SIS Faculty and PhD Students Present at APSA Conference

The 2024 American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting and exhibition, focused on the theme of "Democracy: Retrenchment, Renovation, & Reimagination," featured a number of SIS faculty and PhD students who presented their academic papers and participated in panel discussions on key topics. Some of the scholars and projects included:

• Samantha Bradshaw, Carl LeVan, and Austin Hart co-presented a paper entitled "Exporting Autocracy: How Foreign Influence Operations Shape Democratic Attitudes.
  • Through an examination of democratic attitudes in 15 African countries between 2009 and 2023, they present evidence that autocrats export authoritarianism. Statistical tests demonstrate that regular and enduring exposure to foreign influence operations weakens support for democracy. Specifically, they find that spikes in Russian activity correspond with decline across five measures of democratic norms, and that Russia targets countries already rife with government sponsored disinformation, a phenomenon they call "autocratic congruence."

• Randall Henning organied a panel on the "Evolution of International Regime Complexes" and presented a paper on the regime complex for sovereign debt restructuring. The panel and his paper examined changes to the clusters of institutions that govern particular issue areas (trade, finance, peacekeeping, development) and assessed whether their evolution is adaptive or maladaptive. Henning's paper concludes that the evolution of the regime complex for debt restructuring is adaptive, though its adaptation lags behind the worsening of the debt problem for many countries.

• Tamar Gutner presented a paper, "MDB Corporate Strategies as Flawed Accountability Mechanisms," on a panel, "IOs and the International Order." She also was chair and discussant for a panel, "Politics and Aid Effectiveness," and chair for a panel "Interventions and Conflict Resolution."

• Susanna Campbell chaired a panel, "The Future of Conflict Management," and presented her paper, "Peacekeeping, Preference Alignment, and the Future of Conflict Management." She also presented on her papers "Improving the Delivery of Aid in Conflict-Affected Areas," "Who is the IO? How Contracts and Collaboration Shape International Organization," "Statebuilding as International Relations," and "Power and Populism in Foreign Aid: Twitter as a Tool of Strategic Communication" (with SIS PhD Candidate Abrehet Gebremedhin).

• Sumitra Badrinathan presented three academic papers: "Family Norms, Gender and Vulnerability to Misinformation: An Experiment in India," "Countering Misinformation Early: A Grassroots Media Literacy RTC in India," and "The Truth in Sharing: Dissecting the Dynamics of Misinformation Spread."
• Agustina Giraudy presented at an author-meets-critics roundtable, "Catherine Boone's 'Political Cleavage in Africa,'" which brought together scholars of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia who have shaped how comparativists theorize the roles of institutions, identity, and subnational dynamics in the making of national politics, focusing on electoral democracies of the developing world. She also participated in the panel, "Mixed Methods in Comparative Politics.
• PhD Candidate Nichole Grossman presented her paper "Logistical Failure as Latent Partisan Bias: Election Admin & Outcomes in Nigeria," which found that administrative problems in Nigeria's 2023 elections were statistically more likely than technological problems to benefit the incumbent ruling party.
• PhD Candidate Shagun Gupta presented her paper "An Associational Advantage? Public Trust and Urban Governance in Delhi, India," which explains the variation in trust in local democratic institutions among the poor in megacities like Delhi. The paper develops a theory of localized trust-building and trust maintenance through horizontal ties among households, and vertical ties between households and neighborhood-level organizations.
• In addition to her paper "Power and Populism in Foreign Aid: Twitter as a Tool of Strategic Communication" with Professor Susanna Campbell, SIS PhD Candidate Abrehet Gebremedhin presented her paper "People Power: The Expansion of Secondary Education in the Global South," which builds on the existing political science scholarship on primary education expansion by the state and argues that elites in the global South often turned to the expansion of secondary education as a tool to 'concede' policy reform and avoid potential demands for democratization.

Read more about the conference and the papers presented here.