Andrea Silva, Ph.D.

andrea.silva@unt.edu


Assistant Professor

University of North Texas

Year of PhD: 2016

Phone: 9405654963

Address: 1155 Union Circle, Wooten Hall 125

City: Denton, Texas - 76203

Country: United States

About Me:

Andrea Silva is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of North Texas. Her work focuses on immigration and Latin@ politics, and minority representation in the United States. Her current research investigates the factors that influence state immigration policy on state-issued driver’s licenses and in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants.

Research Interests

Immigration & Citizenship

Race, Ethnicity and Politics

State and Local Politics

Representation and Electoral Systems

Countries of Interest

United States

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2018) Always Running: Candidate Emergence Among Women of Color Over Time, Political Research Quarterly

Silva, Andrea and Carrie Skulley. 2018. “Always Running: Candidate Emergence Among Women of Color Over Time” Political Research Quarterly The number of women seeking congressional office in the United States has dramatically increased since 1980. Previous research on women candidates explores why women run, but new research on candidate emergence shows that women face different challenges and advantages based on their race and ethnicity. We investigate these differences by disaggregating data on women’s candidate emergence by race and ethnicity to examine how these theories work when explicitly considering race and ethnicity. We focus our examination on women running in House primaries between 1980 and 2012. We argue that theories of candidate emergence are conditional to the racial and/or ethnic identification of the candidate. We employ a cross-sectional time series analysis with the intuition that examining congressional elections over time will allow us to make general comments about the participation of women in congressional elections. We find that many of the conditions thought necessary for women’s emergence as candidates are contextual and temporally specific. Moreover, conditions that encourage women to run do not necessarily apply to women of color.

(2018) Direct-Democracy Rules: The Effect of Direct Democracy on State Immigration Legislation., PS Political Science and Politics

Immigration was a key topic in the 2016 presidential election. During the 2016 presidential cycle, several states proposed and enacted laws in response to constituent interests and concerns regarding immigration. For instance, the National Conference of State Legislatures (2016) stated that 41 state legislatures introduced 159 pieces of immigration-related legislation; 70 of those laws and 159 resolutions passed in 2016. Given the significant number of laws proposed and enacted during this short period, what prompted legislators to propose and put them into effect?

(2016) Neoliberalism Confronts Latinos: Paradigmatic Shifts in. Immigration Practices, Latino Studies

How has the proliferation of neoliberal ideas altered undocumented immigration policy? I argue three neoliberal principles – privatization, efficiency and personal responsibility – have impacted the implementation of American immigration policy, increasing the detention, abuse, and death of undocumented migrants. This change disproportionately affects Latinos, as they are more likely to either know an undocumented person, or be one themselves. Using an historical structural approach, this work problematizes the inevitability of privatization, discusses the influence of efficiency on the record number of deportations, and criticizes the principle of personal responsibility using the deaths of migrants at the border and in detention. This work is of special importance for Latinos as they disproportionately bear repression, abuse and death at the hands of a neoliberal immigration system.

Media Appearances:

Radio Appearances:

(2016) KERA Think!

Donald Trump’s historic upset victory caught many by surprise. This hour, we’ll talk about why the polls showing a Clinton win got it wrong with UTD polling expert Harold Clarke. We’ll also talk about what we can expect for the next four years with TCU political science professor James Riddlesperger and UNT assistant political science professor Andrea Silva.