Listed below are brief descriptions of the lab’s Spring 2026 projects. Please note that these projects are subject to frequent changes or removal depending on each faculty’s circumstances/needs, even after the applications are due.
China-U.S.-Taiwan Relations
China and Taiwan have a long-standing dispute about Taiwan’s sovereignty. As China has become militarily stronger over the past few decades the dispute over Taiwan has heated up, and there is uncertainty about what role the US might play in the dispute going forward. Today, policies that sustained a fragile security balance in the past have been changed or are being challenged. This project analyzes this security problem for the purpose of adding to our understanding of international relations in general and to understand what policies might decrease tensions and contribute to a resolution of the dispute. (Led by: Professor Benson)
Social Media and Politics
This project investigates how reading on mobile phones, computers, or paper influences cognitive processing at two distinct stages: how information is encoded into memory and how it is later retrieved to form beliefs and attitudes. Using a fully randomized experiment that independently varies device and reading context (controlled lab vs. naturalistic settings), the study disentangles the effects of technology itself from the environments in which devices are typically used. By measuring knowledge recall, belief accuracy, and policy attitudes, the project sheds new light on how mobile-first information consumption may alter political cognition—revealing when device effects reflect shallow processing at exposure versus greater reliance on heuristics at retrieval. (Led by: Professor Bisbee)
Bureaucratic Repression
Students who work for this team must commit to a regular meeting time of Mondays at 4pm in Commons Center 316.
This project explores the processes by which bureaucrats in all types of states use repression on behalf of national governments, and how that contrasts with the use of violence by government agents. (Led by: Dr. Emily Hencken Ritter)
The Significance of Deaths in Bolivian Political Conflict
What meaning do the deaths suffered in political conflict have for social movements and political change? This project will focus specifically on Bolivia’s political conflict from 1982 to the present. It will use historical research and interviews to build a database of narratives of all the individuals who died in this conflict. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the database will contribute to our understanding of the political impact of social movements, political and cultural constraints on violence, and the importance of violence and suffering, life and death in the process of social change. (Led by: Professor Bjork-James)
Kin Networks, Political Fragmentation, and the Development of the State
Why did formal political institutions arise in Western Europe when they did, and not elsewhere? While war can contribute to state development, it does so unevenly across space and time. I focus on one precondition for both warfare and state-building: political fragmentation, and, in particular, when and where the Church was able to deepen fragmentation through intervention. My argument is that elite kin networks shaped monarchs’ susceptibility to church interference. Some rulers were embedded in dense, cohesive networks that made outside interference harder; others sat in more fragmented networks that made them easier targets. This project gathers new data on noble kin networks across Europe to measure these differences and to examine how network structure shaped patterns of church interference and, in turn, the development of the state. (Led by: PhD Student Mason Auten)
Latin American Oligarchies
This project seeks to collect historical data to study the collapse of oligarchic regimes in early twentieth-century Latin America –e.g. Porfirian Mexico, Argentina's Conservative Order, Brazil's Old Republic. Tasks include creating original datasets from archival sources and history books, broadly related to socioeconomic development, political connections, and opposition formation. (Led by: PhD Student Federico Lombisano)
Alliances
This project studies the content of military alliances, the optimal design of alliance treaties, and implications for armed conflict. This is for a book project on how alliances might create entangling costs and why those entanglements are, under some circumstances, worth it and, at other times, risky but impossible to avoid. The project studies examples like NATO in addition to examining quantitative data on military alliances throughout history. (Led by: Professor Benson)
Agriculture Modernization and Uneven State Capacity Development
Conventional wisdom holds that frontier regions in developing countries are characterized by weak states dominated by entrenched elites. Yet substantial variation in local state capacity exists even within the countryside. What explains these differences? This project advances a new explanation for the development of local state capacity grounded in the rise of capital-intensive agriculture. It explores how agricultural modernization redistributes local power by strengthening commercially oriented farmers and fostering the emergence of urban-commercial groups through broader economic diversification. The project evaluates this argument using historical agricultural and population census data from Brazil, where the adoption of high-yield crop varieties unevenly transformed agricultural production across space in the second half of the twentieth century, turning the country from a food importer into one of the world’s largest agricultural producers.(Led by: PhD Candidate Guilherme Fasolin)
Infrastructure of Civil Conflicts
Infrastructure is critical for state reach: access to remote areas can increase state presence, improve tax collection and service provision, and deter the activities of non-state armed actors such as criminal organizations or insurgent groups. Yet infrastructure is a double-edged sword: roads built by the government can also be used by the rebels. Are governments strategic in how or where they decide to improve infrastructure? How does the completion of an infrastructure project affect civil war dynamics? To answer these questions, we will systematically collect and map data on infrastructure projects that are active in countries experiencing civil wars. (Led by: PhD Candidate Nguyen Ha)
Administration and Outreach
This team spearheads recruitment efforts, manages ROCCA’s on-campus and online presence, organizes events, and assists faculty mentors with grant applications, among other lab affairs. (Led by Dr. Emily Hencken Ritter)
The Time Horizons of Repression: A Theory of Strategic Sterilization
Existing research acknowledges that repression can take a preventive form; however, much of the literature emphasizes deterring immediate dissent rather than strategies that reshape future mobilization. This project explores the concept of long-term preventive repression, specifically sterilization, as a forward-looking strategy whereby states alter the demographic foundations of resistance. We will analyze qualitative evidence from online archives on the Holocaust and on the sterilization of Indigenous women in Peru and Puerto Rico to assess when sterilization was used strategically and why. Students will help process-trace archival sources, build timelines, and identify decision-makers’ incentives and constraints. (Led by: PhD Student Chloe Hale)
Terrorism and Non-Democratic Behaviors
How do states change in response to terrorism? How does this relate to autocratization? This project looks at short term and long-term effects of how terrorism changes a state and how this can influence autocratization. We will collect data on indicators of state actions such as the duration of states of emergencies and counterterrorism laws. Students will look at cases where states of emergency were declared and record information on their duration and compliance with constitutional provisions pertaining to them. This data will be used to analyze the impact terrorism has on the state. (Led by: PhD Student Addison Emig)
Mapping Candidate Training Organizations
This project seeks to develop a comprehensive dataset of political candidate training organizations in the United States and to examine their effects on both descriptive and substantive political representation. (Led by: Dr. Diana Lee)
Slowing Down Nuclear Proliferation
Students who work for this team must commit to a regular meeting time of Tuesdays at 5pm in Commons Center 316.
Students will analyze particular countries’ history of interest in, and progress toward, developing nuclear weapons, in order to identify and document the ways in which the nuclear nonproliferation regime (NPR) has discouraged interest or impeded progress. Would states that sought nuclear capabilities have started sooner, or made progress faster, in the absence of the NPR? Would some states that never sought nukes decide to do so if it weren’t for the NPR? (Led by: Dr. Andrew Coe)
Indigenous Culture and Collective Resistance in Argentina
This project examines how precolonial Indigenous cultural traits (particularly those related to warfare and conquest) continue to influence patterns of collective resistance against extractive activities in certain regions of Argentina today. (Led by: Dr. Jorge Mangonnet)
Sub-national Nonstate Actor Governance (SNAG)
This project develops new tools to measure how governments and rebel groups control and govern territory within conflict zones. Using open-source text, machine learning, and natural language processing, SNAG produces fine-grained, time-varying data on local territorial control, capturing changes that traditional event-based measures miss. The resulting dataset enables new research on the dynamics of conflict, the effectiveness of development aid in contested areas, and the long-term consequences of insurgent governance for postwar state-building. (Led by: Dr. Nina McMurry)
How Space Shapes the State
This project investigates how socioeconomic segregation impacts state capacity. In doing so, it focuses on how spatial proximity between socioeconomic groups triggers collective action and leads individuals to pressure the state to create and enforce institutions. Empirically, the project adopts a mixed-methods approach to answer its main hypotheses, focusing on the example of Latin American countries, especially Brazil. (Led by: PhD Candidate Lucas Borba)