APSA is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2004 Small Research Grant competition. This year, awards averaging $1,636 went to 11 scholars. The Small Research Grant Program supports research in all fields of political science. The intent of these grants is to support the research of political scientists who are not employed at Ph.D.-granting institutions. For more information on the program and application procedures, please visit the APSA web site <www.apsanet.org/opps/apsagrants.cfm>.

Rebecca Bill Chavez U.S. Naval Academy “The Rule of Law in Democratization and Development: The Construction of Independent Judiciaries in Latin America” Chavez will use this grant to explore how nascent democracies construct the rule of law, hypothesizing that monolithic party control stands in the way of judicial independence.

Thomas S. DeLuca Fordham University “Three Case Studies in Constitutional Development in China” DeLuca will use this grant to further investigate three important legal cases in which Chinese citizens attempted in court to use provisions of the Chinese constitution to protect perceived violations of their rights; the work will be integrated into an edited volume.

Mary Fitzgerald James Madison University “Alternative Voting Methods and Electoral Mobilization in the U.S.” Fitzgerald will use this grant to explore the question: How do recent voting reforms and alternative voting methods in the states, such as in-person early voting, unrestricted absentee voting, and Election Day registration, influence electoral mobilization activities conducted by political parties and other groups?

Eric R. Giordano Unaffiliated Scholar “The U.S. Army and Nontraditional Missions: Explaining Divergence in Doctrine and Practice in the Post-Cold War Era” Giordano's study proposes to explain how and why U.S. Army doctrine diverges from practice by creating a framework to uncover their disjunction and introducing the doctrine-practice relationship as a new dependent variable to be tested against the prevailing theoretical explanations of military organizational change: Realism, Organization Theory, Institutional Theory, and Organizational Culture Theory.

Elise Giuliano University of Miami “Why Secession Fails: The Rise and Fall of Ethnic Minority Nationalism in Russia” Giuliano's project will 1) use field research completed for her doctoral dissertation to identify variables driving the rise and fall of popular support for nationalism in Tatarstan, Russia's most separatist republic, and 2) to test the generalizability of these findings by comparing mobilization in Russia's 20 other ethnic republics.

Manjusha Gupte North Dakota State University “‘Engendering’ Participatory Environmental Policy” While most studies have focused on the environmental outcomes of participatory environmental policy, Gupte's research project focuses on the process underlying these policies by comparatively examining four Indian villages.

Krzystof Jasiewicz Washington and Lee University “The European Union Accession Referendum in Poland” Jasiewicz's project explores both ideological and structural sources of pro- and anti-European attitudes in Poland, and places the referendum vote in the broader context of voting behavior in Poland and other new and old EU memberstates.

Gary Lee Malecha, University of Portland Daniel J. Reagan Ball State University “Congress in the Post-Network News Age” This project investigates, how members of Congress have adapted and responded to the “new media environment” created by the emergence and proliferation of cable news and political talk shows.

Sally Jo Vasicko Ball State University “The Evolving Role of Supreme Court Clerks: The Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts” Vasicko will use this grant to conduct additional interviews with former Supreme Court clerks, focusing on the evolving role of clerks during the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts.

Stephen M. Shellman College of William and Mary “Modeling the Spatial-Temporal Dynamics of Refugee-IDP Flows: A Case Study Approach” Shellman's project proposes to model the spatial-temporal dynamics of forced migrant and repatriation flows in and out of several countries and to develop theoretically driven causal models for these flows.

Margit Bessenyey Williams University of South Florida “Flexible or Fortress Europe? The Eastward Shift of European Union Borders and its Effect on Regional Stability in Eastern Europe” Williams will use this grant to examine the effects of the EU's Schengen border regime for cross-border relations in Eastern Europe.