Junior Americanist Workshop Series

A new virtual workshop for American politics reseach in the pandemic age.

Mission

With the cancellation of conferences and seminar series due to COVID-19, we are starting a virtual workshop series, Junior Americanist Workshop Series, to provide an alternative opportunity for junior scholars (ABD grad students, post docs, and any early career faculty) who study American politics (behavior or institutions) to present and get feedback on their work and to network with other scholars with similar interests.

Sign Up

Use this google form to apply to present: Present your work!

Use this google form to volunteer to discuss: Be a discussant!

Use this google form to be added to our email list: Get our emails!

Format

The workshop provides the opportunity for junior Americanist scholars to present their work and receive feedback. This term we are experimenting with a variety of formats, but each week will include at minimum two presentations, with individual discussions and questions to follow.

In addition to article-length manuscripts, we also encourage the submission of well-developed pre-analysis plans and research designs. Submissions may be solo-authored or collaborative; if the submission is collaborative, we will give preference to those with junior scholars as coauthors.

We will try to match up discussants with papers based on subject area expertise to the best of our ability.

To make sure that participants can review all of the papers in the workshop in advance, we will collect and circulate the papers one week in advance.

When

JAWS is held on (typically) alternating Wednesdays, 2-4pm Eastern Time.

Spring Schedule

Misinformation and Misperception: February 17th from 2:00PM ET-3:30PM ET

Register to Attend Workshop

• Presenter: Matt Graham, “Measuring Misperceptions?” (Discussant: Jennifer Jerit)
• Presenter: Ian Shapiro, “Misinformation and the Public” (Discussant: Joanne Miller)

Computational Text Analysis in American Politics: March 10, 2021 from 2:00PM ET-3:30PM ET.

Register to Attend Workshop

• Presenter: Luca Bellodi, “Bureaucrats, Politicians, and the Strategic Use of Information” (Discussant: Mary Kroeger)
• Presenter: Huyen Nguyen, “The (great) Persuasion Divide? Gender Disparities in Debate Speeches & Evaluations” (Discussant: Sarah Shugars)

Accountability: March 24th from 2:00PM ET-3:30PM ET

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• Presenter: Talbot Andrews, “The Road to Reelection is Paved with Good Intentions: Experiments on the Role of Outcomes and Intentions in Voting Behavior” (Discussant: Gabe Lenz)
• Presenter: Greg Sasso, “Policy Bundling and Costly Monitoring” (Discussant: Sean Gailmard)

Legislative Capacity: April 28th from 2:00PM ET-3:30PM ET

Register to Attend Workshop

• Presenter: Rachel Porter, “Changing the Dialogue: Descriptive Candidacies & Position Taking in Campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives”
• Presenter: Srinivas Parinandi, “Social Returns to Legislative Capacity: Evidence from the Opioid Epidemic”

The Attitudes and Influence of Political Elites: May 19th from 2:00PM ET-3:30PM ET

Register to Attend Workshop

• Presenter: Alexander (Zander) Furnas, The People Think What I Think: False Consensus and Elite Misperception of Public Opinion. (Discussant: Mia Costa)
• Presenter: Laura Moses, Conceptualizing and Identifying Interest Actors. (Discussant: Maggie Macdonald)

JAWS Professional Development Series

This spring we will be holding several of professiomnal development panels in addition to our usual paper series. These will be held at ad-hoc times as speaker availability dictates.

Public Scholarship: February 26th from 3:00-4:00pm ET

Register to Attend Panel

• Panelist: Julia Azari (@julia_azari)
• Panelist: Hakeem Jefferson (@hakeemjefferson)
• Panelist: Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias)

Academic Book Publishing: Thursday March 25th 1:00-2:00pm ET

Register to Attend Panel

• Panelist: Charles Myers, University of Chicago Press
• Panelist: Nazita Lajevardi, Michigan State University

Academic Journal Publishing: Thursday April 27th 3:00-4:00pm ET

Register to Attend Panel

• Panelist: Beth Leech, Co-editor of Interest Groups & Advocacy
• Panelist: Neil Malhotra, Associate Editor, Journal of Politics (2019-2020)
• Panelist: Justin Kirkland, Co-editor of Legislative Studies Quarterly

JAWS Socializing

Trivia: Thursday March 25th 8:00 ET

Register for Trivia

Trivia: Wednesday May 19th 8:00 ET

Register for Trivia

Contact Us

Please reach out to any one of the organizing committee with any comments or questions!

• Austin Bussing (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)
• Zander Furnas (Northwestern University)
• Christina Ladam (University of Nevada-Reno)
• Josh McCrain (Michigan State University)
• David Miller (Vanderbilt University)
• Rachel Porter (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)

Past Presentations

Representation: September 30th

• Presenter: Anna Gunderson, “Descriptive Representation and Prosecutorial Discretion: Do Black and Female Prosecutors Prosecute Differently?” (Discussant: Kelsey Shoub)
• Presenter: Brian Hamel, “The Means Matter, Too: Policy and Economic Retrospective Voting in American National Elections” (Discussant: David Fortunato)
• Presenter: Jaclyn Kaslovsky, “Delegate Rhetoric in Congress: Measuring Representative Orientation with Text” (Discussant: Jeremy Gelman)
• Presenter: Zoe Nemerever, “Rural Representation Gaps in the American States” (Discussant: Justin de Benedictis-Kessner)

Ideology and Partisanship: October 14th

• Presenter: Jon Kingzette, “In-party Love and Out-party Hate” (Discussant: Jenny Wolak)
• Presenter: Chelsea Kaufman, “Ideological Constraint and Stability among Rural, Suburban, and Urban Americans” (Discussant: Yamil Velez)
• Presenter: Lucas de Abreu Maia, “Consequences of Ideology: affective, attitudinal and Behavioral effects of ideological identification in the United States” (Discussant: Victoria Shineman)
• Presenter: Baobao Zhang, “Americans’ perceptions of privacy and surveillance in the COVID-19 Pandemic” (Discussant: Anand Edward Sokhey)

Media Effects/Information Effects: October 28th

• Presenter: Elliott Ash, “Media slant is contagious” (Discussant: Eunji Kim)
• Presenter: Jon Green, “Belief Systems in Theory and Practice: Evidence from Political Pundits” (Discussant: Hans Noel)
• Presenter: Melissa Baker, “Dispositional Traits and Susceptibility to Political Anxiety” (Discussant: Steve Utych)
• Presenter: E.J. Fagan, “The development of partisan knowledge regimes in the United States” (Discussant: Mike Olson)

Identities in American Politics: November 11th

• Presenter: Rachel Bernhard, “The Silenced Text: Field Experiments on Gendered Experiences of Political Participation” (Discussant: Mirya Holman)
• Presenter: Rita Nassar, “Humanitarian Frames and Americans’ Attitudes toward Syrian Refugee Resettlement” (Discussant: Nazita Lajevardi)
• Presenter: Andrew Proctor, “The organizational and attitudinal roots of LGB political incorporation” (Discussant: Eric Hansen)
• Presenter: Jasmine Noelle Yarish, “Quilted Nationalism: Black Feminism, Abolition Democracy, & W.E.B. Du Bois’s COLOR & DEMOCRACY” (Discussant: Anna Daily)

Legislative Politics: December 2nd

• Presenter: Nicholas Howard, “Agenda Control and Amendment Targets: The US Senate” (Discussant: Molly Reynolds)
• Presenter: Michael Kistner, “Legislating or Electioneering? The Effect of Electoral Demands on Policy Productivity” (Discussant: Christian Fong)
• Presenter: Joshua Y. Lerner, “Setting the Committee Agenda: Measuring Speaker Influence in Congressional Hearings” (Discussant: Justin Grimmer)
• Presenter: Annelise Russell, “Tweeting Red: Angry Emotional Appeals in Congress” (Discussant: Kevin Munger)

Legislative and Executive Politics: December 16th

• Presenter: Geoff Lorenz, “Drawing Better Lawmakers: Redistricting Institutions and Legislative Performance” (Discussant: Michael Crespin)
• Presenter: Nico Napolio, “Executive Coalition Building” (Discussant: Alex Bolton)
• Presenter: Erinn Lauterbach, “From Descriptive to Policy Representation: Lawmaking in the U.S. House of Representatives” (Discussant: Christina Wolbrecht)
• Presenter: Leah Rosenstiel, “Congressional Bargaining and the Distribution of Grants” (Discussant: Christina Kinane)

Electoral Systems: January 13th

• Presenter: Jesse Clark, “Electoral System Change in the United States” (Discussant: Jason Roberts)
• Presenter: Karin Kitchens, “Understanding turnout at the local level using spatial data” (Discussant: Chinnu Parinandi)
• Presenter: Shiro Kuriwaki, “Ticket Splitting in a Nationalized Era” (Discussant: Barry Burden)
• Presenter: Victoria Shineman, “Voting in Ranked Choice Vote (RCV) Elections Improves Evaluations of RCV” (Discussant: Lee Drutman)