Her dissertation examines European Union member states' potential to influence policy outcomes in their favor and the political and institutional forces that help them to do so. The first part examines the role member states' voting and proposal powers play in helping them secure higher shares of funding from the EU budget. The second and third parts use data on the position of member states' policy preferences relative to the status quo ex ante and the eventual policy outcome to assess when and why EU countries are able to form coalitions to obtain their preferred policies.

Other research: "The Flag or the Pocketbook: To What are Immigrants a Threat?"

"Legislative Representation and Transfers in the European Union." Co-authored with Jonathan Rodden (Stanford University). European Journal of Public Finance and Management. Forthcoming.

Field Research: Conducted interviews with members of the European Parliament, experts from the European Commission, and experts from member states' permanent representations to the European Union, Brussels, fall 2006.

Assistant to the Editor: Perspectives on Politics, 2006-present.

Advisors: Bing Powell, Tasos Kalandrakis, Bonnie Meguid

Her dissertation investigates how Russia's complex institutions, particularly the election rules and the distribution of power between the executive and the legislature, affected the development of the party system in its formative years. Using a method that does not presuppose that legislative coalitions are party-based, she finds that legislative alignments cut across party lines; electoral incentives and presidential politics split only parties not based on coherent platforms. The second chapter extends this analysis into the Putin era, showing the effects of his more active involvement. A subsequent chapter focuses on SMD deputies to show the conditions for their responsiveness to the ideological preferences of their districts.

Field research: Interviews with members of current and previous Duma, Moscow 2006.

Other research: "Exchange Rate Signalling and Political Risk" (with Randall Stone)

EITM Summer Institute participant 2005. Editorial Assistant, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2005-2006.

Advisors: Bing Powell, Randy Stone, Tasos Kalandrakis

The three papers in his dissertation analyze overlooked aspects of territorial conflict and conflict with violent non-state actors, a previously understudied aspect of international conflict. The first paper examines how the physical characteristics or attributes of disputed territory (e.g. strategic location) affect a state's abilities to physically alter or consolidate it in a way that increases their battlefield prospects. The second and third papers examine the strategic dynamics of state conflict with non-domestic non-state radical groups. The "Compliance Dilemma" focuses on how disputant state policy choices intended to compel a change in the host-state's internal security policy can have damaging effects on the host's future capacity to deal successfully with the group.

Awards: Stuart Bremer Award for Best Graduate Student Paper Presented at Annual Meeting of the Peace Science Society. 2006.

Other research: "Back to the Future: Modeling Time Dependence in Binary Data." (with Curt Signorino.) "The Making of the Territorial Order" (with Hein Goemans.)

Publications: "Under the Influence? Intellectual Exchange in Political Science." PS: Political Science and Politics, forthcoming.

Advisors: Curt Signorino, Randy Stone, Hein Goemans

His dissertation explores the ways in which social group identifications, such as race and religious tradition, affect voting behavior and candidate strategies by influencing perceptions of candidate ideologies. For example, he uses American National Election Studies survey data to show that white voters perceive black candidates for U.S. house to be more liberal than white candidates with identical revealed preferences. These perceptions have direct and indirect implications for voting choices. The election strategies of ambitious politicians anticipate these effects.

Publications: Co-authored article forthcoming in State Politics and Policy Quarterly.

Assistant to the Editor, Perspectives on Politics, 2005--.

Strong interest in the study of religion and politics.

Advisors: Lynda Powell, Richard Niemi, David Primo

His dissertation analyzes the largely ignored role of the president in government formation and termination in European parliamentary democracies with a presidential head of state. A model of government formation explicitly incorporates the strategic selection of a formateur into the coalition bargaining framework, showing that a president whose ideal point is closest to the median party often selects one of the remaining extreme parties as the first formateur. A second chapter uses empirical analysis with data on 153 governments in 7 European countries to support this finding. A third chapter examines the effect of the president's discretionary power to dissolve the parliament on the coalition termination process. A large portion of the variation in the cabinet duration can be explained by the ideological proximity between the pivotal parties within the government coalition and the president.

Other research : "The Median Voter and Changing Tax and Transfer Policies" (with Bing Powell).

EITM Summer Institute participant 2006.

Won the Political Science Department's Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching (2003-2004).

Advisors: Bing Powell, Tasos Kalandrakis, Mark Fey

His work stands at the intersection of international security and international political economy. His dissertation examines the economic foundations of World War II and asks how an aggressor state—in this case Nazi Germany—gears up for war economically. Using a wide range of hitherto unexamined primary sources from archives in Germany, France and the US, he is able to explore the inner workings of an aggressor state in considerable detail. The dissertation also features several statistical components that corroborate the view that economic policies in aggressor states are notably different from those pursued in more peaceful countries.

Publications: Public Policy for Venture Capital: A Comparison of the United States and Germany. Wiesbaden, Germany: Deutscher Universitatesverlag 2006.

Other research: "The Value of Corporate Industrial and International Diversification" (with Thomas Kreye.) DAAD scholarship for a Russian language and cultural immersion course in Tomsk and Moscow, 2007.

Advisors: Randy Stone, Hein Goemans, James Johnson

His dissertation analyzes how the content of—and strategies for—black agenda setting have changed in response to black political advances in the post-World War II era. Using a new data set that covers fifty years of Congressional activity, he finds that empowerment has indeed been a boon to black agenda setting; however, it has also come with a strategic cost in terms of the marginal effectiveness of both protest and descriptive representation.

Awards: Sammy Younge Best Student Paper, annual meeting of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists 2007; APSA Minority Fellow 2003.

Other research:

• "Participation for What? A Policy-Motivated Approach to Political Activism."
• "Preaching in the Wilderness: Exploring the Macro Dynamics of Political Participation" (with Fred Harris.)

Editorial Assistant: Perspectives in Politics 2005 --.

Advisors: Fred Harris, Larry Rothenberg, Richard Niemi, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman

His political methodology dissertation applies new estimation techniques to all three substantive subfields of the discipline: comparative politics, international relations and American politics. His first paper is an application of reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo, a more general form of MCMC popular for model search problems in statistics. RJMCMC is applied to the current Iraq conflict in order to identify change points in terms of civilian casualty numbers. The second employs a generalized linear model framework to analyze "power" in legislatures. The third introduces a nonparametric 'random forests' algorithm to political science for estimation problems in which the number of parameters (in this case, roll calls) outnumbers the number of observations (members of parliament in terms of their home constituency performance.)

Awards: The John T. Williams prize awarded by the Society for Political Methodology for best dissertation prospectus 2007.

Publications: He has seven articles published or forthcoming in academic journals: olitical Analysis (forthcoming and 2007,) The American Statistician (forthcoming,) Government and Opposition (2006,) PS: Political Science and Politics (forthcoming,) The Political Methodologist (2006,) The Political Quarterly (2003.)

Other research: "Identifying Intra-Party Voting Blocs in the UK House of Commons" (with Kevin Quinn.) "Dimensions of House of Lords Reform, March 20007" (with Iain McLean.) "Dynamics of Two Party Competition" (with Tasos Kalandrakis.)

Advisors: Curt Signorino, Tasos Kalandrakis, Larry Rothenberg