A presentation on faculty research in the Political Science Department can be found here. 

Current Faculty Research Projects

• Prof. Julia Azari is continuing her research on the American presidency and U.S. political parties. She is working on a book about race and the American presidency and co-editing a volume on the impact of the presidency of Donald Trump. She has ongoing research projects on the strength and legitimacy of political parties, and about the impact of post-election narratives. 
• Prof. Lowell Barrington is currently working on three projects. The first examines the tension between increasing attachment to civic national identity and increasing resentment of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. It is based on survey data from two national surveys in Ukraine, collected in the fall of 2022 and the fall of 2018. The second is a work on the challenges to reaching a negotiated settlement to end the ongoing war in Ukraine. The third is a revision of his introductory comparative politics textbook (Comparative Politics: Structures and Choices) under contract with Cambridge University Press. 
• Prof. Mark Berlin is currently working on a number of research projects related to the prevention of and accountability for torture. The largest of these projects focuses on the now well-documented use of torture by Chicago Police detectives against criminal suspects throughout the 1970s and 80s. Specifically, the project examines why the system of police oversight and accountability in Chicago failed for so long to stem the abuses, as well as how efforts to achieve justice for the survivors developed over time.
• Prof. Noelle Brigden is currently working on a project that maps the im/mobilities produced by gang borders in El Salvador to theorize globalization and the reordering of the nation-state through the lived spatial orientation of people. She recently completed a visiting fellowship at the Princeton University Institute for International and Regional Studies. Her book, The Migrant Passage: Clandestine Journeys from Central America was published by Princeton University Press in 2018.
• Prof. Risa Brooks research includes a book project (with Peter White) that evaluates the nature and implications of “political control of the military” in authoritarian regimes. It includes a new theory of variation in political control, which is evaluated with large-n quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis in cases selected from around the world, including several from the Middle East and North Africa. Her research on the United States focuses on issues of military professionalism, military advice and civilian control of the military. An additional current project explores the implications for territorial safe havens for the incidence of complex terror attacks in Europe and the United States and includes data collection of terrorist attacks in both regions. In addition to her academic work, Dr. Brooks remains engage with policy debates related to her areas of expertise, and national security more broadly.
• Prof. Darrell Dobbs is currently exploring the scope and limits of the classical trivium and quadrivium in search of an even more foundational art of learning, which might inform a pedagogical modus operandi suited to Plato’s conception of the divine in man.
• Prof. H. Richard Friman is currently working on two book projects, the first exploring efforts against outbound smuggling by advanced industrial countries and the second on ways in which alien criminality arguments have influenced immigration reform in the United States. Other research projects underway include investigating: the origins of U.S. presidential discretionary authority to suspend and restrict alien entry; patterns of leadership succession in drug trafficking organizations; patterns of industry self-regulation in downstream grey markets; and the relationship between states and organized criminal groups during natural disasters.
• Prof. Susan Giaimo recently published a cross-national study analyzing current health care challenges and reform efforts in industrialized democracies and the Global South. The case studies comprise the US, Germany, and South Africa. She is currently exploring the intersection of public policy and the social determinants of health.
• Prof. Barrett McCormick is currently working on a project that compares how political and economic institutions in China and the United States have shaped the development of new technologies and in turn constrained and directed the impact of new media on politics. In a related project, he is investigating the nature of Russian information operations and working to understand how and why American media were vulnerable to information operations in 2016.
• Prof. Paul Nolette is currently researching how elites in the legal profession have contributed to contemporary American political development through legalistic channels — for example, by seeking to change lawyer ethics rules and advocating for changes in plaintiffs’ attorneys fees in federal statutory litigation. While initially appearing to concern issues of “law” and not “politics,” these changes involve very real political conflicts with important consequences for American politics.
• Prof. Jessica Rich is currently working on two projects. Her forthcoming book, State-Sponsored Activism: Bureaucrats and Social Movements in Democratic Brazil (Cambridge University Press), analyzes a new form of political mobilization in Latin America — in which social movements make aggressive policy demands on the state, even while relying on state actors for financial support. Her new project explores surprising tensions between democratic accountability and state capacity by revealing that sometimes the strongest challenge to building state capacity is not corruption or patronage but, rather, the very rules of government that were designed to strengthen democratic accountability. This project analyzes the factors that motivate bureaucrats to look outside government to help them build state capacity versus working within the system, in addition to the trade-offs of these different strategies for democratic accountability and state-capacity over the long term.
• Prof. Philip Rocco is completing work on a book manuscript, Counting Like a State (under contract, University Press of Kansas), which examines how conflict and cooperation between federal, state, and local governments shapes the implementation of the United States census. A second book project, Madison’s Engineers: How Policy Science Remade Federalism (under contract, Columbia University Press), will analyze how policy experts reshaped the relationship between the federal government and the states during the latter half of the twentieth century. A third project, supported by a multi-year grant from the Joyce Foundation, focuses on how U.S. cities are using their American Rescue Plan Act funds to support novel community violence interventions. 
• Prof. Mai Truong is working on a book project, developed from her dissertation, which examines the conditions under which movements of markedly different natures build coalitions to confront authoritarian governments.