For additional information, please contact the candidates themselves or Sanford Gordon, Director of Graduate Placement.

Current Students in Residence
Students with Postdoctoral Fellowships

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Current Students in Residence

Andrew W. Bausch is a PhD candidate in the Politics Department, specializing in International Relations, experimental methods, and agent-based modeling. His dissertation uses laboratory experiments and an agent-based model to explore the micro-foundations behind the Democratic Peace and the finding that democracies win wars more often than any other regime type. In addition, he is working on laboratory experiments related to citizen-government interaction with respect to terrorism and agent-based models of intergroup cooperation.

Han Il Chang is a doctoral candidate in the department of Politics, specializing in Comparative Political Economy, Identity Politics, Experimental Political Science, and Game Theory.  His doctoral research projects investigate three ways in which identity politics is manifested: clientelism, strategic adjustment of ingroup bias, and an electoral appeal to group identity.  In addition, he is currently working on two research projects, one a lab in the field experiment to test effects of citizenship on intergroup cooperation and the other a lab experiment to test predictions generated from a model where indirect reciprocity is formalized as a costly signaling game.

Kazuto Ohtsuki is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics, specializing in International Relations, Formal Theory, and Comparative Politics. His dissertation, combining formal models and empirical analysis, examines how the use of force as a means to alter foreign states' institutions shapes relations between states. Specifically, he explains the determinants and consequences of forcible regime change, as well as the mechanism by which a foreign force incentivizes domestic actors to enforce imposed democracy. He also has active interests in foreign aid and international institutions.

Andrew Little is a PhD candidate in the politics department, specializing in comparative politics and formal theory. His dissertation examines how modeling elections solely as public signals can provide insight into why incumbent leaders hold elections, as well as related decisions such as committing fraud, inviting election monitors, and stepping down from power. A paper from this research agenda was published in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. He is also interested in the relationship between elections and conflict, and conflict in general.

Lindsay Shorr Newman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics, specializing in comparative politics and political economy.  Newman’s research investigates the causes and economic costs of political violence with a particular emphasis on electoral violence.  Her dissertation seeks to explain the circumstances under which elections turn violent or remain peaceful by considering the behavior of state and non-state actors before, during, and after elections, and how the interactions between these actors fuel (or deter) violence.  The dissertation employs multiple research methods, including formal modeling, statistical analysis of cross-national trends in electoral violence using an original dataset of all direct, national elections held between 2000 and 2005, and close case study.  She expects to complete her PhD in Politics in the Fall of 2012.

Gonzalo Rivero is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics. His research analyzes the conditions under which civilians can expect blind obedience of those holding the monopoly of violence. The relation between rulers and their generals plays a crucial role in all theories about political regimes and political stability, which are the two topics that delimit his areas of interest. He is the author of "Análisis de datos incompletos en Ciencias Sociales", a handbook on multiple imputation for social scientists.

Tianyang Xi is a PhD candidate in the Politics Department. His areas of specialization are in the field of comparative political economy with a substantive focus on China. His dissertation analyzes bureaucratic accountability and the mechanism of appointment in Imperial China during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Using an original dataset, he finds that public officials were systematically accountable for their performance, and the patterns of accountability and appointment were primarily a function of internal conflicts as well as the long term decline of state's military and fiscal capacity. Other research topics focus on conflict processing mechanisms, e.g. power sharing, suffrage extension and third party mediation.

Thomas Zeitzoff is a PhD candidate in the Politics Department, specializing in international relations, comparative politics, and political psychology. His dissertation explores the effects of emotions, particularly anger, and exposure to violence on subsequent levels of conflict among Israelis and Palestinians. Using experimental methods drawn from social psychology and behavioral economics, along with formal modeling, he shows under what conditions emotions interact with exposure to violence to exacerbate or attenuate intergroup conflict. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Electoral Studies, and Political Psychology.

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Students with Postdoctoral Fellowships

Nick Beauchamp is Associate Lecturer in the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences institute and the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. He will receive his PhD from the NYU Department of Politics in August, 2012, specializing in U.S. politics (political behavior, campaigns, congress, political psychology, social networks) and political methodology (quantitative text analysis, machine learning, bayesian methods, agent-based models, networks). His dissertation develops new techniques in text analysis to model the interplay between speech, belief, and behavior in legislatures, campaign advertising, and online communication. He has won the Bradley Fellowship at NYU and the Elmore A Willets Prize for Fiction at Yale, received an MA in Literature from Johns Hopkins in 2001, and worked in election observation and fraud analysis at The Carter Center. His current work examines argument and long-term opinion change within the left online; the spread and evolution of ideas over Twitter; and predicting and explaining Supreme Court decisions using the text of legal briefs.

Ana Bracic will be a Visiting Junior Fellow at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.  She plans to defend her dissertation in Political Science at NYU in Fall 2012.  Her dissertation, specializing in human rights within the field of international relations, consists of three papers.  In the first she studies discrimination against the Roma in Slovenia and Croatia and finds that ground level non-governmental organizing geared towards improving Roma/non-Roma relations helps reduce discrimination.  In the second she studies cross-country diffusion of human rights practices and finds that states tend to mimic rights practices of their neighbors, especially when more information on rights abuses is available.  In the third she compares physical integrity rights violations in failed and stable autocracies and finds that in the short term, rights violations are worse in failed states; while the absence of central authority appears to be the root cause behind this difference, warring factions that develop in light of that absence appear to be immediately responsible.

Mathew Coakley is the 2012 Political Theory Fellow at the London School of Economics & Political Science. He received his PhD from the Politics Department in 2011 specializing in Political Theory, Ethics and Epistemology. His dissertation explores how agents' motivations should affect the evaluation of what they do. In 2008 he was awarded the Northeastern Political Science Association Theory Paper of the Year prize for his work on why political legitimacy is desirable (the paper was subsequently published in Politics, Philosophy & Economics). Current research projects include how to estimate social welfare using epistemic frameworks, how problems for action-based theories in making moral agent evaluations might be overcome, and the possibilities for progress in addressing certain difficulties with inductive inference.

Anna Getmansky is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). She received her PhD from the Department of Politics in 2012. In her dissertation, she studies the effects of domestic politics on outbreak and outcomes of insurgencies, as well as on government protection from insurgency and terrorism, and on the insurgents’ and terrorists’ choices of targets. A paper based on one chapter of her dissertation is forthcoming in the Journal of Conflict Resolution. At CMU, she continues her research on terrorism and insurgency. Her current projects examine the effect of violence on land control and on voting behavior in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Kristin Michelitch is a Research Fellow at the Kellogg Institute, having recently received her Ph.D in 2012.  Her research concerns the political economy of development with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa and a specialty in field experimental, quasi-experimental, and survey methodology. In the dissertation, she questions whether electoral competition exacerbates interethnic versus interpartisan discrimination in ordinary economic activities, finding evidence, contrary to the dominant wisdom, for the latter. Recent projects partner with local NGOs and utilize large-scale field experiments to investigate the role of new information communication technologies to (1) improve political accountability for public service provision and (2) catalyze the emancipation of ordinary citizens from the influence of traditional and religious elites. Such research demonstrates her two major goals as a scholar: to advance our knowledge of social science by testing theoretically-driven hypotheses and to help the aid community learn which policy programs are most effective in improving the well-being of citizens.

Hande Mutlu-Eren is a Fellow in Political Science and Public Policy in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She received her Ph.D. from the Politics Department in 2011, specializing in Comparative Politics and Political Economy. Her dissertation analyzes intra-party dynamics in single party governments and provides across three papers, an account of a stable party defined as a party free of leadership turnover and split caused by a dissenting group of legislators. Her wider research interests include analytical and empirical accounts of party competition, coalition politics, and comparative political institutions with a focus on advanced industrialized democracies. She is currently working on a book project on party splits and a paper examining the impact of partisan alignment between the central government and individual MPs on the allocation of grants across parliamentary constituencies.

Victoria Shineman is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. She will defend her dissertation in January 2013. Her research focuses on the interaction of political behavior and the incentives generated by institutional constraints. Her dissertation argues that decreasing costs or increasing incentives to participate will also motivate citizens to invest in political information and informed voting. The five chapters include two theoretical models, a statistical analysis using survey data from an observational case study, a laboratory experiment, and a field experiment integrating two experimental treatments within a panel survey conducted before and after an observational election. Her dissertation is part of a larger research project which studies the effects of participation on political information, trust in government, political efficacy, ideological extremism, partisan identity, and the propensity to participate in the future. She is currently planning two field experiments which will generate exogenously-driven participation within observational elections.

Tolga Sinmazdemir is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. from the Politics Department in 2012, specializing in comparative politics and political economy. His research interests include political economy of ethnic conflict, causes and consequences of political violence, and determinants of inequality and redistribution in different political systems. His dissertation develops a game-theoretic model to analyze how redistributive policies and income inequality between ethnic groups affect chances of violent conflict in democracies. He tests the empirical implications of the model both cross-nationally and also by using original, sub-national data on the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey, which continues to destabilize Turkish democracy.

Michael Tiernay is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University, specializing in international relations, comparative politics, and quantitative methodology.  His dissertation focuses on how civil wars end, with an emphasis on the reasons combatants sign peace agreements.  His dissertation demonstrates that: (1) capturing or killing rebel group leaders increases the probability of conflict termination by 400%; (2) peace agreements generally occur after rebel victories or battles resulting in stalemate; and (3), the United Nations agreeing to send peacekeepers to a conflict does not increase the probability that combatants will sign an agreement.

Yael Zeira is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics (degree exp. Sept. 2012).  During the 2012-13 academic year, she will be a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.  Her research and teaching interests include comparative politics, international relations, intrastate conflict, ethnic politics and Middle East politics.  In her dissertation, she examines individual participation in anti-regime movements using interview and survey research on participation in the Palestinian national movement.  In contrast to previous approaches emphasizing the private benefits of participation, her dissertation argues that membership in social organizations activates political grievances that motivate participation.  Other projects include a field study exploring the effect of United Nations decisions on the conflict attitudes of individuals in war-torn societies.