Undergraduate students interested in conducting original research should consider the political science honors program. During their senior year students in the honors program write a thesis on a topic of their choosing while being supervised by a political science faculty member.
2017-2018 Thesis Projects
| Thesis Title | Author (Student) | Faculty Advisor |
|---|---|---|
| The Violence of Religious Difference: A Study of Civil War Onset | Ljubica Basica | Alyssa Prorok |
| The Effect of Party Turnover on Government Corruption | Thomas Bishop | Matthew Winters |
| Economic Interdependence and Probability of Conflict: Territorial Disputes as a Moderating Factor | Chase Bloch | John Vasquez |
| Investing in Science: Professionalization Effects on the Provision of Constituent Service | Thomas Dowling | Jake Bowers |
| Hierarchical Capture: Bridging the Gap in Analyses of the Bureaucracy | Stephen Duginger | Gisela Sin |
| The Impact of the Syrian Refugee Crisis on Immigration | Reema Ghabra | Avital Livny |
| Cooperation with International Environmental Agreements -- The Role of Regional Forms of Government | Gina Gonnella | Robert Pahre |
| Ideological Drift and the Personal Lives of Supreme Court Justices | Granger Gridley | Alicia Uribe-McGuire |
| Media Influence on Public Opinion: Civil Liberties vs. National Security | Cordelia Grob | Thomas Rudolph |
| When More Knowledge is Not Sufficient: Political Sophistication, Motivation & Ideological Constraint | Shawn Kim | Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz |
| Ethnic and Religious Discrimination: Is there a Difference | Autumn Langdon | Carol Leff |
| Going Viral: Characteristics of Newsworthy Tweets | Julia Nusgart | Scott Althaus |
| Racial Bias in Sentencing and Courts | Kanishk Patel | Alicia Uribe-McGuire |
| Revisiting the Effect of Presidential Approval: Observing the President Leveraging His Popularity | Christoper Piper | Gisela Sin |
| Personality's Role within the World's Greatest Deliberative Body: How the "Big Five" Factors Drive the Rise of United States Senators to Legislative Success | Matthew Rice | Jeffery Mondak |
| Who Would Have Won: Electing the President Through the Direct Vote, 1980-2016 | Jeff Talley | Brian Gaines |
| An Examination of NASA Funding: Causal Factors, Funding Trends, and the Implications of These Findings | Kevin Wenzel | Nicholas Grossman |
The 2017 best poster award winner is Amy Radlinski for her thesis "Understanding the Brexit Referendum: Direct Democracy and International Regimes."