The American Political Science Association is pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG) Awardees for 2020. The APSA DDRIG program provides support to enhance and improve the conduct of doctoral dissertation research in political science. Awards support basic research which is theoretically derived and empirically oriented.
Andra Pascu, Rice University
Andra Pascu-Lindner is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Her research interests include voting behavior, gender and politics, and cabinet formation in Western democracies. She is particularly interested in strategic voting and its intersection with gender at both the voter and candidate level. Her doctoral dissertation studies the extent to which gender and gender stereotypes impact the ways in which voters navigate complex political environments. This broader question is investigated in the context of Western European democracies where coalition governments tend to form, using a combination of observational data and original cross-country survey experiments. Her dissertation research is generously supported by the APSA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, as well as funding from the Social Sciences Research Institute and the Doerr Institute at Rice University.
Originally from Romania, Andra received her BA degree in International Politics and Economics, with a Spanish minor, from Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. She studied abroad at Sciences Po Paris, in the French-language political science program. Outside of academia, she has worked as a policy analyst for the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and as a consular assistant to the Romanian Honorary Consulate to Houston.