Vanderbilt University Political Science Ph.D.s and Ph.D. Candidates on the market during 2007-2008 are:

RODELIO C. MANACSA, Ph.d. (Vanderbilt, August 2007)
Comparative Judicial Politics and International Relations

B.A., Ateneo de Manila University. 
Post-Graduate Degree (Executive Masters),
  Amsterdam School of International Relations,
  International and European Politics Program,
  University of Amsterdam (1998).  Graduated With Distinction

 Click here for Rae's c.v. 

Rodelio (Rae)  Manacsa is serving as Lecturer in Political Science at Vanderbilt during 2007-2008

Rodelio (Rae) is a Ph.D. Candidate specializing on comparative judicial politics, international conflict, and civil wars.  He was a Fulbright Scholar in American History and Law at Boston College in 2000 and a European Union Scholar in International and European Relations at the Amsterdam School of International Relations in 1998. He studied quantitative political analysis in the 2005 summer program of the Interuniversity Consortium for Political Research (ICPSR) and the Empiricial Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) in the 2006 EITM workshop held at Washington University in St. Louis.  Before coming to Vanderbilt in 2003, he was a tenured faculty member of the Department of Political Science at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines.

Office:  Calhoun Hall 310
Phone:  615-363-0871
Mailing Address:  VU Station B # 351817, Nashville TN 37235-1817
E-mail:  rodelio.d.manacsa@vanderbilt.edu

SAMUEL WHITT, Ph.D (Vanderbilt, Summer 2005)
E-mail:  swhitt3@utk.edu

Click here for Sam' c.v.

Sam Whitt  is Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Dissertation:   Beyond Keeping the Peace:  Can Institutions Promote Trust and Cooperation after Violent Conflict?

Whitt's  dissertation -- defended in summer 2005 -- involves questions of trust and cooperation across ethnicity in the aftermath of violent conflict. From Sept. 2003 through Jan 2004 he ran a series of experiments and a survey with 681 ethnic Serbs, Croats, and Bosnjaks (Bosnian Muslims) from regions across Bosnia to assess how norms of cooperation and trust have evolved since the war. His dissertation  asks to what extent patterns of trust and cooperation across ethnicity can be explained by institutional variation, specifically with respect to differences in power sharing and the presence of international peacekeepers. Whitt finds strong correlations between institutional trust and trust across ethnicity. In particular, the experiments, which were variations on the ‘dictator game’ with ethnic manipulations, very effectively ttapped ethnic bias and discrimination. He also finds, however, a surprisingly strong norm of fairness across ethnicity within the sample and that threat perceptions and the salience of ethnic ties are also important in accounting for trust and cooperation across ethnicity.

Whitt's most recent project involves a study of New Orleans evacuees and disaster relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in the Houston area. The goals of this project are to understand how crisis situations affect trust and cooperation over time and to assess the impact of different disaster relief response efforts on evacuee populations and between the evacuees and those who are trying to assist them. Again, this can be thought of as an institutional question – comparing the coordinated evacuation response of the city of Houston to non-governmental and otherwise ‘informal’ strategies. Working with Rick Wilson at Rice University and a team of research assistants, we conducted a series of six experiments and a survey of 353 evacuees in various shelters across Houston in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina. The data will help dispel some negative stereotypes about the behavior of evacuees – they are demonstrating a strong norm of cooperation and fairness among many evacuees in the sample, but a serious lack of institutional trust.