Center for the Study of Democratic Politics

Peter Enns is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. His primary research and teaching interests focus on public opinion, representation, and quantitative research methods. His work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science and Presidential Studies Quarterly and he is co-editor of the book Who Gets Represented? While at Princeton, he will be working on a book about the relationship between public opinion and mass incarceration in the United States. 

Miriam A. Golden is Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Los Angeles. She has diverse interests in the area of comparative political economy.  Currently her major research project concerns corruption in rich and poor democracies, with particular attention to India as well as Italy.  She has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, served as Chair of the American Political Science Association's Organized Section in Political Economy, and been a recipient of multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, the International Growth Centre, and the Governments of Quebec and Canada.  Her article on "Electoral Systems, District Magnitude and Corruption" was awarded the Lawrence Longley Award for the best article in representation and election systems. She will be devoting her time at CSDP to a book-length manuscript on corruption in democratic countries, both rich and poor.

Isabela Mares (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1999) is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests include comparative political economy and comparative social policy. She is the author of The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (Cambridge University Press 2003), which won the Gregory Luebbert Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book in comparative politics. Her book Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment (Cambridge University Press, 2006) explores the consequences of the growth of the fiscal burden on employment outcomes in advanced industrialized economies. Prior to joining the Columbia Political Science Department in 2006, Professor Mares was Assistant and then Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. While at CSDP, she will focus on a new project on electoral reforms in early 20^th century Europe, seeking to develop an account of the variation in the persistence of “imperfections” in voting technology that shaped electoral competition and the electoral disenfranchisement of voters.

Monika Nalepa is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. She was born in Warsaw, Poland and received her PhD at Columbia University’s Political Science Department. She has taught at Rice University, and held a post-doc at the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies. She recently published "Captured Commitments: An Analytic Narrative of Transitions with Transitional Justice," in World Politics and Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe with Cambridge University Press. She has also published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, and the Taiwan Journal of Democracy. At CSDP she will be using disaggregated voting records to study the transition from a consensus-based to a majoritarian-dominated parliament, using the example of the Polish Sejm.

Jeffrey A. Segal is SUNY Distinguished Professor and chair of the political science department at Stony Brook University. He has also served as Global Research Fellow at the Hauser Global Law School Program at the NYU School of Law and as a Fellow in the Law and Social Sciences Program at Northwestern University. He has a Ph.D. in political science from Michigan State University (1983). He is co-author of seven books, including Majority Rule or Minority Will: Adherence to Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court (Cambridge 1999, with Harold Spaeth) which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book in law and judicial politics, and The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model (Cambridge 1993, also with Harold Spaeth) which won the Wadsworth Award (2005), for book or article, ten years or older, that has had a lasting influence on the field of law and courts. His articles include "Predicting Supreme Court Cases Probabilistically: The Search and Seizure Cases, 1962-1981" (American Political Science Review, 1984), which also won the Wadsworth Award (2002) for lasting influence. His article "The Supreme Court During Crisis" (NYU Law Review, 2005, with Lee Epstein, Daniel Ho, and Gary King) won the McGraw-Hill Award (2006) for best article published by political scientists on law and courts. Segal has served on the Board of the Law and Social Sciences Program at the NSF and as President of the Midwest Political Science Association. While at CSDP, he will be researching the historical responsiveness of the Supreme Court during wars and other crises. This project uses data from all cases involving Civil Rights and Liberties from the Supreme Court’s first decisions in 1793 until today.