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American Politics PhD Job Candidates
2019 - 2020
Podob, Andrew
- Dissertation Title: Anxiety Among Marginalized Groups and What it Means for Politics
- Committee: Tom Nelson (chair), William Minozzi, Michael Neblo, Tom Wood
- Summary: Previous studies theorize a de-politicized thought process under the influence of anxiety, which inhibits cognitive biases like heuristics from coloring political decision making. Furthermore, the results of these studies indicate anxiety can often be beneficial for the anxious, leading individuals to engage in normatively positive behaviors they might not otherwise engage in absent their anxiety. But anxiety is not always normatively warranted or personally beneficial. Consider African Americans and welfare (food stamp and Medicaid) recipients. Government policy (or politics more generally) can be at the root of or cause much of their anxiety. Members of these groups are chronically taxed by politics, which rewires neural networks in the brain and which leaves them with less available mental bandwidth to conduct themselves civically and politically; and they are more likely to have lower internal loci of control and self-esteem. Taken together, members of marginalized groups will respond differently to anxiety inducing primes than members of non-marginalized groups. While members of non-marginalized groups will respond to these primes with increased participation, members of marginalized groups will respond to these same primes with the opposite. I launch three preregistered survey experiments to test my theory.
Comparative Politics PhD Job Candidates
2019 - 2020
Garza Casado, Miguel María
- Dissertation Title: A comprehensive study of pre-electoral coalitions and partial alignment.
- Committee: Sarah Brooks (chair); Jan Pierskalla; Paul J. Healy
- Summary: Electoral coalitions between political parties in Proportional Representation systems have received extensive attention in the literature, but their role in Majoritarian/Presidential systems has been largely overlooked. The pre-electoral coalition of interest raises questions about voters' behavior, (will voters support their preferred party despite the non-contiguous coalition? Will voters punish coalition members if it breaks while in office?), resource allocation under partial alignment (Do municipalities under pre-electoral coalition government receive more or less resources from the federal and state level governments? Does party alignment play a significant role in resource allocation?) and government spending when these coalitions are in power (Do expenditure patterns change when a pre-electoral coalition is in power? Does ideology play a role when selecting where to spend public resources with non-contiguous pre-electoral coalitions?).
International Relations PhD Job Candidates
2019- 2020
- Dissertation Title: The Global Governmentality of Protests
- Committee: Alexander Wendt (chair), Jennifer Mitzen, Christopher Gelpi
- Summary: My research agenda focuses on the impact of international organization, aid regimes, and interventions on democratic rule, free expression, and free assembly. In my dissertation, I investigate how police professionalization programs, as a facet of global governing, have affected the politics of protests across the world. Despite the fact that many transnational police professionalization programs have been designed to promote democracy and stability, many police training programs have failed to stop police from violently harming protesters. I argue that transnational police professionalization programs create political dynamics which can stymie progress and peace in the protest space. Transnational police professionalization programs foster police role conflict, incline police to dehumanize protesters, and depoliticize conflicts in the protest space. To better understand the impact of transnational police professionalization, I developed an original dataset of police professionalization and genealogically examined the governing logic behind global police professionalization programs from the turn of the 20th century to the present. By considering the ways professionalization shapes how police see themselves, my dissertation raises broader questions about how professionalism is imposed on an occupation, and how global governing affects democracy promotion abroad.
- Noteworthy: Awards: The Francis R. Aumann Award For Distinguished Teaching (2018)
Publications: "What Pivot? International Relations Scholarship and the Study of East Asia." 2015. International Studies Perspectives, 16 (3). Co-authored with Lindsay Hundley and Susan Peterson.
Kurtz, Reed
(Website)
- Dissertation Title: Climate Change and the Ecology of the Political
- Committee: Alexander Wendt (co-chair), Joel Wainwright (co-chair, Geography), Alexander Thompson, Inés Valdez, Jason Moore (Sociology, SUNY-Binghamton)
- Summary: My research concerns the relations between politics and nature in an age of planetary ecological crisis. In my dissertation I study these matters through a critical ecological analysis of the politics of climate change. Theoretically, I explore the challenges that the global ecological crisis of climate change poses for our political relations with the Earth, and develop a critical ecological framework for analyzing the politics of climate governance and climate justice. Empirically, I ground my research in critical qualitative and site-specific fieldwork conducted at various sites of climate politics, including the COP22 and COP23 climate negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. I find that the struggle for climate justice must be understood as a struggle to reorganize the relations between humans and the Earth.
- Noteworthy: Awards (selected): OSU University Fellowship for Graduate Studies (2013-14); Mershon Center for International Security Studies Student Research Grant (2017); OSU Department of Political Science Graduate Student Grant (2018, 2016); Travel Grants from American Political Science Association (2018) and International Studies Association Northeast (2015); Positions (selected): Delegate Observer for American Association of Geographers at COP23 in Bonn, Germany; Department Representative for Parallel Graduate Studies Council (2013-14, 2015-18); Department Representative for Council of Graduate Students (2016-2017); Founding member of Ohio State University Labor Council and Central Ohio branch of the Industrial Workers of the World
- Dissertation Title: Attenuation, Stasis, or Amplification: A Framework for Change in Causal Relationships
- Committee: Christopher Gelpi (co-chair), William Minozzi (co-chair), Bear Braumoeller, Randall Schweller, Alexander Wendt
- Summary: My dissertation studies how the causal effect of foreign policy tools—particularly those that are designed to coerce or compel opponents—change over time. In contrast to the existing literature, which typically assumes causal relationships remain constant, I demonstrate that the effects of coercive policies are dynamic and change in response to a variety of contextual factors. Moreover, the results indicate that the effect of coercive policy tools tends to attenuate and grow less effective over time as targets adapt and/or change their behavior. These findings indicate that U.S. policymakers commonly misuse a wide array of foreign policy tools and in the most extreme cases, implement policies that are counterproductive to U.S. interests.
- Noteworthy: Awards (selected): Presidential Fellowship (2019 – 2020), University Fellowship
Publications: Secret but Constrained: The Impact of Elite Opposition on Covert Operations (International Organization)
- Dissertation Title: Moral Theory of International Politics
- Committee: Alexander Wendt (chair), Michael Neblo, Jennifer Mitzen, Alexander Thompson, William Minozzi
- Summary: The way in which states talk about morally-exigent political issues, such as refugee crises and climate change, has received little attention by international relations theorists. In part the lack of attention to moral grammar is a data issue: one can only sift through and read a finite number of speeches. And in part this omission is due to a lack of attention to morality as a concept in international relations theory. My research addresses both of these concerns. Whereas previous IR research focuses on morality as a monolithic category, I conceptualize morality along two broad lines: consequentialism and deontology. I use this understanding to argue that shifts in moral grammar coincide with problematic outcomes for vulnerable people in need of states’ moral assistance. I argue that particular moral grammars come to characterize policies such as refugee crises and climate change. These grammars in turn trap states and other actors by reducing the discursive flexibility to deal with the full complexities of the political problems they face. Leveraging state-of-the-art text as data techniques combined with interpretive discourse analysis, I present a map of moral discourse from 1993 to 2017 using a new corpus of United Nations General Assembly speeches.
- Noteworthy: Recipient of Department of Political Science Graduate Student Grants for methods training and research assistance, and a University Fellowship. Managing editor of International Theory.
Political Theory PhD Job Candidates
2019-2020
Kurtz, Reed
(Website)
- Dissertation Title: Climate Change and the Ecology of the Political
- Committee: Alexander Wendt (co-chair), Joel Wainwright (co-chair, Geography), Alexander Thompson, Inés Valdez, Jason Moore (Sociology, SUNY-Binghamton)
- Summary: My research concerns the relations between politics and nature in an age of planetary ecological crisis. In my dissertation I study these matters through a critical ecological analysis of the politics of climate change. Theoretically, I explore the challenges that the global ecological crisis of climate change poses for our political relations with the Earth, and develop a critical ecological framework for analyzing the politics of climate governance and climate justice. Empirically, I ground my research in critical qualitative and site-specific fieldwork conducted at various sites of climate politics, including the COP22 and COP23 climate negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. I find that the struggle for climate justice must be understood as a struggle to reorganize the relations between humans and the Earth.
- Noteworthy: Awards (selected): OSU University Fellowship for Graduate Studies (2013-14); Mershon Center for International Security Studies Student Research Grant (2017); OSU Department of Political Science Graduate Student Grant (2018, 2016); Travel Grants from American Political Science Association (2018) and International Studies Association Northeast (2015); Positions (selected): Delegate Observer for American Association of Geographers at COP23 in Bonn, Germany; Department Representative for Parallel Graduate Studies Council (2013-14, 2015-18); Department Representative for Council of Graduate Students (2016-2017); Founding member of Ohio State University Labor Council and Central Ohio branch of the Industrial Workers of the World
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