NYU has established the Center for Social Media and Politics, co-directed by Professors Joshua Tucker and Jonathan Nagler of the Politics Department, along with Richard Bonneau, Professor of Biology and Computer Science, which will examine the production, flow, and impact of social media content in the political sphere, as well as support research that uses social media data to study politics. The center was the recent recipient of a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation part of a general announcement about its investment in supporting the study of the impact of technology on democracy.
Professor Arthur Spirling, along with colleagues at NYU's Center for Data Sciences, have received a $3 million Research Traineeship Grant from the National Science Foundation to support FUTURE, an initiative to train fifty PhD students, including twenty funded trainees, from data science and other disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, physics, neuroscience, health sciences, psychology, and politics. An additional 145 MS or PhD students will engage in select courses and professional development opportunities offered through the project.
Professor Howard Rosenthal wins the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) prize for best working paper published in the ECGI finance series. The paper, "Investor Ideology" (ECGI Finance Working Paper 557/2018, co-authored by Patrick Bolton, Tao Li, and Enrichetta Ravina) is now forthcoming in the Journal of Financial Economics.
Professor Arturas Rozenas won the 2018 James Caporaso award. Professor Rozenas received the award for the best paper published in Comparative Political Studies, "Literacy, Information, and Party System Fragmentation in India."
Professor Steve Brams elected a Fellow of the Game Theory Society.
Professor Gwyneth McCledon receives Robert E. Lane Award for Best Book from APSA Political Psychology section. Professor McClendon's book, Envy in Politics, explores the connections between status motivations and political behavior through a focus on the United States and South Africa. In addition to receiving the Robert E Lane award for the Best Book in Political Pscyhology published in 2019, Envy in Politics has been selected as one of Choice Reviews' Oustanding Academic Titles of 2018.
Public Safety Lab Receives 600K LJAF Grant For Jail Data Initiative. The problem of overincarceration has received considerable attention of late. The focus of this attention, however, has largely been on state and federal prison systems. Often overlooked are local jails. In any given year, approximately 11 million Americans will be detained in a county jail, often because they lack the funds to post bail, or even because they lack the funds to pay their fines. Yet we know little about county jail practices, including which counties are systematically jailing defendants pre-trial and/or post-fine, and about the consequences of these practices. It is possible that longer periods of pre-trial detention, for example, actually increase recidivism, and/or escalate petty offending into more serious offending. The Public Safety Lab, founded and directed by NYU Politics Professor Anna Harvey, has received a 611K grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation for its Jail Data Initiative. The Lab's data science team will crawl daily county jail rosters and criminal case records in over 1,000 counties throughout the U.S. over a period of 3 years. Using these data, the Lab's research team will be able both to identify counties that are systematically jailing defendants pre-trial and/or post-fine, and to estimate the impacts of these practices on recidivism. For more information, please contact publicsafetylab@nyu.edu.
Doctoral program alumni wins 2016 Commonwealth Short Story prize . Parashar Kulkarni, who received his Ph.D. from NYU Politics in 2015, currently Assistant Professor at Yale-NUS, won the 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for his piece "Cow and Company". The prize is awarded to the best unpublished short fiction written by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations.