Clara Suong, Ph.D.

chs298@nyu.edu

Assistant Professor

Virginia Tech

Year of PhD: 2018

Country: United States (Virginia)

Research Interests

Conflict Processes & War

Foreign Policy

Political Communication

Experimental Research

Formal Theory

Text as Data

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2013) Polls and Elections: The New Deal Realignment in Real Time, Presidential Studies Quarterly

Right after the 1936 election the Gallup Poll began probing party identification. From then on until 1952, when the National Election Studies entered the field, nearly 200 surveys produced measurements of partisanship in the American electorate. We exploit this largely unexplored data set to examine the partisan transformation commonly called the New Deal Realignment in real time. It turns out that it was not until the late 1940s that the Democratic Party secured an enduring hold on the American electorate. The New Deal and the Depression had less to do with this change than did World War II and the postwar prosperity. The lead cohort of the Democratic surge in party identification was the generation that came of age during the 1940s, not the 1930s. The findings suggest that a historic crisis or a new policy program may not be enough to realign partisanship in the electorate but that it takes the success of the ascendant party in mastering historic crises.

Book Chapters:

(2019) PAKISTAN, 2001–11: Washington’s Small Stick, Cornell University Press

U.S.-Pakistan cooperation in counterterrorism efforts from 2001 to 2011 highlights the success and failure in translating U.S. influence into effective indirect control of high-cost agents in proxy wars. After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and the Pakistani military leadership made an implicit contract regarding Pakistan’s cooperation in counterterrorism efforts. However, the growing divergence in interests between principal and proxy, as well as the rising cost of effort, induced the proxy to shirk and the principal to resort to direct action. The resurgence of the Afghan Taliban after 2004 and the U.S. policy shift to deter them exacerbated the conflict of interests between the United States and Pakistan. Growing domestic opposition within Pakistan to its cooperation with the United States also increased Pakistan’s cost of effort, leading to shirking by Pakistan. Consequently, the United States shifted to direct action using drone attacks.