This new year, we wanted to step back and look at the articles which were published in 2017. Our compilation is a combination of highest read articles, pieces by eminent authors, editor picks, and articles which roused interactions. We hope to continue finding great content in years to come!
1. Rigging Elections: A Spatial Statistics Analysis of Political and Unintentional Gerrymandering
Jeanette Petti
Jeanette Petti is a senior in Cornell's urban and regional planning program, with additional interests in architecture and design. She currently works as a consultant at a planning firm in her hometown of Rochester, New York. After graduation, she intends on pursuing a master's degree in regional planning.
2. What’s Next in Pay-for-Success? Lessons Learned and the Future of “Social Impact Bonds” in the U.S.
Will von Geldern
Will von Geldern is a researcher and consultant on issues of state and local policy in the U.S. Will is also a student in the MPA program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs focusing on management, civic technology, and policy innovation. His past research has focused on social movements and political organizing in South Africa, the use of technology for public policy and civic engagement, and innovation in public policy. In addition to studying at Columbia, Will worked for five years in New York City as a researcher, consultant, and organizer on issues of urban environmental policy, civic engagement, and public sector innovation. Will holds a B.A. in Political Science and Music from Grinnell College.
3. How to Clean Up a City – a Case Study on Stopping Illegal Construction in Kosovo
Fjolla Kondirolli
Fjolla Kondirolli is a second year Master's in Public Administration Candidate at The Cornell Institute for Public Affairs as a Kosovo American Education Fund (KAEF) student. Her field of study is international development with a focus on education policy. She has a degree in economics and public policy from the American University in Kosovo.
4. The Anatomy of New Public Transit: The Opportunities and Challenges of the Brooklyn Queens Connector Streetcar
John Foote
John is on the faculty of Cornell University’s Institute for Public Affairs, teaching courses in public finance and infrastructure policy. Prior to turning to research and teaching, John was a co-founder of a transportation engineering company specializing in intelligent transportation systems and services, such as electronic toll collection. He also has twelve years of experience as a public finance banker both in the United States and Asia. John holds a Master of Public Administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in Engineering from Cornell University. He oversees the CIPA Graduate Certificate program in Infrastructure Project Management and Finance (IPMF).
5. Choosing a Side: Examining the Abortion Debate
Katharine Reeves
Katharine Reeves graduated from CIPA’s MPA program with a concentration on domestic education policy in May 2017. Prior to her time at CIPA, Katharine studied Policy Analysis & Management with minors in Education, Law & Society, and Inequality Studies at Cornell University. Katharine has experience working in the private, government and non-profit sectors as an education researcher. As a result of these experiences, she is interested in addressing operational efficiencies and policies of public sector entities, especially inefficiencies resulting from inadequate interactions between local, state and federal government affect policy across the board. Katharine’s research interests include education policy, human rights and social justice. Her goal is to help establish policies and systems within all three levels of government that will close achievement gaps and allow children to thrive in any and all learning environments – no matter their specific learning needs or their socioeconomic backgrounds.
6. Children and the British Border: UK Policy Hurting Lone Child Migrants
Benjamin Hunter
Benny Hunter is a writer, artist and activist. He has written for the Guardian, the Independent, the Huffington Post and Canadian Art Magazine and his artwork has been curated in shows in Canada, Finland and the UK. He is a volunteer for the charity Help Refugees and has worked with Safe Passage around the Dubs amendment and Dublin III agreement for bringing unaccompanied refugee children to the UK from Europe.
7. The Feminization of Migration: Why are Women Moving More?
Paulina Lucio Maymon
Paulina Lucio Maymon is Senior Managing Editor for the Cornell Policy Review and a Fulbright Fellow from Mexico. She is pursuing a Master of Public Administration at the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, concentrating in Human Rights and Social Justice. Paulina's research interests focus on human rights, gender equality, and international law. She currently works as an intern in the Independent Evaluation Office of UN Women in New York. Prior to attending Cornell, she worked as a Gender Equality and Human Rights Consultant at the Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers (INFONAVIT), a federal institution that provides mortgage credits to workers in Mexico. Paulina graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and obtained a graduate certificate in Human Rights from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.
8. Improving Public Service Delivery in Pakistan
Mohammad Zohair Javed
Zohair is a Fulbright Scholar completing his MPA at Cornell with a focus on International Development. His prior experience includes working in the e-commerce sector in Pakistan and interning at the Harvard Kennedy School where he worked on an education-related research project. He has an interest in governance, innovations in public service delivery, and social entrepreneurship.
9. Political Knowledge and the Paradox of Voting
Mark Chou
Mark Chou is an associate professor of politics at the Australian Catholic University and co-editor of Democratic Theory: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
10. Policy Gaps in Prevention of Vector-Borne Diseases in India
Wamika Kapur
Wamika Kapur is a Research Assistant to Legislators (RAL) at Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies (RGICS), New Delhi, India. Prior to her time at RGICS, she studied law at the Indian Law Society (ILS) Law School, Pune, India in 2014 and pursued her Masters in East Asian Studies from the University of Delhi in 2016, with a concentration on Korea and China.
She is interested in understanding the role of domestic politics and political institutions in policy making and its implications. Her research is focused on Indian and North East Asian political systems (China and Korea). Her areas of interest include law and society, institutional reform, political economy and comparative politics.
11. Bridging the Indigenous Wage Gap in Mexico
Ana Cañedo
Ana Cañedo is a 2017 CIPA Fellow. She earned two bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Political Science from ITAM, Mexico. Prior to Cornell, she worked as a Research Coordinator at the Human Capital Division of CIDAC, an independent, not-for-profit think tank. She then served as Project Leader for the creation of the Tabasco Technology Transfer Center for Energy Reform. Ana has authored numerous articles for Mexican newspapers and blogs on human capital development, education and employment and she currently publishes an online column on policy analysis for Inteligenciaindependiente.com.
12. Dropping Out of the Electoral College
Robert Speel
Dr. Robert Speel received his PhD in Government from Cornell University and a BA degree in political science and sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. He is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, and has also taught at Ryerson University in Toronto as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration. He is the author of Changing Patterns of Voting in the Northern United States, from Penn State University Press. His teaching and research interests include elections and voting behavior, regional politics, ethnic and racial politics, public policy, state and local government, Congress and the presidency, and Canadian politics.
13. Mobile Money Impact Evaluations: A Review
Stephanie Coker
Stephanie Coker is a second–year student at the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, where she is pursuing a Master of Public Administration. Her concentration is in the area of Economic and Financial Policy. She is interested in the implementation and impact evaluation of social enterprises and economic development projects at the international level Prior to Cornell, Stephanie served as an AmeriCorps VISTA at Habitat for Humanity managing projects and doing research evaluation. Currently, Stephanie is a member of the American Evaluation Association’s 2016-2017 cohort of the Graduate Education Diversity Internship (GEDI) program. As part of the program, Stephanie is part of the evaluation team at TCC Group, a New York social sector consulting firm.
14. Family Farms Fuel Brazil’s School Lunch Program
Elizabeth Sweitzer
Elizabeth Sweitzer is a Masters of Public Administration Candidate (’18) at the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA), concentrating in International Development. At CIPA, she aspires to address global food insecurity using data-driven insights to influence evidence based policy decisions. Prior to joining CIPA, Elizabeth completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Brazil (‘15), and performed public policy research in Toronto, Canada and Washington, DC. Elizabeth has worked with institutions including the Mowat Centre, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Canadian Centre for Responsibility to Protect, and Oxfam Canada. Elizabeth holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts with Distinction from the University of Toronto (’13) where she majored in Political Science and Spanish and minored in Portuguese. Originally from upstate New York, she is happy to return to the great outdoors of Ithaca after a seven-year hiatus.
15.A Spatial Analysis of Occupy Wall Street and its Occupiers
Oliva So
Olivia So is a senior in the department of City & Regional Planning at Cornell University. Spending most of her life in New York City, she wants to understand the processes to planning a city. She pursued the topic of POPS and Zuccotti Park as a starting point for her thesis "Public Space: How Design And Policy Affects the Users And Their Right to Free Speech".
16. The Need for Institutional Reform at the National Minorities Commission, India
Arpit Chaturvedi
Arpit is the Co-Founder and CEO of Global Policy Insights, a centrist Policy think tank and the Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer of EnviPol, an Environmental Consulting firm based out of India. He is also the Co-Director of Global Policy, Diplomacy and Sustainability Fellowship (GPODS). Along with leading these organisations, he is a Lecturer at the San Francisco State University where he teaches Comparative Perspectives in Public Service to graduate students.
He is a graduate of the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs and holds an MPA degree (Pi Alpha Alpha) with a focus on Governance, Politics, and Policy Studies. He was also the first non-US citizen to hold the position of the Editor-in-Chief of the Cornell Policy Review. He is the author of the book “Our Egalitarian Universe?” and has been the editor of “Not Without her: Communal Harmony” – a monograph printed by the National Foundation for Communal Harmony, Government of India, with essays from the top civil servants of the country. He has published articles in various prestigious journals on the themes of democracy, governance, systems thinking, game theory, history and politics.
17. Misleading Incentives – South Asian Farmers’ Use of Fertilizer
Liza von Grafenstein
Liza is a 2017 CIPA Fellow concentrating in International Development. In the course of her studies, she gained expertise in evaluation of programs and projects allowing her to present in the annual American Evaluation Association Conference in 2016. Prior to Cornell, she studied Political Science and South Asian Studies at Heidelberg University in Germany and at Delhi University in India. Her research interests focus on food security, intra-household allocation, and gender relations.
