The UW-Madison American Politics Workshop is a multidisciplinary group of faculty and graduate students that meets every other Monday at noon in 422 North Hall to discuss new and ongoing research projects in American Politics. A typical workshop meeting will open with 10-15 minutes of comments by the paper author followed by an hour of discussion. Papers are posted online for reading prior to the meeting. Faculty and graduate students wishing to present at the workshop should send an email to
David Canon.
The European Politics Workshop is a forum for informal discussion among graduate students and faculty members. It usually meets once per month and serves as a forum for scholars interested or working in the area of European politics - broadly conceived - to receive comments and feedback on work in progress, such as research proposals, conference and working papers, and dissertation drafts. For updated information about meetings, discussion papers etc., contact Jess Clayton (email: jeclayton@wisc.edu
).
The Comparative Politics Colloquium (CPC) is the intellectual forum for comparativists of all areas and methods to meet and discuss current work. In addition to featuring faculty papers and occasional outside speakers, the CPC is an integral part of graduate training in the department of political science, serving as a place for students to present papers as well as dissertation prospectuses, grant proposals, dissertation chapters and practice job talks. The general format is for papers to be made available on our website a week in advance, and there is an expectation that colloquium participants will have read the papers in advance. The CPC meets weekly during the academic year. For fall 2009, we will meet on Mondays from 1:30-2:45, and in spring 2010 we will meet on Wednesdays at 1:30-2:45. All meetings will be in the Ogg room (# 422) in North Hall unless otherwise noted on the schedule. The CPC is a great opportunity to get to know fellow comparativists as well as t o learn about and advance each others' scholarship. Please contact Jeffrey Paller (paller@wisc.edu) for additional information about the CPC.
The Chinese Politics Workshop is a forum for the presentation of ongoing work focusing on Chinese politics (working papers, grant proposals, dissertation proposals and chapters) by University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate students and University of Wisconsin-Madison and external faculty. A graduate student reviews the work for about 15 to 20 minutes, followed by a response from the author and open discussion among the participants. There are no formal presentations. Papers are made available to participants one week in advance of the workshop. The workshop generally meets on Thursday afternoons during the Spring 2009 semester. For more information, please visit our website. If you are interested in participating or submitting a paper, please contact Leah Larson-Rabin, Graduate Student Coordinator, at lrabin@wisc.edu.
The IR Colloquium brings students and faculty together to discuss international security, foreign policy, international organizations, and international political economy. Visiting scholars as well as faculty and graduate students from UW present their ongoing research, followed by questions and open discussion among the participants. For more information, please contact Dave Ohls at
ohls@wisc.edu.
Models and Data Group (MAD) is a working group to assist faculty and graduate students in improving the quantitative aspects of working papers. Topics discussed cover a wide range of substantive interests from every subfield, while discussions focus on methodology issues ranging from research design to estimation issues. Graduate students are encouraged to participate as members of the working group, especially in the role of presenters.
Most Americans get most of their information from television and local news in particular. Yet there have been few systematic studies of the content and effectiveness of local television news. NewsLab at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, directed by Professor Ken Goldstein, is revolutionizing the way scholars study politics and media coverage by providing systematic capture, story-based analysis, and digital, web-based, searchable archives of local news across the country since 2002. The Wisconsin NewsLab dataset is the most comprehensive and systematic collection of local news ever gathered. NewsLab video archives have been crucial resources for scholars documenting the flow and effect of broadcast messages and for policymakers seeking to improve the quality of news coverage across the nation on a variety of topics from elections to health to foreign affairs.
The Political Behavior Research Group consists of faculty members and graduate students within the department of political science who are involved in research on political behavior broadly construed -- i.e., political participation, public opinion, political psychology, political culture, political communication, political socialization, and mass-elite linkages. The group meets once a
month to discuss a participant's ongoing research project.
Modern political economy may be defined as the study of incentives in group life. Central to the field are such questions as the nature of cooperation and competition among individuals and organizations, the role of institutions in structuring individual behavior, and the aggregation of individual preferences into group choice. Using tools and concepts that largely originate in economic theory, political economy has grown to encompass theoretical and applied work in economics, political science, sociology, and related disciplines. The Political Economy Colloquium features presentations by visiting and University of Wisconsin-Madison speakers on a wide range of topics within this field. For more information, please contact Emily Sellars, Graduate Student Coordinator, at esellars@wisc.edu.
The Political Philosophy Colloquium brings together graduate students and faculty with an interest in the history of social and political thought, normative social and political theory, and the normative and theoretical dimensions of public policy and public law. Our meetings center around the discussion of work in progress by UW graduate students and faculty, as well as by invited guests from around the country. They include a brief presentation by the author and a prepared response by an advanced graduate student, followed by a general discussion. In most cases papers are distributed in advance of the meetings. We welcome participants from a broad range of disciplinary and methodological approaches.
Transitional justice mechanisms, or institutional arrangements for addressing past authoritarian state violence, have proliferated around the world. States emerging from civil war or authoritarian rule during the recent global wave of democratization since the 1970s have adopted a variety of transitional justice mechanisms. These have included elaborate truth commissions and trials intended to hold perpetrators accountable; restorative justice mechanisms such as reparations, monuments, and other public memory projects; and constitutional amendments and institution building (such as the creation of ombudsmen) intended to safeguard human rights. Despite significant geographic and institutional variations, transitional justice arrangements share a common set of goals aimed to avoid repeating, reenacting, or reliving past horror, deter future violators, establish democratic (particularly legal) political institutions, and restore the dignity of citizens victimized by atrocity. This project explores whether transitional justice achieves these goals. At the macro-level the project seeks to uncover what impact, if any, transitional justice has on the prospect for peace and the deterrence of human rights violations in emerging democracies. If transitional justice does have a positive impact on transitional states, which specific mechanisms, or combinations of mechanisms, should states employ to best achieve these desired results? Once identified, what conditions best facilitate the adoption of these mechanisms? Finally, if transitional justice does not have a significant impact, what factors are driving improvements in human rights conditions and continued stability in many newly democratized states?
The Wisconsin Advertising Project, directed by Professor Ken Goldstein and using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG), is a unique resource for tracking all aspects of political advertising in the largest hundred markets of the United States (covering over 86 percent of the population). The data collected tracks each individual airing of political commercials (electoral and issue advocacy) in these major markets markets. In addition, the project is able to analyze the content of all these ads, with access to storyboards of each different commercial. By combining the data of the targeting of individual spots with analysis of each of the storyboards the project is able to give a comprehensive account of the nature of political advertising in the United States. Work so far produced by the project has related to the use of "soft money" in campaigns (and the implications of this for campaign finance reform); the effects and nature of negative political advertising; the role of gender in political advertising and targeting of campaign resources. In addition, the project has been a valuable resource for both the print and broadcast media. The Wisconsin Advertising Project is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.