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| These Rice students are currently seeking employment. |
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AMERICAN POLITICS: |
Christy's research and teaching interests include political behavior, political psychology, campaigns & elections, the policy process, political institutions, social identity, race & ethnicity, and research methods such as Quantitative Methods, Experimental Methodology, and Survey Methodology. Her dissertation explores how and when group mobilization efforts are successful. Christy takes a micro approach by exploring the specific ways that varying rhetorical strategies enhance the likelihood of successful mobilization. Specifically, she combines rational choice and psychological theories to generate hypotheses concerning the role of thresholds (rules that determine how far the group is from its goal), the stakes involved in the decision, and source credibility in moderating the success of frames in increasing group participation. These predictions are tested in a series of three experiments -- a voting game laboratory experiment, a public goods laboratory experiment, and a mobilization survey-experiment. Christy finds evidence that group-based mobilization is most successful when moderators reinforce the mobilization messages, suggesting that identity-based politics have a greater underlying rational (i.e., instrumental) component than previously thought. The findings of this project have significant implications for the role of mobilization and identity in politics.
Dissertation Committee: John R. Alford (Co-Chair), James N. Druckman (Northwestern University, Co-Chair), Randy Stevenson, Robert Stein, and Michelle Hebl (Psychology)
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David’s research and teaching interests include political institutions with an emphasis on legislatures, bureaucracies, and the policy process, U.S. state politics, interest groups and parties, and comparative institutions. His dissertation explores the impact of political and institutional arrangements that vary across the U.S. states on decisions by legislators to engage in statutory control of bureaucrats and where that control is imposed. While legislative scholars examining the use of statutory control to oversee and control bureaucrats have consistently found the political environment to impact both bureaucratic behavior and the amount of policy-making discretion legislators provide to bureaucrats, David argues that these studies have focused predominantly on statutory control decisions made by the U.S. Congress, an institutionally static legislature which severely limits our understanding of control strategies and the factors other than partisanship that influence these decisions. His study expands upon legislative studies that have transported statutory control research to utilize the political and institutional variation that exists across U.S. state legislatures by providing a new dataset of statutory control decisions by state legislators, testing a new model of statutory control of bureaucrats that examines statutory control decisions as a “two-stage” process, and incorporating institutional measures that adequately capture the variation that exists across U.S. states. In particular, David examines enacted legislation pertaining to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) across all 50 states over a 10 year period to assess the impact of political and institutional arrangements not only on whether legislators engaged in statutory control of bureaucrats, but also where that control was imposed, in general legislation or appropriations bills.
Dissertation Committee: Keith E. Hamm (Chair), Rick K. Wilson, Randolph T. Stevenson, and Richard Boylan (Economics)
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COMPARATIVE POLITICS: |
Jonathan’s research and teaching interests include comparative politics, Latin American politics, political parties, comparative institutional analysis, and political clientelism. His dissertation addresses a lacuna in comparative work on clientelism by developing a new method of measurement that combines the detail of qualitative description with the comparability of quantitative measurement. Raw data on clientelism is collected from seven cities and regions in Argentina and Brazil. In each location party leaders, party militants, neighborhood vote brokers, community leaders, government staff and voters describe how vote buying works. The rich and colorful descriptions provided by local informants offer an understanding of clientelism that’s found only in the field. Through a process of systematic categorization, informants’ considerations are coded in specific empirical categories and by broad ideal types. The coding process preserves the character of descriptions while allowing for a meaningful comparison of dependent variables that describe clientelism, across the cases.
Dissertation Committee: Mark P. Jones (Chair), Randy Stevenson, and Lanny Martin
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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: |
Victor’s research and teaching interests involve the quantitative study of international conflict, conflict processes, American foreign policy, and comparative politics (institutions). His dissertation project examines the relationship between mutual military buildups (arms races) and the onset of international conflict. The arms race literature has traditionally focused upon the major powers of the system and the empirical results remain inconsistent. Victor’s investigation attempts to address the gap in this literature by shifting the focus to the minor powers of the international system (thus broadening the number of available observations) and offering a new and more rigorous model of dyadic arms racing. Specifically, his project focuses upon minor power states located among three major geographical regions of Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa over the time period 1970-2000. The empirical analysis seeks to determine whether dyadic arms racing leads minor powers interacting with other states in their region into militarized conflict with one another. Victor incorporates the actual number of weapons and weapons systems of a pair of states as the primary measure of an arms competition as opposed to military expenditure data. His project is therefore able to analyze specific types of arms racing – such as land, sea, and aerial – over a large-N sample size and how these different types of military buildups affect the likelihood of conflict between states. This will allow researchers to move beyond a general notion of an arms race and speak in more nuanced terms about different forms of arms buildups and their impact on conflict. Preliminary results have indeed shown meaningful differences in land, sea, and aerial based arms competitions and their effects on interstate conflict.
Dissertation Committee: Richard Stoll (Chair), Cliff Morgan, Bill Reed, and Devika Subramanian (Computer Science)
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