Some
of what I have been up to the last year:
Getting
to know my son, Hunter,
who was born in 2004. Traveling,
including spending several weeks in the Brazilian northeastern
state capital of Natal. Teaching
in High Point, North Carolina, where I am an
assistant professor of Political Science at High
Point University. The University is a comprehensive, regional liberal arts college that boasts a
Division I athletics program, an MBA program, and a history-political science department with ten members. The city of
High Point is located in the Piedmont Triad (along with Greensboro
and Winston-Salem), which is home to 1.3
million people. The school is an hour from Duke
and UNC-Chapel Hill; is is less than five hours from Washington,
DC. Staying
in contact with former students from the University of Portland and
Lewis
and Clark College. Former students should continue to feel free to contact me by
e-mail or phone for letters of
recommendation. Working
on journal articles that examine Latin American
political life. Two of my manuscripts investigate the relationship between socioeconomic resources and
varying outcomes for democratic reform in urban Brazil. Two other
papers analyze the acquisition and retention of basic political knowledge
by Brazilian voters, with an eye towards better understanding the
relationship between political engagement and political
participation in developing democracies. One of the articles on
political sophistication looks at what factors lead voters to
become engaged, informed citizens, while the other primarily discusses how variations in
sophistication shape both electoral and non-electoral political
behaviors. The fifth article adds to the growing scholarship
addressing the weakness of political parties in Latin America by
looking at how economic, educational, and other resources
influence party identification and the use of party identification
when
voting. Presenting
papers at conferences. I am writing another article with Nick McRee, a
sociologist at the University of Portland, that uses survey data
to look at the civic incorporation of first
generation and second generation adolescent immigrants.
"Becoming Young Americans" was presented at the 2004 Pacific Sociological Association meeting in San
Francisco. A revised version of this paper will be presented at at a national political science meeting in
2004-2005.
I am currently working on “Electing
Women Legislators in Brazil: Rules and Resources,”
which will be
presented at the 2005 meeting of the Southern Political Science Association
in New Orleans. The paper investigates the extent to which a
legislative district's institutional and socioeconomic
characteristics can predict the electoral prospects of women
candidates running for state and federal office.
Some
of what I have been reading:
-
"The
Killer Elite," Rolling Stone. Evan
Wright, an embedded reporter in Iraq, provides a vivid and
brutally-honest first-hand account of the Marine's First
Reconnaissance Battalion's experiences in the Iraq invasion. His
narrative continues in "From
Hell to Baghdad," and "The
Battle for Baghdad."
-
"The
End of the West," The Atlantic Monthly. Charles
Kupchan thinks the next major "clash of civilizations" will be
between the United States and Western Europe.
-
"Bystanders
to Genocide," The Atlantic Monthly.
I
reread this article by Samantha Power as I was contemplating the
ten-year anniversary of Rwanda's mass killings. The issues explored in Power's article
are not unique to Rwanda. While the west has focused its attention on Iraq over the
last decade, as many as three million people have died in the Congo
in recent years (see background
article from the Economist). A Rawanda-like genocide also is
currently taking place in the Sudan with little intervention from
the international community.
"The
Organization Kid," The Atlantic Monthly. David Brooks pokes around Princeton's campus trying to figure out
how today's young American elite will run things when its time comes. The Economist's
latest country survey on the United States examines the American exceptionalism thesis, our political culture, and our
long-term economic prospects.
The survey mostly is concerned about the last point. Arthur
M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s The
Disuniting of America. How in the world did someone as
bright as Schlesinger get the story of second-generation
immigrant assimilation in the US so wrong? Schlesinger's main argument is
that immigrants arriving in the US after the 1960s do not
assimilate as did earlier waves of European immigrants, thus
threatening America's democracy. His beliefs are echoed by
Samuel Huntington's Who
Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity.
Using a new dataset on the civic attitudes and behaviors of US
adolescents, Nick McRee and I have written an article that
challenges the anecdotal evidence presented by Schlesinger and
Huntington. Our article finds that young immigrants are show
higher rates and levels of attachment to America's core political
and civic values than are most other young people in the
US. Recent
pleasure reading (all translated into Brazilian
Portuguese, of course) includes: The
Sicilian, by Mario Puzo, several Robert
Ludlum novels, a couple of war-setting tales by Ken
Follet, Gary
Jenning's series detailing the fall of the Aztec empire, David Baldacci's Total
Control, and Scott Turow's, Reversible
Errors. As part of my effort to be a better uncle and father, I also have
read carefully the Brazilian versions of Harry Potter's many
adventures.
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