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Department of Political Science

Research Fellows

The conduct of research and the profession of political science are somewhat of a mystery even to advanced and highly-qualified undergraduate students, regardless of their participation in the Honors Program or the University Scholar Programs. The Research Fellows Program rectifies this neglected area by providing meaningful research experience, insight into the profession of Political Science, and the ability to work closely with a faculty member or an advanced (ABD) graduate student. The program is designed for advanced juniors and seniors wishing to gain the experience that will prepare them to succeed in their senior thesis work and stand out as they apply for research opportunities and advanced degrees. Junior Research Fellows will have a hands-on experience with the innovative research performed at the Department of Political Science and gain valuable professional insight by working closely with their supervisor on a weekly-basis, attending a seminar series exploring the diversity of methods and approaches, and participating in a capstone research presentation workshop.

Students register for POS4911 and receive credit as outlined in the Program Overview (Word doc).

Students who have any questions about this program should contact Dr. Ben Smith, Experiential Learning Coordinator, via email or during office hours.

Matching Junior Research Fellows with Faculty and Advanced Graduate Students

The Junior Research Fellows program is highly competitive. The Program Director will assign Research Fellows according to Faculty nominations and the needs of the projects, but not all projects or Research Fellows are guaranteed to be matched unless nominated directly by a faculty member. Faculty and advanced graduate students (ABD) are encouraged to identify and recruit prospective Research Fellows from their own classroom experiences, or voice their interest in working with a Research Fellow from the open pool of applicants by providing the Program Director the open pool request. Research Fellow applicants from the open pool will be chosen and assigned based on merit and fit with the research projects available that semester. Prospective Research Fellows should apply to the program directly by following the guidance contained in the program documents.

Grading

50% of the final grade will derive from the research progress report submitted by the faculty supervisor.

30% of the final grade will derive from participation in the initial seminar and the three critical summaries of the special topics presentations.

20% of the final grade will derive from the presentation during the final research presentation workshop.

 Program Deadlines:

April 15th for the following Fall semester
November 15th for the following Spring semester

Ongoing Faculty/ABD Research Projects Available

Professor Sebastian Elischer seeks Junior Fellows to work on the following research projects.

The first project examines the electoral contexts in the aftermath of military coup and the extent to which military juntas (do not) rig those elections. Interested students will examine secondary sources, conduct background research into the dynamics that led to the coup, collect and analyze descriptive statistical data or provide updates on current developments in countries that recently experienced a military coup.

The second project analyzes the evolution of violent Islamic extremism in sub-Saharan Africa. Interested students will collect data on how African states have tried to preempt the formation of such organizations and/or how they engage with these organizations outside of the battlefield. Students will stay on top of the ongoing academic debate about (de)radicalization and pursue in-depth research on the relationship between individual African states and Islam. Interested students ideally have some knowledge of French (but not required).

Professor Lindsey Goldberg is conducting research for Data Collection on Sexual and Reproductive Violence in Armed Rebel Movements. Junior Research Fellows working with Dr. Goldberg on this project will be responsible for collecting and coding data on acts of sexual and reproductive violence that have occurred within armed rebel movements across the globe. Data collection will require skills in searching for, identifying, and efficiently reading reliable sources of information on these topics (e.g., research articles, nonfiction books, governmental and nongovernmental reports, etc.). Data coding will require: (1) the ability to stay organized while managing large quantities of information, and (2) the ability to take consistently clear notes. Dr. Goldberg will teach Junior Research Fellows all necessary procedures for data collection and coding, and she will meet regularly with them to discuss the progress of the project and any questions they may have. Content Warning: This project requires reading about and discussing traumatic events, including acts of sexual and reproductive violence. Some sources of information on these topics go into detail and reflect on these acts alongside other wartime atrocities. Please consider your own ability to navigate this sensitive material as you consider potentially working on this research.

Professor Andrew Janusz is conducting research on elections and inequality in Brazil. He is seeking students interested in gender and racial politics. Students will learn how to collect and analyze observational data. Students with data skills(R/Stata) and Portuguese speakers are especially encouraged to apply. Previous Junior Fellows have coauthored papers and articles with Dr. Janusz.

Professor Nicholas Kerr is working on a project titled Post-Election Court Challenges and Democracy in Africa.
Across Africa’s multiparty regimes, losing parties and candidates have increasingly relied on the courts to settle post-electoral disputes instead of resorting to post-election violence. Using the case of Nigeria, this project seeks to theorize and study (1) the factors that motivate candidates to mount post-election challenges and, (2) the consequences of judicial intervention into elections on the quality of elections and democratization in Africa.

The first stage of the project seeks to develop an original database of the petitions filed with the Election Tribunal and the Courts of Appeal across sub-national elections (Governor, House of Representatives, Senate, and State House of Assembly) during Nigeria’s 2015, 2019 and 2023 elections cycles. Students will analyze official documents from the Nigeria Court of Appeals on petitions filed at the Electoral Tribunals and appeals filed at the Nigeria Court of Appeals to manually code 15 indicators associated with the petitions and appeals.

The resulting data will be used to:
• Catalogue petition judgements associated with each petition and appeal
• Link the petition database with an existing candidate database to explore the factors that motivate losing candidates to file electoral petitions
• Link the petition database with public opinion data to explore how sub-national regions with high number of petitions (or petitions that have been successful) influence perceptions of election quality, trust in the courts, and support for democracy.

It would be great if the junior fellow had some basic statistical analyses training (R or Stata) but this training is not mandatory.

Professor Amie Kreppel is working on three different of EU related projects which involve both detailed data collection and analysis and more qualitative work compiling materials from a variety of academic and archival (online) sources. Project 1 involved coding and compiling a dataset related to the questions of Members of the European Parliament during the Monetary Dialogues with the European Central Bank. Project 2 is focused on the evolution of oversight and accountability measures in the European Parliament and requires compiling articles and collecting data from text-based resources. Finally, Project 3 is analyzing changing patterns of voting coalition in the European Parliament over time and includes cleaning and verifying a dataset of roll call votes and preliminary analysis.

Professor Bryon Moraski is working on a project focused on Russia’s influence in Europe. Tasks include but are not limited to collecting information on changes in Europe’s energy sector since the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Positions are limited and preference will be given to students who have performed well in Professor Moraski’s courses, “Russian Foreign Policy” or “Politics in Russia.” Familiarity with Excel as well as STATA or R is a plus. More information about the project is available here: https://people.clas.ufl.edu/bmoraski/rie-project/

Professor Cassidy Reller is working on a project focused on this question: How do the Democratic and Republican Parties respond to new competition? This project will examine how the Democratic and Republican Parties change electoral rules to benefit them competitively by encouraging and discouraging state-level third-party development. Research assistants will help collect data on changes to electoral rules at the state level using a database of news reports on these changes. Students will learn how to collect data on election laws and legislative processes and how to analyze legal databases and other forms of observational data. When this project is complete, students will work on other electoral laws and direct democracy projects, including the collection of polling data.

Professor Juliana Restrepo Sanín’s research focuses broadly on obstacles to political representation of women and other marginalized groups and has two current research projects. The first project focuses on the underrepresentation of victims of Colombia’s armed conflict. With her current Junior Fellows she is collecting data on the representatives of the Special Districts for Peace created as part of the 2016 Peace Accord. The project aims first to understand who these representatives are and how they frame their ‘victimhood’ status, then to analyze their work as members of congress to examine whether and how they advance the substantive representation of victims.

Her second project maps the efforts of different state and non-state actors in Latin America to promote the political inclusion of LGBTQ communities.

Professor Beth Rosenson is currently conducting research on sexual harassment cases involving members of Congress, looking at how responses to these cases vary by the party and gender of their fellow legislators. The research aims to establish whether partisan and gendered differences exist in members’ responses, and whether over time there has been an increasing bipartisan consensus that sexual harassment is an ethically problematic behavior.

The junior fellow will assist with coding of newspaper articles to evaluate the responses of members of Congress to accusations of sexual harassment against fellow members. The junior fellow will also assist with gathering information from a federal government dataset on Congressional ethics charges to compare sexual harassment charges to other types of ethics charges with regard to 1) punishments and 2) retirements of the accused members.

The main methods utilized in the research are simple quantitative methods to compare different types of legislators and different outcomes across ethics cases. Basic skills in creating spreadsheets and graphical depiction of data would be helpful.

Professor David Siroky is working on a project titled “Armed and Dangerous: Explaining Popular Support for Domestic Militia Groups.” Why do some citizens support fringe militia groups and non-state home guards? In the US constitution, the Federalist Papers, and many other founding documents, the need for a militia is recognized both in the form of a national guard and in terms of well-armed civil society groups. In countries during civil wars, militia groups have defended civilians and provided services and goods in the absence of a functioning state. However, the existence of non-state militia groups is more contentious today in many European countries, since they are not in the middle of civil war or under imminent threat of state failure. Using original endorsement experiments, the project assesses four prominent theories of civilian support for militia groups across four East European countries.

The Junior Fellow will work toward achieving the following goals:

1. Research militia groups (focusing on membership, historical origins, links to political participation, leadership and rank-file participants, broader support base, their declarations and official documents).
2. Write analytic summaries of each group with a focus on the above.
3. Create specific visualizations of the data (some of this would require knowledge of the R statistical language and some specialized packages to analyze endorsement experiments.)

Professor Ben Smith is working on two projects that will benefit from Junior Fellows collaboration. The first, titled, Indonesia’s Unlikely Transitions: Economic and Political Transformation in the World’s Largest Muslim Nation, 1985-2004, puts the country’s export market-oriented reforms of the late 1980s and democratic transition in 1999 in comparative perspective. This project requires both a Junior Fellow with data collection and analysis proficiency and one (or more) who can assist in analyzing secondary research for the purpose of directing the statistical data collection. The second, titled “Oil, Autocratization, and Democratization: Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Venezuela in Global Perspective,” explores whether oil wealth helped to consolidate both democracy and autocracy in the early 2000s and will require both qualitative research assistance and help with constructing a global statistical dataset.

Professor Daniel Smith is conducting research on voting and elections in the American states, particularly how election laws affect political participation and turnout. He is seeking students interested in learning how to collect data on state election codes, to make public records requests for data on early voting and absentee ballots, and to analyze observational data.  Students with language skills (especially Spanish and Haitian Creole), big data (STATA/R/SQL), and GIS (ArcGIS) are especially encouraged to apply.  Students will also meet weekly as a team with Professor Smith and Professor McDonald. Previous Junior Fellows have coauthored papers/articles/book chapters with Dr. Smith.

Advanced Doctoral Student Research Project Summaries

Murad Gafarov is working on a project examining the extent to which a commitment to democracy has informed the development of the European Union (EU) and, particularly, its motivation to enlarge into post-authoritarian states. Democracy has always been central to European integration, but over time, its prioritization vis-à-vis economic and geopolitical considerations has changed. My research examines whether the increase in the relative prioritization of democracy is a result of discourse that has framed it as the primary goal of European integration. I argue that democracy has come to constitute an ideological goal for the EU, while economic and geopolitical interests continued to be the main functional priority. To support this claim, I offer a close examination of the enlargement processes, with a specific focus on post-authoritarian states, and question whether the commitment to democracy has had a more limited effect on the decision to enlarge than the official discourse suggests.

This project will require finding and working with historical documents, interviews, articles, speeches etc. It would be helpful (but not a requirement) to work with someone who has at least a reading-level knowledge of either Spanish or Greek.

Yuanxin Wang is currently conducting research on the entanglement of Social Darwinism, racial ideologies, and (anti-)imperial politics in the 19th and 20th centuries (especially in Britain and China). He looks forward to working with Junior Fellows on two historical and interpretive projects. The first examines how W.E.B. Du Bois and Zou Rong theorize race/racism in different national contexts as well as its implications on global politics at the turn of the 20th century. The second project focuses on 19th-century British Social Darwinist thought (especially in works of Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley) in the contexts of imperial expansion and global racial order. He welcomes students interested in political theory, especially in modern political thought (Western and non-Western), race, and imperialism. They are expected to work on both historical documents and secondary research

Long Xiao is working on a project titled Securitizing China: Exploring the Construction of Threat Perception in U.S. – China Relations
Securitization is the process by which an issue is framed as a matter of national security. This project addresses the U.S. securitization of China in its policymaking discourse. It aims to identify the main actors and how/why securitization happens over time. The first phase of my study conducts a qualitative discourse analysis of policymaking dialogue on national security issues relating to China in formal U.S. congressional settings between 2008 and 2022. In the second phase, I test hypotheses to explore the motivations for U.S.–China securitization from political, economic, and social perspectives. Data will be gathered from a myriad of public datasets in preparation for the regression tests which will help us explore securitization under a rationalist lens. Securitization theory remains absent mainly in studies of U.S.-China relations, and this dissertation attempts to fill this gap.
Students considering this project should possess basic skills in data collection and coding, as this study will compile and utilize a text-based database. They should also be willing to familiarize themselves with securitization theories and topics in U.S. – China relations.

* Please feel free to contact the individuals listed above and browse the faculty departmental webpages to get further information about the ongoing research

Program Documentation: