Search Fellows
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Nicholas Sambanis
Yale University
Visiting Scholar
2003 to 2004
Nicholas Sambanis, assistant professor of political science at Yale University, will study the political economy of civil war in many countries between the years of 1945 and 2000 to test hypotheses related to the onset, duration, and recurrence of civil strife. To investigate the complexity of civil war, Sambanis has developed a model that offers an explanation of how and why a society transitions from one phase of civil war to the next; the model provides a way to test whether the phases share common risk factors.
Mark Schneider
State University of New York, Stony Brook
Visiting Scholar
1997 to 1998
Mark Schneider, professor and chair of the department of political science, State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote a book on how increasing freedom of choice affects parents' pursuit of educational alternatives for their children. Schneider evaluated both sides of the school choice argument, examining whether greater choice benefits society by prompting parents to become informed consumers, or whether it increases segregation along racial and class lines.
Lyle A. Scruggs
University of Connecticut
Visiting Scholar
2012 to 2013
Scruggs will write a book that examines the historical evolution of social welfare programs around the world and in the U.S. between 1970 and the present. He will assess whether social policy provisions are becoming less generous in richer democracies or in American states, and investigate the role of structural, institutional, and political factors to explain differences in the comparative generosity of the welfare state.
Robert Shapiro
Columbia University
Visiting Scholar
2006 to 2007
Robert Shapiro, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, will use self-reported data on political ideology and party affiliation to examine the extent to which public opinion in the United States has split along party lines. He will go beyond previous studies to analyze public opinion data from 2006 and to assess the relationship between partisanship and ideological beliefs with respect to foreign policy issues.
Peter Skerry
Boston College
Visiting Scholar
2006 to 2007
Peter Skerry, Professor of Political Science at Boston College, will write a book on the social and political integration of Muslims in contemporary America. Based on his fieldwork in several U.S. cities, the book will explore how a distinct American Muslim identity is emerging from the presence of Arab, South Asian, and African-American Muslims in the United States.
Alastair Smith
New York University
Visiting Scholar
2012 to 2013
Smith will investigate voting behavior and the ways parties solicit votes. He will build on existing formal models to argue that parties reward voting groups that offer them the greatest level of support. In this model, individual voters have much greater influence over the distribution of local rewards than over which party wins elections.
Susan C. Stokes
Yale University
Visiting Scholar
2014 to 2015
Stokes will write a book investigating what compels people to participate in elections. She argues that the subjective cost of abstention—or how much a person feels he or she will lose by not voting—can explain why people turn out at higher rates when the office to be filled is elevated. Stokes will also explore how this theory of abstention may shed new insight on why low-income populations vote at lower rates than more affluent populations.
Dara Strolovitch
Princeton University
Visiting Scholar
2017 to 2018
Strolovitch will complete a book about how widening socioeconomic inequality and catastrophic events such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Great Recession affect political representation for marginalized groups.
Piotr Swistak
University of Maryland, College Park
Visiting Scholar
1998 to 1999
Piotr Swistak, associate professor in the department of government and politics at the University of Maryland at College Park, will develop a new framework for understanding the emergence of norms, group values, and other social institutions. At the heart of many policy problems involving firms or nations lies a need for institutions that promote efficiency through cooperation. Drawing on real-life empirical puzzles, Swistak will identify the conditions under which the norms conducive to stable institutions are most likely to arise.
Sidney G. Tarrow
Cornell University
Visiting Scholar
2003 to 2004
Sidney G. Tarrow, Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government and professor of sociology at Cornell University, will write a book that examines transnational activism. He will consider a variety of questions, such as whether transnational activists consider themselves a distinct group, whether they move in and out of their activist role as issues ebb and flow, how they gain certification to be able to operate internationally, and how they appropriate domestic organizations for international purposes.
J. Phillip Thompson
Columbia University
Visiting Scholar
1995 to 1996
J. Phillip Thompson, assistant professor of urban politics and urban policy at Barnard College, began work on a book that will trace the narrowing of the political scope of black politics and the limiting of black collective action that accompanied the election of black mayors in New York, Oakland, and Atlanta. He also completed a book chapter on urban community initiatives and shifting federal policy.
George Tsebelis
University of California, Los Angeles
Visiting Scholar
2000 to 2001
George Tsebelis, professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, will develop a theory of political institutions, focusing upon those individuals or groups who hold a veto over any attempt to change the status quo. According to this theory of "veto players," political institutions do not influence the direction of policy so much as the pace of legislative change. The greater the number of veto players, the greater the cohesion within them, and the greater the ideological distance between them, the harder it is to pass legislation.
Robert Wade
Brown University
Visiting Scholar
1997 to 1998
Robert Wade, professor of political science and international political economy at Brown University, studied the process by which the World Bank, the world's preeminent development agency, has come to integrate environmental criteria into its standard advice and lending procedures. Wade explored the World Bank's evolving conceptualization of environmental considerations, focusing on the influence of such outside forces as the U.S. Congress, U.S. Treasury, and environmental NGOs.
Hannah Walker
University of Texas at Austin
Visiting Scholar
2023 to 2024
Walker will explore how local police enforcement of federal immigration laws affect Latinx people. She will analyze data from the Immigrant Legal Resources Center, Stanford Open Policing Project, and Transactional Records Access Clearing House to assess how the impact of these programs on Latinx people varies by local police precinct practices and procedures.
Dorian T. Warren
Columbia University
Visiting Scholar
2008 to 2009
Virginia L. Parks, Assistant Professor, School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, and Dorian T. Warren, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, will study grassroots community resistance to “big box” retail stores in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Ariel White
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Visiting Scholar
2018 to 2019
White will study why and how unelected government workers who interact with the public at the street level—including police officers, public benefits caseworkers, and teachers—engage in racial and ethnic discrimination. Using administrative data and field and survey experiments, she will investigate the effects of this street-level discrimination on disadvantaged groups and study the extent to which public pressure, such as protests, citizen monitoring, and media campaigns, can reduce discriminatory behavior by government workers.
Rick K. Wilson
Rice University
Visiting Scholar
2003 to 2004
Rick K. Wilson, professor of political science at Rice University, will write a book that examines trust, ethnicity, and transitional political and economic systems. Transformations from authoritarian rule over the past 25 years have highlighted the critical role trust plays in shaping both democracy and markets. For his project, Wilson collected data from two regions in the Russian Federation that have waged campaigns for sovereignty and indigenous rights.
Cara Wong
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Visiting Scholar
2015 to 2016
Wong will study how individuals perceive and react to their environments, using a new map‐drawing measure of people’s “local communities.” Using multiple survey datasets, she will investigate how individuals’ perceptions of the racial and ethnic characteristics of their locales affect their intergroup attitudes, civic engagement, and their preferences for policies that address immigration and social inequities.
Albert H. Yoon
University of Toronto
Visiting Scholar
2008 to 2009
Albert H. Yoon, Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, will write a series of articles illuminating the relationship between legal representation and social inequality in the United States and Canada. Yoon hypothesizes that vast disparities in the quality of legal representation impose not only private costs on individual litigants, but also considerable costs on society as a whole, exacerbating and even creating social inequality along a number of dimensions.
Aristide Zolberg
The New School
Visiting Scholar
1999 to 2000
Aristide Zolberg, professor of political science and director of the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity, and Citizenship at the New School for Social Research, will contribute to long-running debates on multiculturalism and the cultural incorporation of immigrants by focusing on the rise of Spanish as an increasingly "recognized" second language in the United States.