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UCLA, Howard University launch summer program on race, ethnicity and politics

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The new UC-funded Mark Q. Sawyer Summer Institute will support young scholars in this burgeoning academic field
Image of Mark Sawyer

The program’s namesake, the late Mark Sawyer, was a professor of political science and African American studies at UCLA and a pioneer in the field of race, ethnicity and politics.

By Jessica Wolf 

The first-ever Mark Q. Sawyer Summer Institute will bring four undergraduate fellows from Howard University in Washington, D.C., to the UCLA campus this June for an immersive six-week academic research program that explores the crucial role of race, ethnicity and politics in society.

The multiyear program, a collaboration between faculty from UCLA’s political science department and Howard, is funded by the UC–HBCU Initiative, which seeks to boost the number of undergraduate scholars from historically Black colleges and universities who enroll in and complete advanced degree programs at University of California campuses.

Named for the late UCLA professor Mark Sawyer, a pioneer in the field of race, ethnicity and politics, the newly launched summer institute will be led by UCLA’s Lorrie Frasure, an associate professor of political science and African American studies, and Natalie Masuoka, an associate professor of political science and chair of the Asian American studies department. Their Howard counterpart is Niambi Carter, an associate professor of political science and director of graduate studies.

“Our objective is to create an inclusive and supportive environment for students to develop their skills in research methods and design and to encourage participants to see themselves as confident and qualified applicants to an advanced degree program in political science,” said Frasure, who also serves as vice chair of graduate studies in political science.

Fellows in the program will focus on race and ethnicity as a central category that informs political processes in the United States and will help produce research that spotlights the underrecognized political role played by African American and other communities of color. The scholars will familiarize themselves with empirical research methods through innovative workshops and participate in seminars that explore theories of U.S. racial and ethnic politics, specifically Black politics.

The four undergraduate scholars selected for this summer, all of them political science majors entering their senior year at Howard, are Justina Blanco, Havillyn Felder, Donroy Ferdinand and Yasmine Grier.

Carter said the partnership between UCLA’s political science department and Howard’s program in Black politics provides an ideal opportunity for some of Howard’s best and brightest students to work on cutting-edge research while carving a pathway to graduate studies and professorships.

“I am excited that our students get to experience a different campus and different approaches to political science. I am also expecting UCLA to learn a lot from our students, whose worldview has been shaped in really important ways by Howard University and our motto, ‘Truth and Service,’” Carter said. “This partnership helps both our campuses achieve our shared goals of producing bright scholars who will bring all of who they are to the classroom and in their approaches to studying some of the biggest issues in political science. We look forward to creating lasting, deep connections and looking for other places to connect our campuses.”

As part of the mission of the UC–HBCU Initiative, the University of California will waive application fees for alumni of the initiative’s programs — including the Sawyer Summer Institute — who apply to any of the more than 700 academic graduate programs at the UC’s 10 campuses. Those admitted to advanced degree programs will be eligible to receive competitive funding packages.

The field of race and ethnicity politics at UCLA today serves as a model for universities across the nation, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Mark Sawyer, Frasure said.

Sawyer, a professor of political science and African American studies who died in 2017, co-founded the race, ethnicity and politics program in UCLA’s political science department in 2006 and was instrumental in establishing the campus’s department of African American studies in 2015.

“Professor Sawyer is remembered as an outstanding scholar and a committed mentor and teacher,” Frasure said, “but he is most remembered as a visionary builder of lasting institutions.”

UCLA’s political science graduate program is currently one of only a handful in the U.S. to have established racial and ethnic politics as an institutionalized field of study, and its political science department boasts one of the largest concentrations of faculty engaged in the specialty.

► See UCLA’s recent study of how attitudes toward politics and policy vary among racial groups.

The Sawyer Summer Institute will also benefit from programmatic partnerships with UCLA’s department of African American studies, Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and Academic Advancement Program.

“We’ve assembled an incredible team of scholars and programs for this first year of the initiative,” Masuoka said. “We are eager to welcome these young researchers to UCLA but also look forward to learning from them. We have an opportunity to consider how their experiences and ideas can inform novel and innovative research questions.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. For more news and updates from the UCLA College, visit college.ucla.edu.

Participants of the 2018 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey meeting

UCLA political science team leading the way in the study of race and ethnicity politics

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Participants of the 2018 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey meeting

The 2018 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey meeting held at UCLA brought together more than 100 scholars from universities and colleges across the country.

How do race and ethnicity affect the U.S electorate and the nation’s political system? What effect did Bernie Sanders’ appeal to millennial voters have on Hillary Clinton’s candidacy? How do emotions make an impact on political ambition?

For researchers interested in trying to use data to answer questions like that, UCLA was the place to be this summer, as the second annual gathering of scholars who are participating in the multi-university Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, known as the CMPS, convened here in Westwood.

In early 2016, UCLA political science professors Lorrie Frasure-Yokley and Matt Barreto, along with co-principal investigators Janelle Wong from the University of Maryland and Edward Vargas from Arizona State University, launched the online survey, which is the first of its kind in the study of race, ethnicity and politics in the United States.

In early August, UCLA hosted its second annual gathering of more than 100 scholars to collaborate on work-in-progress studies using CMPS data including such topics as “Was Hillary Clinton ‘Berned’ By Millennials? Age, Race, and Third-Party Vote Choice in the 2016 Presidential Election” and “Riled Up about Running for Office: Examining the Impact of Emotions on Political Ambition,” both led by UCLA alumnus Jonathan Collins, now at Brown University.

“It’s great to see the diversity of ways the survey findings are explored by scholars of racial and ethnic politics across the country,” Frasure-Yokley said.

The impetus behind the self-funded nationwide research effort was also, in part, about academic inclusion, she said. The project was developed through a collaboration of more than 80 scholars from 55 universities and colleges and 17 academic disciplines and conducted in five languages.

“The 2016 CMPS is more than just a groundbreaking, high-quality, national dataset,” Frasure-Yokley said. “We are changing the way data is collected in the social sciences and collaboratively building a diverse and inclusive academic pipeline of scholars in political science and the social sciences more broadly.”

Collaborating scholars and UCLA workshop attendees included junior and senior faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, as well as postdoctoral fellows from large research institutions, smaller liberal arts colleges, historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions.

This event was an important incubator for feedback on more than a dozen current projects, Frasure-Yokley said, and served as an opportunity to brainstorm on efforts to update and improve the survey before it is launched again following the 2020 presidential election.

The CMPS was designed to house large and generalizable samples of racial and ethnic groups, which allow for within-group comparison and analysis of an individual racial group, or comparative analysis across groups.

A series of articles has already been published using CMPS data, including a study of the Asian American vote in the 2016 election, published in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, and another about immigration politics in 2016, published in PS: Political Science & Politics.

The goal is to expand the 2020 survey in several ways, Frasure-Yokley said. The team plans to increase the sample size from 10,000 to 20,000 cases including, but not limited to the following groups: Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, whites, Muslim Americans, black Caribbean immigrants and/or black African immigrants, Native Americans and native Hawaiians. They are also planning to poll an ongoing panel of respondents about a subset of issues important to the study of race, ethnicity and politics in the United States.

Earlier this summer, Frasure-Yokley and Tyson King-Meadows, professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, organized a working group to study black politics. The two-day writing retreat held in Washington, D.C. brought together an intergenerational group of 22 scholars, working in research teams of three or four people, who will write and publish together using data from the CMPS.

Politics of place still exerts powerful influence in voting booth

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John Agnew, UCLA distinguished professor of geography, has spent his scholarly career examining the politics of place. He teaches courses in political geography and globalization, as well as sections in the department of Italian.