Research
ASU School of Politics and Global Studies faculty are engaged in a wide variety of research, stretching across and interlinking many disciplines. Several on-going and innovative, collaborative research projects being done by our faculty are described briefly below.
Religion and Conflict
While recent events have made clear that religion can play a large role in conflict studies, there exists little comprehensive data and few coherent theories that incorporate religion’s role in conflict processes. Professors Carolyn Warner and George Thomas are seeking to fill this gap with contributions to "Agents of Change: the Dynamics of Religion and Conflict," a National Science Foundation-funded project in the NSF’s Human Social Dynamics program.
The project integrates various theoretical and analytical levels, ranging from the political and institutional to the individual and psychological. The project uses an informant-based methodology to acquire information about theoretical constructs of interest from a large number of international locations, which should make possible significant inferences about religion-conflict processes; computer simulation modeling will be used to explore implications. The goal is to create a comprehensive conceptualization of religion-conflict relationships and to discover the existence of fundamental, cross-cultural principles through which religion may enhance or decrease conflict.
Women and Politics
Professors Magda Hinojosa and Miki Kittilson look at women and politics from a comparative perspective. Substantial differences persist across nations around the world in the percentage of women in elected office. While Hinojosa's specialization is in Latin America and Kittilson's in Western Europe, both focus on the role of electoral institutions and political parties in facilitating or hampering women's opportunities for office. Hinojosa and Kittilson are beginning a project on the effects of candidate gender quotas for media coverage of elections in Latin America. They also share an interest with Professor Kim Fridkin, who has carried out groundbreaking research on media coverage of women in politics in the United States, and in gender differences in news media coverage of candidates in elections.
Senators and the Media
The impact of media content, specifically of coverage of electoral campaigns, on the U.S. Senate, has been an ongoing interest of Professors Kim Fridkin and Pat Kenney. Previous studies have included the relationship between negative campaigning and turnout as well as editorial endorsements and citizen views. Earlier publications use survey data, content analyses, and interviews to draw a connection between the level of competition and the form of the campaign.
Fridkin and Kenney are now examining the media framing of senator positions and actions. Identifiable patterns are hoped to be uncovered by analyzing the difference in coverage of positions and projects between the media and the senators themselves. This project is currently ongoing and involves a team of graduate and undergraduate research assistants.
Science and Technology Policy
Science and engineering laboratories have been receiving increased demands from policy makers to address certain societal demands about their scientific research. The capacity of laboratories to respond to such demands, however, is lacking. The Socio-Technical Integration Research Project (STIR), with Professor Erik Fisher serving as the director and Principal Investigator (PI), Professor David Guston as a co-PI, and Professor Clark Miller as a Senior Investigator, seeks to determine the capacities that are necessary to design, implement, and assess effective programs aimed at responsible innovation.
To accomplish this goal, 20 laboratory engagement studies, based on a protocol designed by Professor Fisher, will assess and compare the varying pressures on – and capacities for – laboratories to integrate broader societal considerations into their work. The STIR project is investigating whether the results of a pilot study are applicable across a diverse and globally distributed range of labs. The STIR project is co-funded through the NSF programs in Science, Technology & Society; Biology and Society; Mathematical and Physical Sciences and Society; Science of Science and Innovation Policy; and Office of International Science and Engineering. Two political science graduate students at ASU are also aiding in this research.
Environmental Issues
Professors Pam McElwee and Ken Abbott have been participating in an ASU/U. of Georgia/World Wildlife Fund project called "Advancing Conservation in a Social Context: Working in a World of Trade-offs” (ACSC). As part of the overall project they have researched local and global linkages of biodiversity institutions in Vietnam and Peru, interviewing parties ranging from governmental officials to lawyers to NGO activists in both countries and in global settings. Several SGS majors have been research assistants on the project, which has been funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
McElwee and Abbott, together with Professors Doug Webster and George Thomas also have a small seed grant from the ASU Office of Global Engagement to explore biodiversity and protected area management in the Greater Mekong Subregion and hope to further collaborate with universities and NGOs in this part of the world into the future. Webster and McElwee have additionally studied climate change and cities' responses in Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City, and McElwee is currently taking part in a large World Bank study on the Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change by advising the research teams assessing the costs of climate change in Vietnam, one of the six main study countries.
