Kelly Piazza

This chapter highlights the diversity of career options open to Political Science PhDs, in particular those outside of tenure track jobs at major research universities and small liberal arts colleges. The chapter describes the advantages, disadvantages, and how to prepare for teaching opportunities at the U.S. military service academies and professional military education institutions; pre-collegiate education positions; policy-focused jobs at think tanks, nonprofits, and in government; and private sector jobs. NOTE: This manuscript is part of Strategies for Navigating Graduate School and Beyond, a forthcoming volume for those interested in pursuing graduate education in political science (Fall 2022 publication).

The coronavirus pandemic has ravaged countries across Latin America. Although the region continues to suffer, the promise of vaccinations provides reason for hope. As vaccines become more widely accessible in Latin America, public support for and willingness to receive the vaccine will be essential to pandemic recovery. Recognizing this, politicians in the region are already actively publicly promoting vaccination. In this research note, we explore Latin Americans’ attitudes on vaccine acceptance as well as the influence of political recruitment for vaccination and both consumption of and trust in news from politicians on self-reported attitudes of vaccine acceptance. We learn that, in general, Latin Americans are receptive to vaccination but that acceptance varies as a function of country, time, and recruitment and, interestingly, that Latin Americans are actually dissuaded from vaccination if encouraged by politicians. We conclude with a discussion and a plea that vaccination camp...

The promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women are global policy priorities across countries and development institutions. Research on gender and politics shows that exceptional environments can activate stereotypes of women as honest, trustworthy, and competent lawmakers in public health and, in doing so, can generate increased public support for female political candidates. We argue that the 2019–2020 Coronavirus Pandemic has the potential to produce this outcome, as recent public opinion polls highlight widespread discontent with male-led governments’ responses to the pandemic and elevated concerns surrounding public health. Recent positive media reports of female world leaders’ responses to the pandemic provide further reason to suspect a forthcoming increase in political support for female candidates. We posit that such an outcome may prove essential not only for enhancing development and improving long-standing gender inequities but also for alleviating the pand...

Recent research probing the latent gender dynamics of political corruption finds that revealing malfeasance increases support for female representation but that female candidates struggle to translate favorability for their candidacies into electoral success. In this chapter, we, first, evaluate this observation in the context of Brazil and, second, identify and investigate institutionand norms-based mechanisms that jointly contribute to this troubling outcome. We posit that distinct institutionand norms-based barriers, together, reinforce women’s continued exclusion from politics, even in corrupt-laden contexts. We evaluate and find support for this argument with a series of linear probability models estimated with data from a rigorous anti-corruption program in Brazil. Our results address an important gap in research on the corruption and gender nexus and provide insight into steps needed to mitigate the interrelated challenges of corruption and political female underrepresentatio...

Non-pharmaceutical interventions to increase physical distancing have been instrumental in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Governments have enacted stringent public health policies that impose limits on mobility outside the household. However, for containment policies to be effective, there is a growing understanding that emergency aid programs must be designed to ensure that the most vulnerable receive financial and in-kind aid resources to support their ability to “stay at home.” In this study, we use survey data from an Oxford  USP-FGV collaborative research initiative to empirically assess the effectiveness of these two policies in reducing mobility with an eye to those at-risk or living in conditions of poverty in eight Brazilian capitals. We learn that, in general, neither stringent public health policies and receipt nor promised receipt of the Auxílio Emergencial were effective in limiting mobility outside of the home. We do, however, find limited evidence that receipt or ...