Learn about our current 2022-2023 fellowship projects and requirements below.
Mango Jane Angar: "The Census, Disability and The African State: Grappling For Recognition"
Details: What factors determine whethera state selects to include a category for ‘disabled persons’ in their census? In the case that they do, what factors then shape who (which impaired groups) a state chooses to count as disabled? Focusing on censuses in former British colonial African states, I conduct an inductive study leveraging digitally available census questionnaires to provide a descriptive analysis of within-country and cross-country variations in censuses categorization of disability. I argue that the variations we see can be explained by the robustness of the civic space. That is, Disabled People Organizations (DPOs) in their pursuit of recognition and full citizenship rights, will leverage their agency in an open civic space to agitate for inclusion. However, if the civic space is restricted, inclusion in the census will be dependent on whether the state is heavily aid-dependent and thus has a strategic political elite motivated to include a category on disability to bolster their international reputation and thus received democracy-contingent benefits. I supplement my earlier data with two case studies to strengthen my argument.
Fellow Responsibilities: Fellows will be expected to assist with constructing datasets related to disability and census in African states , gathering information through qualitative research, transcribing interview recordings and some data analysis. Proficiency or some knowledge of French will be particularly helpful when working on census records from Francophone African countries.
Preferred Skills: Python, R, Excel / Google Sheets, Text Analysis
Jennie Barker: "Standing Up for Democracy? Democracy Promotion under Emerging Multipolarity"
Details: Despite an increasingly challenging international environment for democracy, why do some states continue to prioritize democratic values in their foreign policies? In this project, I examine why some states promote democracy while others do not, particularly as the relative power among powerful democratic states has declined vis-a-vis rising authoritarian states and as democratic backsliding has increased. Given that there are few studies of democracy promotion in middle and small power states in general and no cross-national measures of democracy support in foreign policy, I need to develop in-depth case studies that examine foreign policy approach to democracy promotion in select middle and small power states and collect data on democracy promoting actions. I am looking for 1-2 fellows who have an interest in foreign policy and who are interested in working on case studies and collecting and coding data for a new dataset.
Fellow Responsibilities: Fellows will be expected to conduct case studies on 1-2 states’ approaches to democracy in foreign policy using primary and secondary sources. Fellows will also assist me in collecting and coding data on democracy promoting actions, including official rhetoric, resolutions in international organizations, and democracy aid.
Preferred Skills: R, Excel / Google Sheets, Literature Reviews, Case Studies
Clara Bicalho: “Collective land titles and the political power of ethnic minorities”
Details: Despite major land reform projects in the past decades, inequality in land distribution continues to grow in Latin America. This has negative consequences for who holds political power in rural areas. My project seeks to understand the political consequences of a particular type of land distribution in Latin America: the titling of communal land policies targeting black rural communities in Brazil (also known as quilombos). It draws on administrative records, geospatial and electoral data to investigate the role of land policies on local level governance. I am looking for research fellow(s) interested in land rights and/or race and ethnic politics and/or who are motivated to learn research skills, including how to assemble, code, and combine existing qualitative and quantitative data and to engage with initial analyses.
Fellow Responsibilities: There are a number of tasks to choose from depending on the research fellow's interest and skill. No previous knowledge is required and I am open to discussing research tasks with fellows themselves so the experience is helpful and interesting to them. Possible tasks could include (a) collecting and processing geospatial data on land titling, land ownership, and use in Brazil from different administrative sources, (b) building a data base of coordinates for polling stations and linking polling station-level data with communities eligible for titling, (c) compiling and reviewing ethnographies, administrative data, and news accounts on the use of land, political organizing, and titling process of particular black rural (quilombola) communities, (d) producing visualizations and data summaries from the data compiled. Research fellows who are interested in the subject of land policy and race and ethnic politics are encouraged to apply, especially if they want to build skills for social science research and land policy.
Preferred Skills: R, Web Scrapping
Prof. Robert Braun: "Bewitched: How does Witchcraft spread across Space"
Details: Why do some places become associated with witchcraft? This project deploys Danish Folklore data to answer this question. The main hypothesis is that accusations of witchcraft are produces by the interplay of ancient fault lines that persist due to spatial infrastructure and contemporary demands political for order.
Fellow Responsibilities: Cleaning and compiling data.
Preferred Skills: Python, R, ArcGIS
Prof. Ryan Brutger: "Public Support In International Negotiations"
Details: My research studies international negotiations, international organizations, and domestic public support for international cooperation and economic policies. This includes a range of substantive issues, such as the negotiations surrounding the Iran-nuclear deal, the World Trade Organization, climate-change talks, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and antitrust policy. My research examines how leaders engage with international organizations (IOs), how leaders conduct international negotiations, and how the public learns about international negotiations and cooperation (such as through media coverage). Rather than focusing exclusively on the final substance of negotiations and the policies of IOs, I examine how leaders talk about and engage with IOs and how negotiations are conducted. This includes examining who is involved in which roles (international organizations, political leaders, mediators, etc.), and how the media reports on the negotiation process. The goal is to understand what factors of policy formation and negotiations generate public attention and how they shape public attitudes toward international agreements and economic policy.
Fellow Responsibilities: Fellows will participate by identifying media coverage of specific IOs, policy proposals, and negotiations and documenting the volume of media coverage in major news outlets. Students may engage in systematic coding of the media content, and may also develop case studies of particular negotiations and events. Depending on which aspects we focus on in the particular semester, students may learn how to conduct advanced searches in LexisNexis, how to document and report findings, and will gain substantive knowledge about historical and contemporary international negotiations and IOs. Depending on the level of progress made, students may also help conduct analysis of the data using R and may contribute to the editing and revision process for articles and a book manuscript.
Preferred Skills: Strong organizational skills
Juan Campos: "The Politics of Police Reform and Organized Crime: Evidence from Mexico"
Details: Although organized crime-related violence was already on the rise in Mexico during the 1980s and 90s (Trejo and Ley 2020), the security situation deteriorated further when former president Felipe Calderon declared war on the nation’s drug cartels in 2006. Since then, criminal organizations (COs) have started to engage more frequently in armed struggles not only with each other, but with the state as well (Lessing 2015). These events prompted political scientists to think more carefully about how the state should respond to violence perpetrated by COs now that the “Drug War” has been initiated. Against this backdrop, the question emerges of how local security institutions can be strengthened to meet these new challenges without exacerbating an already difficult situation at the local level. In light of this conundrum, my dissertation project explores why local governments in Mexico implement police reforms that aim to absorb municipal police forces under state-level control—a phenomenon that I refer to as subnational police centralization. The dissertation also examines the effectiveness of these reforms in containing organized criminal violence and police corruption within the context of the ongoing drug war.
Fellow Responsibilities: Fellows will be tasked with collecting, cleaning, and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data from a variety of primary and secondary sources. In addition, Fellows will be responsible for assisting the principal investigator schedule interviews for the qualitative component of the project as well as transcribing audio files. There will be instances in which Fellows will also be asked to work on separate projects that are related to the principal investigator’s broader research agenda, which covers themes related to policing, organized crime, and political violence in comparative perspective.
Preferred Skills: R, Excel / Google Sheets, Spanish fluency and the ability to transcribe audio files
Prof. James Bradford DeLong: "Economic Growth in Historical Perspective"
Details: How has the process of economic growth—or not growth—shaped the economy and, indeed, the rest of society? The enlightenment, social scientists of the 1700s proposed "stage theory": the progress of technology and culture moved humanity from hunter-gatherer to, successively, herding, agrarian, and commercial economies, with a greater fraction of the people gaining greater privileges and rights and increased cultural sophistication coming with each successive stage. In the 1800s, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels added steampower society to the list of stages. They thought it would lead within their children's lifetime to full equal communitarian socialism. But steampower society was not the final stage. It has been followed by applied science, mass production, global value chain, and now info biotech society. My question: IS it worthwhile to update the intuition and insights of the original stage theorists, and try to draw a picture of how prevailing modes of production (and distribution, communication, and domination), enable and constrain economic and more general societal possibilities?
Fellow Responsibilities: On the quantitive side, there will be some scraping of texts from archive.org and elsewhere to figure out how common keywords that gave important insights into societal organization are in different eras. on the qualitative side, there will be readings of "typical "books which the powerful used in different eras to justify their power.
Preferred Skills: Python, Web Scrapping, Excel / Google Sheets
Prof. Bethany Goldblum: "The Three-Body Problem in Nuclear Arms Control"
Details: The demise of bilateral arms control between the United States and Russia, alongside the rapid expansion and modernization of China’s nuclear arsenal, have increased global concerns over nuclear proliferation and raised new challenges for international security and stability. As the 2022 National Defense Strategy notes, “By the 2030s, the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.” This project examines nuclear arms control and adversarial cooperation in a world of three near-peer nuclear competitors.
Fellow Responsibilities: Fellows will develop an arms control encyclopedia which outlines various strategies employed both historically and prospectively to meet these ends. Additionally, Fellows will play a role in assisting the Nuclear Policy Working Group and Berkeley Risk and Security Laboratory in implementing educational programming designed to lay the groundwork for the next generation of strategic stability dialogues and nuclear arms control.
Preferred Skills: Strong oral and written communication skills, case study research, highly organized.
Ritika Goel: "Populism and Perceptions of Performance"
Details: This project involves analyzing political communication to analyze how Populists like Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro campaign. At the same time, I am interested in how these gains are communicated to voters. Another aspect of the project will be focused on literature reviews around the relationship of populists with Business, particularly as this relates to media ownership. The CPD fellow will be using judgement to code campaign strategies used by populists who are up for re-election - to see how they claim results in office.
Fellow Responsibilities: Coding newspaper articles, Literature review, web scraping and creating databases, based on interest, text analysis.
Preferred Skills: Excel / Google Sheets, Language of Hindi and/or Portugese desirable but not required.
Johnathan Guy: "Who Decarbonizes? Energy Planning, State Structures, and the Politics of Distributive Control"
Details: Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, many low-carbon energy technologies became cost-competitive for the first time. Yet, only some countries chose to take advantage of this opportunity. Why? My research portfolio investigates this question through the lens of distributive politics. In my dissertation, I study how political and state elites make decisions about what kinds of power generation capacity (coal, solar, etc.) will be added to their country's stock, and on what terms (i.e. who pays the benefits and costs, and how these are allocated). The project combines analysis of cross-national data with a set of targeted case studies, in particular a controlled comparison of India and Indonesia. The other project students may work on, entitled "When the River Runs Dry," is a study of how climate change is impacting the politics of electricity in hydropower-dependent countries.
Fellow Responsibilities: Fellows will conduct literature reviews and/or assist with data collection and cleaning efforts. Data of interest includes energy subsidies, public tendering decisions, firm characteristics, and institutions. Most of this data will be available online; web-scraping skills are particularly desired. Fellows may also participate in the development of an expert survey, depending on time and interest.
Preferred Skills: Web Scrapping, Excel / Google Sheets
Otto Kienitz: "State-Building and Democracy in Historical Political Economy (Russian Empire)"
Details: What is the relationship between taxation and representation and how does it emerge in historical comparative perspective? This project focuses on historical data collection for addressing the link between state capacity and local government in 19th century autocracies, with a particular focus on the Russian Empire. I seek to understand how the Russian Empire generated revenue, developed human capital to staff the local bureaucracy, and collected information from society. Drawing on new approaches in historical political economy, I am looking to add historical data to a larger dataset on taxation and public goods provision in the Russian Empire, converting archival materials into empirics for data analysis. This project is geared towards undergraduates looking to develop skills in historical research methodologies in the social sciences or history with an interest in Russia or historical comparative democratization in the 19th century.
Fellow Responsibilities: Fellow(s) will assist the project coordinator in collecting historical data from microfilm and/or web archives, learning how to operationalize historical data for empirical analysis in Excel/Google Sheets (or R or Python depending on mentee's technical skills), and piecing together a comparative dataset from different historical sources for data analysis. Mentorship for 1-2 fellow(s), with priority to those with language skills (reading comprehension of Russian), but not strictly required if fellow(s) have an affinity or training in political science, history, or political economy, or are interested in applying their skills to political science research.
Preferred Skills: Web Scrapping, Excel / Google Sheets, Microfilm
Adan Martinez: “Brazilian Everyday and Subnational Pandemic Politics”
Details: This project focuses on the political motivations for the implementation, or lack thereof, of pandemic-related municipal policies in Brazil. Common explanations in the political science literature suggests that Covid policies were closely link to political parties, polarization, and political alignment. However, these explanations, derived from the political realities of the United States and Europe, fail to consider the weak political party structures of other countries, particularly in Brazil. Moreover, these analyses fall short of considering other political explanations. Using a multi-method approach, I hope to shed light for these explanations and provide a broader theory, which can help us understand crisis and pandemic policies.
Fellow Responsibilities: 1) Collecting municipal decrees for three states: São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Bahia; 2) Extracting data from government decrees at placing them in a working spreadsheet; 3) Finding newspapers, publications, and articles for 6 case studies that Adan has previously worked on to augment theoretical narratives
Preferred Skills: Excel / Google Sheets, Working Knowledge of Spanish/Portuguese
Daniel Quiroga-Ángel: "Does Democracy Cause Peace? Reevaluating the Democratic Civil Peace"
Details: Political scientists have long been interested in understanding the relationship between democracy and civil war. The dominant view is that countries with fully democratic or fully autocratic regimes are less prone to violence than countries with semi-democratic regimes. The latter group of countries—the argument follows—is "caught in the middle of two worlds": like fully-fledged autocracies, they lack institutional mechanisms to accommodate the opposition and address political grievances, but they also lack the means to repress dissidents and prevent them from organizing armed insurgencies. Yet, several studies have documented evidence that calls into question this inverted-U relationship between the level of democracy and the probability of civil war onset. This project analyzes the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological problems underlying the contradictory findings in this literature.
Fellow Responsibilities: Fellows will collect, clean, and organize quantitative data on multiple country-level socioeconomic and historical characteristics using R or STATA. Depending on their technical skills, Fellows will also support the analysis of Geographic Information System (GIS) data and the elaboration of graphs, tables, and maps. Candidates interested in civil wars, democratization, and authoritarian politics are encouraged to apply.
Preferred Skills: R, STATA, ArcGIS
Julia Raven: "The Design Dilemma: Military strength and the ethnic composition of colonial militaries"
Details: Colonizing powers often built militaries in the territories they colonized, but when they did so, they faced a dilemma: make the military too weak and the colony is defenseless to threats, but make it too strong and the colony can rebel. My project seeks to explore how and why the British and French varied the recruitment of troops within their colonies' militaries. In particular, I look at the ethnic composition of battalions across African colonies using historic documents found in the archives.
Fellow Responsibilities: Reading historic documents, following a codebook, inputing numbers into Excel, and some other qualitative work.
Preferred Skills: Excel / Google Sheets
Prof. Andrew Reddie: “The Emergent Properties of Frontier Military Technologies”
Details: This project for the Berkeley Risk and Security Laboratory (BRSL) focuses on understanding how new technologies—from dual-use technologies to those designed specifically for military applications—might impact strategic stability and the prospects for international peace and security. Our current work contributes to the policy debates concerning whether the deployment of low-yield nuclear weapons has stabilizing or destabilizing consequences. We also engage with various emerging technologies, from cyber capabilities to various applications of autonomy in military contexts. Perhaps as important as our substantive findings, we also contribute to nascent efforts in the field to use of wargaming methods to examine nascent national security challenges. Indeed, policy-makers must consider the consequences of research, development, and deployment of new capabilities in the absence of empirical data. As a consequence, there is often no way to adjudicate claims across political and theoretical divides. This is particularly problematic in military contexts where force postures are decided over the course of decades. Methodological frameworks developed by our team at Berkeley have already contributed to policy in the United States—not least in the way in which wargaming is carried out by the defense community.
Fellow Responsibilities: We expect the Fellow to undertake research tasks (literature reviews, data collection, and analysis) in support of the project and, as appropriate, engage with external visitors and speakers taking part in various series.
Preferred Skills: R.
Prof. Michelle Reddy: "Racial Justice and Disaster Planning in California"
Details: Using computational methods, this project will create a database of climate action plans and emergency response plans over time and use topic modeling and social network analysis to examine to what extent local governments refer to and cooperate with local organizations and refer to principles of racial justice, comparing across counties and across types of disasters.The project also aims to investigate various types of government policies, including relocation of affected individuals, reconstruction of damaged areas, restrictions and regulations of third-party disaster relief, and neglect, across time and counties, to examine variation between counties based on socioeconomic and demographic data.
Fellow Responsibilities: Data collection of climate action plans and emergency response plans, literature review on disaster planning, if possible, web-scraping and automated text analysis.
Preferred Skills: Python, R, Web Scrapping
Oren Samet: "Challenging Autocrats at the Ballot Box and Beyond"
Details: How do opposition parties and their allies challenge authoritarian governments and work to counter democratic backsliding? In this context, when and how do parties engage and request support from international actors, and what are the implications of doing so? In order to help answer these questions, this project will compile data on authoritarian elections since the end of the Cold War and the activities of opposition parties both at home and abroad.
Fellow Responsibilities: Fellows will support the collection of data on authoritarian elections worldwide, focusing in particular on the behavior and performance of opposition parties in this settings. This will comprise primarily desk research on specific cases using online sources. Applicants with an interest in democratization, human rights, authoritarianism and/or related topics are encouraged to apply.
Preferred Skills: Excel / Google Sheets
Surili Sheth: "Women's Political Engagement and Family Disputes in India"
Details: Can the experience of family dispute mediation increase women’s preferences for gender-sensitive representation? Gender gaps in active citizenship persist across marginalized communities in India. For example, in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, both urban and rural women are more pessimistic than their male counterparts about believing they would command the attention of officials (this gender gap is particularly large in rural areas – with only 35% of women respondents expecting a response, compared to 55% of men) (Auerbach and Kruks-Wisner 2020). Additionally, rural women were 33% less likely than men to report being aware of brokers (non-state agents in the community who help connect citizens to state services) – and 55% less likely than men to report seeking help from them (Auerbach and Kruks-Wisner 2020). These gender gaps in both direct and indirect engagement are smaller but are still present in poor, urban areas. Women’s pessimism is not unfounded. When they do attempt to participate in local politics, their participation is arguably less consequential than that of their male counterparts. In village assemblies in rural Tamil Nadu, for example, women are less likely to speak, set the agenda, and receive a relevant response (when they do speak up) from state officials (Parthasarathy, Rao, and Palaniswamy 2019). This empirical gender gap in engagement in India is a case of a wider phenomenon: Mansbridge (1999) notes that the political engagement gender gap is a form of adverse selection, which could be attributable to resources, family obligations, or relevant role models; other research shows, however, that the “gendered psyche” prevents women from participating fully in political and civic life (Lawless and Fox 2010). In my dissertation project, I gender the notions of both representation and active citizenship, and seek to evaluate whether the experience of family dispute intervention by state or civic actors can increase women’s desires and demands for gender-sensitive representation more narrowly, and the enabling conditions for their active citizenship practices more broadly.
Fellow Responsibilities: Putting together a literature review on women's political engagement; coding text data in Excel, coming up qualitative codes for themes.
Preferred Skills: R, STATA, Excel / Google Sheets
Soo Sun You: "The State, Family, and Trajectory of Women’s Empowerment"
Details: Marriage and reproduction have long been sites of contestation, as women have fought for not only their choice to have abortion, but also to have children and the right to parent any children they have (Ross, 2006; Luna and Luker, 2013). Throughout the world, it is easy to observe these rights being in constant tension with government attempts to influence individuals’ marital and reproductive decisions. Despite the significance of such interventions on all aspects of women’s lives, we lack an understanding of their long-term consequences for women’s empowerment. My research project seeks to fill this lacuna. I focus on South Korea, and more broadly East and Southeast Asia, where one of the most ambitious fertility control programs took place. To understand the consequences of anti-natalist and pro-natalist government policies for different aspects of women’s empowerment, I use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods including in-depth interviews, archival work, as well as analysis of survey and administrative data. I am seeking to work with students who are enthusiastic about gender and politics, and in particular, reproductive justice.
Fellow Responsibilities: Research tasks include 1) constructing datasets from different administrative sources, 2) compiling and reviewing news articles, ethnographies, and relevant literatures, and 3) web scrapping/conducting analysis. Specific tasks will vary depending on the fellows' interests and skills.
Preferred Skills: R, Web Scrapping, Excel / Google Sheets, Applicants with language skills (especially Korean, Chinese, or Japanese) are strongly desired; coding skills (R or Stata) are not required but preferred.
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