APSA is pleased to recognize the students who conducted this research and the mentors who supervised their efforts:

John Klopotoski, University of Southern California

My name is John Klopotowski, and I am a junior double majoring in Middle East Studies and Political Science at the University of Southern California. The following statement is a description of a paper that I am writing about the connection between Turkish/Armenian carpets and political trends in the 20th century. 

My paper seeks to answer the following question: What can carpets — as an economic good, an artistic work, or a tangible creation of culture — elucidate about these identities in Turkey, particularly as Continental Europe and the United States became increasingly involved in its political and economic systems? 

And it posits that given their place in many different systems (namely economic and cultural) Ottoman carpets are a particularly helpful way to consider the creation of the Turkish identity that occurred in the 20th century which,  at the expense of millions of minorities, simultaneously claimed a proximity to European whiteness while highlighting local culture. At the same time, though, given Armenians' production of carpets — which was also aided by Western resources — throughout the Genocide the story of rugs show how global flows of money or culture do not simply travel in one direction around the world, and they can even contradict each other. Although, as this paper will show, most actions taken in the early 20th century surrounding Turks and minorities — whether by Turkish leadership, Turkish citizens, Armenian orphans, American policy makers, or Swiss missionaries — was borne out of choice and not an expressed ideological view, thus challenging the largely fatalistic view of “Turkish” and “Armenian” identities that are represented today, and illuminating how identities that often seem so disparate have changed over time and are truly more connected than superficially apparent. 

My research is mostly an examination of secondary sources and personal interactions with Armenians and Turks who work in the California oriental rug industry today.

Matthias Elijah Lopez, University of the Pacific (Political Science Capstone Project)

I am currently working on my Political Science Capstone Project where I will be investigating the possible impacts that virtual reality has on political beliefs as well as political ideology. The research study will involve a survey based experiment where human participants are surveyed and shown a particular content based virtual reality treatment. My hypothesis is that the particular content delivered through the virtual reality will change the participant's ideology and political beliefs towards that specific virtual reality content. The goal is to understand the difference between previous technology (standard technology) and emerging technology (virtual reality). This is a pilot study and I am bringing together cognitive science with political science. I hope to continue to build off this study to discover the neural, psychological, and physiological mechanisms behind political ideology and political belief formation. I do believe this study will generate interest for other undergrads as the set-up is simplistic, yet revealing. The experiment begins March 1st and will conclude by March 23rd.

Breanna Jackson, University of the Pacific (Full-Time Undergraduate Student and Full-Time HR Coordinator)

My name is Breanna Jackson. I am also a full-time HR Professional and I would like to submit my summary of my undergraduate research for APSA National Undergraduate Research Week 2022. 

The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is still the only national medical leave policy with high eligibility criteria and does not provide paid leave. To many employees, it leaves the question “What’s the point of taking medical leave to take care of myself if you’re going to be distracted by work?” My focus is a policy evaluation of the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 and pinpointing the specific ‘serious health’ eligibility requirement among the following criteria: Political Feasibility, Employer Cost, and Employee Morale. With my experience in Human Resources for the past three years and experiencing the severe effects of the Pandemic on the workforce, this policy evaluation is a call to action on reshaping how we look at and understand the importance of the wellbeing of the employee and the long-term consequences the employer faces when it is disregarded.

Carlos Gonzalez, New College of Florida

(Senior Thesis on "Paving over Democracy: The Relationship Between Highways and Voter Turnout in Florida," presented at the Florida Political Science Association)

Highways are ubiquitous in the context of the United States, shaping much of American environmental, economic, and social geography. While urban planners have long heralded highways as the lifelines of American society, research has shown that highways have also enabled the segregation and displacement of resources from cities. Additionally, recent scholarship has connected such highway-induced processes to the polarization of American political geography. In this paper, I expand this connection by arguing that highways negatively impact voter turnout. Highways segregate, displace, and divide existing neighborhoods, producing contexts less conducive to the development of social capital. With less social capital, individuals near highways have fewer informal resources to help them overcome the costs of voting. Hence, residents living closer to highways are less likely to vote than those living further away. I test this hypothesis with an individual level analysis using the 14.3 million record Florida Voter File combined with additional data from the United States Census and GIS shapefiles of all major highways in the state of Florida. My findings contribute to a broader theoretical debate on highways, by asserting that their “dividing” effects have ultimately outweighed their “uniting” effects on American society. This paper also supports the case for critically assessing the role of infrastructure on context and political behavior. 

Angela Kothe, New College of Florida

(Senior Thesis on "Canada, Pluralism in Political Time: A Theory of Political Transition," at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference)

The Liberal Party of Canada has governed for 78 of the past 110 years. Current analyses of Liberal success tend to focus on the impact of population distribution and fail to adequately explain how the Party has continued to succeed despite electoral losses and changes in electorate composition. To explore the origins of party success and failures, I form a theory that ties long- term success to cultural accommodation and electoral losses to conflict. I will use the implications of this theory to test three hypotheses with a regression analysis of electoral districts from 1997 to 2019. The results demonstrate that recent Liberal Party victories are due to the successful management of bilingual coalitions, and that past losses were caused by coalitional collapse.

Angie was also a 2021 APSA Diversity Fellowship Fall Fellow.

Riley Bedell, New College of Florida 

Riley Bedell, a fourth year political science student at New College of Florida, will be presenting part of his thesis at the Southeast Association for the Continental Traditiion's Annual Conference. The title of his conference presentation is "Unpaid Labor, Social Reproduction Theory, and Capitalism's Oppressive Contradiction." 

In this paper, I explore how capitalism’s regimes of accumulation subsist on an oppressive gendered division of labor which is coercively unnatural and has disproportionately marginalized women, people of color, and the less well-off. I further develop a theoretical account of how various feminist movements’ responses to such oppression have had critical shortcomings, and propose a more complete solution. 

Although the work of Karl Marx recognizes the privatization of feudal lands in 16th century Europe as the birth of capitalist relations’ possibility, the perseverance of this exploitative regime of accumulation would not have been possible without the cooptation of women’s labor and social position within society. This oppressive relation has also uniquely marginalized women of color, yet many affluent, primarily white women’s movements throughout history have lacked the theoretical tools and perspective of those most denigrated necessary to grasp the multiplicity of conditions which underpin capitalism’s gender-based exploitation. Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser and Silvia Federici, I trace the conceptions of capitalist exploitation beyond that of laborers within the economic sphere to the primarily un-marketized realm of social reproduction. Likewise, through engaging with Angela Davis, I show how an expanded understanding of the conditions which allow for the oppressive gendered division of labor provides for the extension of analyses surrounding women’s oppression to that of women of color. 

For centuries, the particular mode of labor which sustains workers and cultivates community has been devalued, its exercise hidden, and its performers subjugated. Social reproduction, the amalgamation of affective care work, social development of the youth, domestic labor, and the physical reproduction of the workforce, takes place primarily outside of the market sphere yet provides the necessary prerequisites for its existence. The social order that constitutes capitalist society thus necessitates a delineation of productive economic labor from socially reproductive labor, from which springs its gendered division. Similar to that of the antinomy Marx described between the competing rights of capitalist and laborer, capitalism’s reliance on this unpaid labor to socially reproduce the work ability of its producers marks the exhaustive consumption characteristic of its drive towards endless accumulation. This crisis tendency has resulted in the transformation of multiple capitalist regimes, and I draw upon the work of Fraser when exploring the shift to 21st century neoliberal capitalism, with its distinct separation between the economic and private spheres that simultaneously revoked the socialization of domestic labor, yet which shifted the boundary again with its introduction of more women into the workforce. 

In conclusion, I reflect on this expanded account of capital’s oppression and propose a multifaceted solution to its contradictory relations as well as to the theoretical shortcomings of previous feminist movements. In so doing, I explore how a continued reinvigoration of strikes reminiscent of working class feminism, universal parental leave and child care, alongside the socialization and industrialization of housework, could offer far-reaching, effective rectification. 

Amelia Malpas, Mount Holyoke College

“Bringing the Party Home: The Progressive Insurgency in the House of Representatives and its Impact on the Democratic Party"

Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic presidential nomination. Twice. And yet, since his first loss in 2016, the Democratic Party has moved toward his policy stances on a range of issues. Ideas that pundits derided as politically impossible when Sanders first ran are now at the center of the policy debate within the party. Sanders lost his insurgent bids, but the “political revolution” he sought to ignite continues through a movement of progressive insurgents including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nina Turner. Like Sanders, most of these insurgents lose. Despite this, they are a serious force pushing Democrats left. This is puzzling: how do insurgents change political parties and national politics so rapidly when nearly all fail to win election outright? Drawing on original interviews with over 40 insurgent candidates and raw data on campaigns and congressional legislation, this thesis develops a theory of insurgency and insurgent-driven party change, provides a portrait of the Progressive Insurgency, determines what factors predict its candidates’ electoral success, and examines its impact on Democratic Party policy. It finds that the Progressive Insurgency is a semi-coordinated movement that aims to capture the Democratic Party to reorient its policy priorities and through that, turn the United States into a multiracial social democracy. The predictors of insurgents’ vote share vary by how Democratic their district is and if the incumbent is a Democrat, but largely concern the quality of the insurgent—their electoral experience, endorsements, and fundraising—rather than the district or the incumbent. Last, the insurgency has had a substantial influence on Democrats’ policy conversation and proposed policy but only a limited impact in its passed policy. It argues that the efficacy of insurgency comes from its simultaneous institutional and ideological challenge to its host party and that, measured by its rate of electoral victory and policy impact on the Democratic Party, the Progressive Insurgency has been moderately successful.

Emma Jensen, Catholic University of America

"The Crucifixion Standard of Forgiveness"

After the deadly global conflicts in the twentieth-century and the rise of world-ending weapons, vengeance seemed to replace forgiveness. Forgiveness is crucial in order for healing to come from justice and not morph into vengeance. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that on the cross Christ said, “Father, forgive them they know not what they do,” (Luke 23:34). His profound example is nearly incomprehensible to the modern world. Forgiveness at such magnitude would appear to remove the culpability of the perpetrator, however, instead has the power to provide opportunity for healing and rehabilitation of goodness within a community or state. There are two modern examples that will be used to show the power of the Crucifixion standard that Christ has shown: St. Maria Goretti’s forgiveness of Alessandro Serenelli the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. St. Maria Goretti chose to forgive her assaulter, Alessandro Serenelli who later attended her canonization in 1950. Following the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, over one million  Tutsi were killed by the Hutu majority. In the years after, the country has held reconciliation meetings where victims have the opportunity to confront and forgive their perpetrators. These examples show that the example that Christ showed is possible and further analysis of the means that the certain individuals relied upon in order to make such a powerful decision will offer greater tools for discovering other opportunities for conflict resolution. The Crucifixion forgiveness standard is vital to the international community in order to forgive radically and allow justice to be a priority.