Research Projects

2008-11 PROJECTS

 

TOWARD A EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION AREA: BOLOGNA PROCESS AND BEYOND
This three-year project includes a set of interrelated instructional and research activities centered on the creation of a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by the EU. Three international seminars are planned: one in Ann Arbor in Winter 2009, one in Oslo in May 2010, and a final one in Ann Arbor in May 2011. Each seminar will be linked to graduate courses offered by U-M's Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education (CSHPE). The lead U-M unit, CSHPE, has been the top-ranked U.S. higher education research and graduate education center for over 50 years. Located at U-M's School of Education, CSHPE is comprised of faculty and graduate students interested in higher education as a social institution and as an area of professional practice. Although the predominant emphasis within CSHPE has been on U.S. higher education, faculty and students have continuously engaged abroad in a variety of professional development and research activities. Given the Council of Europe's 2010 deadline for establishing EHEA, the next three years are an optimal time to concentrate on the university dimension of the EU. Of particular interest will be how accountability is achieved at the federal level while national and institutional autonomy are maintained, and how shifts in ethnic, racial and religious diversity are reflected in EHEA as well as policies and practices at the national and university levels. Principal investigators for this project are Janet Lawrence, associate professor, and Michael Bastedo, assistant professor, U-M School of Education; and Peter Maassen, professor and director of Higher Education Development Association (HEDDA), University of Oslo, Norway.

 

PATHWAYS FOR WOMEN TO OBTAIN POSITIONS OF ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP
This is a research initiative developed by a Working Group chaired by Cindy A. Schipani, professor of business law at U-M's Stephen M. Ross School of Business; other members include Terry Dworkin, Indiana University; Virginia Maurer, University of Florida; Angel Kwolek-Folland, University of Florida; Marina v.N. Whitman, Ross School of Business and Ford School of Public Policy, U-M; and Mary Hinesly, Women's Initiative, Ross School of Business, U-M. The multi-phase project will result in survey collection of comparable data among the countries of North America and Western Europe to determine which factors enable women to obtain and remain in positions of leadership in business organizations.

 

MUSLIMS IN EUROPE

This project builds on a previous collaborative project involving American and European researchers that included a 2004 pilot survey of three relatively specific Muslim population groups: Bangladeshis in London and Manchester, Turks in Berlin, and Moroccans in Madrid. Nearly 600 individuals were surveyed across all the sites, with virtually identical questions asked in each location. The goals were to enable researchers to quantify population characteristics and to make comparisons across the three countries and of different age, gender, and length-of-stay cohorts within countries. Some questions were identical to those asked of Arab-Americans in a Detroit Arab-American survey, thus enabling transatlantic comparisons, too. In collaboration with colleague Berta Álvarez-Miranda Navarro, at Complutense University, Madrid, U-M Professors of Political Science Ken Kollman and Mark Tessler will conduct a follow-up study of Moroccans in Madrid in 2009. Using a similar sampling scheme to that employed in 2004, they plan to survey 200-300 randomly selected Moroccan immigrants. The survey instrument will include many of the same questions used in 2004 as well as new questions on contemporary circumstances and current events. With this new survey, the researchers will be able to study what has changed since 2004 and what has stayed the same among these immigrants. For example, have anti-Americanism and anti-European attitudes increased or decreased over the previous five years? Has religiosity become a more potent predictor for feelings of exclusion? Or, has religiosity acted as a way for immigrants to feel more at home among fellow immigrants? Has there been a trend either way in experiences of discrimination among these immigrants in Madrid? Have ties to Morocco increased or decreased in importance among these immigrants over the past five years? The previous study was a successful collaboration between American and European researchers that resulted in several conference papers and journal publications on Muslims in Europe and three international conferences devoted to the data. It is expected that this new project will yield additional papers and publications, ultimately leading to a book project on the topic, co-authored with American and European scholars.

BACTERIA WITHOUT BORDERS: THE EUROPEAN GOVERNANCE OF COMMUNICABLE DISEASE CONTROL
What explains the rise of the EU as a major actor in communicable disease control and what are its effects? These questions will be the focus of a three-day international conference to be convened at U-M in Winter 2010 by Scott L. Greer, assistant professor of health management and policy at U-M’s School of Public Health. Through his three-year Nuffield Trust-supported study of EU health lawmaking and current National Science Foundation-supported research on the effects of EU law on the health systems of France, Germany, Spain, and the UK, Greer has come to appreciate the remarkable and remarkably unreported emergence of the EU as a major force in international public health policy, in general, and in communicable disease control, in particular. This is particularly surprising given the relatively weak treaty bases for public health action.To bring more focused scholarly attention to these developments, Greer plans to assemble U.S. and EU experts for an academic research conference that will explore the intended and unintended consequences of EU integration on communicable disease control.

ATTITUDES OF POLES TOWARDS THE EUROPEAN UNION

How have attitudes of Poles towards the EU evolved? What are the consequences of these attitudes for Polish and European politics? John E. Jackson, professor of political science at U-M, and Bogdan W. Mach, professor at the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, and Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, propose to address these questions using two survey data sets that will be available in 2009.

 

THE SACRALIZATION OF POLITICS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

Anna Grzymala-Busse, associate professor of political science at U-M, proposes to compile a database of sacralization in Europe. This will include data on church efforts to recast political debates, the political response, and policy outcomes in several critical domains: abortion, divorce, education, stem-cell research, same sex marriage, environmental concerns, prostitution, poverty, and immigration/asylum rights.The project will advance an important and flourishing research agenda in the study of religion and politics at U-M, making three contributions to the scholarly community.

2005-08 PROJECTS

ENERGY AND SECURITY IN EUROPE AND EURASIA
In this project carried out in association with the Aleksanteri Institute's Eurasia Energy Group at the University of Helsinki, Michael D. Kennedy seeks to identify how various actors influence and transform the meanings, identities, values, and representations accompanying the exercise of power and influence around the definition and address of energy security, with special focus on the European Union and its relationship to energy coming from Russia and the Caspian Sea. For more information about this project please visit Energy Security in Europe and Eurasia webpage.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF LAWS AND POLICIES RELATED TO THE DISSEMINATION OF PUBLIC OPINION DATA IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
This project involves a collaboration initiated when Professor Traugott was a Fulbright Senior Specialist at the Central European University in Budapest.  Professor Miklós Sükösd and Traugott are working on a project looking at the role of public opinion specialists, and the growth of the public opinion industry in the newly emerging democracies in Eastern Europe.  Since they began collaboration, Sükösd became the principal investigator of an EU COST grant focusing on the development of mass communication theories appropriate to this region.On the U-M part of the project, Professor Traugott has been working with a graduate student, Lauren Guggenheim at the Center for Political Studies at U-M's renowned Institute for Social Research (ISR). They have been doing background research, developing a bibliography of polling based research, as well as research on the development of the public opinion industry in the Eastern European countries that are "rising" members of the EU. They were invited to attend the COST meeting in Milan in June 2007, to present on their research. While they discussed the results of their work in informal sessions, Professor Traugott also presented on research in which he is developing a model of the role of public opinion in the support of democratic government. He is hoping that it will be possible to develop additional collaborations to look at this process in terms of a developmental sequence.

PATHWAYS FOR WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP POSITIONS
This five-phase project started in November, 2005 at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. The Working Group (Professors Cindy Schipani (University of Michigan), Marina Whitman (University of Michigan), Virginia Maurer (University of Florida), Terry Dworkin (Indiana University), and Angel Kwolek-Folland (University of Florida) invited a group of approximately twenty-five women, including academics, prominent business women, and policy makers, from throughout the US, Canada, and Europe to Ann Arbor for two days to discuss the types of questions that should be included in the interviews and survey. The Working Group identified a number of topics to be included the survey, and published an article entitled "Women and the New Corporate Governance: Pathways for Obtaining Positions of Corporate Leadership" in the University of Maryland Law Review.The second phase involved analyzing the data gathered in Phase I, and hiring a statistician and research assistants to also help with survey design. Phase II took place from January-December, 2006. The initial survey was drafted in this phase, after extensive meetings. In addition, members of the Working Group presented our findings to date at the Second International Conference on Women's Studies, held at Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus in April, 2006.The third phase, involved a Workshop, convened in Paris, France in September, 2006, to gather a comparative perspective among the North Americans and Europeans. This meeting included approximately 20 participants. The purpose of this meeting was to further refine the survey instrument and discuss how best to disseminate it and collect the country-by-country data sets. This meeting was highly successful. The Working Group is now studying the transcripts from the sessions. The Group met in Ann Arbor on December 2, 2006 to revise the survey in accordance with the recommendations gleaned from the meeting in Europe. This phase should be complete in early 2007. In addition, we have begun drafting a second law review article tentatively entitled "Pathways for Women to Obtain Positions of Organizational Leadership: The Significance of Mentoring and Networking." Work on this article is ongoing. Phase IV will involve refinement and execution of the survey.