Summer 2024 Edition
The Department of Political Science has launched an International Relations Workshop model aiming to equip students with practical skills and collaborative feedback on their ongoing research.
Earlier this semester, the WashU Department of Political Science hosted an innovative day-long conference that brought together chairs from various political science departments across the country.
‘Through the Grapevine' to be released in July
We live in turbulent times. Over the last year, the world has had more active armed conflicts than any other year since the end of World War II. In the United States, we have witnessed protests and increased levels of polarization & political anger. We live in an age that needs political science: evidence-based and theoretically rigorous research, a commitment to share that research globally, and practical pedagogy to train future leaders. Our department is meeting the needs of our age.
We were incredibly active in terms of conferences & research outreach. We hosted an international conference on Peace Science this fall. We held our 11th annual Comparative Politics Annual Conference, focusing on Political Violence and Reconciliation. We also held conferences in American politics, formal theory, and racial & ethnic politics. We ran an active speaker series with guests from around the world and we held more than twenty sessions of our political theory speaker series as well. We co-hosted the Mid-American Conference for Race, Gender, Immigration, and Ethnicity Politics. Finally, we welcomed more than 40 department chairs from around the country to discuss building departments that foster inclusivity of identity and ideas in collaboration with WashU leaders from around campus.
In terms of faculty expansion, we hired five new faculty. We have significantly expanded our judicial politics group to include Professor Lee Epstein and, joint with the law school, Professor Christy Boyd. We recruited two new faculty in American politics: Jaclyn Kaslovsky, an expert on Congress, and Michael Strawbridge, an expert on race & ethnic politics. We also hired an expert on Chinese politics, Peng Peng.
This year also witnessed four successful promotion cases: Amy Pond, Timm Betz, and Christopher Lucas were all promoted to the rank of Associate Professor and Keith Schnakenberg was promoted to the rank of Full Professor.
This summer we continue into our second year our WUSTEPS program, which extends graduate training to undergraduates who might not otherwise have pathways into graduate school. After a successful summer last year, two of those previous students have matriculated into our program this fall. We will continue to train students in advanced statistical methodologies this summer: spatial statistics, Python programming, and quantitative methodology.
We will host a gathering of alums in Philadelphia this September. If you are in the area, please reach out to us at polisci@wustl.edu and let us know so that we can connect.
Our mission remains to be intellectually ferocious and radically empathetic- our work matters more than ever, and we will continue to produce cutting-edge research that shapes political systems, policy, and the world.
-Professor Betsy Sinclair, Chair of Political Science
Political Science has been very active in creating a more vibrant and inclusive learning environment. In Spring 2024 we initiated two new student-focused events; we held our first “Creating a More Inclusive Political Science” panel for undergraduate students, and a “Climate and Inclusion Lunch” with representatives from each of our graduate cohorts. Look for both events to return in the coming academic year. We are also continuing our WUSTEPS program for its second year with a brand new cohort of six fantastic undergraduate students from across the country. The first year of WUSTEPS was a tremendous success, and two former WUSTEPS participants were admitted to our PhD program and will be starting with us in the Fall. The Department is also heavily involved in research on race, gender, and identity, and has supported numerous conferences in these areas. The Mid-American Conference on Race, Gender, Immigration, and Ethnicity was held at the University of Missouri in March; the Empirical Study of Gender Conference on our campus in May; and the Visions in Methodology Conference on our campus in May. These events have broadened our intellectual diversity, and given our students the opportunity to engage with cutting-edge research on the role of diversity in shaping our politics. Learn more about WUSTEPS: https://sites.wustl.edu/wusteps/ -Matthew Hayes, Director of Diversity (CLICK THE ELLIPSIS TO THE RIGHT TO READ THE NEXT LETTER.)
Congratulations Class of 2024! This year we are delighted to award degrees to 60 Political Science Majors, 20 Political Science Minors, and 5 Environmental Policy Majors. Additionally, 35 of our majors have newly joined Pi Sigma Alpha, the National Political Science Honors Society! With our rigorous methodological training and diverse opportunities to apply this training in original research, our graduates are well positioned to venture into a huge range of fields—from consulting firms to think tanks, congressional offices to nonprofit groups, public service and graduate school. This spring, fourteen of our students completed original honors thesis research projects: the topics ranged from renewable energy investments to state immigration law to political misinformation. Seventeen rising seniors have proposed honors projects for next year—a new record! Our aim is not only to provide only first-rate instruction in Political Science, but also to build community among faculty, students, and alumni. Recent events included a dialogue with Professors Matthew Hayes and Sunita Parikh on “How to Create a More Inclusive Political Science.” To find out about department new and events, job and internship postings, and academic opportunities, connect with us on Instagram at www.instagram.com/washupolisci! This summer I will be stepping down after four years as the Director of Undergraduate Studies. During my tenure, the program had depended on the contributions of many people, including especially program administrators Sarah Winkler, Jessica Droege, Ellen Huppert, and Elyse Waterhouse; academic and community coordinators, Dr. Zoe Ang and Dr. Zack Bowersox; and our department chairs, Margit Tavits and Betsy Sinclair. I am extremely grateful for their support—and for the dedication of all our political science faculty to teaching and advising—in helping the undergraduate program at Washington University succeed and flourish. Our goal this summer is to ensure a smooth transition to the incoming director, Professor Dan Butler. I am excited to leave the program is such good hands! -Frank Lovett, Director of Undergraduate Studies (CLICK THE ELLIPSIS TO THE RIGHT TO READ THE NEXT LETTER.)
It has been an exciting year for the Washington University political science graduate program! Here are a few highlights. Several students graduated this Spring and are moving on to bigger and better things: Tony Yang has accepted a tenure track position at Emory University; Ipek Sener has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University; Jeremy Siow has started a postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford; Lucas Boschelli has started a job in the private sector. See the bottom of this newsletter to see a highlight celebrating them and their next steps. This summer, we are doing our second annual Washington University Summer Training Experience in Political Science (WUSTEPS), our pipeline program aimed at preparing students for success in graduate political science programs. The first iteration of this program was very successful, so much so that two of last year’s WUSTEPS participants (Maryam Oyebamiji and Jose Santiesteban) are part of our excellent incoming first year cohort. We are excited to welcome them to our department next fall, and to welcome a new WUSTEPS cohort to campus this summer. In the fall, we are welcoming an exciting cohort of eleven scholars into the program. Stay tuned to our website and social media to hear more about them when they arrive. We look forward to a great fall semester. -Keith Schnakenberg, Director of Graduate Studies (CLICK THE ELLIPSIS TO THE RIGHT TO READ THE NEXT LETTER.)
Assistant professor of political science Carly Wayne discusses the role anger plays in public attitudes about counterterrorism.
The Department of Political Science is proud to celebrate the following faculty who have been granted tenure and promotions...
Michael Strawbridge, Assistant Professor of Political Science, joins our faculty specializing in American politics and quantitative methodology with an emphasis on developing novel empirical ways to assess and understand the political behavior of racial and ethnic minorities. Michael specializes in Black politics and his research examines how social and environmental factors shape Black citizens’ and Black political elites’ political attitudes as well as behaviors. His scholarship collectively contributes to the fields of Black politics, political communication, and political representation.
Christina L. Boyd, Professor of Political Science, joins our faculty with a joint appointment in the Law School specializing in judicial politics, public law, women and politics, judicial diversity, American politics, and the intersection of courts and the bureaucracy in American politics. Professor Boyd comes to us from the University of Georgia Department of Political Science and the School of Public and International Affairs where she is the Thomas P. and M. Jean Lauth Public Affairs Professor. She earned her PhD at Washington University in St. Louis, and we are excited to welcome her back home to the WashU campus.
Jaclyn Kaslovsky, Assistant Professor of Political Science, comes to us from Rice University. Kaslovsky specializes in American politics, focusing on Congress, representation, and women in politics. In her current work, Professor Kaslovsky analyzes how legislators choose to allocate their resources, including their time and staff, and the effect of these choices on the legislator-constituent relationship. In doing so, she seeks to provide an update to the traditional “home style” literature that explains congressional members’ attention to their home districts. Professor Kaslovsky's other projects leverage unique time series and congressional speech datasets to explore the consequences of increasing diversity in Congress for representation and how legislator behavior has evolved over time.
Peng Peng, Postdoctoral Scholar, joins our department specializing in the politics of state building, state development, and the role of political elites in state building, combining statistical methods with extensive archival research. Peng comes to us from Yale where she was a postdoctoral associate in the McMillan Center, and she is an alumni of Duke Political Science.
Diana Z. O’Brien, the inaugural Bela Kornitzer Distinguished Professor, led the symposium.
Chancellor Andrew Martin and Noemi Neidorff listen at the symposium.
Carly Wayne speaks at the symposium
Article David Carter's "Border Barriers and Illicit Trade Flows" accepted for publication at International Studies Quarterly.
Read the StoryArticle Deniz Aksoy, Ted Enamorado, and Tony Yang's co-authored paper “Russian Invasion of Ukraine and Chinese Public Support for War” has been published in International Organization.
Read the StoryArticle Congratulations to Keith Schnakenberg and Carly Wayne for being published in the American Political Science Review for “Anger and Political Conflict Dynamics."
Read the StoryBook Award Congratulations to David Carter, whose 2023 book Historical Dictionary of Modern Coups d'Etat with John Chin and Joseph Wright won a Best Historical Materials award from the American Library Association.
Read the StoryArticle Congratulations to Margit Tavits whose co-authored paper "Fixed Effects and Post-Treatment Bias in Legacy Studies" has been published in the American Political Science Review.
Read the StoryAward Andrew Strasberg's paper, "Who Tweets Populism When?", was chosen as the winner of the Pi Sigma Alpha Best Undergraduate Paper Award Presented in a Poster Format Award following the 2023 MPSA Annual Conference.
Read the StoryArticle Professor James Gibson's new article, "Losing legitimacy: The Challenges of the Dobbs Ruling to Conventional Legitimacy Theory" has been published in the American Journal of Political Science.
Read the StoryArticle Professor James Gibson's "Do the Effects of Unpopular Supreme Court Rulings Linger? The Dobbs Decision Rescinding Abortion Rights", forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, is now available to view on SSRN.
Read the StoryArticle Taylor Damann, Dahjin Kim, and Margit Tavits's new research on "Women and Men Politicians’ Response to War: Evidence from Ukraine" has been published in International Organization.
Read the StoryGrant Dan Butler, Political Science (WUSTL), Sarah Anderson (University of California Santa Barbara), and Laurel Harbridge-Yong (Northwestern University) were recently awarded a $60,000 grant by Unite American for their impactful research studying the 2024 Primary Elections.
Read the StoryBook In her new book, “Through the Grapevine: Socially Transmitted Information and Distorted Democracy,” published by The University of Chicago Press, Taylor Carlson, an associate professor of political science in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, examines how everyday people — not just the media and politicians — contribute to the creation and spread of misinformation through conversations they have with friends, colleagues and family about politics.
Read the StoryArticle Dan Butler joins co-authors Sarah E. Anderson, Laurel Harbridge-Yong, and Joe Nemerever on the article "Legislator Pivotality and Voter Accountability," published in Political Research Quarterly.
Read the Story
Looking to the future of the department we are committed to enriching undergraduate and graduate experiences through student research, scholarly networking, and extracurricular events, including election-related programming, speakers, and other community-building events. These varied learning opportunities are invaluable to our students, and you can help enhance our efforts by making a gift to the Department of Political Science today.
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