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
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. Of particular interest is the role of international, regional and local actors in promoting democracy through electoral revolutions and public protes! ts; the factors that make such revolutions successful or unsuccessful; the processes by which these electoral revolutions move from one country to the next; and the lessons these revolutions hold for future American efforts at democracy promotion. A book and four articles are planned, to be completed by September, 2007. They will all be co-authored with my collaborator, Sharon Wolchik, who is at George Washington University.
Back to 2005 October Awards
(When) Should Knowledge Be Controlled?
Knowledge Spillovers and Firms’ Innovation Behavior
This project proposes to carry out a preliminary study of firms' intellectual property strategies. Successful commercialization of technological innovations necessitates control of immaterial rights to the underlying technology or knowledge. Without such control rights, innovators may face substantial uncertainty about who will capture the returns to the innovation investment. If copying the innovation is legally possible and much less costly than creating the innovation, this might seriously reduce the incentives to invest in innovation, constraining development. On the other hand, knowledge spillovers are beneficial for the industrial environment, because one firm's innovation benefits other firms. This may lead to a virtuous cycle of innovation. Understanding spillover channels and firms' strategies of managing spillovers are of paramount importance from policy-makers' perspective. How to recognize the real-world situations where spillovers most reduce private R&D investments, and how to best mitigate these issues? When should policy-makers support capturing of spillovers by firms through cooperative and other communication arrangements (e.g., providing incentives for consortia and relaxing anti-trust), and when would it be fruitful to help innovating firms prevent spillovers from happening at all? 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, a preliminary analysis of existing data, and a new survey instrument to collect additional data. These three products will strengthen grant applications to the Academy of Finland and the National Technology Agency of Finland. If successful, these grants would fund survey data collection and analysis by the international team working at Cornell and in Finland. The long-term goal is to contribute to a comparative institutional perspective on the economics and management of knowledge.
Back to 2005 Awards
The Social Distribution of Hope
Hope has recently become an important subject of inquiry in various fields of study. So far, however, there has been little empirical and comparative research on the social dimensions of hope in the U.S. In contrast, two groups of social scientists in Sydney and Tokyo, respectively, have already embarked on significant empirical projects on the social distribution of hope. Likewise, over the last five years I have been studying the social production of hope as a capacity to maintain prospective momentum in uncertainty across radically different ethnographic settings. More recently, I have organized a series of events to initiate a dialogue on the social dimensions of hope in the U.S. Up to now, these three sites of empirical research have operated relatively in isolation. I propose a series of preparatory activities for an international collaborative project that would bring together Australian, Japanese and U.S. social scientists interested in the empirical study of hope. I seek funding to travel to Sydney and Tokyo. My immediate goals are: 1) to prepare a series of grant proposals in consultation with the two Australian and Japanese groups for various components of the international collaboration; 2) to organize a workshop with each group to initiate an in-depth discussion of empirical data, methodologies and theoretical perspectives; and 3) to edit a collection of programmatic essays by myself and several members of the Sydney-based and Tokyo-based groups. The goals of our proposed collaboration are: 1) to organize two workshops in Sydney and Tokyo; 2) to hold a full-scale international conference in Ithaca; 3) to publish a collection of research papers; and 4) to advance a comparative and comprehensive understanding of how society produces and distributes hope.
Back to 2005 Awards
A New Social Indicators Framework for Measuring Trends in Inequality
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 inc!
ome 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 that will allow 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.
Back to 2005 Awards
Strategy & Sincerity in Democratic Party Systems
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.
Back to 2005 Awards
The Development of Social Capital and Transactive Memories Systems
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.
Back to 2005 Awards
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
In September 2004 Merck withdrew from the market Vioxx, an anti-arthritis and acute pain medication that was used by an estimated 20 million Americans, because it raised the risk of heart attack and stroke. Six other prescription drugs have also been withdrawn from the market since January 2000. The frequency of recent withdrawals, and the possibility of additional ones in the future, indicates an urgent need to better understand how consumers respond when drugs are withdrawn from the market.
How consumers respond will determine whether the withdrawal of a drug confers competitive benefits or imposes negative spillovers on remaining drugs in the therapeutic class. Competitive benefits stem from operating in an oligopolistic market; the withdrawal of one competitor increases the residual demand faced, and therefore quantity supplied, by remaining producers. Negative spillovers occur if, for example, consumers become concerned about the safety of the entire class of drugs due to the withdrawal of one and decrease their utilization of the non-withdrawn drugs.
This project is the first direct study of consumer response to drug withdrawals. 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 (FDA) 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.
Back to 2005 March Awards
Building a Sociology of Displacement
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. Some argue that the very project of economic change generates conditions that lead inevitably to either forced or voluntary migration, and includes diasporic populations associated with contemporary immigration. 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-st!
ate 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. We imagine interesting intersections of these substantive foci to provide the bases for a thematic project in 2006.
During the grant year we anticipate a series of bi-monthly lunches to identify and discuss key research of the above focal areas. We envision the meetings to generate three collaborative products that build toward a Theme Project Proposal: 1) a framework to integrate campus interests and expertise as the basis for a theme project, 2) identification of national and international institutes for future collaboration, and 3) an integrative workshop to provide a venue for scholars of displacement able to draw campus attention to the salience of displacement and social exclusion.
Back to 2005 March Awards
Lying Online:
The Effects of Communication Technology on Deception
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 1) affect how we produce deception in our everyday lies, and 2) our ability to detect lies in online communication.
Back to 2005 March Awards
Media Effects and Political Knowledge in Africa
Much of Africa is undergoing a political transition. Ordinary citizens are faced with new responsibilities as voters, local councilors, monitors, litigants, and petitioners, often for the first time in their lives. Africans are concurrently experiencing a dramatic growth of communication resources due to new technologies and the lifting of political and economic constraints. Independent newspapers and magazines, private FM radio stations, foreign television programs, internet connections and cell phones are proliferating across the continent, even in remote locations. This project examines how citizens use (or do not use) these new sources of information 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 compa!
red with similar communities without access. Initial research for the project will take place in Ghana, a country with relatively robust media and democratic politics.
Adolescent Health and Community Service:
Building Bridges and Planting Seeds
The adolescent period consists of multiple and simultaneous transitions, which can present opportunities for growth and development as well as opportunities for engagement in risky and health-compromising behaviors. Health promotion, disease prevention, and youth development programs all strive to shape these opportunities to minimize risky behaviors and facilitate engagement in positive and meaningful activities that promote competence and the adoption of health-promoting attitudes and behaviors. 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 thr! ough 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.
The project involves a strong group of junior and senior faculty who are eager to develop interdisciplinary collaborations to further strengthen their own research and to enhance the research environment across the institutions. The core faculty share common research interests in youth development, adolescent health, environmental influences on behavior, program development, mentoring and community service. At the same time, the investigators also enhance one another’s contributions by bringing to the table the unique training, perspectives, and skill sets of their respective disciplines: developmental psychology, education, health promotion research, behavioral epidemiology, environmental psychology, adolescent parenting skills, and medical anthropology.
Back to 2005 March Awards
Return to top.
Read small grant application guidelines
