Welcoming 4 new faculty members!

With pride and enthusiasm, The Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science welcomes four new faculty members to our program.

Jennifer Bussell studies comparative politics with an emphasis on the political economy of development and governance, principally in South Asia and Africa. Her research considers the effects of formal and informal institutions – such as corruption, coalition politics, and federalism – on policy outcomes. Her book Corruption and Reform in India: Public Services in the Digital Age (Cambridge University Press) examines the role of corrupt practices in shaping government adoption of information technology across sub-national regions and is based on fieldwork in sixteen Indian states, as well as parts of South Africa and Brazil. Her current research uses elite and citizen surveys, interviews, and experiments to further explore the dynamics of corruption and citizen-state relations as they relate to public service delivery in democratic states. She also studies the politics of disaster management policies in developing countries. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and prior to returning to Berkeley taught in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin.

Thad Dunning is Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and directs the Center on the Politics of Development. He studies comparative politics, political economy, and methodology. Dunning’s work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Analysis, Studies in Comparative International Development, and other journals. His first book, Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes (2008, Cambridge University Press), contrasts the democratic and authoritarian effects of oil and other natural resources; it won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association and the Gaddis Smith Prize, for the best first book on an international topic by a member of the Yale faculty. His current work on ethnic and other cleavages draws on field and natural experiments and qualitative fieldwork in Latin America, India, and Africa. Dunning has written on a range of methodological topics, including causal inference, statistical analysis, and multi-method research; his book Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences: A Design-Based Approach (2012, Cambridge University Press), develops a framework for the use, analysis, and evaluation of distinct research designs. Together with Susan Stokes, Marcelo Nazareno, and Valeria Brusco, he is the author of Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism: The Puzzle of Distributive Politics (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press). Dunning teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in methodology and comparative politics. Dunning received a Ph.D. degree in political science and an M.A. degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley (2006). Before returning to Berkeley, he was Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

Aila Matanock studies international relations with a focus on civil conflict and international intervention. Her current research projects are on post-conflict elections and peace, shared sovereignty on policing, and support for armed actors, especially in Latin America. Her doctoral dissertation, "International Insurance: Why Militant Groups and Governments Compete with Ballots Instead of Bullets," won the 2013 Helen Dwight Reid award from the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in the field of international relations, law, and politics. Her research has been funded by the Eisenhower Institute, the National Science Foundation, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, and the Department of Defense’s Minerva Research Initiative. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in political science from Stanford University and an A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard University. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) at the University of California, San Diego, apredoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University and at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, and a research assistant and summer associate at the RAND Corporation.

Michaela Mattes joins us from Vanderbilt University and specializes in International Relations. Her research focuses on security institutions, in particular conflict management agreements and military alliances. She is interested in questions such as whether these agreements can constrain the behavior of international and domestic actors, through which mechanisms they work and under which conditions, and why they are designed the way they are. She has published articles in American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and Conflict Management and Peace Science. She has also been involved in a large data collection effort on changes in leaders’ supporting coalitions funded by the NSF.