Political Science

Philip Arena recently completed his PhD at Pennsylvania State University and will be starting as an Assistant Professor at Buffalo University in the fall. His research explores the implications of party competition on government accountability, and how changes in the government's accountability domestically effects its resolve in international crises. Methodological interests include formal modeling (especially bargaining theory and spatial modeling) and quantitative methods (especially MLE and duration analysis).

Nazli Avdan is a fourth year graduate student at Duke University. My primary field is International Relations and secondary field is Methods. Broadly speaking, my interests lie in the quantitative studies of international conflict/security. My dissertation focuses on state strategies of control over the movement of individuals across borders and tries to bridge the gap between security studies and globalization scholarship. My side projects lean more towards the ‘cooperation’ side of international politics; more specifically I focus on domestic—institutional and public --mechanisms of financial crises management. Academics aside, I am from Istanbul, Turkey, where I got my BA in political science and was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign prior to coming to Duke. Besides researching border policies and territorial conflict, I devote my time to missing ‘real winter’, skiing, jogging, concert-going, learning Spanish, and listening to Scandinavian metal. Homepage: www.duke.edu/~na15.

Tobias Boehmelt: I am a first-year Ph.D. candidate in International Relations at the University of Essex, UK. My research interests include international regimes, regime effectiveness, conflict & cooperation, international mediation and quantitative methods. My dissertation asks, “how to explain interaction between mediating parties and what impact does this have on effectiveness?” Before I started my Ph.D., I received my M.A. in International Relations from the University of Essex and studied in Bamberg, Washington DC, and Berlin.

Michael Brady is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Duke University. His dissertation addresses the question of how increasing party polarization in the U.S. Congress over the last decade influences policy through bicameral negotiations in conference committees. In doing so the project uses the conference process to advance topics within political science such as the role of political parties in shaping policy, bicameralism, and the politics of congressional earmarks. Other projects he is working on spill into areas such as congressional voting behavior, elections and representation, race and politics, and public opinion.

Martin Brunner: I am a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Konstanz, Germany. My dissertation with the provisional title "Much Ado about Nothing? An Analysis of Opposition Initiatives in European Legislatures" investigates the bill sponsorship behavior of opposition MPs and parties. I studied Public Policy and Management (Dipl. Verwaltungswissenschaft) at the University of Konstanz (Germany), the Institut d’Études Politiques de Grenoble (France), and the University of Leiden (Netherlands). In my free time I like sailing, climbing, and other outdoor activities.

Cristina Corduneanu-Huci is a fourth-year PhD student in Political Science at Duke. Her research interests include democratic consolidation, state capacity, political economy of developing countries and interest mobilization under various regime types. Her dissertation project looks at variations in the salience of taxation and social spending across democracies and autocracies. Empirically, she is interested in the politics of the Middle Eastern liberalizing economies and of the post-communist countries.

Jonghoon Eun is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. His fields of study are American politics and Methodology. He is especially interested in presidential politics at both elite and popular levels. Using categorical and hierarchical data analyses, he has investigated presidential elections and presidential policy actions. His dissertation explores the president’s choice of a particular policy activity among different alternatives given a policy issue. His EITM project will focus on presenting his dissertation model, a Unified Theory of Presidential Policy Activity, and developing empirical tests for it. Before coming to Austin, Jonghoon studied Political Science and Political Theory at Seoul National University (B.A. and M.A.), Seoul, Korea. He is an avid fan of movies and music.

Marek Hanusch: In 2007, I received a masters degree in Comparative Government from the University of Oxford, where I am currently reading for a DPhil (for some reason Oxford resists calling it a PhD as everyone else does). My research interests centre on the political determinants of budget deficits and other issues in political economy. I suppose it is fair to say that I thus remain loyal to the intersection of economics and politics, which I have focused on since my undergraduate studies at the University of Essex.

David Hendry is a third-year Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining the program at Illinois, I spent a year and a half in the Ph.D. program at Florida State University and subsequently transferred. My research interests are varied, but my EITM project focuses on race as it relates to the post-1960s partisan realignment in the United States. Specifically, I am developing an individual-level theory of variation in the salience of race as a social cleavage. A key component of the theory is interaction between races, and hence a key component of my empirical investigation concerns the incidence of racial segregation and desegregation. I plan to use the theory to inform a computational model that incorporates such features as information environments and generational replacement. The project is in its infancy, but will be a component of my dissertation.

Jonathan Kropko is a third-year Ph.D. student in American Politics at UNC Chapel Hill. My research has focused on elections, and I have worked on evaluating empirical models to explain multiparty elections. I am especially interested in how electoral rules and strategic behavior affect electoral outcomes. It will be important for me to be able to use and successfully integrate advanced formal and empirical methods to research this topic. Specifically, empirical models make substantive assumptions for statistical reasons which might not be appropriate for the political situation in question. Formal theory can be used to develop better assumptions for our data. I'm from Ohio, where I received a BA in Political Science and a BS in Mathematics from Ohio State University in 2005.

In Won Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University. He obtained his master’s degree in Economics at University of Virginia (B.A. in Economics from Yonsei University, Korea) before entering his current program. His research interests include urban and metropolitan politics, public policy analysis, economic development policy, game theory, and social network analysis. His dissertation investigates how voluntary regional organizations for economic development are formed and maintained in US metropolitan areas by integrating formal game theoretic approach and social network theory. He is a huge baseball fan and likes to watch movies in his spare time.

Dan Magleby: I am a PhD student in the political science department at the University of Michigan. I have an MS in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences from Northwestern University's Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences department, and a BA in political science from Brigham Young University. My substantive interests center in American Politics. In particular, I am interested candidate entry, legislative bargaining, and party formation in the American context. In my EITM project, I model the strategic use of the conference committee in the U.S. Congress.

Hande Mutlu is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Politics department at New York University, where she specializes in comparative politics. Her research interests include political parties, political competition, coalition formation and coalition stability with a focus on advanced industrialized countries. In her dissertation she examines intra-party dynamics and explores the conditions under which parties are stable, with no splits, focusing on single-party majority governments. Hande is originally from Istanbul, Turkey, and prior to coming to New York she spent a year in London, where she received a Master's degree in European Studies.

C. Daniel Myers is a rising fourth year student at Princeton University. His dissertation examines the potential for information sharing in deliberative democracy, particularly with regards to "experts" or people with unique access to specialized knowledge. More broadly, he is interested in American Politics and Democratic Theory with particular focus on political participation and communication. Dan is a 2005 graduate of Allegheny College, where he was a fellow at the Center for Political Participation.

Brendan Nyhan is a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University. website

Sunhee Park is in the fourth year of the Ph.D. program in Political Science at Florida State University. The research question that I address with my EITM project, and further with my dissertation, is how third-party enforcement influences the negotiated settlement processes of civil wars, from the early stage of framing the bargaining offer to the later stage of the bargaining outcome. As a preliminary effort toward this goal, I have developed a bargaining model with an option for the stronger group to renege. In my work thus far, I have found that the level of third-party enforcement in a civil war influences the decisions about bargaining offers and the final outcomes for each group.

Dana Adriana Puia:

Gabriele Ruoff: I am a PhD student and research associate at the Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS) at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. The research project I am working in since October 2005 is part of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research "Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century". Our project deals with democratic structures and processes and the provision of public goods. Before moving to Zurich I studied public policy and management

(Diplom-Verwaltungswissenschaft) with a focus on international relations at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and at Charles University at Prague, Czech Republic.

Willem Schudel: I am a second-year PhD student at the University of Essex (UK). My thesis consists of three essays on the relationship between corruption and international capital flows such as aid, investment and lending. Some of my research interests are economic development and international institutions as well as dyadic panel data analysis. I grew up in The Netherlands, having studied International Relations at the University of Groningen.

Joel Selway: I am a fifth year PhD student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My research interests include ethnic politics, redistribution, civil war, political institutions, economic growth and development (esp. health and education). My dissertation explores the interaction between social structure and electoral rules on distributive outcomes with a substantive focus on developing democracies.

Kaitlyn Sill: I am going to be starting my fourth year in the Political Science doctoral program at Louisiana State University. Broadly, I am interested in studying all aspects of Judicial Politics, but my specific research interest is in the institutional effect of courts domestically and comparatively. My dissertation explores the relationship between judicial independence and economic development by looking at variations in independence across states and cross nationally.

I am originally from Sacramento, CA and received my BA at UC Davis. When I am not studying Political Science or nursing an injured tendon, I am spending time with my husband, napping with my dogs, running, and spinning.

Adriana Stoian: I am a PhD candidate at Binghamton University (SUNY). I have received my first MA in political science from Babes-Boylai University in Romania, where I lived until 4 years ago before arriving in the United States. My fields of interest are institutional analysis and comparative judicial politics. My research interests include transitions to democracy with a focus on Eastern Europe, authoritarian regimes, the choice and design of political institutions in transitional democracies, and comparative constitutional courts. My dissertation focuses on the choice of electoral systems and the design of constitutional courts in the transitional democracies of Eastern Europe. I also have design and conducted experiments to determine whether different electoral formulas affect voters’ incentives for strategic behavior.

Andrew Waugh: I am a third year doctoral student in political science at the University of California, San Diego. I did my undergraduate work at Duke University, where I was a president of the debate team and majored in political science and psychology. My EITM project will examine the structure of political party organizations in the United States. By integrating elements of social network analysis, organizational theory, and cognitive psychology, I hope to construct an analytical model of party organizational structure that will yield testable implications for congressional and campaign behavior. I am especially interested in the potential for party organizations to set electoral agendas and reinforce partisan polarization in Congress. I also enjoy gin, gadgets, red wine, running, and music.