 |
Thompson 324
Office Hours: Tu 3:45-4:45; Th 12:45-1:45 and by appt.
schaffer@polsci.umass.edu
Phone: (413) 545-0725
Interests:
My area of specialization is comparative politics. Substantively, I study the meaning of democracy, the practice of voting, and the administration of elections. What sets much of my work apart from other empirical research on democracy is a methodological focus on language. By investigating carefully the differing ways in which ordinary people around the world use terms such as "democracy," "politics," or "vote buying" - or their rough equivalents in other languages - I aim to arrive at a fuller appreciation of how they understand and make use of electoral institutions. This richer appreciation, I believe, is both intrinsically interesting and crucial to tackling real-world political problems.
A good deal of my research, to be more specific, has taken up three basic but understudied questions: (1) Does democracy, when translated, mean what we think it does? (2) Why do attempts to make elections less fraudulent and error-prone so often backfire? (3) What exactly is vote buying, why is it bad, and can it be reformed away?
Education:
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Courses Taught:
The Language of Politics; What is Politics?; Is Democracy Possible Everywhere?
Current Projects:
A Genealogy of Democracy in Translation: The Origins of "Demokrasya" in the Philippines (book project); Ambivalent Democrats: the Middle Class and the (Un)making of Philippine Democracy (article); Coordinated Voting: Collective Strategies of Vote Deployment (article).
|
