Carew Boulding

Carew Boulding, 2022 Seligson Prize Winner!

Anonymous — Tue, 24 May 2022 21:31:40 +0000

Carew Boulding, 2022 Seligson Prize Winner! Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/24/2022 - 15:31

Congratulations to CU Political Science Professor Carew Boulding for winning the Seligson Prize from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) at Vanderbilt University! The Seligson prize was awarded to the best scholarly work of 2020 or 2021 that utilized LAPOP survey data. Carew won for her new book Voice and Inequality: Poverty and Political Participation in Latin American Democracies, written with Claudio A. Holzner.

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Voice and Inequality

Anonymous — Thu, 27 May 2021 21:19:37 +0000

Voice and Inequality Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/27/2021 - 15:19

Voice and Inequality

By: Carew Boulding

Abstract:

The first large-scale study of political participation in eighteen Latin American democracies, focusing on the political participation of the region's poorest citizens.

Political regimes in Latin America have a long history of excluding poor people from politics. Today, the region's democracies survive in contexts that are still marked by deep poverty and some of the world's most severe socioeconomic inequalities. Keeping socioeconomic inequality from spilling over into political inequality is one of the core challenges facing these young democracies. In Voice and Inequality, Carew Boulding and Claudio Holzner offer the first large-scale empirical analysis of political participation in Latin America. They find that in recent years, most (but not all) countries in the region have achieved near equality of participation across wealth groups, and in some cases poor people participate more than wealthier individuals. How can this be, given the long history of excluding poor people from the political arena in Latin America?

Boulding and Holzner argue that key institutions of democracy, namely civil society, political parties, and competitive elections, have an enormous impact on whether or not poor people turn out to vote, protest, and contact government officials. Far from being politically inert, under certain conditions the poorest citizens can act and speak for themselves with an intensity that far exceeds their modest socioeconomic resources. When voluntary organizations thrive in poor communities and when political parties focus their mobilization efforts on poor individuals, they respond with high levels of political activism. Poor people's activism also benefits from strong parties, robust electoral competition and well-functioning democratic institutions. Where electoral competition is robust and where the power of incumbents is constrained, the authors find higher levels of participation by poor individuals and more political equality. Precisely because the individual resource constraints that poor people face are daunting obstacles to political activism, Voice and Inequality focuses on the features of democratic politics that create opportunities for participation that have the strongest impact on poor people's political behavior. Ultimately, Voice and Inequality provides important insights about how the elusive goal of political equality can be achieved even in contexts of elevated poverty and inequality.

Voice and Inequality

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Laying the foundation for student success: Marinus Smith awardees honored

Anonymous — Fri, 04 May 2018 16:25:22 +0000

Laying the foundation for student success: Marinus Smith awardees honored Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/04/2018 - 10:25

The Political Science Department would like to congradulate Professor Boulding, Professor Ferguson, and Professor Young in recieving the 2017-2018 Marinus Smith Awards. We feel grateful to have such amazing staff members!

"The Marinus Smith Awards are presented each spring to nominated faculty, advisors and staff members who have made a positive impact on the lives of CU Boulder students. Submitting a nomination provides a meaningful way for students to say thank you to outstanding staff and faculty members who have taken the time to show care and concern for those they serve."

Click here to read more from CU Boulder Today.

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Grad students find support, guidance in Dissertation Proposal Workshop

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 20:57:57 +0000

Grad students find support, guidance in Dissertation Proposal Workshop Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 01/03/2018 - 13:57

Writing a dissertation proposal is an important step toward the dissertation itself, but the process of researching and writing one can be a difficult transition time for many graduate students.

For their first years of graduate school, students adhere to a structured coursework schedule with deadlines from their advisors, the Graduate School or their department. After spending those years criticizing the best work by experts in their fields, students are expected to propose something new and better.

The Social Sciences Dissertation Proposal Workshop offers graduate students strategies and support for getting started and efficiently completing their proposal.

To learn more click here!

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Meet Carew Boulding

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 14:21:58 +0000

Meet Carew Boulding Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/04/2017 - 08:21

Casey Van Divier

Associate Professor in Political Science

“I always liked the idea of being a professor,” Dr. Carew Boulding reflected from her serene, second-story office. Packed wall to wall with books, the office is a reminder of the ten years Boulding has spent doing what she loves at CU Boulder, the only university she’s ever worked at.

“I applied for about forty jobs at universities all over the world,” she said. “I felt incredibly lucky to get the job at CU. I love Boulder—there aren’t many better places to live.”

To be sure, Boulding has many ties to the scenic college town. She spent her childhood in Boulder, and her husband is a CU graduate. What’s more: her grandparents, Kenneth and Elise Boulding, both taught at CU in the economics and sociology departments, respectively.

“My grandparents were kind of public figures in Boulder,” Boulding said. “Through the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, they were really involved in organizing peace movements.”

She’s reminded of their contributions whenever she happens upon newspaper articles about their achievements or academic papers published by her grandparents.

“They’re definitely inspirational people to me,” she said. “I was really close to both of them.”

Though many factors played a role in Boulding’s decision to become a professor, she is “sure it was influenced by seeing the work that they had done.”

Now a tenured professor herself, she puts maximum effort into all aspects of her work and enjoys when she can bring her research and her teaching together.

“Undergraduates often don’t get the opportunity to understand the research their faculty are doing,” she said, “so in my teaching I try to engage students with my research.”

Boulding’s latest project draws from surveys and data to find out how poverty affects political participation in Latin American countries. Her efforts will culminate in a book that has been five years in the making and will, hopefully, be ready for publishers in the summer of 2017.

In the meantime, she plans to keep up with both a diversified list of hobbies—reading, hiking, cross-country skiing—and her energetic family.

“I have three daughters who are 4, 8, and 11,” she said, “so they keep me pretty busy. They’re a lot of fun.”

As for her research, she has yet to decide on the next subject she’ll study. She’s hardly at a loss for possibilities, however—like a true professor, she’s already “thinking of ideas for the next big project.”

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Scholars eye freedom in reverse

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 23:15:21 +0000

Scholars eye freedom in reverse Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/02/2017 - 16:15

CU Boulder researchers win USAID grant to examine backpedaling democracies

President John F. Kennedy signed the Foreign Assistance Act in 1961, for the first time separating federal budgets for defense and non-defense spending and creating the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

“The amount of money that is involved in the nonmilitary areas are a fraction of what we spend on our national defense every year,” Kennedy said, “and yet this is very much related to our national security and is as important dollar for dollar as any expenditure for national defense itself.”

More than six decades later, USAID provides more than $20 billion annually — less than 1 percent of the federal budget — about a quarter of it to non-governmental organizations working in Asia, Africa, Latin America and beyond in its efforts to “end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize their potential.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the money doesn’t always achieve desired results. In fact, it tends to promote moderate political participation through formal mechanisms such as voting only in democratic societies where institutions already are working well, says Carew Boulding, associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of “NGOs, Political Protest, and Civil Society,” published by Cambridge University Press.

“My research has shown that where historically aid allocation is assumed almost always to lead to more democratic engagement, the evidence has shown that a lot of that engagement is really contentious,” Boulding says.

“That’s certainly not what (USAID) expected. The assumption is that they are giving to NGOs to help build civic engagement in a moderate, institutionalized way.”

Now, Boulding and Associate Professor of Political Science Andy Baker have been awarded a USAID grant to find out why. With help from five graduate students, they will conduct a massive literature review to examine what happens to citizen engagement when previously liberal democratic nations become more repressive.

The researchers hope to get a clearer idea of what citizens can do in such scenarios. Are there spaces for them to express themselves via the internet? How do they vote when elections continue but are highly restricted? How do they engage when protest activity is heavily regulated?

The review will focus on cases from the 20^th and 21^st centuries, from the collapse of Weimar Germany to recent backsliding in countries such as Venezuela and Ecuador. The researchers will locate appropriate literature from academic journals and annotate some 200 articles. Boulding and Baker will write a summary focused on three questions:

What enables civic and political participation in countries where civil liberties have been lost?
How do forms of civic and political engagement in such contexts differ from forms of engagement in contexts in which civil liberties are protected?
Are some forms of civic and political engagement generally more tolerated in newly repressive contexts than others? How do civic actors adapt their engagement tactics to achieve their objectives?

“For years academics have been telling policy makers and practitioners that they need to listen to academics, read the research, and distribute aid in a way that recognizes best practices, what works, what doesn’t work, and follows the cutting edge of the most rigorous research,” Baker says.

“This is USAID putting its money where its mouth is.”

China, while infamous for its repression of protest and citizen engagement, doesn’t make the researchers’ list because it is a “stable authoritarian” nation lacking recent history as a democracy. But China does provide insight into just how difficult it is for governments to control information flow and protest, Baker notes.

“The internet is like a giant sieve; there is only so much dictators can control what is said and done there,” he says. “China has had some success, but they have tens of thousands of people whose job it is to sit at a desk all day and troll the internet and be the speech police. That level of repression is very costly.”

A quarter-century later, it’s clear that political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history” following the collapse of communism, and “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” was premature.

Even in the United States and Europe, liberal democratic ideals once considered the foundations of Western society have been weakened, particularly in the post-9/11 era.

“It’s easy to believe that democracy is just naturally stable,” Boulding says. “This project is looking at the ways in which democratic freedoms can be undermined even in seemingly stable systems like the U.S.—and the ways in which citizens can push back.”

~Original Story: http://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2017/02/28/scholars-eye-freedom-reverse

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