“We were glad to admit her,” recalled Katherine Tate, assistant and then associate professor of government at Harvard from 1989 to 1993, a member of the department’s admissions committee. Among many talented applicants, “She soared,” Tate said recently, and “turned out to be a very talented student.”

The abstract for Patrick Heller and Ashutosh Varshney's paper states: "Research on democracy has shed much light on two kinds of democratic politics: patterns of voting and patterns of associational or movement politics. But there is growing recognition that in order to better understand the quality or depth of democracy, we need to move beyond this dualistic focus to better understand the everyday practices through which citizens can effectively wield their rights; these practices often diverge from the formal equality enshrined in laws and constitutions. We study this question through a large, unique sample survey carried out in a South Indian city. We find that effective citizenship is refracted through the institutional specificities of urban India and that, as a result, the poor access the state through political participation and the rich through particularistic connections to persons of influence. But unlike the conventional celebration of participation as a citizenship-deepening activity, we also find that a substantial part of participation is associated with forms of brokerage that compromise democratic citizenship."

Karra McCray Gibson (Brown University)

The New Congressional Black Caucus: Differentiating Divisions within the CBC

By investigating ideological heterogeneity among the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, this project seeks to understand the interaction between intersectional representation of individual members and the collective voice of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington.

Gemma Dipoppa's paper on “Fascist Ideology and Migrant Labor Exploitation”, coauthored with Mario Carillo and Shanker Satyanath is the 2023 winner.

The McGillivray Best Paper Award is given for the best paper in Political Economy presented at the previous year’s APSA Annual Meeting.

The Political Science Department welcomes three new members to our community who will join us officially on July 1st. Meet Aditi Sahasrabuddhe, Deva Woodly, and Marques Zárate.

The Barbara Sinclair Legacy Award is new LSS award designed to honor the work of a scholar or set of scholars who have contributed a lifetime of significant scholarship to the study of legislative politics. In the tradition of Professor Sinclair’s body of work, recipients of this award have focused on individual legislative behavior, institutional rules, or the role of party in shaping legislative politics. This award is also intended to recognize scholars who employ a range of methods in their research.

The International Political Economy (IPE) Distinguished Scholar Award recognizes outstanding senior scholars whose influence and path-breaking intellectual work will continue to impact the international political economy field for years to come.

In the aftermath of the refugee crisis caused by conflicts in the Middle East and an increase in migration to Europe, European nations have witnessed a surge in discrimination targeted at immigrant minorities. To quell these conflicts, some governments have resorted to the adoption of coercive assimilation policies aimed at erasing differences between natives and immigrants. Are these policies the best method for reducing hostilities? Native Bias challenges the premise of such regulations by making the case for a civic integration model, based on shared social ideas defining the concept and practice of citizenship.

Drawing from original surveys, survey experiments, and novel field experiments, Donghyun Danny Choi, Mathias Poertner, and Nicholas Sambanis show that although prejudice against immigrants is often driven by differences in traits such as appearance and religious practice, the suppression of such differences does not constitute the only path to integration. Instead, the authors demonstrate that similarities in ideas and value systems can serve as the foundation for a common identity, based on a shared concept of citizenship, overcoming the perceived social distance between natives and immigrants.

Addressing one of the most pressing challenges of our time, Native Bias offers an original framework for understanding anti-immigrant discrimination and the processes through which it can be overcome.

Brown University’s Wendy Schiller and Coastal Carolina University’s Kaitlin Sidorsky call for more targeted laws and federal/state cooperation to address a widespread problem of gun-based domestic violence against women.