IR 392: Undergraduate Research Program

Description of Research Project

Leading Faculty: Dr. Erin Baggott-Carter

Dr. Erin Baggott-Carter is seeking an RA who reads and writes Mandarin fluently for the Spring 2017 Semester (with the possibility of extension). The chosen student will be responsible for data entry and coding on a book project that considers the following research questions: 1) does diplomacy between China and the United States increase trust and cooperation?; 2) what are the variants of Chinese nationalism?; 3) is congressional lobbying on Chinese human rights issues effective?

Leading Faculty: Dr. Saori Katada

Dr. Katada needs help editing her single-authored book on Japanese foreign economic policy. The draft of eight out of nine chapters are complete. She needs to complete the revision of these eight chapters and add one chapter over the course of the next few months (December 2017 through March 2018). Prof. Katada needs someone to edit and proofread the manuscript, complete the footnotes and citations (using the Endnote program), including some fact-checking.

Required Skills:

Looking to hire one undergraduate student who is a native speaker of English with good writing skills. It would also be great if he/she is proficient in using Endnote program for citations. Although Japanese language skills are not required, interest in and some basic skills in Japanese language would be a plus.

Leading Faculty: Dr. Saori Katada

This research project is a three-scholar co-authored work among Gene Park (LMU), Gabi Cheung (POIR PhD student) and Dr. Katada, following the book project on the Bank of Japan that Park and Katada recently completed (forthcoming from Cornell University Press). This project examines the reasons behind politicization of Bank of Japan’s monetary policymaking by analyzing the BOJ governor summons to the Diet committee meetings. It is well documented that the Japanese Diet summons its Central Bank governors much more frequently than any other legislatures among the advanced economies. By focusing on the rationale and politics behind these summons and identifying when, how, who and why these summons take place, we examine the politics behind Japan’s monetary policy. The Diet documents all the committee questioning in the form of transcripts going back to the BOJ’s de jure independence in 1998. We identify the diet members who summon the BOJ governors and examine their motivation by matching their respective electoral district characteristics with the members’ motivation. Although electoral motivation has often been used in analysis of US policymaking, it is much harder to conduct such research in Japan because Japanese lawmakers vote basically on party line. Using the Diet debate will allow us, however, to examine the impact of electoral motivation on monetary policy.

Required Skills:

One undergraduate student from Computer Science with strong Python skills. The research assistant must be able to write an API in Python to download economic data in JSON format. The website has daily download limits so the research assistant will have to write loops that download the data over multiple days. The downloaded data must be in format that can be read into statistical packages – Stata and R.

Leading Faculty: Dr. Megan Becker

Dr. Megan Becker is looking for students to become involved in a large-scale data collection project on military activity. Those chosen will be gathering information about military deployments in the South China Sea. Fluency in regionally-appropriate languages is a plus, but not required.

Leading Faculty: Dr. Robert English

Dr. Robert English is looking for a student to work as a research assistant on the Arctic. More specifically, duties include finding and analyzing media and think-tank articles on Arctic security and geopolitics. The larger project examines how the news media and specialist publications present or “frame” Arctic security issues. I am also particularly interested in Russian debates on the Arctic, so there will be some focus on Russian publications too. Desired skills are: diligent research and careful analysis a must; familiarity with military and security issues desired, knowledge of naval affairs particularly welcome; Russian language is a big plus.

Leading Faculty: Dr. Laurie Brand

Dr. Laurie Brand is looking for a student who is fluent in Arabic. The student will work on a project focusing on the construction of the notion of academic freedom in the Arab world and the ways regimes have suppressed or constrained it as part of broader policies affecting political rights and freedom of expression, particularly post-2000. Tasks include reading and looking for specific information in the memoirs — currently being published as a series of articles in the Jordanian newspaper al-Ghad— of a former Jordanian minister or education.

Leading Faculty: Dr. Wayne Sandholtz

Dr. Wayne Sandholtz is looking for students interested in international law and courts to provide assistance in creating a new dataset.

Leading Faculty: Dr. Shannon Gibson

Dr. Shannon Gibson is seeking research assistance with work related to the politics of climate change and the recent Paris negotiations. Tasks include negotiation updates/literature reviews along with various themes, protest event analysis, discourse analysis, and working to submit a new IRB protocol.

Leading Faculty: Dr. Patrick James

Dr. Patrick James is recruiting students for the Near Crisis Project (NCP), a large-scale data collection enterprise. It involves identifying a particular type of event, known as a near crisis, during the period from 1919 to 2017. The NCP is at an exciting point of its development – we have searched through about 95% of monthly time periods and soon will have completed the identification phase of the project. Students in NCP this semester will do research on a two-week cycle in which they seek to identify potential cases for the NCP data set. Every two weeks, each student attends a group meeting in which potential cases are debated. The Project Director, based on arguments heard back and forth, then decides whether a candidate case will be included.

Creation of this data set will permit rigorous analysis of conflict escalation. Data on crises and wars already exist. When NCP is completed, near crises – conflicts but milder ones than crisis and war – can be included in analysis. Thus research can zero in on what causes a near crisis to become a crisis, in comparison to existing research about what makes a crisis turn into a war.