

Busra Nur Ozguler Aktel – Georgia State University

My research explores tribal dynamics and alignments in civil wars. Tribes, as historically rooted social organizations, play essential roles in many conflict-ridden states, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Yemen. Despite their distinct roles in conflicts, these actors are often neglected in scholarly literature. Acting with different motivations than other non-state actors, tribes react to prevailing challenges within conflicts by forming and switching alliances. This study seeks to understand why some tribes align with rebels while others align with states during civil wars and why some tribes switch their alignments. I argue that tribes form and switch their alliances based on their perception of threats to their traditional tribal structure (internal dynamics) and clientelist relationships (external dynamics). In other words, threat perceptions lead tribes to establish non-fixed alignments with either the state or rebels, whichever is less likely to disrupt their traditional structure and patronage networks.

Empirically, I examine Iraqi tribes between 2003 and 2017 and employ mixed methods. I explore the causal dynamics between threat perception and alliances by conducting fieldwork in Iraq and Jordan from January to March 2023, which includes 40 interviews with Iraqi Sunni tribal leaders, tribespeople, and professionals. I also test my theory through computational text analysis of statements made by Iraqi tribal leaders in newspapers and tribal documents.

This study contributes to the advancement of international security studies by introducing tribes as non-state actors and shedding light on the complex (re)alignments of tribes that can shape the trajectory and outcome of conflicts.

Gino Pauselli – University of Pennsylvania

This project aims to generate the first dataset on rights violations against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people worldwide by using the US Department of State’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. The dataset will be created by coding sentences from the section of these reports that specifically address the situation of the LGBT community in that year. The coded sentences will be analyzed for allegations of different types of rights violations, such as discrimination, physical abuse, violations of political and civic rights, and economic and social rights. The data will be used to train an algorithm, which will be exposed to the same countries coded by research assistants to generate indicators on the number of allegations of these different types of rights violations. The dataset will be useful for scholars studying the state of LGBT rights across different countries and regions, and may also be of interest to activists, policymakers, and human rights organizations working to promote the rights of LGBT people around the world.

Alex Zhao – UC San Diego
Damon Clark – Office of Navajo Government Development
Triston Black – Office of Navajo Government Development
Harrison Tsosie – Office of Navajo Government Development

Institutions matter for Indigenous Nation economies but little work understands what institutions Indigenous Americans even want. Do Indigenous Americans prefer presidential or parliamentary governance, or even want democracy? This question poses the impossible task of surveying a representative sample of Indigenous Americans, therefore we begin this endeavor with the largest tribal sovereign in the US; the Navajo Nation. The general expectation is Indigenous Americans prefer communal governance which aligns well with observational research on parliamentary institutions producing long-run economic growth. However, this study also has the opportunity to investigate Indigenous federalism with the structure of the Navajo Nation and its 110 chapters. Therefore, this summer we are traveling all across the Nation to field the Navajo Comprehensive Government Reform Survey. This includes a conjoint randomizing government institutions alongside a geometric model for respondents to rank-order Navajo civic duties. While providing the Navajo Nation with citizen preferences for government reform, we also investigate diversity within the Nation to identify what social cleavages are most salient in politics. Furthermore, our experimental design allows us to investigate how perceived legitimacy and cultural congruence of institutions shape government reform preferences.

Juan Espindola – National Autonomous University of Mexico
Tom Donahue-Ochoa – Haverford College

This project seeks to advance engaged political theory from and for the Americas. The aims of engaged political theory are: to expand political theory’s global reach, by partnering with ideas, voices, and movements that have been most affected by injustices; to foster the use of engaged approaches to theorizing; to re-center “marginal” ideas and practices within political theory; and to engage broad publics. The project will address how the Global South is being remolded by new technologies. Digital platforms have transformed the world; and as artificial intelligence (AI) is added to them, they will continue to do so. The Global North has seen much debate over how these tools can spur advances in many areas while causing harm in others. But what of the South? This question has hitherto been neglected by American political theory. We think that some impacts will parallel those felt in the North. But not all; and it behooves engaged political theory to study these differences. The workshops would aim to reveal how the impacts differ from their Northern counterparts; how the South’s experiences offer new insights into those counterparts; and how these impacts reshape the plurality found within each region.