The Department of Political Science provides the opportunity and atmosphere for both faculty and graduate students to excel in research and be leaders in their fields of study.  Recently, three faculty/graduate student pairs have collaborated on research and have had their articles published.

Professor Bruce Bimber and Lauren Copeland will have an article, “Digital Media and Traditional Political Participation Over Time in the U.S.,” published in the forthcoming edition of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics. They use 12 years of data from the American National Election Studies to test if a consistent relationship between Internet use and political participation exists over time. They find that a general measure of Internet use for political information is not consistently related to six acts of traditional political participation across elections.

Professor Pei-te Lien and Katie O. Swain’s article, “Local Executive Leaders: At the Intersection of Race and Gender,” appears in Women & Executive Office: Pathways & Performance (Lynne Rienner, 2013).  Their research, based mostly on the Gender and Multicultural Leadership Project, breaks new ground by focusing on the oft-overlooked women of color executives who hold locally elective offices.  Although holding executive leadership positions, these women are found to hold offices that are comparatively weak in political power and in cities that are smaller in population than those offices and places governed by their male counterparts. In addition, they often hone their political skills in civic organizations and cite service to community as the primary motivation for office.

Professor Pei-te Lien and Jeanette Yih Harvie published an article comparing the political incorporation of Taiwanese Americans and Irish Americans in Taiwan in Comparative Perspective 4. Their article reviews theories of immigrant political incorporation and compares the social and political adaptation of two very different ethnic groups in American history and contemporary politics. They take stock of historical, institutional, and behavioral evidences related to the evolution of the two ethnic groups to challenge the validity of the conventional pluralist framework and liberalism’s assumptions of immigrant incorporation for an emergent, non-white, and majority-immigrant community.