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2006 Small Research Grant Recipients
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In 2006, APSA awarded 11, 2006 Small Research Grant Program awards averaging $1,636. The Small Research Grant Program supports research in all fields of political science, designed to support the research of political scientists who are not employed at PhD-granting institutions.
For more information on the program and application procedures, click here.
2006 Recipients
Phillip J. Harold, Robert Morris University
"Prophetic Politics: Emmanuel Levinas and the Ethics of Suffering"
This grant will be used for work on a monograph, "Prophetic Politics: Emmanuel Levinas and the Ethics of Suffering," in which I hope to offer a nuanced interpretation of an important philosopher whose works are not well understood in the English-speaking world. The early work of Levinas critiques the rationalistic, instrumental interpretation of politics. In his later work, however, he tries to capture the meaning of human suffering and describe the ethical reversal this effects on our thought; here, it is only by giving up my claim to exercise power, and thereby exposing myself to suffering, that I can fulfill my ethical and political demands. True authority is found in the individual prophetic witness that exceeds all institutional recognition. A correct appreciation of these insights is important for understanding the tradition of thought to which Levinas belongs, and will also make a vital contribution to contemporary political thought.
Lilian A. Barria & Steven D. Roper, Eastern Illinois University
"The Completion Strategy for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: Judicial Capacity-Building in Bosnia and Herzegovina"
This project investigates the Completion Strategy for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the development of national courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) as appropriate venues for transferred cases as well as originating cases involving war crimes and other human rights violations. This research will be based on interviews conducted in BiH and is focused around several questions. First, the project seeks to examine whether the BiH judiciary has received sufficient training in order to meet the demands imposed not only by the substantial number of cases that will be tried but also the complexity of the cases. Second, this research seeks to examine whether national trials have increased the transparency of the judicial process and dispelled notions of bias in the prosecution of cases. Finally, this research seeks to examine whether the strengthening of national judiciaries in the region should be linked to the Completion Strategy of the ICTY.
David A. Backer, College of William & Mary
"Just Compensation? A Longitudinal Study of Victims' Attitudes Towards Reparations in South Africa"
More than 20 of the 'third wave' democracies have implemented reparations programs that compensate victims of past human rights abuses. Despite the prevalence of these measures, they remain controversial: analysts question the propriety and impact of such remuneration. While the relevant literature examines notable historical cases, few efforts have been made to gauge the responses of victims. My previous research in South Africa, including a survey of 228 victims of apartheid-era abuses that I conducted in the Cape Town area during 2002-03, found that the government's failure to deliver on promises of reparations was a key reason why they perceived the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process to be unjust. I plan to conduct a second wave of the survey, in order to undertake a longitudinal analysis of the impact on victims' attitudes of the financial compensation disbursed by the government between late 2003 and early 2005.
Jessica Allina-Pisano, Colgate University
"The Last Barbed Wire Fence in Europe: The Local Politics of Surveillance in a Divided Village of Transcarpathia in 1945-2005"
Kisszelmenc, an ethnically Hungarian settlement at the edge of southwestern Ukraine, consists of a single street that ends with a barbed wire fence. Just beyond that barrier, across the Ukraine-Slovakia border, is its sister village of Nagyszelmenc and the European Union. The proposed project will analyze the local politics of surveillance and control by four pairs of regimes in the post-war period in Kisszelmenc and Nagyszelmenc. The research will investigate the range of mechanisms by which states and empires engage local political actors to establish and maintain control over people and territory. Work on this region up to this point has addressed primarily questions of explicit collaboration, relationships between law and identity, party politics, and institutional change at the national level; this project will specify how different types of regimes negotiate with, direct, and are shaped by the infrapolitics of subordinate groups.
Bonnie N. Field, Bentley College
"Establishing Political Party Discipline: The Case of Democratic Spain, 1977-1989"
This project investigates the establishment of political party discipline in Spain between the 1977 founding democratic elections and 1989. Despite a common discipline-encouraging institutional environment, descriptive accounts indicate that the pace and timing of the establishment of party discipline varied by political party. This suggests that important non-institutional variables are at work, and/or that unidentified institutional variables are significant. As the descriptive accounts are ad hoc, this project will develop the first quantitative dataset of individual legislator votes in the Congress of Deputies, determine the empirical patterns of party discipline for each party, explain through statistical analyses the empirical patterns, and assess the implications for the development of stable parties, specifically, and of stable democracy, generally. Spain is a model case of a successful transition to and consolidation of democracy. The lessons learned from this study therefore have broad implications for understanding the challenges of democratic stability in new democracies.
John A. Scherpereel, James Madison University
"European Integration and the Changing Patterns of Territorial Authority in Central and Eastern Europe"
This project examines the relationships linking European integration and territorial authority in the EU's new member states. Preliminary research suggests that EU membership has empowered sub-national actors in some new member states while reinforcing central state authority in others. The project seeks to explain this variation, to generate predictions about the future of state authority in Central and Eastern Europe, and to contribute insights to contemporary debates about the fate of the nation-state in a globalizing world. I will use the SRG to fund summer research in Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
Christopher P. Muste, University of Montana
"Attitude Change and the Information Environment: A Multi-level Study of Public Opinion on Immigration"
The project explores changing attitude toward immigration, a prominent national issue in the 1990s, and evaluates the extent to which immigration attitudes respond to news media content and individual media exposure, as well as to changes in other attitudes related to immigration. The research design combines contextual measures of the volume and content of local news media coverage with NES panel data from 1992-1994, consisting of individual-level measures of attitudes, media use, and political awareness.
Patrick J. Sellers, Davidson College
"Constructing the News: Strategic Communication in Congress"
How do members of Congress work to shape news coverage outside the institution, and how effective are these efforts? My project addresses these questions by combining quantitative and qualitative evidence analyzed through the lens of theory. The evidence includes hundreds of thousands of public statements and news stories, as well as interviews with congressional press secretaries and personal experiences from an APSA Congressional Fellowship. Using this evidence, I consider two distinct but related stages of legislator's media campaigns. The first is the promotion of a message, which requires coordination of politicians' promotional efforts. The second stage involves coverage of the message, which can vary from a great deal to none at all. The interaction among the two stages creates a collective action problem for legislators. Solutions to this problem illustrate the power and importance of agenda setting by politicians and the news media.
Andrew Konitzer, Austin College
"Accounting for the Success of the Serbian Radical Party in Municipal Elections: Seven Hypotheses"
This project is a study designed to gather data about local election outcomes in the Republic of Serbia, create an electoral database including political, economic and social variables for each of Serbia's 160 municipalities from the years 1996-2004, and test seven hypotheses regarding the variation of Serbian Radical Party electoral success in the Republic
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