A University of Cincinnati political science professor is one of from the Andrew Carnegie Corporation of New York.
David Niven is associate professor at the UC College of Arts and Sciences’ School of Public and International Affairs. He was nominated for the fellowship by the university, and chosen out of more than 300 proposals.
Niven will spend the next two years studying the American polling system and how polling environments impact voters. He says that’s partly about actual experiences, like wait times and voter ID laws.
"The other half of it is really looking at, how does that voting experience affect our opinions of voting?" Niven told WVXU. "Our thoughts about whether voting is free and fair in this nation or not; our thoughts about what changes should be made to the way we vote."
Niven says the $200,000 fellowship award will fund graduate and undergraduate research assistants. The end product will include the traditional academic research results, as well as recommendations for how to address identified problems.
"A big component of this is thinking about how [voting] can be made more equitable," Niven says. "Is it laws that need to be changed? Is it the behavior of polling place personnel that needs to be changed? What could be tweaked that would make the voting experience more equal for everybody?"
All the Carnegie Fellowship awards this year are focused on political polarization research. Niven says although the research projects are independent, the goal is to tackle the question of why Americans are politically divided. Other topics include partisan media, political segregation among neighborhoods, and exposure to online misogyny.
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