ISS Small Grant Program
2005 Awards: Fall and Spring
Fall 2005 Awards
Democracy Promotion and Electoral Revolutions in Postcommunist Eurasia
Valerie Bunce
Department of Government
(When) Should Knowledge Be Controlled?
Knowledge Spillovers and Firms’ Innovation Behavior
Aija Leiponen
Department of Applied Economics and Management
The Social Distribution of Hope
Hirokazu Miyazaki
Department of Anthropology
A New Social Indicators Framework for Measuring Trends in Inequality
Kim A. Weeden
Department of Sociology
Strategy & Sincerity in Democratic Party Systems
Robert Weiner
Department of Government
The Development of Social Capital and Transactive Memories Systems
Connie Y. Yuan
Department of Communications
Democracy Promotion and Electoral Revolutions in Postcommunist Eurasia
Valerie Bunce, Department of Government
2005 Project Description: Over the past seven years, citizens across postcommunist Eurasia have used elections to challenge the power of dictators. In some cases, they have succeeded—by defeating them at the polls and, where necessary, using popular protests to force leaders to abide by the verdict of the voters. These mobilizations, in turn, have sometimes led to the creation of more authentic democracies. However, in other cases, these efforts have failed—in dislodging illiberal leaders and in building democratic polities. This project uses a variety of materials, including indepth interviews with local and international participants, to compare successful and unsuccessful electoral revolutions in nine postcommunist countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Croatia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Slovakia and Ukraine.
2012 Update: This study resulted in a book, Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Post Communist Countries, published in 2011.
Back to 2005 October Awards
(When) Should Knowledge Be Controlled?
Knowledge Spillovers and Firms’ Innovation Behavior
Aija Leiponen, Department of Applied Economics and Management
2005 Project Description: Given the significance of knowledge in structuring the economy and advancing development, understanding how to balance the need to ensure firms have incentives to invest in innovation while sustaining a convention of openness in knowledge creation is a critical social science question. A team of three investigators, one from Cornell University and two from research institutions in Finland, will work together to produce a review of relevant literature on firms' intellectual property strategies, a preliminary analysis of existing data, and a new survey instrument to collect additional data. The long-term goal is to contribute to a comparative institutional perspective on the economics and management of knowledge.
2006 Project Update: The main results of the paper suggest that very few small firms find protection for their intellectual assets provided by patents to be very important or useful. Most firms in the sample rely on trade secrets or quick market launch instead. In particular, small firms that collaborate vertically (with their clients or suppliers) tend to compete on time to market as a way to benefit from their innovation activities. These results are in stark contrast with the current intellectual property rights debate that centers on the patent system. This project is in the process of collaborating with with Prof. Markku Maula, Helsinki University of Technology, and Dr. Ari Hyytinen, Bank of Finland, and has succeeded in obtaining a grant of 20,000 euros from the Academy of Finland.
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The Social Distribution of Hope
Hirokazu Miyazaki, Department of Anthropology
2005 Project Description: Working with researchers in Sydney and Tokyo, Miyazaki plans to organize workshops and conferences in Australia, Japan and the U.S. featuring empirical and comparative research on the social dimensions of hope in the U.S. The researchers plan to publish a collection of research papers and advance a comparative and comprehensive understanding of how society produces and distributes hope.
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A New Social Indicators Framework for Measuring Trends in Inequality
Kim A. Weeden , Department of Sociology
2005 Project Description: This project seeks to put the measurement of inequality, and its fluctuations over time, on solid empirical footing. Its premise is that the many available approaches to measuring inequality (e.g., income reports, socioeconomic scales, class schemes) should be converted from discipline-specific preferences or tastes to testable hypotheses about the structure of a multidimensional inequality space comprising endowments and investments (e.g., education), working conditions (e.g., type of employment contract), and job rewards (e.g., income, wealth). By exploiting recent developments in latent class modeling, the project will formally evaluate the ability of conventional measurement approaches to characterize the inequality space in a given time period. In the process, it will address fundamental questions about the form of inequality in the United States, questions that have been largely ignored in the rush to describe trends in the extent of income inequality: Is inequality increasingly taking on a "big-class" form in which classes correspond to aggregations of detailed occupations, a "micro-class" form in which classes correspond to detailed occupations, or a more heterogeneous constellation of positions at the site of production? Is a true underclass emerging? Is the "middle class" breaking down? Does the site of production remain the breeding ground of inequality, or are inequalities in wealth or education becoming ever more fundamental? Are the various dimensions of inequality crystallizing on gradational lines, such that simple income reports or socioeconomic scales are increasingly accurate ways to simplify the inequality space? The main broader impact of the project is the development of a methodological framework enabling social scientists and policy makers to monitor trends in the form of inequality, a task that takes on special importance once the multidimensionality of inequality is appreciated.
2007 Project Update: This reasearch was recognized by the Institute for the Social Sciences in the piece "Small Grant Breaks Down Disciplinary Borders in Study of Inequality" in 2007.
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Strategy & Sincerity in Democratic Party Systems
Robert Weiner , Department of Government
2005 Project Description: Research on political party competition and party system evolution generally assumes that political parties are strategic – that they pick their battles. Strategic parties run candidates only in elections they expect to win, and efficiently conserve resources by foregoing less promising races. But at least as many parties subvert theoretical assumptions and act sincerely: they run candidates in all elections as a matter of course, apparently concerned more with their roles and duties as parties than with any cost-benefit calculations. Researchers should be concerned, then, with how parties vary between strategic and sincere approaches – and so should citizens, since parties’ competition patterns have profound effects on policy choices and quality of representation. But when and why parties vary between strategy and sincerity has largely been ignored by party researchers, and remains little understood. My project first aims to address three basic-research questions: How prevalent is strategic behavior (in established democracies with district-based elections)? How does one systematically distinguish strategic from sincere behavior in the first place? And why are some parties strategic and others sincere? The answers will lay a foundation for deeper and more general work on how these patterns evolve within and shape democratic party system development. An ISS Seed Grant would support one portion of the basic research process: one month of fieldwork in Japan, whose unusually diverse party system makes it ideal as an initial-research site.
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The Development of Social Capital and Transactive Memories Systems
Connie Y. Yuan, Department of Communications
2005 Project Description: The purpose of this project is to study the social dynamics of collaboration across cultures and contexts. The project will investigate the development of transactive memory systems and social capital in communities of collaboration using both empirical social network analysis and agent-based computer simulations. Community wares grounded in recent development in social science research will be designed and implemented to facilitate collaborative work. The project will collect longitudinal data, both qualitative and quantitative, to evaluate the relative effectiveness of the community wares in support of collaborative work in both co-located and distributed communities, and in both same-culture and different-culture communities.
2006 Project Update: This project involved the sponsorship two graduate students in the year of 2006 to develop and test an expertise recommendation system that is grounded on the basic premises of transactive memory theory and social capital. The research studied both positive social capital that people can access from friendship ties, and negative social capital from adversarial relations. This project assisted in the development of two journal publications, including Homophily of network ties, and bonding and bridging social capital in distributed teams, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication in 2006.
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Spring 2005 Awards
Consumer Response to the Withdrawal of Prescription Drugs
John Cawley
Department of Policy Analysis and Management
Building a Sociology of Displacement
Shelley Feldman & Charles Geisler
Department of Development Sociology
Lying Online:
The Effects of Communication Technology on Deception
Jeffrey Hancock
Department of Communication and Computing & Information Science
Media Effects and Political Knowledge in Africa
Devra Moehler
Department of Government
Adolescent Health and Community Service:
Building Bridges and Planting Seeds
Tracy Nichols
Public Health, Weill Medical Center
Consumer Response to the Withdrawal of Prescription Drugs
John Cawley, Department of Policy Analysis and Management
2005 Project Description: This project is the first direct study of how consumer responsewhen drugs are withdrawn from the market. This study will answer the following questions: After the withdrawal of a drug, do those taking non-withdrawn drugs in the same therapeutic class continue to comply with their treatment regimens or are there negative spillover effects that lead them to reduce compliance or quit? Do initiations of the non-withdrawn drugs fall after the withdrawal of a different drug in the same class? These questions will be answered using patient-level longitudinal data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey for 1996-2002.
Understanding whether there exist negative spillovers from drug withdrawals is important because such spillovers would represent an unintended consequence of drug withdrawals. When the Food and Drug Administration asks a manufacturer to withdraw a drug, it does so with the intent of protecting public health. If consumers perceive a withdrawal as a warning that all drugs in that class are dangerous when they are in fact not, it could lead to many people quitting beneficial treatments. The recent withdrawal of prescription drugs taken by millions of Americans, and the warning that there may be additional withdrawals in the near future, make it imperative to understand how consumers respond to these events.
2008 Project Update: Using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, this project tested for competitive effects following prescription drug withdrawals in six therapeutic classes between 1997 and 2001. Although the results varied, stronger evidence of negative spillovers were found rather than competitive benefits. The research concluded with a discussion of the characteristics of drugs and classes that may influence how remaining drugs are affected by a withdrawal in the class that was presented at many universities and conferences and also led to the development of working paper authored by John Cawley and John A. Rizzo entitled “The Competitive Effects of Drug Withdrawals.”
Back to 2005 March Awards
Building a Sociology of Displacement
Shelley Feldman & Charles Geisler, Department of Development Sociology
2005 Project Description: Human displacement, whether in response to civil and ethnic war, disaster, economic opportunity, or the building of infrastructure within countries, is a central trope in contemporary discussions of population movements. These movements include political and economic refugees, migrants, and exiles who move across and within national boundaries, as well as those forced to migrate in response to infrastructural development such as dam construction or conservation projects. Analyses of these movements are important in identifying the strategies people employ in migration decision-making, the conditions that attend to their relocation, and the ways in which such movements transform, individual lives, household, communities, and the nation-state system under globalization. We also are interested in creative thinking about what we call in-situ displacement or social processes that do not depend on spatial relocation but rather on the loss of identity, security, and community as aspects of social dislocation and exclusion.
This ISS initiative is intended to outline key analytic contributions to dislocation and exclusion research and identify key areas for further research. Our intention is to build collaboration among social scientists - sociologists, anthropologists, planners, economists, and demographers - with theoretical and applied interests in population movements who are willing to integrate various levels of analysis in conceptualizing displacement, social exclusion, and poverty in the context of the reorganization of the nation-state system. We also seek to include those with interests in cross border and internal migration policies and their implications for recasting state relations within the global economy.
During the grant year we anticipate a series of bi-monthly lunches to identify and discuss key research that could lead to a Theme Project, future institute or workshops.
2008 Project Update: This project supported a series of lunches with faculty for whom displacement might be a research hook. As our differences were quite broad, this initiative did not turn out to have a synergy of interests to be self-sustaining. However, members of this initial group contributed to discussions among our invited speakers, including Neil Brenner, NYU, a critical social geographer whose work also contributed to the interests of a number of graduate students; Ranabir Samaddar, a Calcutta based political theorist, research on refugees, state formation, and technologies of rule helped students working on these themes to benefit from his critical reflections on their research; as well as Rashida Manju is a South Africa advocate and member of the committee to bring religious and civil law together in ways that sustain equality under the South African constitution whose discussions focused on questions of religious marginality and the character of religious and gender relations. This speaker series lead to many publications and helped to develop a graduate seminar on the Sociology of Displacement that drew students from Development Sociology, Government, City and Regional Planning, and Anthropology.
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Lying Online:
The Effects of Communication Technology on Deception
Jeffrey Hancock, Department of Communication and Computing & Information Science
2005 Project Description: Deception is one of the most significant and pervasive social phenomena of our age. On average, people tell one to two lies a day, and these lies range from the trivial to the more serious, including deception between friends and family, in the workplace, and in power and politics. At the same time, information and communication technologies have pervaded almost all aspects of human communication and interaction, from everyday technologies that support interpersonal interactions, such as email and instant messaging, to more sophisticated systems that support organizational interactions. The proposed research will examine how information and communication technologies affect 1) how we produce deception in our everyday lies, and 2) our ability to detect lies in online communication.
2006 Project Update: This reserach received an additional grant by the National Science Foundation in 2006. More on this award can be found in the article Small Grant Research Receives $680,000 NSF Award.
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Media Effects and Political Knowledge in Africa
Devra Moehler, Department of Government
2005 Project Description: This project examines how African citizens use independent newspapers and magazines, private FM radio stations, foreign televison programs, internet connections and cell phones when making political choices. It seeks to determine the conditions under which new media will enlighten, deceive, or be ignored by citizens in formerly information scarce settings. The incomplete media penetration in Africa provides for a natural experiment whereby communities with access to new media can be compared with similar communities without access. Initial research for the project will take place in Ghana, a country with relatively robust media and democratic politics.
2007 Project Update: This research was recognized by the Institute for the Social Sciences in the piece ISS Funds Reseach into Politics & the Media in Africa in 2007.
Adolescent Health and Community Service:
Building Bridges and Planting Seeds
Tracy Nichols, Public Health, Weill Medical Center
2005 Project Description: The focus of the current project is to develop an interdisciplinary research agenda among faculty from Weill Cornell Medical College’s Department of Public Health, Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology, the Cornell Urban Semester Program, and the Cornell Cooperative Extension @ NYC, geared towards promoting healthy development among adolescents through the use of community service. This will be accomplished through three primary aims: 1) bringing together geographically-dispersed faculty engaging in applied and theoretical social science research with adolescents in a series of face-to-face meetings to identify common and complementary interests; 2) convening two symposia on Healthy Adolescents and Healthy Communities – one in New York City and one in Ithaca – featuring presentations by core faculty and discussions with colleagues and students; and 3) developing a specific and fundable research agenda to obtain extramural funding to support ongoing collaborations.
2006 Project Update: Although the grant was originally conceptualized as focusing on adolescent health and community service, the mutual interests of the group emerged primarily around adults (parents, program leaders, teachers) and environments (families, community organizations, schools) that guide adolescent engagement in healthy behaviors. Successful pilot projects generated from this collaborative effort include: (1) a community-based mentorship project between Cornell Urban Semester students and a group of urban adolescent boys on healthy environments; (2) a qualitative study on mother-daughter perceptions of family health issues and healthy relationships [subsequently funded by the Bronfenbrenner Lifecourse Innovation Award]; (3) the development and feasibility testing of a research protocol for assessing mothers’ daily health practices and experiences; and (4) a grant proposal to study dissemination and implementation issues of evidence-based drug prevention programs for adolescents. Members of the group have also participated in and/or planned interdisciplinary seminars across campus, including a poster presentation at the College of Human Ecology’s Obesity Conference, hosting the New York City outreach site for the Obesity Conference, and hosting the NYC outreach site for Ross Greene’s presentation on the Explosive Child (March 2006).
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