Democratic Innovations has created a grant program for undergraduate students to conduct projects under the supervision of Yale faculty members. Coordinated by ISPS faculty fellow Joshua Kalla, the program’s first student projects are:
- Determining if showing study participants a disruptive climate change protest produce a backfire effect and result in a lower likeliness to support climate change legislation?
- Analyzing legislative voting patterns in the Puerto Rican Assembly to see how they have changed before and after major protests in 2019 (data available at Yale Dataverse)
- Researching Swiss voter turnout patterns and public attitudes toward digital voting infrastructure
- Investigating the effectiveness of an open-source technology called Polis to reach consensus among large groups of people on policy opinions
The Polis project was launched by Matthew Meyers, ’24. He has passed on the data and responsibility for completing and building upon the project to Beata Fylkner, ’26 and member of the Democratic Innovations Student Research Group that Meyers co-founded.
ISPS also funded Kyle Thomas Ramos to participate in the Hoover Institution Summer Policy Boot Camp. He produced a paper on revitalizing the Government Accountability Office’s power to enforce the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.