Adrienne Scott

Adrienne Scott is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Government at Cornell University. She specializes in studies of inequality and social welfare policy. Her research interests span across fields of race and ethnic politics, gender politics, and public opinion. Although her primary area is American Politics, she also studies similar topics in a comparative context, as well. Prior to pursuing graduate studies, Adrienne focused on education programming. She developed children’s literacy and homework help programs at New York Cares and provided administrative support to the College and Career Readiness team at New Visions for Public Schools. Adrienne earned her M.A. in Government at Cornell University and her B.A. in Political Science from CUNY Brooklyn College.

Project Abstract: Scott will use this grant to support her dissertation project. Most broadly, her dissertation investigates understandings of citizenship—social and civic status. She takes a mixed-methods approach, combining survey analyses and interviews, to explore how views of citizenship differ by race and gender and to examine the underlying processes driving these differences. Adrienne integrates literatures of the welfare state, policy feedback, and intersectionality to examine the ways in which how the programmatic features of US social welfare policies influence political outcomes and how Americans understand their positioning in this polity. Although her project examines how outcomes may differ for people across racial, gender, and class backgrounds, it centers the experiences of Black women.

Angie Torres

Angie Torres-Beltran is a third-year PhD student in the Government Department at Cornell University. She attended the University of Central Florida where she majored in International and Global Studies. Her broad research interests include the comparative study of violence against women, state and non-state institutions, and political participation. Her dissertation focuses on the effects of domestic violence on women’s political participation. Specifically, she argues that when women who experience domestic violence choose to engage with the state (or not), their political engagement will be conditional on their interactions with the state and non-state actors that they seek to help them find justice. Her research examines the formal and informal continuum of political participation of women who experience domestic violence, at the micro-level, in Mexico and the United States. Outside of academic research, she is an advocate for first-generation, minority students that are interested in learning more about graduate school, research, and funding opportunities. Her work has been supported by the American Political Science Association, National Science Foundation, Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Latin American Studies Program, and the Cornell Graduate School.

Project Abstract: What explains variation in political participation among this group of women? Previous research has examined political organization among women in the conflict and post-conflict setting, and the demographic-based determinants of women’s political engagement. However, most countries in the world are currently not at war, and studies demonstrate that violence is primarily operating at the individual level. Torres’ research thus asks two interrelated questions: under what conditions does domestic violence lead to women’s political participation and how do women’s interaction with state and non-state institutions determine the characteristics of their mobilization? She argue that the nature of political participation among women who experience domestic violence is dependent on two crucial conditions: their decision to interact with institutions and their perceptions of procedural justice therein. Funding from the grant will provide her with the necessary funds to begin fieldwork and thus make progress on her overall dissertation project. While she aims over the next year to conduct ethnographic participation observations and semi-structured interviews in Mexico and the US, this grant will allow her to begin conducting research in one of her two fieldwork locations—Columbus, Ohio—from August to February 2022.

Jacob Harris

Jacob Harris is a PhD student in Government at Cornell University. His interests include American politics, criminal justice, prison proliferation, public opinion, and political psychology. He has published his work on youth perceptions of police officers in the Journal of Criminal Justice and has another manuscript on how racial attitudes mediate the relationship between punitiveness and religion under review. His work is generously funded by the Sage Fellowship, PRICE Initiative, Population Center, and Rural Humanities Initiative at Cornell University and the Kohut and Mitofsky Fellowships at the Roper Center for Public Opinion. Jacob’s ongoing projects include 1) assessing the political implications of prison proliferation, 2) analyzing the relationship between crime, victimization, and punitiveness in the United States and Great Britain, and 3) measuring how voters are biased by the processing fluency of political candidates’ names. During his free time, Jacob enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter and playing tennis.

Project Abstract: Voters are only guaranteed to know three things about political candidates: party identification, ballot order, and name. In nonpartisan elections, guaranteed knowledge is restricted to just ballot order and name. Research exploring the relationships between party identification and ballot ordering on election outcomes is extensive. However, we know very little about how a candidate’s name affects his or her electability. Harris provides a novel analysis of the relationship between the processing fluency of political candidates’ names and their performance in elections. He tests this relationship in two contexts: non-partisan school board elections and senate elections to see how the relationship varies in different electoral contexts. Preliminary results demonstrate that the processing fluency of political candidates surnames has a significant positive correlation with vote share in non-partisan school board elections for White and non-White candidates but that it only has a positive effect in senate elections for White candidates. Funding from the PRICE Initiative will allow him to develop a better measure for measuring the candidates’ race/ethnicity and further examine this issue through experimentation.

Kanika Khanna

Kanika is a fourth year graduate student at Cornell University's Department of Government. Broadly, her research is centered around race and ethnic politics, housing policy, and inequality in the United States. Her ongoing work focuses on the politics of residential segregation and integration, fair and affordable housing, and policy responsiveness. She has a BA from the City University of New York and an MPP from Brown University.

Project Abstract: Despite efforts through judicial ruling and federal legislation to integrate schools, businesses, and communities in the 1960s, large spans of the United States remain deeply racially segregated. Racial segregation has widespread implications on one’s access to health, education, employment, safety, and public services. These disparities exacerbate growing racial and economic inequality nationwide. Consequently, municipalities such as New York City have outlined policy proposals to encourage racial integration in neighborhoods in an attempt to reverse the inequities imposed on communities of color as a result of pervasive historical and structural segregation. As the New York City government explores these policy options, residents have been asked about their thoughts on integration. Yet there is neither consensus about what it means for a neighborhood to be integrated, nor a strong sense of people’s opinions, particularly residents of color, of integrationist policies and how they will translate into actual policy. Khanna’s project aims to explore the following: what attitudes do people of color (i.e. Black, Latinx, and Asian) hold about racial residential integration? And how, if at all, are people’s attitudes reflected in the fabric and outcomes of the institutions that oversee housing and integration efforts (in this case community boards and City agencies), from membership to policy recommendations? In pursuit of learning about individual attitudes towards integration, she aims to chart out how these attitudes motivate individuals to engage with the formal institutions overseeing land use and integrationist policies and how these institutions understand and respond to these individual level attitudes.

Marissa Rivera

Marissa Rivera is a first year PhD student in the Department of Government at Cornell University studying American politics. She is from Metro Detroit and received her B.A. in Political Science from Michigan State University. Rivera’s research focuses on racial and ethnic politics, political behavior, and public opinion. In particular, she investigates the political implications of criminal justice policy and the carceral state. She is interested in uncovering how the public, elites, and democratic processes are shaped by racialized criminal justice policies, such as drug laws, cash bail, and felon disenfranchisement. Her research also considers people of color’s access to political institutions in locations with harsher or more lenient criminal justice policies.

Project Abstract: The research question Rivera seeks to answer is whether or not white conservatives are more likely to support Black candidates when those candidates endorse punitive criminal justice policies. In the 2020 Congressional elections, there were 30 Republican candidates of color running as challengers or in open seat elections. What factors, other than partisanship and ideology, contribute to white conservative support for Black candidates? Research has yet to uncover whether criminal justice policy preferences play a role in the political phenomenon. If it does play a role, to what extent and how strong are the effects? To answer this question, Rivera will conduct a survey experiment manipulating the candidate’s race and their support for stop-and-frisk. Not only will this research provide insight into conservative policy preferences, but it will reveal if Republican candidates of color are more likely to win the support of white conservative voters if they adopt a “tough on crime” policy approach.

Shirley Le Penne

Shirley Le Penne is a rising third-year PhD student in Political Theory (Government) at Cornell University. She is interested in the politics of hope and despair, and experiences of confinement and captivity. More specifically, Le Penne conducts interdisciplinary research, fusing insights from political theory, comparative politics, social psychology, and existential philosophy. She currently works on experiences of confinement in prison and prison-like environments, the politics of life, death and suicide in the US carceral system, and the spectrum of life and death sentences. Interested not merely in understanding existence but the very experience of it, her approach consists of a phenomenological leap into the human qualia: the subjective and intersubjective living experiences that make us who we are, privately and publicly. Reviving existentialism, philosophically and politically, she asks why and whether to live.

Project Abstract: Le Penne’s project seeks to discover the PRICE of prison: the value and cost of experiencing group confinement when it comes to North African immigrants (or banlieusards) in France: Communities whose race, ethnicity and class distinguish them from, and often make them feel ostracized by, the majority population. Squared and targeted by strategies of racial profiling, the banlieusards exist within the confines of “ghettoization” – a space fostering a sense of abandonment and isolation that many individuals have described as similar to what prisoners feel inside prison walls. How different are these experiences of life imprisonment? And when such experiences amount, in one’s mind, to a life sentence, why and how does one choose to continue living? Why would “lifers” in and beyond incarceration opt not to “exit”? To what ends does society trap millions into these impossible existential predicaments? This early-stage research project seeks answers by studying the lived experiences of North African migrants living in France’s “HLM” or blocks of housing affected by social disenfranchisement. Specifically, she will compare experiences of prison and prison-like environments, the banlieues, in two of France’s main sites and cities of immigration and imprisonment: Paris and Marseille, conducting qualitative research interviews and on-site archival work.