Letter from the Chair Faculty News News from Graduate Students And

Issue Highlights:

p.2 Letter from the Chair p.4 Faculty News p.11 News from Graduate Students and Alumni

p. 14 Miscellaneous: Bob Bate’s Retirement; Sidney Verba Lectures in Politics p.18 Holiday Skit

CGIS Knafel Building

Bob’s Retirement Party Contact Us: https://gov.harvard.edu/contact [email protected]

https://gov.harvard.edu/

Department of Government https://gov.harvard.edu/news- and-announcements- categories/department-news

Department of Government News

Claudine Gay, New FAS Dean

Letter from the Chair

Hello friends and colleagues,

As I write this, the temperature outside hovers around 2 degrees (not a typo); I trust that you are in more comfortable circumstances. Nonetheless, I am happy to report, Harvard’s Gov faculty, staff and students are busy and happy – or at least as happy as one can expect from academics. . . . As you will see in this newsletter, there is at least no question that people associated with Gov are busy. Our students and faculty can point to amazing number of accomplishments since our last newsletter. In addition, several colleagues have been promoted or taken on important administrative positions (or both); our own Claudine Gay became Harvard’s Dean of FAS; our students are graduating to become our colleagues (and they continue to be our co-authors, thank heavens).

• Among our activities, you might be most interested to hear about the work of the Climate Change Committee, established last spring in the wake of the charges of sexual harassment against Jorgé Dominguez. (Jorgé has retired from Harvard; the Office of Dispute Resolution continues its investigation of his alleged violation of Harvard’s Title IX policy.) The committee has worked hard over the past months; its bi-annual progress report is available on the Government Department website at https://gov.harvard.edu/government-department- climate-survey.

Highlights of the Committee’s work so far include:

• A richly detailed analysis of the department’s fall 2018 Climate Survey, ranging from reports of harassment or discrimination to evaluations of classes, workshops, and mentoring. Most respondents – faculty, students, and staff-- are satisfied with or even gratified by their experiences in Gov, but disturbing threads run through the survey results. You can read the report, and analyze the data yourself, at https://gov.harvard.edu/government-department- climate-survey • Ongoing discussions with the senior Harvard administration about an external analysis of the institutions, culture, and practices that enabled behaviors alleged to be persistent sexual harassment. The university administration has agreed that an external investigation will be conducted, although determining its scope and mandate awaits completion of the ODR investigation. • Systematic analysis of the Gov department’s record of recruitment and retention of women faculty and faculty of color. The goal is to identify strategies for hiring, fostering, and retaining the best faculty, including those who contribute to various forms of diversity. • The inaugural Sidney Verba Lecture. This is a new cross-field speakers’ series designed to create a common intellectual space among faculty and students. Our speaker was Margaret (Molly) Roberts, Associate Professor of political science at UC San Diego. She received her PhD from the Gov department in 2014; she spoke on Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall Rafaela Dancygier of Princeton University will be the spring Verba Lecturer; you are all invited to her talk.

• A day-long retreat run by the leaders of the Center for Improved Mentoring Experiences (CIMER) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. About 50 faculty and administrators from across FAS departments participated in a morning discussion on best practices in mentoring, and the experts met with CCC members in the afternoon to start developing a new mentoring program tailored specifically to the Gov department. • And more…! See the full progress report for activities around teaching and training with a particular focus on improving undergraduate classes and advising, the possible deployment of a departmental ombudsperson, strategies for making workshop and classroom culture more intellectually and interpersonally effective, the chili-and-cornbread bake-off, and so on.

The Gov department is also working on faculty recruitment, graduate admissions, strategies to promote equity in teaching responsibilities, and more. As I said at the outset, we may not always be warm (or happy) –but we are always busy.

Since I wrote this note, we have received unhappy information of a very different kind: our friend, colleague, mentor, and former chair Rod MacFarquhar died on February 10. To give a small example of his character: the last I heard from Rod was a note written 5 days earlier in order to ensure that his research funds would be made available to continue the research that he cherished. See the more detailed notice of this sad event below.

A final note: we recently discovered that many Gov PhD alumni have not received the earlier newsletters, due mainly to the fact that they were sent to unused email addresses. We now have a new set of emails for post-2000 alumni (thank you, Thom Wall!), that we will use for this newsletter. New recipients, and everyone else, can read earlier newsletters at https://gov.harvard.edu/files/gov/files/gov_newsletter_may_2018.pdf https://gov.harvard.edu/files/gov/files/gov-june-2017.pdf http://gov.harvard.edu/files/gov/files/alumni_newsletter_01-03-17.pdf

Best to all,

Faculty News

Former Chair of the Department from 1998 – 2004 Roderick MacFarquhar passed away on Sunday, February 10, 2019. He was Leroy B. Williams Professor Emeritus of History and Political Science at Harvard.

Professor MacFarquhar first came to Harvard to pursue a master’s degree in East Asian Studies, graduating in 1955. He received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics in 1981 and was appointed the Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science in 1984. He was the Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies from 1986- 1992 and again from 2005-2006.

Rod’s wife, Dalena Wright writes that he departed without pain, with his family beside him, and with grace and fortitude. A public memorial will be planned for the future, at which we can all pay tribute to him.

Please read about Professor MacFarquhar’s life in the New York Times, Washington Post, South China Morning Post and Caixin.

Eric Beerbohm

Eric became Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies.

Matthew Blackwell

Matt, together with Avidit Acharya and Maya Sen, recently published Deep Roots. How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (Princeton, 2018). The book explores the lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the American South.

Also, Matt was promoted to the Associate Professor of Government.

Daniel Carpenter

Co-authored with former PhD students Clayton Nall (now at Stanford University) and Benjamin Schneer (now at HKS), Daniel’s paper “Paths of Recruitment: Rational Social Prospecting in Petition Canvassing”, was a co-winner of the award for the best article appearing in American Journal of Political Science, v. 62 (2018).

Timothy Colton

Tim has received three grants from within the Harvard system for a project on “World Regions and the International Order.” It involves eight investigators, including Tim and Kathryn Sikkink of Harvard Kennedy School, who holds an Affiliate appointment in our department. They have been funded for: a Radcliffe Institute Exploratory Seminar, to be held in late September; a WCFIA Research Cluster ($60K/year for 3 years); and an HGI project award ($100K/year for 2 years). The HGI award is for collaborative work with Chinese and Indian scholars.

The Research Cluster is to foster scholarly cooperation and community building on campus.

Nara Dillon

Nara joined the Government Department as Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the fall of 2018. Her interests include globalization and the politics of welfare, charity, and inequality in China. In addition to contemporary Chinese social policy, her research examines its origins in the Mao and the pre-revolutionary Republican periods. Her publications include At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks, and Statebuilding in Republican Shanghai (Stanford University Press, 2008) and Radical Inequalities: China's Revolutionary Welfare State in Comparative Perspective (Harvard University Press, 2015). Dillon offers courses on China's economic reforms, global cities in East Asia, and anti-poverty programs in China and other developing countries.

Grzegorz Ekiert

Congratulations to Grzegorz on the anniversary of his 30-year teaching career at Harvard!

Ryan Enos

Ryan was promoted to the Professor of Government.

Ryan’s book, The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017) was awarded the Best Book Prize by the APSA’s Experimental Politics section.

Peter Hall

Peter Hall won a Guggenheim fellowship for 2019-20.

Jennifer Hochschild

Jennifer’s book, What's Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice (Harvard University Press, 1986), won the APSA Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior section’s Philip E. Converse Book Award.

Josh Kertzer

Josh was promoted to the Associate Professor of Political Economy.

Steve Levitsky and Dan Ziblatt

Steve and Dan published How Democracies Die (Crown Publisher, 2018). The book spent five weeks on the New York Times best seller list and won seven “best book” notices. The book is being translated into 15 languages. Here is their description of its reception:

“We have given more than 50 talks. We met with two congresspeople and 7 senators. Joe Biden and Senator Richard Durbin frequently make reference to our book in public talks and in television interviews. Obama recommended our book in his annual end of the year book recommendations. So did former Brazilian President Lula da Silva (er, from prison) and Paul Krugman in his New York Times column. It was listed by Washington Post and Time as one of the best books of 2018.

We made TV appearances on CNN, MSNBC (Morning Joe, Joy AM twice, Chris Hayes, Laurence O’Donnell, Chris Mathews), and Christian Broadcasting Network. And it was a best seller not only in US but in Brazil (#1), Germany, and Japan. The book won an award from German Public Radio’s (North German Radio) as the Best Nonfiction Book of the year in 2018, and Dan presented it to the planning staff of the German Foreign Ministry.

It’s been quite a ride. Never could have imagined it.”

Robert Putnam

Bob received an honorary doctorate from Oxford. The citation described him as “one of the leading scholars in social research on contemporary social and political developments, advancing social sciences and public understanding of the importance of civil engagement.”

Also, Bob won the 2018 Karl Deutsch Award from the International Political Science Association (one of the top two awards in international political science).

Pia Raffler

Pia received the Best Dissertation Award from the APSA’s section on Experimental Research.

Pia’s project, Money, Monitoring, Masses: An Experimental Assessment of the Interacting Roles of Resources, Bureaucratic Incentives, and Bottom-up Pressure in Uganda, will receive funding through the fall 2018 competition of the Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship.

Jon Rogowski

Jon’s and Aaron Kaufman’s 2017 APSA conference paper “Interbranch Conflict, Unilateral Action, and the Presidency” was the 2018 recipient of the APSA Section on Presidential and Executive Politics’ Founders Best Paper Award Honoring Dom Bonafede.

Jon’s project, The Politics of Power: Unilateral Action and the Presidency, will receive funding through the fall 2018 competition of the Dean’s Competitive

Fund for Promising Scholarship.

Michael Rosen

In October, Michael Rosen sat down for a conversation with Charles Taylor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WadtRpja2Lo

In January 2019, Michael chaired the conference held at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Entitled “Inequality, Religion, and Society”, the conference examined works of John Rawls. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/01/a -new-look-at-john-rawls- nearly-50-years-later/

Michael Sandel

Michael won the 2018 Princess of Asturias Award in Social Sciences from Spain for his work “on the normative foundations of liberal democracy as well as the defense of civic virtues and the diverse ways of conceiving good in our societies.”

Kenneth Shepsle

Ken has been named one of the Walter Channing Cabot Fellows for 2018. The fellowships are given annually to a few faculty in recognition of their achievements and scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history or art. The award reflects Ken’s outstanding contributions to his field, including the publication of his recent book, Rule Breaking and Political Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Theda Skocpol

The Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association presented the first “Distinguished Career Award in Political Sociology” to Theda. The award recognizes and celebrates a lifetime of contributions to the area of political sociology.

Theda’s project, State and Local Parties Project, will receive funding through the fall 2018 competition of the Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship.

Also, Theda was featured in The Harvard Gazette, revealing her avid passion for football and especially the Patriots – “Theda Skocpol, superfan” https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/01/talking-patriots-with-harvard- political-scientist-and-superfan-theda- skocpol/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=D aily%20Gazette%2020190118

Jim Snyder

Jim’s paper “Primary Elections and Candidate-Centered Campaigns” (co-authored with Government department graduate students Jaclyn Kaslovsky and Michael Olson, and Shigeo Hirano, a former PEG student and now an Associate Professor at Columbia University) has been named the Pi Sigma Alpha Best Paper Award winner from the 2018 conference.

Dustin Tingley

Dustin, together with the former graduate students Molly Roberts (now at UC San Diego) and Brandon Stewart (now at Princeton University), was announced as the winner of the 2018 Society for Political Methodology Statistical Software Award for stm: An R package for Structural Topic Models. Structural topic models have enhanced and advanced the use of topic modeling for diverse text corpora by encompassing metadata and structure at the document level in model estimation , http://www.structuraltopicmodel.com/

Daniel Ziblatt

In 2018, Daniel’s 2017 book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge University Press) was awarded four scholarly awards: the APSA’s Woodrow Wilson Award for the Best Book in the Study of Government; the APSA Comparative Democratization section’s award for the Best Book published in 2017; the APSA European Politics section’s award for the Best Book published in 2017; and the American Sociological Association’s Barrington Moore Prize for the Best Book in Comparative Historical Sociology.

Daniel had a banner year – he also published, with Steve Levitsky, How Democracies Die. See the description of the book’s reception above, under Steve’s name.

In 2018, Daniel was named Eaton Professor of the Science of Government.

News from Academic Affiliates

Christoph Mikulaschek (Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Department of Government).

Christoph is the recipient of this year's APSA Merze Tate Award for the best dissertation successfully defended during the previous two years in the field of international relations, law, and politics. It is entitled, “The Power of the Weak: How Informal Power-Sharing Shapes the Work of the United Nations Security Council.”

While readying the dissertation book for publication, Christoph also published "Issue linkage across international organizations: Does European countries’ temporary membership in the UN Security Council increase their receipts from the EU budget?" in the Review of International Organizations (December 2018).

News from Graduate Students and Alumni

Volha Charnysh (Ph.D. ’17, Assistant Professor, MIT) won the Best Dissertation award from the APSA Migration & Citizenship Section, for “Migration, Diversity, and Economic Development: Post-WWII Displacement in Poland”.

Our former student Eitan Hersh (Ph.D. ’11, Associate Professor at Tufts University) testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the hearing regarding Cambridge Analytica. http://www.zimbio.com/photos/Christopher+Wylie/Eitan+Hersh

https://www.wired.com/story/christopher-wylie-cambridge-analytica- senate-testimony/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-cambridge-analytica- whistleblower-testifies-before-senate

Our former student Jeff Javed (Ph.D. ’17, currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Michigan University) was awarded the APSA’s Walter Dean Burnham Prize in the field of Chinese politics. He was preceded in this honor by Daniel Koss, Ph.D. ’15 in 2017 and Sheena Greitens, Ph.D. ‘13 in 2014.

Government department graduate students Jaclyn Kaslovsky’s and Michael Olson’s paper, “Primary Elections and Candidate-Centered Campaigns” won the Pi Sigma Alpha Best Paper Award from the 2018 conference. They wrote it with Jim Snyder and Shigeo Hirano (now at Columbia University).

Gabriel Katsh (Ph.D. ’15, Lecturer on Government at Harvard) is a recipient of the Star sophomore advising award. The Star Family Prizes for Excellence in Advising recognize and reward individuals who contribute to Harvard College through their exemplary intellectual and personal guidance of undergraduate students. https://apo.college.harvard.edu/star-family-prizes

Solé Prillaman (Ph.D.17, Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford) received the APSA Comparative Democratization Section’s Juan Linz Award, for the Best Dissertation in the Comparative Study of Democracy completed and accepted in the two calendar years prior to the APSA annual meeting. It is entitled,” Why Women Mobilize: Dissecting and Dismantling India’s Gender Gap in Political Participation.”

Shanna Weitz (Ph.D. ‘18) received the Bok Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching of Undergraduates. The Bok Center celebrates the recipients of teaching awards for lectures and preceptors, graduate student TFs and TAs, and undergraduate CAs at Harvard. https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/stories/shanna-weitz-2018-derek-c-bok- award-citation

Bernardo Zacka (PhD. '15, Assistant Professor, MIT) won the 2018 Charles Taylor Book Award from APSA for the “best book in political science that employs or develops interpretive methodologies and methods.” His book is When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).

Ana Catalano Weeks (Ph.D. ’16, Lecturer /Assistant Professor at the University of Bath). Her paper "Why Are Gender Quota Laws Adopted by Men? The Role of Inter-and Intra-Party Competition" was awarded The Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha prize for the best paper presented at the previous year's annual meeting of the APSA.

Departmental Dissertation Awards given at the department’s doctoral cocktail party on commencement eve, May 23, 2018.

The Edward M. Chase Prize for the best dissertation on a subject relating to the promotion of world peace was awarded to Madhav Khosla for his dissertation, “Modern Constitutionalism and the Indian Founding”.

The two Senator Charles Sumner Prizes for the best dissertations “from the legal, political, historical, economic, social, or ethnic approach, dealing with any means or measures tending toward the prevention of war and the establishment of universal peace” were awarded to

1. Peter Bucchianeri (Ph.D. ’18, Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University) for his dissertation, “Ideology and Factions in Urban Politics” and

2. Leslie Finger (Ph.D. ’17, Lecturer on Government and Social Studies, Harvard) for her dissertation, “Group Power and Policy Change in Education”.

The Robert Noxon Toppan prize for the best dissertation upon a subject of political science was awarded to Ranjit Lall (Ph.D. ’18, Assistant Professor, London School of Economics) for his dissertation, “Making International Organizations Work: The Politics of Institutional Performance”.

Miscellaneous

Bob Bates’ Retirement

Robert Bates, the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies, retired in spring 2018 after teaching at Harvard since 1993. At his request, we celebrated his retirement with a talk to a comparative politics workshop and a small reception. He spoke on “RESEARCH: Matters of Method, Matters of Substance.” At the reception, students and colleagues talked of Bob’s impact on their work and lives, and of his love for both political science rigor and Africa. Yuhua Wang commented that “having Bob as my office neighbor was the best thing that happened to me when I moved to Harvard.”

According to WCFIA, their most popular tweet ever was the May 29th, 2018 tweet about Bob Bates retiring (“hanging up his hat”), https://twitter.com/HarvardWCFIA/status/1001479566593052675. It showed up on 26,000 feeds, was retweeted 52 times, and sparked nearly 300 visits to the blog post about Bob’s influence on the field (which was published two years ago!). Most of the retweets mention the fact that Bob is seldom seen without a hat, making this photo rather rare.

Celebrating Bob:

Sidney Verba Lectures in Politics

Ryan Enos and Melani Cammett are organizing this new departmental lecture series. They describe it as follows:

We started the speaker series in an effort to bring the department together around a common intellectual focus. This was in recognition of the fact that, while we all like being together, we are pulled in so many different directions that it doesn’t always happen. Engaging in scholarship is what we all most like to do and engaging with each other makes us smarter and happier. The series gave us an opportunity to do this. The natural person to name the series after – in fact the person that first came to everyone’s mind – was Sid because he did so much to bridge intellectual fields and was a great citizen of Harvard. As a first speaker, Molly was also a natural choice because, not only is she one of our alumni and we are quite proud of her, but her work is of broad interest and relevance. Molly gave a rigorous and fascinating talk. I (Ryan) was so intrigued by it that I went and bought her book and I’m now assigning it to my undergraduate course.

Molly’s talk was entitled “Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall,” and it’s built on work that she began as a Ph.D. student in Gov.

Margaret (Molly) Roberts is an Associate Professor of Political Science in UC San Diego. Molly’s research interests lie in the intersection of political methodology and the politics of information, with a specific focus on methods of automated content analysis and the politics of censorship in China. She received a PhD from Harvard in Government (2014), MS in Statistics from Stanford (2009) and BA in International Relations and Economics (2009). Currently, she is working on a variety of projects that span censorship, propaganda, topic models, and other methods of text analysis. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Political Analysis, and Science.

Holiday Skit

https://www.dropbox.com/s/k8nwgfg1c430hwf/g2_skit.mp4?dl=0