POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPARTMENT

2014 Political Science Department Newsletter

POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPARTMENT ANNUAL NEWSLETTER | 2014

PhD’s Awarded • Deepa Prakash, June 2013 “Carrots, Sticks and Stones: The Politics of Naming in CounterTerrorism.” • Keneshia Nicole Grant, May 2014 “Realignment and Relocation: How the Great Migration Changed the Face of the Democratic Party.”

Graduate Funding Awards Ronit Berger • Received the Cohn Fund Award Michael Makara • Received the Koff Award Michael Newell • Received the Meiklejohn Award

Rachel Sigman • Received the Nagle Fund Award • Received the Ketcham Award Logan Strother • Recevied the Stonecash Award Eric van der Vort • Received the Kissel Fund Award

Master’s Degrees Awarded December, 2013 • Nneke Eke • Sefa Secen • Logan Strother May, 2014 • Lindsay Burt • Gregory Clark • Leeland Clark • Alex Miller • Jason Montgomery • John Ryan • Prakhar Sharma

POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPARTMENT ANNUAL NEWSLETTER | 2014

Graduate Student and Alumni Jobs Bertha Amisi accepted a tenure track position at Nova Southeastern University. Amanda DiPaolo accepted a tenure track position at St. Thomas University in Fredericton Canada. Cyril Ghosh accepted a tenure track position at Wagner College in Staten Island, NY. Keneshia Grant accepted a tenure track position at Howard University. Christopher Jones accepted the position of Dean of Arts and Sciences at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY. George A. Lopez, has been named vice president of the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding. Mike Makara accepted a tenure track position at University of Central Missouri. Emy Matesan accepted a tenure track position at Wesleyan University.

Sibel Oktay accepted a tenure track position at University of Illinois Springfield. Eric Rittinger accepted a tenure track positon at Salisbury University. Daniel Singer accepted a position as the City Manager of Poway, California. Ebrahim Khalifeh Soltani accepted a tenure track position at Eastern Michigan University. Ralanda Winborn accepted a position as an Excelsior Service Fellow at NYPerforms.

Baby News Petra Hejnova and her husband Eric Persons announced the birth of their daughter, Madeleine Hana Persons on August 3, 2013. Dan McDowell and his wife, Sara welcomed their daughter, Eileen Victoria, in May 2014.

POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPARTMENT ANNUAL NEWSLETTER | 2014

ALUMNI BOOKS Cyril Ghosh

Published “The Politics of the American Dream: Democratic Inclusion in Contemporary American Political Culture” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013), which made Huffington Post's list of Best Books in Political Science in 2013 (by Heath Brown). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heathbrown/best-political-sciencebo_b_4454570.html

FACULTY BOOKS Marian L. Palley

Published “The Politics of Women's Health Care in the United States” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) with her husband, Howard.

Michael Barkun Published the second edition with four new chapters of “A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America.” (University of California Press, 2013.)

Audie Klotz Terrence Guay

published “The Business Environment of Europe: Firms, Governments, and Institutions” (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Published “Migration and National Identity in South Africa, 1860-2010.” (Cambridge UP, 2013.) Professor Klotz would like to acknowledge that several RAs that helped with the project, especially Heather Pincock.

POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPARTMENT ANNUAL NEWSLETTER | 2014

NEW FACULTY

Dimitar Gueorguiev Dimitar Gueorguiev will be joining our staff as an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where he teaches courses on Chinese politics, research methods, and foreign policy. His work on China covers a range of topics broadly connected to governance and public relations. This work is primarily empirical, relying heavily on randomized public opinion surveys and original data on sub-national legislative and judicial activity. Outside of China, Dimitar focuses on election turnout, corruption and foreign investment. Dimitar's work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of East Asian Studies and the Asian Journal of Economics.

Spencer Piston Spencer Piston’s research examines the influence of attitudes about social groups, with particular attention to racial and class groups, on public opinion and political behavior. He conducts survey research, often experimental. Piston has two primary strands of scholarship. The first is a series of articles examining the conditions under which racial prejudice influences policy opinion and electoral behavior. The second, a book project based on his dissertation, assesses American reactions to economic inequality. The dissertation, which was completed at the University of Michigan in August 2014, was co-chaired by Vince Hutchings and Skip Lupia, and Don Kinder, Rob Mickey, and Mary Corcoran also served on the committee.

POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPARTMENT ANNUAL NEWSLETTER | 2014

Faculty Awards, Grants, and Honors

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Received a grant to support the Qualitative Data Repository through the National Science Foundation

Margarita Estevez-Abe Michael Barkun •

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Served as a Consulting: Member of the International Advisory Group research program on The Impact of Religion: Challenges for Society, Law and Democracy, Uppsala University, Sweden. Served as a Consultant for the United States Bureau of Prisons Served as a Member of the Academic Advisory Board, The Intelligence Project, Southern Poverty Law Center, Montgomery, Alabama. Served on the Terrorism and Political Violence; Journal for the Study of Radicalism editorial board.

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Received the O'Hanley Faculty Scholar Award at the Maxwell School. Received a grant to support a conference on Iranian foreign policy decision making and negotiation through the Carnegie Corporation of New York Received a grant to support the Tenth Biennial Conference of the International Society for Iranian Studies through the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute Received the Iran Data Portal Support Grant through the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University

Elizabeth Cohen •

Received a Russell Sage Foundation Fellowship

Received a Toyota Foundation Research Grant Received a Suntory Foundation Research Grant

Audie Klotz •

Christopher Faricy •

received a $60,000 grant from the Russell Sage Foundation for The Other Side of Social Spending: Public Opinion toward Social Tax Expenditure Policy in the United States.

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along with Margaret E. Roberts, Brandon M. Stewart, Dustin Tingley, Christopher Lucas, Jetson Leder-Luis, Bethany Albertson, and David Rand, are the 2014 winners of the Society for Political Methodology's Harold F. Gosnell Prize for the best work in political methodology presented at any political science conference during the preceding year. Their "Topic Models for Open-Ended Survey Responses with Applications to Experiments" was presented at a number of conferences over the past year including the NYU Experimental Methods conference, Visions in Methodology, and the New Directions in Text Analysis Conference in London. Awarded a Political Science Research Grant from the Norway Research Council

Seth Jolly •

gave a talk at UNC entitled “Xenophobia in the EU: Public Attitudes Toward Immigration” for the Center

Co-recipient of the 2014 J. Ann Tickner Award from the International Studies Association for innovative scholarship and exceptional mentoring. Many colleagues and former students endorsed the nomination, led by Mark Rupert.

Yuksel Sezgin •

Shana Gadarian

Mehrzad Boroujerdi •

for European Studies’ Friday Lecture Series, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Available at http://www.youtube.com/wat ch?v=48PWFxI-GTI

Colin Elman

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Received the Gordon Hirabayashi Book Award from the Human Rights Section of the American Sociological Association for his book “Human Rights Under StateEnforced Religious Family Laws in Israel, Egypt and India.” (Cambridge University Press, 2013) Received the Jack Shand Research Award by the Society for Scientific Study of Religion

Anoop Sadanandan •

Awarded an Appleby-Mosher Grant through the Maxwell School

Corrine Zoli • •

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Awarded the Google Global Impact Award research grant Awarded a research grant to hold a workshop for the Brookings/US-World Islamic Forum Received a research grant from the United States Department of State Received a research grant from the United Institute of Peace

POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPARTMENT ANNUAL NEWSLETTER | 2014

Spotlight on the Koff Award The Koff Award, given for the best graduate student paper written each year on comparative politics, is named for the late Stephen P. Koff, pictured at left, who served as a faculty member in the political science department for many years until his passing in 2003.

Michael Makara won the Stephen Koff Award for Best Graduate Student Paper in Comparative Politics for Fall 2013 for his article titled “Coup-proofing, Military Defection, and the Arab Spring.” The article was recently published in the November 2013 issue of Democracy and Security. In this article, Mike explains why different militaries in the Middle East reacted so differently to popular uprisings against authoritarian rule during the Arab Spring. He explains why, for example, the Egyptian military sided with the opposition to Hosni Mubarak’s rule, while the Syrian military largely continues to defend Bashar al-Assad to this day. What makes this variation in military behavior so puzzling is that each of these regimes had been considered equally “coup-proof.” Each regime had imposed a variety of measures that aimed to maintain their military’s loyalty, prompting scholars of the Middle East to cite strong civil-military relations as one of the main reasons why authoritarianism had been so exceptionally resilient in the Arab world. Mike finds that the variation in coup-proofing strategies implemented across regimes in the Middle East explains why some militaries defected to the opposition during the Arab Spring while others remained loyal. Countries such as Egypt and Tunisia that relied solely on distributing patronage and other “divide-and-rule” failed to prevent to military defection when mass protests began in early 2011. By contrast, those regimes such as Syria and Bahrain that staffed their militaries with communal minorities continue to enjoy security apparatus loyalty to this day. At the very least, this suggests that not all coup-proofing strategies are created equally and that some strategies are more effective than others. More ironically, however, the article finds that some strategies used to maintain military loyalty can actually backfire and make regimes more vulnerable to military defection when confronted with mass protests. Michael Newell won the Stephen Koff Award for Best Graduate Student Paper in Comparative Politics for Fall of 2012 for his article titled “Democracy and Redistribution in South Africa”. In 1990, Nelson Mandela promised that “The nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable.” As the leader of the African National Congress (ANC), Mandela was indicating the economic policies his political party would pursue if the apartheid system in South Africa were dismantled, if democratic institutions were put in its place, and if the ANC were to gain political power. However, upon realization of these goals, the ANC instead pursued relatively orthodox neo-liberal economic policies despite Mandela’s guarantee, and these policies have since failed to redress significant wealth inequalities in South Africa. Given that Acemoglu and Robinson and Boix see economic inequality as a catalyst for democratization and democratic reform as a process of renegotiating a countries’ level of wealth redistribution, South Africa represents a tough case for these theories of democratization. Why did Mandela’s ANC reverse its economic policies once in power, and what does this case study tell us about the relationship of economics to democratization? While a number of explanations have been advanced—the neo-liberal indoctrination of the ANC, international and domestic pressure for liberal policies from businesses and economic organizations, and the balance of class power—this paper argues that this policy reversal is the result of the pacted transition to democracy in South Africa. The necessity to negotiate led the ANC to mitigate its reforms in light of the demands of the National Party, the political party that had ruled under apartheid institutions. In consideration of this case study, theories of democratization should acknowledge the conservative elements of pacted transitions and question theories that link regime change to wealth redistribution if democratic institutions may not guarantee this result.

POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPARTMENT ANNUAL NEWSLETTER | 2014

ATTENTION ALUMNI!!! Please send us your accomplishments!!!

We would like to continue having an increased presence from our alumni, but we cannot do this without your help! If you would like to have your accomplishments published, or if you have a story that you think would be of particular interest to our audience, please send me your information! I’d absolutely love to hear from each and every one of you. Sally Greenfield 100 Eggers Hall Syracuse, NY 13244 315-443-9868 [email protected]

Political Science Department

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