On September 11, 2017, Dr. Bonnie Mani traveled to Virginia Commonwealth University to give a presentation to their Ph.D. students. The title of her presentation was “Barriers and Facilitators to Successful Academic Careers: An Owner’s Manual.” In addition, because she completed her degree at VCU (in 1987), she met with Dean John J. Accordino of the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs to discuss her subsequent academic career and experiences.

Carmine Scavo spent the last part of the summer working on the 2016 ANES SETUPS (American National Election Study Supplementary Empirical Teaching Unit in Political Science). This project seeks to teach undergraduate and graduate students basic data usage and data analysis skills using the 2016 American National Election Study. Scavo and co-author Charles Prysby of UNC-Greensboro reformat and recode the ANES to make it simpler for students to use to do their own data analysis.

See http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/instructors/setups2016/.

On the website, students are led through a series of exercises that gradually increase in sophistication leading them to develop their own research questions which they can analyze in the included data set. The project is sponsored by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. The SETUPS project has been developed in the summer after a US presidential election since 1980. Prysby was an originator of the project and Scavo came on board in 1984. Early versions of the project were published as monographs with an accompanying data set; since 2004 the project has been completely online and includes online data analysis software for student and instructor use.

During 2017, Dr. John Williams presented two papers, “Saudi Arabia in Transition” for the Great Decisions program here at ECU, and ”Improving Decision Making and Cultural Understanding Through the Global Partners Program” at the Global Partners in Education Conference here at ECU. The latter will be included in the Proceedings for the conference.

In addition, Williams was nominated for Teacher of the Year in the Global Partners in Education Program. He also reviewed several articles on political factions in Middle Eastern countries.

Dr. Peter Francia attended the 2017 American Political Science Association’s annual conference in San Francisco (August 31-September 3). As a member of the American Political Science Association’s Committee on the Status of Contingent Faculty in the Profession, Francia gave a talk at the conference that addressed labor and educational concerns regarding the dramatic increases in the hiring of non-tenured and non-tenure-track faculty in universities and colleges nationwide. Francia, who co-authored the book, The Financiers of Congressional Elections, also served as a discussant on the panel entitled, “Donors and Spenders in U.S. Elections.”

Dr. Francia is the Director of the new THCAS Center for Survey Research.

Dr. Jonathan Morris has been asked to be the new director of ECU’s Leadership Studies Program. The Program, now several years old, has well over 100 minors and is attracting an increasing amount of attention within the university and from outsiders as well. Dr. Morris is also Political Science’s Undergraduate Director, and in the past 5 years and has been responsible for efforts that have resulted in a three-fold increase in the number of political science majors.

Join us in thanking Dr. Morris and wishing him luck in moving the program forward!

The Political Science Department is launching its first Study Abroad Program to Prague, Czech Republic, led by Dr. Giurcanu, “Prague in Context: Politics in East Central Europe” (June 16-July 28, 2018).

Why choose this program?

• Spend six weeks in a marvelous city — “Magic Prague” has something for everyone!
• Gain 6 credits that fulfill degree requirements in Political Science majors and minors, and in Russian Studies minor.
• Join us to Radio Free Europe, the Museum of Communism, Czech Parliament, the US Embassy, and many more.
• Enjoy affordable prices and student discounts in the heart of Europe!

Financial aid can be applied towards the cost of this program. ECU scholarships available @ piratesabroad.ecu.edu

Application deadline: January 1st

Program cost: $3,925.

Marie Olson Lounsberry will be serving as guest co-editor of a special issue of Peace and Change, with Karl DeRouen of the University of Alabama, on civil war mediation. The issue will be published in 2018. They will also be contributing an article on peace agreement provisions for that issue.

Dr. Olson Lounsberry has also been invited to submit an article on the effectiveness partial peace agreements, or those that do not include all rebel factions, for a special section of the International Peacekeeping journal. Karl DeRouen is special editor of that section.

Armin Krishnan has received a book contract from Palgrave Macmillan for a book titled Why Paramilitary Operations Fail. The book analyzes 25 pro-insurgency paramilitary operations (PMOs) that have been undertaken by the U.S. government from 1948 to the present in view of finding patterns in the way they were approached and the way they turned out.

The main finding is that only eight out of 25 PMOs succeeded in overthrowing a targeted government or carving out a separatist state and that in only three cases a PMO succeeded without direct U.S. military intervention. Furthermore, it is argued that in most cases PMOs have produced severe ‘blowback’ that has undermined U.S. national security or harmed U.S. interests, which suggests that PMOs are not a worthwhile instrument of U.S. foreign policy unless they are approached in a very different manner.

Krishnan is currently editing the manuscript for final submission sometime in October 2017.

The Master of Public Administration program proudly announces that Mariana Rolinsky is the 2017 – 2018 winner of the Donald B. Hayman Scholarship from the North Carolina City and County Management Association. This award carries a $2,000 stipend to support her MPA studies at ECU. Ms Rolinksy was born in Moldova and holds Bachelor’s and Master degrees from Moldovan State University. She has worked as a College and Career Readiness Instructor at Beaufort Community College and as an Instructor Administrator for the Boys and Girls Club in Washington, NC where she lives.

Mariana will be honored for this award at the winter meeting of the Association in Durham in February. Students selected for this award have shown they are interested in working in local government in North Carolina after complete of their Public Administration studies. Previous ECU winners of this award are working in local governments throughout the state of North Carolina.

Congratulations to Dr. Morris, who has recently been added to the editorial board of the Journal of Political Marketing. The journal “aims to be the leading scholarly journal examining the latest developments in the application of marketing methods to politics” and “is highly selective in publishing only the most advanced conceptual, strategic and quantitative oriented work from academics around the world. It is vital reading for politicians, candidates, political party officials, consultants, corporate lobbyists, pollsters, media specialists, journalists, business executives, managers, and academics in democracies around the world.”