Note: The Advanced Research Colloquium concluded in 2022 and is no longer active. This page is preserved as an archive of past presentations.
About
The Advanced Research Colloquium was a series of meetings for scholars to present their in-progress work and receive feedback. Presenters shared initial material before the workshop, presented at the workshop, and received questions and feedback over the course of an hour. The colloquium connected Binghamton graduate students, faculty, and alumni in a format that allowed them to continue sharing their research, connecting, and developing ideas.
Past Presentations
2022
July 8th – Kevin Banda, Erin Cassese, and Joshua Zingher, “Adventures Among the Engaged? A Reassessment of Sorting in American Politics.”
June 10th – Paola C. Fajardo-Heyward and Carlos Moreno-Leon, “Respice Polum in Colombia’s voting behavior in the UN General Assembly: what the evidence shows.”
What determines small states’ behavior in multilateral organizations? Mainstream theories of international relations expect small states to be conditioned by the power asymmetries in which they are immersed. Recent work explores if this is always the case. Following this approach, we argue that small states have more choices than to support or oppose powerful countries. We use the case of Colombia to test our argument. Due to close relationship that Colombia has with the United States (US), scholars describe Colombia’s behavior as subordinated to US interests. We provide a more nuanced view of the reasons behind Colombia’s foreign policy. We review Colombia’s voting behavior in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and analyze the circumstances under which Colombia votes the same way as the US. Our findings suggest that while some types of foreign aid and trade dependency increase the chances that Colombia and the US vote similarly in the UNGA, counternarcotics aid decreases the likelihood that Colombia votes as the US does.
May 20th – Robin Best, “Are leftist voters better substantively represented? The effects of variance in district magnitude on party-voter ideological congruence.”
Electoral systems are known to affect the partisan outcomes of elections. While proportional representation systems are shown to produce better representation of the left than their majoritarian counterparts, scholarship on districted proportional representation systems has found that variance in district magnitude generally results in the numerical underrepresentation of leftist parties in the legislature. Here, I shift the focus to ask how districted proportional representation systems affect a different quality of representation: party-voter congruence. These expectations are tested using survey data from 45 elections in 12 districted proportional representation systems included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). The results consistently support the expectation that party-voter ideological congruence will be higher for voters in larger electoral districts, and lower for voters located within smaller districts.
April 15th – Mert Bayar, “Politics of Good and Evil: Conspiracy theories role in democratic erosion: evidence from the United States and Turkey.”
This project explores the consequences of conspiracy beliefs, emphasizing a recent wave of partisan conspiracy theories from Turkey and the U.S.A. — two significantly different countries with surprising resemblances. It identifies when conspiracy theories become relevant and influential in mainstream politics either as divisive and destructive to democracy or unifying and helpful to democratic forces. Through two survey experiments and 14 focus group sessions in Turkey and the U.S.A., this dissertation project analyzes how conspiracy beliefs affect people’s attitudes toward political institutions, democracy, and autocracy when attached to salient political identities such as partisanship.
March 11th – Mert Moral with Emre Toros (Hacettepe University), Yasemin Tosun (Sabanci University), and Melike Ayse Kocacik-Senol (Sabanci University), “Let Them Take a Bus Instead: On the Effects of Intimidation on Turnout and Vote Choice in Turkey.”
The election law, amended shortly before the announcement of the snap presidential and parliamentary elections in June 2018, provides the Supreme Election Council (SEC) with the authority to move or merge polling stations as per local authorities’ requests. This study asks how the Council’s related decisions, which affected about 100,000 voters, influenced their turnout and voting behaviors. The findings suggest a non-random selection of target precincts and provide empirical support for the expectation that moving and merging polling stations decreased voter turnout and many parties’ vote shares in the affected precincts.
February 11th – Ben Fordham, “Race, Trade, and the Demise of Southern Support for Multilateralism, 1945–1962.”
Southern members of Congress were once the strongest supporters of multilateralism in U.S. foreign policy, nearly unanimously backing the League of Nations and other multilateral initiatives in the early 20th Century, as well as the United Nations during and after World War II. By the end of the 1950s, though, many of them had turned sharply against this institutional form. This paper assesses two possible explanations: the threat multilateral human rights norms posed to the institutions of white supremacy in the South, and the rise of protectionist labor-intensive industries that eroded the economic benefits of multilateral cooperation.
January 21st – Michael Allen (Boise State University), Michael Flynn (Kansas State University), and Carla Martinez Machain (Kansas State University), “The Motte-and-Bailey of Power Projection: American Overseas Deployments in the Context of Great Power Interaction.”
We propose a theory of United States deployments that suggests expansion and contraction, under the context of diminishing overseas deployments, follow periods where the U.S. faces different threat assessments of the world. When the U.S. is secure, it expands its basing network. When the U.S. faces heightened threats, it redeploys troops to enduring allies. We label this the motte-and-bailey foreign policy.
2021
December 10th – Sam Bell (Kansas State University), “The United Nations Security Council and Human Rights: Who Ends Up in the Spotlight?”
At the end of the Cold War, the United Nations Security Council broadened its view on what constitutes a “threat to international peace and security.” Despite an increased commitment to human security, the Council’s attention on these issues has been uneven. This paper asks what determines whose rights capture the Council’s attention, and finds that human rights abuses lead to countries being placed on the Council’s agenda, while human rights organization naming and shaming results in more action by the Council — in terms of both meetings held and resolutions passed.
November 19th – Graig Klein (Leiden University), “Domestic Terror Groups’ Campaign for Constituents.”
This study develops an innovative triadic-relation theory focusing on how domestic terror group-government-constituent interactions can improve our understanding of how terror groups use violent tactics for constituency building goals in response to changes in government-constituent relations, in particular repression. Domestic terror groups apply violence to highlight their capability to punish the government and avenge grievances with the goal of shifting constituents’ support toward the terror group.
September 10th – Paul Collins, Christine Bailey, Jesse H. Rhodes, and Douglas Rice (University of Massachusetts Amherst), “The Effect of Judicial Decisions on Issue Salience and Legal Consciousness in the LGBTQ+ Community.”
This paper investigates the ability of judicial decisions to shape issue attention and affect toward courts in the LGBTQ+ community, compiling an original database of LGBTQ+ magazine coverage of court cases from 1998–2004 — a period that includes Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health (2003). Combining structural topic modeling and sentiment analysis with qualitative analysis, the authors find that both decisions increased attention to their respective issues and enhanced the affect of the LGBTQ+ community toward courts.
August 20th – Yüksel Alper Ecevit (Çukurova University) and Fatih Erol (Koc University), “Stand up for Whom? A Cross-National Investigation of Elite-Mass Congruence in Ideological Orientation and Polarization.”
Combining mass survey data on partisans from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) with candidates survey data from the Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS), this paper assesses how attitudes towards democratic representation vary according to congruence on ideology and polarization at the levels of partisans and candidates. Results highlight that meaningful partisan-candidate congruence effects are not confounded by alternative explanations such as the winner-loser gap and populism.
July 16th – Olga Shvetsova (Binghamton University), Andrei Zhirnov (University of Exeter), and Julie VanDusky-Allen (Boise State University).
June 18th – Ben Farrer (Knox College), “A Model of The Public Sphere as a Common Pool Resource, Subject to Technological Risks.”
This paper develops a theory of public attention to politics as a common-pool resource problem, where resource extraction is mediated by increasingly risky technologies. The authors argue that contemporary social media technology accelerates political attention exhaustion through algorithmic microtargeting and the linking of public and private spheres, and draw on Elinor Ostrom’s findings about preventing common pool resource collapses to suggest remedies for the public sphere.
May 21st – Anessa Kimball (Université Laval), Director of the Center on International Security (CSI), “Rational strategic problems and the collaborative defense of North America: Canadian credibility, Arctic sovereignty & defense (NATO/NORAD) burden-sharing.”
Examining the intersection of credible commitment, rational strategic problems, sovereignty, and bargaining over defense burden sharing, this research brings together issues facing continental North America — including US-Canadian Arctic disagreements, NORAD’s informal adaptive structure, and NATO burden sharing across multiple dimensions beyond the 2% spending threshold.