Political Science News

Professor Amber Boydstun and recent PhD Jill Laufer (now Assistant Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Sacramento Center) have co-authored a Cambridge Element book, titled Catching Fire in the News, asking the question: Why do some events catch fire in the news, producing a media storm, while many similar events go all but unnoticed? They use a fire triangle analogy to explain the necessary conditions of media storms. The “heat” is the spark: a dramatic event or discovery.

A new article in American Political Science Review by Vincent Heddesheimer, UC Davis political scientist Hanno Hilbig, and Erik Voeten explores how ambitious climate policies can reshape political landscapes by creating new lines of political polarization along occupational divisions.

UC Davis PhD candidate Anya Stewart has published a new article in the journal Conflict Management and Peace Science introducing the EmPower dataset, a novel resource for systematically defining and measuring martial law across countries and time. The article addresses a long-standing challenge in the literature on emergency powers by offering a clear, consistent conceptualization of martial law and accompanying empirical data that researchers can use to study how and when governments deploy military authority over civilian institutions.

UC Davis political scientists Cheryl Boudreau and Scott A. MacKenzie have a new article forthcoming in the Journal of Politics that examines when and why citizens choose to donate money to political campaigns versus charitable causes. Using a donation experiment conducted during California’s 2022 elections, the study shows that people are generally less willing to give to political recipients than to non-political organizations.

How did companies change their campaign contributions in response to the January 6th Capitol Insurrection? In a new article in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, PhD Candidate Alex Cohen studies Fortune 500 companies' contributions to members of Congress, and finds a sharp but declining penalty against election deniers in the 2022 and 2024 election cycles. The findings emphasize the important trade-off between access-seeking behavior and public reputation in the corporate response to political controversies.

Professor Brandon Kinne and PhD candidate Andrew Roskos-Ewoldsen have published an article in the Journal of Conflict Research testing a theory of how reciprocity in international relations affects the beliefs and attitudes of individual citizens. This study uses the theoretical framework of Unbounded Generalized Reciprocity, where reciprocity operates as an informational shortcut about the trustworthiness of others, to understand how people interpret situations where countries return favors, or fail to.

Assistant Professor Tye Rush has published a new article published in Political Research Quarterly that examines whether mistrust in American elections extends beyond white conservatives to racial and ethnic minority groups. Using an original national survey and data from the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (2012–2022), Rush and his coauthors find that Black and Native American respondents express significantly lower trust in electoral integrity than white Americans.

We are thrilled to share that incoming PhD student Laila Waddell, who earned her BA from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in December 2024, has won the prestigious Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship. The Cota-Robles is named after one of the first Mexican-American professors in the UC system and provides full tuition and fees plus a living stipend for the first two years of a PhD. Laila plans to continue to research the intersection of environmental justice and urban planning in disenfranchised communities during her PhD in political science.  

Alex Cohen, a graduate student in our PhD program, has accepted a postdoctoral position as a voting law scholar with the Democracy Policy Lab at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP). In this full-time, mentored research appointment, Alex will contribute to the nationally recognized Voting Laws Roundup—a partnership between Berkeley’s GSPP and the Brennan Center for Justice that tracks state-level legislation affecting the right to vote.

Haley Daarstad was awarded $15,000 through the APSA doctoral dissertation research improvement grant (DDRIG) to support her research on criminal violence during elections in Mexico. Her dissertation explores how women and men experience and impact criminal violence differently at various stages of the electoral process in Mexico.