Faculty Research with Undergraduates

Faculty Supervisor: Prof. Cleo O’Brien-Udry

Project Summary: This project supports the creation of an in-depth dataset of World Bank projects prior to their approval. When and how do foreign aid projects get implemented? The causes and consequences of existing aid projects–geopolitics, economic development, altruism, international cooperation–depend on understanding which projects do not get implemented. Students will help build a dataset of all of the World Bank projects ever proposed across time and space to unpack these dynamics. The dataset includes four main tasks: 1) digitizing World Bank documents, 2) historical research on withdrawn projects, 3) data management and cleaning, and 4) biographical research on bureaucrats associated with different projects.

Program Details: Students complete either four (one research credit) or eight (two research credits) hours of coding or research per week (asynchronously). Biweekly meetings held in-person at time TBD.

Status: Accepting new applicants to begin spring 2026.

Application Process: Apply online HERE

Faculty Supervisor: Prof. Don Casler

Project Summary: This book manuscript explains foreign policy bureaucracies’ preferences regarding the use of force during crises and how those preferences can shape the leader’s decision environment. It argues that diplomatic and military organizations have distinct preferences about the use of force as a function of their bureaucratic missions: diplomats are image managers charged with cultivating their state’s reputation, whereas military officers are technicians charged with cultivating their state’s combat prowess. Student research assistants will review and synthesize a mix of historical documents and secondary sources for inclusion in case studies of several Cold War-era crises.

Program Details: Students spend 7 hours reviewing primary and secondary sources asynchronously and attend a one-hour weekly meeting in-person; 8-hour total weekly commitment for 2 credit hours. New team members receive training as part of initial weekly time commitment. 

Status: Accepting new applicants to begin spring 2026.

Application Process: Apply online HERE

Faculty Supervisor: Prof. Alyssa Prorok

Project Summary: During civil wars, governments and rebel groups fight each other in pitched battles, hit and run attacks, and violent repression. Yet, at the same time, these adversaries also frequently cooperate with one another, engaging in ceasefires, negotiations, and making concessions to one another. Why do rebels and governments cooperate while fighting? And what impact does such cooperation have on conflict dynamics and the likelihood of conflict resolution? Students will help answer these questions by collecting data on cooperative events between governments and rebel groups during civil wars.

Program Details: Students complete 7 hours of coding per week (asynchronously) and attend a 1-hour weekly meeting (in-person); 8-hour total weekly commitment for 2 credit hours. New team members receive training and a senior mentor. Minimum two-semester commitment strongly encouraged.

Status: Not currently accepting new applicants.

Application Process: N/A

Faculty Supervisor: Prof. Avital Livny

Project Summary: Current understandings of the ways that diversity does – and does not – impact politics and economics is undermined by existing data: because current measures of diversity rely on government statistics, and because these government statistics are unequal in their availability and quality – uneven-ness that often reflects local politics and economics – statistical inferences may be compromised. In place of government statistics, the Global Diversity Index measures ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity using cross-national, multi-wave surveys. To account for potential measurement error in these surveys, their results are compared to high-quality census tallies, where available. Students conduct research into the ethnic, religious, and linguistic composition of countries around the world to allow for surveys and censuses to be combined and compared, helping to improve demographic statistics while also expanding our understanding of how identities are constructed and measured.

Program Details: Undergraduate researchers are part of a research team based at the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research. Team members keep a regular schedule – 6 hours each week – throughout the semester and are given work space at the Cline Center, to allow for collaboration. Returning team-members help train new members, building leadership skills. In addition, Prof. Livny teaches students about the research process, supporting them in developing their own research projects over the course of 2-4 semesters. More information about the curricular component of the program is available here.

Status: Not currently accepting new applicants.

Application Process: N/A

Faculty Supervisor: Don Casler

Project Summary: This project investigates the politics of national decline: does relative decline in power influence states’ ability to make credible threats? Many scholars suggest that declining states are more warlike, as they are tempted to use force in staving off changes to their status quo position. Yet others find that when powerful states experience decline, they tend to moderate their ambitions and retrench from their previous heights. Neither set of arguments, however, considers whether or how effectively declining states can communicate their demands to others, which has implications for why these actors might find themselves in conflict with other states in the first place. This paper argues that states on the receiving end of a threat from a declining power are more likely to take the threat seriously because they have observed decline in the declining power and believe that given the leader would only make a threat if they intend to carry it out. A combination of survey experiments and case studies offer empirical support for this claim.

Program Details: Students spend 7 hours reviewing primary and secondary sources asynchronously and attend a one-hour weekly meeting in-person; 8-hour total weekly commitment for 2 credit hours. New team members receive training as part of initial weekly time commitment.

Status: Accepting new applicants to begin spring 2026.

Application Process: Apply HERE!

Faculty Supervisor: Prof. Gino Pauselli

Project Summary: When do countries adopt expansive and restrictive policies toward sexual minorities? How do countries promote and resist norms in international organizations? This project investigates the adoption of pro- and anti-LGBT policies worldwide, and the promotion of human rights within the UN Human Rights Council. Students will follow coding rules to document laws, Supreme Court rulings, and executive decrees that expand or restrict the rights of LGBTQ+ people around the world. They will also systematize text-as-data available in online archives of the UN Human Rights Council, particularly statements delivered by diplomats, international organization officials and civil society advocates on multiple topics and different languages. Finally, they will also conduct research on the characteristics of foreign policy elite members.

Program Details: Students will be expected to attend one online training session at the beginning of the semester, and weekly online check-in meetings. 

Status: Accepting new applicants to begin spring 2026.

Application Process: Apply online HERE

Faculty Supervisor: Fabricio Vasselai

Project Summary: It became common sense to hear that Artificial Intelligence services like ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek, etc are politically “biased”. While that word might be a bit imprecise, this usually means that those Large-Language Models (which is the general technical name of those AI chats) are often said to have a political inclination – usually left-wing or progressive. Interestingly, this wide-spread perception is indeed backed by numerous high-profile published research. However, little do we know about why it is the case that those Large-Language Model are perceived as having such a political slant. What in their answers suggest that? And where is this political inclination coming from? Does it come from the data that companies use to train those AI systems, or does it come from the very way we ask questions to AI (which may lead to political slant in their answers)? This project investigates exactly that, by comparing thousands of answers given by 15 to 20 different AI chats from multiple countries. Students working with Prof. Vasselai will help systematize, organize, code and analyze AI-generated answers to politically charged questions. They will also help write new questions and explore details contained in the answers given by AI. Finally, students may also help reviewing literature about AI and Politics. 

Program Details: Students will be expected to attend a general meeting at the beginning of the semester and one training session. From then on, they meet Prof. Vasselai either weekly or bi-weekly, usually online. Students are expected to work a total of 8 hours per week (including eventual meetings) to get 2 research credits. 

Status: Accepting new applicants to begin spring 2026.

Application Process: Apply HERE! 

Faculty Supervisor: Prof. Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson

Project summary: This project theorizes terrorism in the United States from its emergence at the end of the eighteenth century to the present. It examines how terrorism has been tied to processes of racial formation and what role it has played in contestations about how to live and how to make one’s own way of living hegemonic. Students will primarily help with developing the theoretical framework for this argument. Tasks include reading and discussing works in contemporary political theory, archival and bibliographic research, article summaries, and discussion of research results. Research topics include the biopolitics of terrorism, U.S. racial formation, the use of the terrorism designation in the United States in the 20th and 21st century, and the rise of far-right terrorism in the United States.

Program details: Students register for 3 credit hours and engage in research activities for 6–8 hours per week. Students also attend biweekly 1–2 hour meetings with Professor Erlenbusch-Anderson to discuss research results and ideas.

Status: Accepting new applicants to begin spring 2026.

Application Process: Apply HERE!

Faculty Supervisor: Fabricio Vasselai

Project Summary: Political Scientists are often interested in studying the backsliding of traditional democracies or, conversely, the adoption of democratic practices by historically authoritarian regimes. One key aspect, however, that has been seldomly studied is to which extent democratization evolves or devolves differently across the territory of countries? Why is it that challenges to the democratic process, like disenfranchisement, frauds, election distrust, evolve or devolve unevenly across different areas of countries? Since a key impediment to studying that has been the lack of detailed geospatial data disaggregated at local-levels, part of Prof. Vasselai’s research aims at ameliorating that. Depending on their interests and skills, students working with Prof. Vasselai will be trained to (1) help create and improve a novel set of high-resolution georeferenced maps of elections and geocoded election data that cover more than 1360 elections from more than 160 countries (see geoElections); (2) or help organize historical electoral and census data from multiple countries, disaggregated at very local levels (e.g. polling places, census blocks); (3) or assist in linking georeferenced maps and those local-level data; (4) or help review pertinent literature.

Program Details: Students will be expected to attend a general meeting at the beginning of the semester and one training session. From then on, they meet Prof. Vasselai either weekly or bi-weekly, usually online. Students are expected to work a total of 8 hours per week (including eventual meetings) to get 2 research credits.

Status: Accepting new applicants to begin spring 2026.

Application Process: Apply HERE! 

Faculty Supervisor: Prof. Samantha Frost

Project Summary: Students work with Professor Frost on drafting Chapter Four, “The unencumbered self”, of her book manuscript, Use of the World. Tasks include bibliographic exploration of research databases, collation of research results, summaries of specified resources, bibliography spelunking, and discussions with Professor Frost about how the research results fit into the book’s argument. Specific topics of research include: Sir Isaac Newton’s use of frequency probability during his development of his theories of space and time; the use of frequency probability in the gambling, mathematics, insurance, law, epistemology, and theology, as well as in the development of the scientific method; the emergence of private property from discourses of common property; the rejection of complex historical causation in the development of the scientific method in the Royal Society; the rejection of complex historical causation in the development of arguments about natural law, positive law, and the rule of reason; the use of free will/reason as a civilizational litmus test in early European colonization of the rest of the world; Hobbes’s use of materialism, nominalism, and complex causation as a defense against all these developments.

Program Details: Students register for 3 credit hours and engage in the above activities for approximately 6-8 hours per week, meet together for 1-2 hours per week to coordinate and synthesize their findings, and hold a 1-2 hour weekly meeting with Professor Frost to discuss research results and emerging ideas. At the end of the semester, research assistants will write an 8-10 page essay on a related topic of their choosing. Students need to have taken courses in political theory, philosophy, or literary/cultural theory… or otherwise be able to work with abstract ideas across disciplines. 

Status: Not currently accepting applications

Application Process: NA