Participant Bios

John Ahlquist: I am a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Washington. My dissertation explains why some organizations develop the capacity to influence national-level economic policy, with an empirical focus on peak-level labor union confederations. My research interests encompass comparative and international political economy, applied game theory, quantitative methods, esp. network models, and computational simulation.

I'm a California boy. I grew up in San Francisco and completed high school in Orange County. I attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate and worked in LA for four years after school.

When I'm not tying myself in knots trying to get out of graduate school, I am a thoroughly addicted (though mediocre) surfer & a 4.0-4.5 level tennis player. I'm ready & willing to check out music of almost any type. I also attempt to support a sushi addiction on a grad student income.

Email: jsa5@u.washington.edu

Website: http://students.washington.edu/jsa5/

Bethany Blackstone: I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Emory University. My research interests include Congress-Court interactions, judicial process and behavior and congressional politics. My minor field is political methodology. My dissertation asks, (1) "under what conditions will Congress refrain from enacting legislation because of anticipation of negative treatment by the Supreme Court" and (2) under what conditions does Congress/the Court enjoy the last move in Congress-Court interactions?

Email: bblacks@emory.edu

Jos Elkink: After receiving his MA from Leiden University in the Netherlands, Jos is a PhD candidate in political science at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, where he is working on developing an agent-based model of the international diffusion of democracy. Through modeling the way attitudes change through communication, and the way attitudes are translated into anti-regime behavior, an attempt is being made to get more insight in the way democracy spreads over the globe. He is also currently a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, where he consults students and staff on quantitative analysis for their research. Besides (quantitative) research methods, comparative politics, agent-based modeling, Jos is interested in Go, sailing, piano, and many other things.

Email: jelkink@gmail.com

Philipp Fuerst: I am a forth-year Ph.D. student at Emory University's Political Science Department. I focus on international conflict and security. For my dissertation I examine grand strategy signals of deterrence and reassurance. Besides interstate communication, I am very interested in international alliances. Before I came to Emory, I received my M.A. in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin. I grew up in Moenchengladbach, a small city in the German Rhineland, which is known for soccer, dark beer and champagne truffles. In my spare time I like to go sailing, play soccer and travel.

Email: kfuerst@emory.edu

Roy Germano: I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in Government at the University of Texas at Austin, generally interested in international labor emigration, the political economy of developing countries, and economic globalization. My dissertation project is a study of the political causes and political impacts of the large sums of money sent by expatriates (remittances) to developing countries like Mexico, Poland, and Indonesia. Before coming to Austin, I studied International Relations at the University of Chicago (M.A., 2003) and Political Science at Indiana University (B.A., 2001). I am a native of Louisville, KY. Hobbies include traveling in Mexico, improving upon my conversational Spanish, and cycling around Austin.

Email: rgermano@gov.utexas.edu

Email: roypgermano@yahoo.com

Website: http://www.roygermano.com

Jean-François Godbout is a newly appointed Assistant Professor of Political Science at Simon Fraser University. He is finishing a Ph.D. at Northwestern University and obtained BA from the University of Montreal. Godbout's research is primarily focused on American Politics, Congress, and Elections. His dissertation entitled "Congress, Representation, and Participation: The Influence of Voter Turnout on Legislative Behavior in the House of Representatives", studies the relationship between voter turnout and legislative representation in the United States Congress. You can read more about Godbout's work on his website at http://www26.kellogg.northwestern.edu/jgo166/

Email: godbout@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Maria Elena Guadamuz: 4th year PhD student in political science at UCLA. Fields are comparative politics and political methodology. Currently I am exploring the role of political institutions on the advancement of economic reforms in Latin America. I was born in Nicaragua, and grew up in the Bay Area.

Email: mariaelena.guadamuz@gmail.com

Chris Haid is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Chicago. His research interests include electoral violence, authoritarian politics, and democratization as well as the use of mathematical methods to explain political phenomena. His current projects include a game theoretic model of militant violence during elections, an event history analysis of the effects of regional rebellions on authoritarian regime types (with Dan Slater), and a dynamic model of franchise extension in authoritarian regimes.

Chris is from Great Falls, VA and holds degrees from the College of William and Mary and the University of Chicago. Having retired from post-collegiate lacrosse, he's recently taken up tennis.

Email: haid@uchicago.edu

Haifeng Huang is a rising fifth year student in political science at Duke University, where he has recently received a master's degree in economics. He has been working on a model of central-local government relations in China and a model of electoral competition with voter uncertainty about candidate intentions. He plans to analyze the relationship between mass media (freedom) and political control in non-democratic countries for his dissertation. Haifeng is from China, and his name has been variously pronounced as Haifa, hyphen, or have fun...

Email: h.huang@duke.edu

Aya Kachi: I recently finished my second year in Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I have diverse research interests in democratic and authoritarian institutions, political behavior and cooperation theory. My methodological interests are both in formal modeling and statistics, with stronger emphasis on the former. My project at EITM focuses on the effects of various structural and stochastic factors on coalition bargaining duration and government survival, suggesting an alternative empirical strategy that uses a multivariate distribution to correct for the omitted variable bias caused by unobservables that affect both bargaining duration and the government survival. The project is motivated by bargaining models that highlight the possible correlation between the two durations. I also recently started working on my dissertation topic regarding revolution and regime transition. The major focus so far has been to conceptualize the success of revolution as a collective consequence of individuals' myopic decisions, introducing network and agent-based models. I earned a B.A. in Economics from the University of Tokyo, and an M.A. also in Economics from Duke University. Prior to entering the Political Science Ph.D. program at Illinois, I spent a year in Tokyo, where I grew up, working for the Japan Institute of International Affairs as a researcher.

Email: akachi2@uiuc.edu

Website: http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/akachi2/home

David Hugh-Jones: I'm a PhD student from Essex University Department of Government. My thesis is on direct democracy. I've just spent a year getting a MS in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences at Northwestern University's Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences department. My interests include migration and local political economy, and the evolution of altruism and morality.

Email: d-hugh-jones@northwestern.edu

Koji Kagotani is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His fields of research are international relations, applied game theory, and statistical methods. He is especially interested in the politics of compliance in security and economic issues and has been studying enforcement problems of military alliances and preferential trade agreements (PTAs). His dissertation project involves the effects of international trade on alliance reliability and the duration of alliances, and the effects of international structures on the performance of PTAs. He grew up in Osaka, Japan and received his bachelor's degree in law and his master's degree in policy studies from Kwansei Gakuin University. He enjoys playing golf and often can be found attending jazz concerts in LA.

Email: kagotani@ucla.edu

Anna Kalbhenn: I have been a research associate and PhD Student at the Center for Comparative and International Studies, ETH Zurich, Switzerland since June 2006. I am engaged in the National Center of Competence in Research "Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century", collaborating in a project on democratic structures and processes and the provision of public goods. Before moving from my home country, Germany, to Switzerland, I studied public policy and management (Diplom-Verwaltungswissenschaft) with a focus on international relations at the University of Constance, Germany and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. During my studies, I worked as an intern to several political and public institutions in

Brussels, Geneva and Berlin.

Email: annaka@ir.gess.ethz.ch

Yong Kyun Kim is a PhD candidate in Political Science at UNC, Chapel Hill. His main fields of interest are Comparative Politics, International Political Economy, and Political Methodology. His dissertation project explores three questions on global capital and the politics of developing nations: 1) What makes governments more or less likely to default on foreign debt? 2) How does the uncertainty regarding a government's ability and willingness to pay affect the intensity of the discipline of financial markets imposed on the government's welfare spending? and 3) When does foreign aid help recipient governments buy foreign direct investment? Yong seeks answers to these questions using a combination of formal methodology and statistical analysis. At EITM he will be developing a series of theoretical models that help us understand how political institutions shape developing countries' incentives to act in a cooperative way in the globalizing world. Yong is from Korea.

Email: ykkim@email.unc.edu

Julia Rabinovich: I am a fifth-year graduate student in the Political Science department at Northwestern University. I came to the Unites States from sunny Tel Aviv, Israel, about 5 years ago. My research focuses on the interaction between public opinion and political institutions. More specifically, I study the ways in which the structure of political institutions affects the relationship between political elites and the general public. I am currently working on my dissertation, tentatively titled "The Conditional Nature of Administrative Responsiveness to Public Opinion". My dissertation examines the theoretical and empirical relationship between public opinion and the policy-making of unelected executive agencies, a topic that has been largely neglected by public opinion-policy scholars. My other research interests include the role of political information on the gap between the respective foreign policy preferences of the general public and elites, as well as the impact of political parties' and constituents' respective preferences on legislators' voting behavior in Congress.

Email: j-rabinovich@northwestern.edu

Tyson Roberts is a fourth-year graduate student in the Political Science Department at UCLA. His research examines how changes in the international political economy affect politics in developing countries, particularly democratization and investment financing strategies. Tyson is a Los Angeles native and has also lived in the Washington DC area; Ithaca, NY; and N'Dali, Benin.

Email:tyson.roberts@ucla.edu

Jacqueline Rubin is a fourth-year PhD student at Florida State University. Her methodological interests in econometrics and formal theory are driven by substantive interests in government killing, human rights and political violence. At the EITM Institute she will further develop her dissertation project, which builds on formal delegation models to explain variance in civilian death tolls over space and time. By focusing on killing as a process rather than a governmental decision, she hopes to shed new light on the covariates and conditionalities that explain noncombatant body counts. Jackie is originally from New York. When she is not working she spends time with her fiance, her dog or playing the drums (badly).

Email: jrubin@fsu.edu

Website: http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~jhr03

Yoji Sekiya: I am a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Rochester. I analyse how domestic political factors can lead to the outbreak of war. I also demonstrate that war begins because of commitment problem, but it also ends when war has solved commitment problem. I am particularly interested in dynamic models of bargaining. I also use structural models to test implications. I am from Japan, and enjoy watching soccer games and playing poker.

Email: yoji.sekiya@rochester.edu

Zeynep Somer-Topcu is a PhD candidate at the University of California-Davis, where she specializes in comparative politics. Her dissertation asks the broad question of why political parties change their policy positions in advanced industrial democracies. She examines this question using a combination of spatial models, computational analyses, and empirical techniques. The EITM project that she will be pursuing focuses more narrowly on the implications of past election results and average shifts of other parties in the system on party positional changes. Currently, she is also working on papers investigating cabinet durations and formations in advanced industrial countries with a social network approach, the effects of party shifts on election results, economic voting in the post-Communist Europe, and the factors affecting party leader durations. Zeynep is originally from Istanbul, Turkey and currently lives in Berkeley, CA. She likes hiking, dancing, and reading literature.

Email: zsomer@ucdavis.edu

Martin Steinwand: I just finished my 3rd year in the PhD program at the University of Rochester, and I am recently ABD. My dissertation looks at the political economy of aid and civil war in developing countries. My broader research interests also include economic aspects of interstate war. Thus, my work lies at the intersection between international relations and comparative politics. I grew up in West-Germany. I have a history degree from Humboldt University in Berlin, and an MA in political science from Brandeis University.

Email: martin.steinwand@rochester.edu

Website: http://www.steinwand.us

Tatiana Vashchilko: I will be a fourth student in Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU) in Fall 2007. How institutions affect globalization is the broad research question that my dissertation focuses on. In particular, I investigate the effects of the design variations in international investment institutions on foreign direct investments (FDI). My research interests include IPE (with the major focus on FDI), IO (with institutional design as the major topic of interest), regional economic institutions (with the concentration on such region as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)), political methodology and formal modeling. In formal modeling, some of my research focuses on the application of signaling and contracting models to the analysis of international institutions. My methodological interests include spatial times series, choice models, and models of dyadic data. I have a master's degree in Economics from the Pennsylvania State University. I grew up in Russia, where I received my undergraduate degree in Finance and graduate degree in Economics. Before coming to the US, I also worked as a journalist for one of the Russian news agencies in Moscow. I like traveling, hiking, and reading, though during last two years all my free time has been devoted to my family, my two-year old son and my husband.

Email: tvv105@psu.edu

Melissa Willard: Foster is a PhD candidate in political science at UCLA. She studies international relations and security and is particularly interested in the study of how wars end. Her dissertation explores why, when, and how victors impose regime change in the aftermath of interstate war. She grew up in Massachusetts, attended Georgetown University as an undergraduate, completed a masters at the University of Chicago and is now enjoying twelve months of sunshine in LA.

Email: willardm@ucla.edu