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Rachel Brule Ph.D. Candidate Rachel Brulé is a PhD candidate (expected degree in Spring 2013) specializing in comparative politics and South Asia, with a focus on the political economy of development and gender. Her dissertation provides a unique investigation into the perverse effects of legal empowerment in rural India. Her research is based on two years of fieldwork and rigorous empirical analysis, combining a wide range of methods: difference in differences OLS regressions of large panel survey data, geo-spatial analysis, archival research into national- and state-level legislative debates and 30 years of district-level court rulings, as well as 1,200 interviews, which include focus group discussions with 692 individuals, across South India.	Brian Coyne Ph.D. Candidate Brian Coyne is a fifth year Political Science PhD candidate studying political theory. His dissertation, currently in progress, addresses how the liberal principle of legitimacy can be revised to take into account the involvement of non-state actors, such as NGOs and corporations, in governance around the world. His other research interests include public reason, global justice, and representation. He has been a graduate fellow at the Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society and served as a Teaching Assistant for Justice, Global Justice, the Ethics and Politics of Public Service, and Theories of Civil Society, Philanthropy, and the Non-Profit Sector.
Kyle Dropp Ph.D. Candidate I am a Ph.D. Candidate with a focus in American Politics and Quantitative Methods. I study how elites influence mass public opinion and behavior through strategic rhetoric and the manipulation of electoral institutions. For my dissertation, I engaged three prominent means of elite influence -- televised advertising, political endorsements and election administration policies -- that shape voters' attitudes and behavior. Examples of my published work can be found in the Journal of Politics, where I examine the broader interplay between citizens and elites.	Jessica Gottlieb Ph.D. Candidate Jessica Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate specializing in Comparative Politics with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. She studies political behavior, institutions, and government performance in developing countries. Her dissertation demonstrates how low voter expectations, collusion among political parties, and social inequalities together undermine electoral accountability in Mali. In her past and current research, Gottlieb combines extensive field work, sound research design and rigorous methods such as field, survey and behavioral experiments. She received an MA in Economics from Stanford in 2011 and expects to complete the PhD in Political Science by June 2013.
Molly Jackman Ph.D. Candidate Molly Jackman is a PhD Candidate specializing in American Politics, with an emphasis on legislative institutions. Her dissertation, ”The Institutional Foundations of Majority Party Power,'' examines the mechanisms that underlie majority party power in legislatures. She utilizes a comparative approach and new data on state legislative institutions to explicitly test the effect that specific procedural rules have on legislative outputs. Jackman’s other research interests include quantitative methodology, political geography, and comparative politics. She expects to receive her PhD in political science from Stanford University in June 2013.	Saul Jackman Ph.D. - conferred Summer 2012 Saul Jackman is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University. He recently completed his dissertation in Political Science at Stanford University, and his Ph.D. will be formally conferred in September 2012. He wrote his dissertation “War, Presidential Action, and Congressional Reaction” under the direction of Terry Moe (chair), William Howell, and David Brady.
Alexander Lee Ph.D. Candidate Alexander Lee is a PhD candidate in Comparative Politics and International Relations. His research focuses on the politics of the developing world, especially South Asia, and the historical factors governing the success or failure of political institutions. His dissertation examines the effect of economic and social changes during the colonial period on caste identity formation, and traces the long term effects of these caste structures on the political economy of post-independence India. He also studies the causes of political violence, especially terrorism, and the long term consequences of colonialism and European expansion.	Xiaojun Li Ph.D. Candidate Xiaojun Li is a PhD candidate with an interest in international and comparative political economy, focusing on China. His dissertation examines the domestic sources of the wide variation in both statutory (de jure) and administered (de facto) protection observed across Chinese industries during and after China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Avital Livny Ph.D. Candidate Avital Livny is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Politics (degree expected in 2013). Her dissertation evaluates Islam’s growing significance for socio-economic cooperation and political mobilization in Turkey and the Muslim World: using survey and observational data, along with experimental methods, she shows that references to a common religious identity are increasingly valuable to political and economic groups because they build trust among individual Muslims, trust which compensates for high levels of generalized distrust in Muslim-majority countries.	Amanda Lea Robinson Ph.D. Candidate Amanda Lea Robinson is a PhD candidate in Comparative Politics and will complete her degree by June 2013. Her research focuses on the political causes and consequences of ethnic and national group identification in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on how group identification impacts inter-ethnic trust and cooperation in diverse settings. In her dissertation, she argues that increased national identification in ethnically diverse societies should reduce the degree to which trust is conditioned on shared ethnicity, which has positive implications for political and economic development. This argument is evaluated by combining original survey, experimental, and behavioral economic data collected in a rural border region of Malawi, with cross-national public opinion data from sixteen African states and local market data from across Malawian districts. Other research projects include the impact of interviewer-coethnicity on survey data quality, the role of ethnic and national identities in motivating costly punishment of non-cooperation in Kenya and Tanzania, the impact of economic and political modernization on group identification across Africa, and the geographic origins of cultural diversity.
Arjun Wilkins Ph.D. Candidate Arjun Wilkins is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate (degree expected June 2013), whose areas of interest include congressional elections, political partisanship, and quantitative methodology. His dissertation research uses vast datasets on congressional elections and individual-level survey responses (from Gallup) to study how the behavior of congressional incumbents and party identification in the mass public shape election outcomes in the United States.