DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

Project: Experiments are a core metholdology in the social sciences. Political scientists have spurred considerable innovation in developing and validating new experimental designs and establishing best practices in the design and implementation of experiments. Despite active development, little consensus exists in terms of the metrics that researchers should use to evaluate the appropriateness of one research design against alternatives. The fellow will collaborate with Dr. Diaz on developing a set of tools and standards to compare experimental designs in a broad range of applications in the social and political sciences, with particular emphasis on questions of political behavior.

Position & Time Commitments:

The Fellow will: 

• Participate in literature reviews, annotated bibliographies, data collection and analysis, write findings, advance their own ideas within the frame of the research project.
• This position can be remote.

Research Training & Outcomes:

The Fellow participating in this project will gain:

• Experience on every step of the academic research pipeline
• Activities ranges from identifying research questions, preparing annotated bibliographies, and literature reviews, collecting and analyzing data, writing papers, and presenting work at academic conferences. 
• This is an ideal opportunity for students considering graduate programs in quantitatively-oriented fields, or careers related to data analysis

Preferred Skills and Experience:

• Data analysis in R and RStudio
• Familiarity with experimental research in social sciences and political science
• Willingness to learn more about these topics
• Interest on academic research and writing

Learn more about Professor Gustavo Diaz | Apply Here

Project: Green Waves is a book project that explores the global histories of modern environmentalism, drawing on cases from North America, Europe, and Asia. From its birth in conservative politics inspired by romanticist reactions against industrialization, to the liberal movement galvanized by labor activists and anti-war protesters, environmentalism has proven to be a malleable political idea up to the present day, when conversatives are gradually confronting the political limits of climate-change skepticism and denial. Among other aims, this project is interested in understanding why and documenting how environmental beliefs sometimes fuse with various right-wing ideologies.

Position & Time Commitment:

The Fellow will:

• Conduct library, internet, and potentially field research
• This position can be remote

Research Training & Outcomes:

The Fellow participating in this project will gain:

• Develop skills relevant to future careers in academia, policy analysis, or investigative journalism.
• Have the opportunity to observe, analyze, and reflect on the ever-evolving ideological landscape of our society

Preferred Skills and Experiences:

• German, Russian, or French language skills
• Those aspiring to write a book one day

Learn more about Professor Iza Ding | Apply Here

Project: The International Criminal Court (ICC) is a permanent tribunal with jurisdiction over atrocity crimes: genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The United States was a strong supporter of the ICC’s predecessors – the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals after World War II and the tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s – so many expected American backing for the ICC too. However, this has not happened. The U.S. voted against establishing the ICC, refused to join the ICC after its creation, threatened dire consequences for states that cooperated with the ICC, and eventually imposed sanctions designed to destroy the ICC.  

This project seeks to understand American hostility toward the ICC via a survey of American foreign policy professionals. Understanding the attitudes of foreign policy elites is essential for two reasons. First, it is elites – not the general public – who actually craft US policy toward the ICC. Second, elite attitudes toward the ICC appear to differ substantially from the attitudes of average American citizens. Indeed, existing surveys indicate that the U.S. public takes a much brighter view of the ICC than government officials do. One of the more remarkable aspects of American hostility to the ICC is the degree to which it is confined to elite “inside the beltway” circles: politicians, policymakers, think tanks, and the like. This survey – the first of its kind – will attempt to understand why official Washington is so opposed to the ICC.  

Fellows working on this project will, first, assist with identifying an appropriate sample of American foreign policy professionals. Then, fellows will assist with administering a survey to these foreign policy professionals on their attitudes toward the ICC. Among other things, it will address: To what extent is there consensus on America’s aggressive policy toward the ICC? Does political partisanship determine attitudes toward the ICC? How much do foreign policy professionals really know about the ICC? 

 Position & time commitment:  

The Fellow will: 

• Assist Professor Krcmaric in identifying a sample of American foreign policy professionals. This will entail reading the biographies of individuals serving in government positions and holding positions at Washington, DC think tanks (where many former government officials work).  
• Create a large sample of all American foreign policy professionals and a smaller sample of American foreign policy professionals with expertise on the ICC specifically. 
• After matching each foreign policy professional to one of these samples, the Farrell Fellow will record their email addresses so that we can send them the survey. 
• This position can be remote. 

Research Training & Outcomes 

The Fellow participating in this project will gain: 

• Knowledge about the politics of the US-ICC relationship 
• Skills regarding the creation and maintenance of a dataset 
• Experience in research progress – learning how a project evolves and develops of the course of its lifespan 

Preferred Skills and Experience 

• Excel or another spreadsheet software 
• Experience in survey experiments is valuable 

Learn more about Professor Daniel Krcmaric  | Apply Here

Project: This book project pursues two aims. The book’s first aim is to offer a general theoretical account of the idea of the “the unthinkable”, which has been heavily under-studied in moral and political philosophy. The second aim, driving the bulk of the project, is more applied. This project wishes to show how a better theoretical grasp of “the unthinkable” can help address concrete questions concerning the relationship between democracy and violence, especially across international borders. Among these questions: can it be permissible to launch a military operation that will harm innocents abroad to stave off a dangerous demagogue who might win an upcoming election at home? Can a democratic government send soldiers to support a manifestly unjust war abroad to prevent them from fomenting a coup at home? Can democratic governments close their borders to citizens of a fellow democracy that has just been invaded by a dictatorship so that the invaded stay and resist the aggressors?

 Position & time commitment:

The Fellow will:

• Read drafts of the evolving book project and offer comments.
• Tracing empirical and normative sources that bear on the book’s arguments.
• This position can be remote.

Research Training & Outcomes

The Fellow participating in this project will gain:

• Further background in moral and political philosophy.
• Familiarity with the book-writing process.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Background in moral and political theory

Learn more about Professor Shmulik Nili  | Apply Here

Project: This project is interested in the ways in which health differences among citizens may affect the quality of democratic representation as well as how people engage with politics. I argue that the roots of political behavior run deep. I contend that any account of political behavior will be incomplete unless it includes heath indicators. I focus on chronic health issues because I believe poor health arrests the resources and drives up the costs of democratic participation.

If we continue to miss health related differences in mass politics amongst people with chronic illness, we will overlook or misconstrue those effects by lumping them into the residual category which happens to be personal choice. By doing this, society also risks what Hochschild labelled as an “empathy wall” (2016) between citizens with and without health problems.

Position & time commitment:  

The Fellow will: 

• Assist with research on health and politics.
• Oversee and take part in several stages of the research process including, pre-registering analysis with OSF Finding and writing about the literature in the field, cleaning data, and creating tables and figures.
• This position will require attending in-person meetings.

Research Training & Outcomes 

The Fellow participating in this project will gain Greater understanding of political science research, including: 

• How to move from research questions to hypotheses, to data and to analysis. 
• Improved critical thinking skills. 
• Better insight into the field of political science and social science more generally. 
• Develop general professional skills, including time management, project management, communications, and so forth, which are transportable across settings. 
• Critical thinking skills, in particular, learning how to ask questions about data and theories in ways that are seldom taught (and hard to teach) in the classroom setting. 

Preferred Skills and Experience 

• Experience working with STATA 
• Experience working on surveys  

Learn more about Professor Matt Pryor  | Apply Here

Project: What is the role of social media as a facilitator of, and motive for, the violence involved in the Capitol invasion on January 6th? This project compares January 6th participants in terms of their engagement with social media (as an explanatory variable) and their involvement with violence during January 6th as shown in court recrods (as an outcome) variable to understand the extent to which social-media networks and the pursuit of online game motivate more extreme actions during protests of this kind. The data for the project include a collection of court records captured from the Department of Justice website before they were deleted, court records collected from other sources, as well as social media transcripts from right-wing broadcasters. The project intends to contribute to our understanding of the event itself, but also of the interconnections between online celebrity and democratic backsliding.  

 

Position & time commitment:  

The Fellow will: 

• Fellows will work with the faculty mentor to help complete and validate coding of court files for January 6th participants according to a pre-existing coding scheme. 

• Once this is completed, the team will work together to carry out data-science and statistical analysis with task divided in ways that match Fellows’ skills and interest. 

• This position can be remote. 

Research Training & Outcomes 

The Fellow participating in this project will gain: 

• Experience in statistical and data-science research, from data-collection side through to analysis 

• This will give a hands-on opportunity to do real statistical social science in the context of highly relevant questions connected to contemporary politics 

 

Learn more about Professor Jaye Seawright  |  Apply Here

Project: This project examines the causes and consequences of the rise of mass investment in the United States and its relationship to politics and political culture, from the mid-1960s through the response to the COVID-19 crisis. It focuses on transformations across three domains: the shift in viewing housing and homeownership from a “store of wealth” towards a “means to wealth”, through legal and cultural changes that made home equity more accessible, day-to-day changes in house values more trackable, and small real estate investing more desirable; the rise in participation in the stock market, through the changing landscape of employee retirement benefits, the rise of mutual and index funds, and other new investment technologies; and the embrace of human capital theories of education that has occurred alongside rising participation in post-secondary education (including conventional colleges and universities as well as certificate programs) often financed by debt, but viewed as an investment. Drawing from a range of sources, including primary documents collected in government and interest group archives, industry periodicals, Congressional debates and documents, and demographic data on asset and wealth holdings, the project examines how policymakers began to view promoting investment and asset-building as a way to provide social benefits during a period under which the “New Deal order” was under strain (Gerstle 2022). As with the broader embrace of financialization during this period (Krippner 2011), the appeals were multiple. These included ot find a non-wage path to economic inclusion, particularly one that could address longstanding patterns of racial and social exclusion in a period of resurgent racialized antipathy towards other forms of social policy; and that could, above all, transform citizens’ expectations of their governments by giving them a greater stake in the performance of markets and “skin in the game”. This project traces the institutions that changed – sometimes deliberately, sometimes through happenstance – to promote mass investment and the patterns of participation they gave rise to, as well as the role of political parties, business actors, labor, and civil society organizations in promoting and contesting these changes. Finally, it examines the unintended consequences and unfulfilled promises of efforts to encourage citizens to view themselves as investors.  

 Position & time commitment:  

The Fellow will: 

• Primarily be responsible for collecting, organizing, and analyzing textual data (from interest group and trade publications, as well as popular media coverage).  
• May also be asked to help to gather government documents, organize archival materials, and compile basic descriptive statistics.  

• This position will meet/work in-person 

Research Training & Outcomes 

The Fellow participating in this project will gain: 

• A firsthand experience of conducting qualitative historical research into the American political economy, including: 
  • Help with locating, managing, and analyzing qualitative data collected from government, business, and popular sources 
  • This is an ideal foray into research for students in terested in eventually conducting independent research while at Northwestern 

Preferred Skills and Experience 

• Interest in qualitative historical research
• Organizanized and attention to detail are essential 

 Learn more about Professor Chloe Thurston  | Apply Here