I am currently working on three projects, in addition to my RA work for Dr. Stuart Soroka (McGill University) and Dr. Richard Nadeau (Universite de Montreal).
1. The Differential Framing Effect: Elite vs. Public Support for the U.S. Missile Defense in Canada, Poland and the Czech Republic with A. Trevor Thrall (George Mason University) and Michael Maclean (University of Windsor).
The paper’s former title was Ignorance, Ideology and International Relations: Support for Missile Defense in Four Nations and it was presented at MPSA Annual Meeting in Chicago in 2010 and at the Annual ISA Meeting in Montreal in 2011.
2. Rational Polish Public?
This working paper was presented at the annual Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC)’s graduate conference in Quebec City in 2011.
The paper tests Page and Shapiro’s Rational Public hypothesis with original Polish public opinion data spanning 1980-2010.
3. Building a Better Boomerang ? Assessing the ‘Human Rights Methodology’ in the New Media Age with A. Trevor Thrall (George Mason University).
To be presented at the Annual ISA Conference in San Diego in 2012.
Abstract: Central to the success of transnational human rights groups is what has been called the “human rights methodology (HRM),” the strategy of identifying and publicizing human rights violations in order to bring international pressure to bear on the perpetrators. In order to make this strategy truly effective, NGOs must be able to expose human rights violations in the international news media. Though there is a great deal of anecdotal and case study-based evidence of the effectiveness of specific campaigns, there has been very little quantitative examination of the overall effectiveness of the HRM and the conditions under which it is most useful. Moreover, thanks to the emergence of the Internet and various new and social media platforms, NGOs, oppressive governments, and even the victims of human rights abuses themselves have new means to communicate, adding complexity to the question of how and how well the HRM works. This paper seeks to assess the effectiveness of the HRM in two steps. First, we investigate the success of the major transnational human rights groups at generating attention for their causes in various traditional international news media outlets. Second, we examine the emerging new and social media strategies of these NGOs and measure the visibility of human rights campaigns in various online settings compared to traditional news media settings.