Faculty Bios 2012 Institute
Bentley B. Allan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University. He will be joining the Political Science Department at Johns Hopkins University as an Assistant Professor this summer. His research focuses on the intersection between scientific discourse, expertise, and values in international politics. Bentley is currently writing a book on the history of scientific ideas in international politics, working on a National Identities Database with Ted Hopf and laying the groundwork for a project on the social theory of international environmental politics.
Andrew Bennett is Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He teaches courses on the American foreign policy process, international relations theory, and qualitative research methods. He has been a fellow at arms control and international relations research centers at Stanford and Harvard Universities, and he has written on the U.S. foreign policy process, research methods, alliance burden-sharing, and regional conflicts and peacekeeping. Professor Bennett is the author of Condemned to Repetition? The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet-Russian Military Interventionism 1973-1996 (MIT Press, 1999). He is, with Alexander George, the co-author of Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2005). Professor Bennett has served as an advisor on foreign policy issues for Democratic Presidential candidates in every campaign since 1984. From 1994-1995, as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, he was Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Joseph S. Nye Jr. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, and he has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN, and Fox News.
Thad Dunning is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University and a research fellow at Yale's Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies as well as the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He studies comparative politics, political economy, and methodology, and his current work on ethnic and other cleavages draws on field and natural experiments and qualitative fieldwork in Latin America, India, and Africa. Dunning has written on several methodological topics, including the role of multi-method research, and his forthcoming book Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences: A Design-Based Approach will appear in August 2012 (Cambridge University Press). His research has also been published in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Analysis, Studies in Comparative International Development, and other journals. Dunning's first book, Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes (2008, Cambridge University Press), contrasts the democratic and authoritarian effects of natural resource wealth and won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization section of APSA. He received a Ph.D. degree in political science and an M.A. degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley (2006).
Colin Elman is Associate Professor of Political Science in the Maxwell School, Syracuse University. He is currently engaged on a book project Regional Hegemony: The United States and Offensive Realism, which investigates America's rise to dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Elman is (with Miriam Fendius Elman) the co‐editor of Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field (MIT Press, 2003); and Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations (MIT Press, 2001); and (with John Vasquez) of Realism and the Balancing of Power: A New Debate (Prentice Hall, 2003). Elman has published articles in International Studies Quarterly, the International History Review, the American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Security, and Security Studies. He is a co‐founder of both the International History and Politics and the Qualitative and Multi‐method Research organized sections of the American Political Science Association, and a co‐founder and Executive Director of the Consortium for Qualitative Research Methods.
John Gerring (PhD, University of California at Berkeley, 1993) is Professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he teaches courses on methodology and comparative politics. He is the author of Party Ideologies in America, 1828-1996 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Social Science Methodology: A Criterial Framework (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (Cambridge University Press, 2007), A Centripetal Theory of Democratic Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2008), Concepts and Method: Giovanni Sartori and His Legacy (Routledge, 2009), Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework, 2d ed (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Democracy and Development: A Historical Perspective (in process), along with numerous articles. He served as a fellow of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), as a member of The National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Evaluation of USAID Programs to Support the Development of Democracy, as President of the American Political Science Association's Organized Section on Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, and was the recipient of a grant from the National Science Foundation to collect historical data related to colonialism and long-term development. He is currently a fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame (2011-12). He is co-editor of the Strategies for Social Inquiry book series at Cambridge University Press.
Adam Glynn is an Associate Professor in the Harvard Department of Government and an Associate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. His research and teaching interests include political methodology, inference for combined aggregate and individual level data, causal inference, and sampling/survey design. His current research involves design for indirect survey questions, and the partial identification of causal effects using quantitative and qualitative information. His recent work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association.
Gary Goertz is professor of Political Science, starting fall 2012, at the Kroc Center and Notre Dame University. He is the author or editor of eight books and over 40 articles and chapters on topics of international institutions, methodology, and conflict studies, His work on international relations includes "Contexts of International Politics" (1994), "War and Peace in International Rivalry" (2000), and "International Norms and Decision Making: A Punctuated Equilibrium Model" (2003). The topic of necessary conditions, their theory and methodology have also been a research agenda item for a number of years. He is co-editor of the anthology "Explaining War and Peace: Case Studies and Necessary Condition Counterfactuals," (2007). Much of his methodological work deals with the construction of concepts including "Social Science Concepts: A User's Guide" (2006 Princeton University Press) and "Politics, Gender, and Concepts: Theory and Methodology" (2008 Cambridge University Press). He and Jim Mahoney have a book in press entitled "A Tale of Two Cultures: qualitative and quantitative research in the social sciences." He is currently working on two books on the Causes of Peace and the Evolution of Regional Governance.
James Goldgeier is dean of the School of International Service at American University. He taught previously at Cornell University and George Washington University, and has held appointments at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, the State Department, the National Security Council, the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Library of Congress, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Hoover Institution, and the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Academy. From 2001-2005, he directed GWU's Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. He is author or co-author of four books, most recently, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (co-authored with Derek Chollet), named "A Best Book" by Slate and "A Favorite Book" by the Daily Beast.
Victoria Hattam is Professor of Politics at New School for Social Research working on American culture and politics. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. For the last decade, Hattam has been researching and writing about immigration and race politics in the United States. Recent publications include "Ethnicity and the American Boundaries of Race," Daedalus 134, 1 (Winter 2005): 61-69; and "Ethnicity: An American Genealogy," In Nancy Foner and George M. Fredrickson, ed., Not Just Black and White (2004), and (with Carlos Yescas) "From Immigration and Race to Sex and Faith: Rethinking the Politics of Opposition," Social Research, 77, 1 (Spring 2010). Her recent book, In the Shadow of Race: Jews Latinos and Race Politics in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2007), was awarded the Ralph Bunche Prize from the American Political Science Association in 2008. Currently, Hattam is continuing to work on immigration politics and is launching a new project on visual politics. Hattam served as the president of the Politics and History section of APSA in 2006-07.
Margaret (Peg) Hermann is Gerald B. and Daphna Cramer Professor of Global Affairs and Director of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs at the Maxwell School. Her research focuses on political leadership, foreign policy decision making, the comparative study of foreign policy, and crisis management. Hermann has worked to develop techniques for assessing the leadership styles of heads of government at a distance and has such data on over 300 leaders. She is currently involved in exploring the effects of different types of leaders and decision processes on the management of crises that cross border and boundaries as well as lead governments to experience crises. Her leadership style measures have also been applied to the leaders of transnational NGOs and international organizations.
Hermann has been president of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) and the International Studies Association (ISA) as well as editor of Political Psychology and the International Studies Review. She developed the Summer Institute in Political Psychology and was its director for nine years. Among her books are Describing Foreign Policy Behavior; Political Psychology: Issues and Problems; Leaders, Groups, and Coalitions: Understanding the People and Processes in Foreign Policymaking. Her journal articles and book chapters include: Assessing Leadership Style: A Trait Analysis; Using Content Analysis to Study Public Figures; The Effects of Leaders and Leadership in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding; Transboundary Crises through the Eyes of Policymakers; Policymakers and Their Interpretations Matter; The Experiment and Foreign Policy Decision Making; The Study of American Foreign Policy; and Leadership, Terrorism, and the Use of Violence.
Erik Herron is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Kansas. He is currently serving as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation. Erik's research focuses on political institutions, especially election rules. He has traveled extensively in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, including a semester as a Fulbright scholar in Ukraine and nine election observation missions in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine. He is a member of the Executive Committee for the Representation and Electoral Systems Section of the American Political Science Association and is Chair of the APSA Committee on Organized Sections. Erik has performed outreach about elections with government officials, the media, and the public in the U.S. and abroad, and has published his research in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Party Politics, Election Law Journal, Democratization, Europe-Asia Studies, East European Politics and Societies, Nationalities Papers, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Journal of Central Asian Studies, and Problems of Post-Communism. He has also published two books with Palgrave Macmillan: Mixed Electoral Systems: Contamination and its Consequences (with Federico Ferrara and Misa Nishikawa) and Elections and Democracy after Communism?.
F. Daniel Hidalgo is an Assistant Professor in the MIT Department of Political Science (starting Summer, 2012). His research focuses on political institutions and elections in the developing world, the statistics of causal inference, and field experimentation in the social sciences. His current empirical research is on the political consequences of electronic voting, the effects of fraud-reducing electoral reforms, and the political economy of campaign finance. He received a Ph.D. degree in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Ted Hopf is a Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University, and previously served on the faculties of Ohio University and the University of Michigan. His main fields of interest are international relations theory, qualitative research methods, and identity, with special reference to the Soviet Union and the former Soviet space. In addition to articles published in American Political Science Review, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies and International Security, and numerous book chapters, he is the author or editor of five books, including Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Cornell University Press, 2002), which won the 2003 Marshall D. Shulman Award, presented by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies for the best book published that year on the international politics of the former Soviet Union and Central Europe. Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945-1958, has just been published by Oxford University Press. Hopf received his B.A. from Princeton University in 1983 and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1989. He was a Fulbright Professor in the autumn of 2001 at the European University at St. Petersburg and a former vice-chairperson of the Board of Directors of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. His research has been supported by the Mershon Center, the Ford Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Olin and Davis Centers at Harvard University.
John Ishiyama is Professor of Political Science (and starting September 2012, University Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science) at the University of North Texas. He is the incoming Lead Editor for the American Political Science Review (beginning July 1, 2012). Currently (until July 2012), he serves as Editor-in-Chief (and was founding editor) of the Journal of Political Science Education, the journal of the APSA Political Science Education section. He is principal investigator, along with J. Michael Greig, for the National Science Foundation-Research Experience for Undergraduates (NSF-REU) grant "UNT Civil Conflict Management and Peace Science". His research interests include democratization and political parties in post communist Russian, European, Eurasian and African (especially Ethiopian) politics, ethnic conflict and ethnic politics and the scholarship of teaching and learning. He has published extensively on these topics, producing six books and over 120 journal articles (in journals such as American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Political Science Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, International Interactions, Democratization, Europe-Asia Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, Party Politics and others) and book chapters. He was a member of the American Political Science Association (APSA) Executive Council (2007-09) and will begin another term in July 2012. Currently he is an executive board member of both the Midwest Political Science Association and of Pi Sigma Alpha (the national political science honorary society) and on the advisory board of the Minorities at Risk (MAR)Project. He was selected as the Quincy Wright Distinguished Scholar in 2009 by the International Studies Association, the 2004 Missouri Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In addition he is a recipient (along with Marijke Breuning) of the 2010 APSA Heinz Eulau Award for Best Article in an APSA journal.
Diana Kapiszewski is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include public law and comparative politics (with an emphasis on judicial politics and democratization) and methodology (focusing on qualitative methods and field research methodology). Her forthcoming book, High Courts and Economic Governance in Argentina and Brazil (Cambridge University Press) explores high court-elected branch interactions over economic policy in Argentina and Brazil in the post-transition period. Her current work explores judicial politics and the uses of law in Latin America. One project examines institutions of electoral governance across the region (with particular attention to Brazil and Mexico), and another analyzes how the relationship between informal workers and the legal system is negotiated and defined in Latin America (focusing on Brazil and Colombia). She is also completing a co-edited volume (with Gordon Silverstein and Robert Kagan), Consequential Courts, Judicial Roles in Global Perspective, as well as a co-authored book (with Lauren MacLean and Ben Read), Field Research in Political Science. Her work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, Law and Society Review and Law and Social Inquiry.
Jody LaPorte is a Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She will be joining the Political Science Department at Wittenberg University as an Assistant Professor in August 2012. Her research interests include comparative politics and political regimes (with a particular focus on the dynamics of non-democratic regimes), research methods (especially qualitative and multi-method research), and the politics of post-Soviet Eurasia. Her current research examines the link between patterns of corruption and variation in strategies of repression within post-Soviet authoritarian regimes. She has published articles in Political Research Quarterly and Post-Soviet Affairs. LaPorte holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Will Lowe is Senior Researcher at the Mannheim Centre for Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim. Before joining MZES he was assistant professor in research methods at Maastricht University and has held postdoctoral research positions at Trinity College, Dublin, the University of Nottingham, and Harvard University. He works primarily on quantitative political text analysis with applications to comparative politics and international relations. Some of this work can be found in Political Analysis, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and International Organization.
Lauren M. MacLean is an associate professor of political science at Indiana University and an affiliate faculty member in the African Studies Program, the Center on Philanthropy, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Committee, and the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis. MacLean's research interests focus on the politics of state formation, social welfare and citizenship in Africa and in American Indian/Alaska Native communities in the U.S. She earned her Ph.D. in 2002 from the Department of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley and then completed a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan (2002-2004). She has a book entitled Informal Institutions and Citizenship in Rural Africa: Risk and Reciprocity in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire (Cambridge University Press, 2010; winner of the APSA 2011 Sartori Book Award; finalist for the ASA Herskovits Award) and several articles published in Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, the International Journal of Public Administration, the Journal of Modern African Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development, and World Development. MacLean is currently co-authoring a book, Field Research in Political Science (under contract with Cambridge University Press), with Diana Kapiszewski and Ben Read, and co-editing a volume, The Politics of Non-State Social Welfare Provision in the Global South, with Melani Cammett. MacLean has completed fieldwork and is drafting a book entitled Constructing Democracy in America: Tribal Consultation and the Representation of American Indians in Health Policy. MacLean is also developing a new project with Jennifer Brass and Sanya Carley (IU-SPEA) on the politics of collaborative governance in local-level, renewable energy projects in Africa. Her research has been supported by grants, including from the NSF, SSRC, RWJ Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education.
James Mahoney is the Fitzgerald Professor and Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Northwestern University. He is a comparative-historical researcher with interests in national development, political regimes, and methodology. He is the author of the prize-winning books, Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). He is also coeditor of Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power (with Kathleen Thelen; Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (with Dietrich Rueschemeyer; Cambridge University Press, 2003). Mahoney is a past president of the Qualitative Methods Section of the American Political Science Association, and a past Chair of the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. Mahoney's most recent book is A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Science (with Gary Goertz; Princeton University Press, 2012).
Andrew Moravcsik is Professor of Politics and Director of the European Union Program at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. From 1992 to 2004, he held similar positions at Harvard University. He has authored over 125 scholarly publications, including four books, on European integration, transatlantic relations, international relations, international law, global human rights, and other topics. His analytical history of the European Union, The Choice for Europe, has been called "the most important work in the field" (American Historical Review). He has served as a trade negotiator for the US Government, as special assistant to the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea, as press assistant for the European Commission, as editor of a Washington foreign policy journal, and as a member of various policy commissions. Since 2004, he has been a Non-Resident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution. Over 100 of his news commentaries and policy analyses have appeared in Foreign Affairs, where he is Book Review Editor (Europe), in Newsweek, where he was Contributing Editor, and in many other publications. He has been a visitor at research institutes in France, Italy, Britain, and Spain, as well as Shanghai, China, where he spent the 2007-2008 academic year. In 2011, Princeton University awarded him the Stanley Kelley Award for Undergraduate Teaching. The National Science, Ford, Fulbright, Olin and Krupp Foundations, as well as various universities and institutes, have supported his research. His reviews and commentary on classical music, particularly opera, have appeared in The Financial Times, New York Times, Opera, Opera News and elsewhere; he also conducts scholarly research on opera history and performance. He holds a BA from Stanford, an MA from Johns Hopkins (SAIS), a PhD from Harvard University, and has studied at German and French universities. He lives in Princeton, NJ, with his wife Anne-Marie Slaughter, and his two sons, Michael Edward (15) and Alexander (13). Further information, publications and methodological materials-including updates on "active citation"-can be found at www.princeton.edu/~amoravcs/.
Anne Norton is Edmund and Louise Kahn Term Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, She is the author of On the Muslim Question (forthcoming 2012 Princeton University Press) and other books including 95 Theses on Politics, Culture and Method. She serves on a number of editorial boards, including Political Theory, Political Research Quarterly and Theory and Event.
Timothy Pachirat is Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College for the Liberal Arts. His research and teaching interests include comparative politics, the politics of Southeast Asia, spatial and visual politics, the sociology of domination and resistance, the political economy of dirty and dangerous work, and interpretive and ethnographic research methods. Pachirat's work has received awards from the American Political Science Association's Section on Qualitative Methods and from the American Political Science Association's Labor Project. He is author of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Yale University Press, 2011), a political ethnography of immigrant labor on the kill floor of an industrialized slaughterhouse that explores how violence that is seen as both essential and repugnant to modern society is organized, disciplined, regulated, and reproduced.
Jennifer Pitts is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is author of A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton 2005) and editor and translator of Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings On Empire and Slavery (Johns Hopkins 2001). Her research interests lie in the fields of modern political and international thought, particularly British and French thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; empire; the history of international law; and global justice. She is currently at work on a book, tentatively entitled Boundaries of the International, which explores European debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among her recent articles are "Empire and Legal Universalisms in the Eighteenth Century," American Historical Review 117 (2012), 92-121, and "Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism," Annual Review of Political Science 13 (2010), 211-35. She is a co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series Ideas in Context.
Sven-Oliver Proksch is a Research Fellow at the Mannheim Center for European Social Research and at the Research Center "Political Economy of Reforms" at the University of Mannheim. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science in 2008 from the University of California in Los Angeles. His research focuses on comparative political institutions, party politics, legislative behavior and speeches, European politics, and political text analysis. His most recent publications include "Institutional Foundations of Legislative Speech" (American Journal of Political Science), "Look Who's Talking: Parliamentary Debate in the European Union" (European Union Politics), and "Position Taking in European Parliament Speeches" (British Journal of Political Science).
Paloma Raggo is the Associate Director of the summer Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. She is also a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Her research interests lie at the intersection of International Relations and Public Administration. Her dissertation focuses on the accountability practices of transnational NGOs (TNGOs). How and why accountability ideas and practices vary across TNGOs? She analyzes 152 in-depth interviews of the Moynihan TNGO Initiative project. In 2011, she was awarded the John A. Garcia Award by the Society for Political Methodology and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social, and has received several teaching distinctions from the Graduate School at Syracuse University.
Charles C. Ragin holds a joint appointment as Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona and is also appointed part time at the Center for Welfare State Research at the University of Southern Denmark. In 2000/1 he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and before that he was Professor of Sociology and Political Science at Northwestern University. His main interests are methodology, political sociology, and comparative-historical research, with a special focus on such topics as the welfare state, ethnic political mobilization, and international political economy. His books include Handbook of Case Based Methods (Sage, with David Byrne), Configurational Comparative Methods: Qualitative Comparative Analysis and Related Techniques (Sage, with Benoit Rihoux), Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond (University of Chicago Press), Fuzzy-Set Social Science (University of Chicago Press), The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (University of California Press), Issues and Alternatives in Comparative Social Research (E.J. Brill), What is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Research (Cambridge University Press, with Howard S. Becker), and Constructing Social Research: The Unity and Diversity of Method (Pine Forge Press/Sage; second edition). He is also the author of more than 100 articles in research journals and edited books, and he has developed two software packages for set-theoretic analysis of social data, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and Fuzzy-Set/Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). He has been awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize by the International Social Science Council, the Donald Campbell Award for Methodological Innovation by the Policy Studies Organization, and received honorable mention for the Barrington Moore, Jr. Award of the American Sociological Association. He has conducted academic workshops on comparative methodology in Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, South Korea, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and for diverse audiences in the United States. (See also www.u.arizona.edu/~cragin.)
Elizabeth N. Saunders is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. Her research and teaching interests focus on international security and foreign policy. Her book, Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions, was published in 2011 by Cornell University Press in the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs Series and won the 2012 Jervis-Schroeder Best Book Award from APSA's International History and Politics section. In 2012-2013, she will be a residential fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. She has previously been a postdoctoral fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University; a visiting scholar at the American Political Science Association's Centennial Center; a Brookings Institution Research Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies; and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, International Security, the American Journal of Political Science, and International Studies Review.
Frederic Schaffer teaches political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His area of specialization is comparative politics with a geographic focus on Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Substantively, he studies the meaning and practice of democracy across cultures using the tools of ordinary language philosophy and other language-based interpretive methods. He is the author of Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture (1998) and The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform (2008). He is, in addition, the editor of Elections for Sale: The Causes and Consequences of Vote Buying (2007).
Carsten Q. Schneider is Associate Professor of Political Science at Central European University (CEU) and founding director of the Center for the Study of Imperfections in Democracies (DISC) at CEU. He received his PhD from the European University Institute (EUI). In 2009/10, he was John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University and in 2008 a visiting scholar at The New School in New York City. Schneider is a comparative political scientist with research interests in the study of political regime change processes in different world regions and in comparative social science methodology, especially set-theoretic methods and research design issues. He is author of The Consolidation of Democracy in Europe and Latin America (Routledge, 2008), and co-author of Set-Theoretic Methods for the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) und Fuzzy Sets (Barbara Budrich, 2007), both with Claudius Wagemann. Schneider has published in Comparative Sociology, Democratization, European Journal of Political Research, Political Research Quarterly, Sociological Methods and Research, and other journals. He co-teaches the course on set-theoretic methods at the Annual Summer School of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) and has, over the past decade, conducted workshops and seminars on methodology in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Kyrgyzstan, Spain, Slovenia, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Jason Seawright is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Professor Seawright's research interests include comparative politics, with an emphasis on comparative political parties and on comparative political behavior; and methodology, particularly involving multi-method research designs and issues of causal inference. He is the author of Party-System Collapse: The Roots of Crisis in Peru and Venezuela. His research has been published in the journals Political Analysis, Comparative Political Studies, Political Research Quarterly, and Studies in Comparative International Development, and he is coauthor of several chapters in Henry E. Brady and David Collier's Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, as well as chapters in a variety of edited volumes.
Lisa Wedeen is Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. She is also Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and Associate Faculty in the Department of Anthropology. Professor Wedeen is the author of Peripheral Visions: Politics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (University of Chicago Press 2008) and Ambiguities of Domination: Politics Rhetoric and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; Arabic translation 2010). Among her articles are "Conceptualizing 'Culture': Possibilities for Political Science" (American Political Science Review, December 2002); "Seeing Like a Citizen, Acting Like a State: Exemplary Events in Unified Yemen" (Comparative Studies in Society and History, October 2003; reprinted in Counter‐Narratives, Al‐Rasheed and Vitalis, eds. Palgrave MacMillan, 2004); ""The Politics of Deliberation: Qat Chews as Public Spheres in Yemen" (Public Culture, 2007) and "Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science" (Annual Review of Political Science, May 2010). She is also a co‐editor of the book series, Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning (with Jean Comaroff, Andreas Glaeser, and William H. Sewell Jr.) and is on the editorial board of Perspectives. She is currently working on a book about autocracy, ideology, and generational change in the Middle East. Professor Wedeen is a past recipient of the David A. Collier Award for Mid-Career Achievement in Qualitative and Multi-Method Research.
Sherry Zaks is a graduate student in political methodology at UC Berkeley. Her methodological interests lie at the intersection of quantitative and qualitative methods, and the focus of much of her current research is on the development of methods and standards that bridge and integrate the two traditions. On the substantive side, Sherry studies comparative politics and international relations with a concentration on whether (and how) governmental incorporation of militant groups alters both the group behavior as well as civilian perceptions and valence attached to a given group.