The College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Associate Professor Sarah Croco of the Department of Government and Politics, who was named as the Kekst Family Endowed Research Fellow for the 2020-2021 Academic Year.

The funding for the accompanying $19,000 award comes from the Kekst Family Endowed Research and Lecture Fund. The Kekst Fund was established by Mr. Gershon Kekst and the Kekst Family Foundation to provide annual income to support curriculum development, a public lecture series and an undergraduate student research program. Professor Croco’s work will be well aligned with the Kekst family’s interest in promoting a civil society.

Professor Croco intends to use the support to: develop a course on the 2020 election and democratic society more generally for the fall term; hire three graduate students with specializations in survey data; and to develop a multi-wave survey with the students where we would write up the results together with the goal of publication. The survey would focus on issues related to the election, citizen confidence in democratic institutions, the importance of democratic norms, and polarization.

Professor Croco also is a faculty associate at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland. She is also the Political Methodology field chair.  

She earned her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan in the spring of 2008. Her research interests include: international conflict; the process by which citizens assign leaders responsibility for international wars; the value of policy consistency in elections; territorial disputes and civilian targeting.

Her book is “Peace at What Price?: Leader Culpablity, Domestic Politics, and War Termination.” Her dissertation won the 2009 Best Dissertation Prize from the Committee for the Analysis of Military Operations and Strategy. She has also won numerous teaching awards. Her work has appeared in The American Political Science Review, The American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and World Politics, among others.

Professor Croco has won several teaching awards and regularly teaches classes about statistical methodology, research design, and programming in R.