Vote Winner

A Holocaust survivor’s gift is fostering research to help engage minorities in politics

By Francie King | Photo courtesy of I.C.A.

The Newman Award, Jillian Jaeger says, allows her to bring a new focus to her studies. “Having the opportunity to have a whole year to just work on this project is going to be very, very helpful.”

Jillian Jaeger wants to know whether the American political system can be more representative of minority and immigrant voters—those who often feel they are outsiders in the electoral process. Specifically, she’s researching the relationship between minority candidates (especially those who are Latino or black) and the information voters use to decide whether to vote for them.

“There is a real lack of data and information on how voters respond to minority candidates in local elections, especially if they don’t have clear party-based information to distinguish the candidates,” says Jaeger (GRS’11,’16), a political science doctoral student. “This is not the case at the national level, where political partisanship is much more often on display and typically explains how voters decide to cast their ballots. In local elections, what do voters do if candidate party affiliation is unknown or is the same across candidates? This interaction between the type of information voters are exposed to and their vote choice is really important to understanding when minorities get elected.”

With the support of the Henry S. Newman Graduate Fellowship for Immigration Studies, Jaeger will be able to pursue her PhD research single-mindedly for a full year, without teaching or other service obligations. She is the Newman Fellowship’s first awardee, selected through a competitive application process. The award, which provides a $25,000 stipend for one year, covering tuition and fees, was made possible through the estate of the late Henry S. Newman (CAS’48), father of Dorothy Newman (CAS’69).

Born March 31, 1920, in Warsaw, Poland, Newman was the only member of his immediate family to survive the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust. After World War II, he immigrated to America, where he worked in television and sold American films in Europe. Then, ahead of his time, he shifted gears in the 1960s to promote environmental quality. He later took five companies public before retiring in 1987. In September 2007, Newman established a charitable gift annuity at BU with $1 million, designating graduate students involved in immigration studies as the award’s recipients. He died in 2013.

As the inaugural Newman Fellow, Jaeger will delve into patterns of voting in US mayoral races to determine which factors attract voters to minority and immigrant candidates. Her interest in the subject grew out of her studies of partisanship, political behavior, and incorporation of minorities and immigrants in the United States and Western Europe.

“I did my master’s in international relations at BU, where I was a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellow at the African Studies Center,” she says. (The FLAS Fellowship is a grant program sponsored by the US Department of Education.) “While studying North Africa, I became really interested in Moroccans and Algerians living in Western Europe. Belgium, for example, was one of the locations where I looked at the process of political incorporation. Based on what I learned in that case, I wanted to know more about immigrants living in the US. I felt like I should become a little more familiar with what was going on in my own backyard.”

She began looking into the scholarly work that had been done on African Americans and their efforts to have more descriptive representation (that is, representatives who share their ethnicity) in government. She also found some similar work done on Latinos, but very little of it compared the groups. “I thought, it seems to me that these two groups are treated very differently by society when it comes to social and economic acceptance. So, what about the political [side]? I needed to understand that much more fully. So that’s how my work really began.”

Jaeger says that with more data at the local level, we could better identify the conditions that lead minorities and immigrants to become more deeply connected to their new cultural environments, and acquire more of a voice in them. “One of the really important ways that immigrants start to gain a meaningful relationship with their new locations is through political incorporation,” she says. With a stronger voice, there would be more opportunities for incorporation and less disenfranchisement. Jaeger also notes that local electoral systems are easier to change than national systems, which makes local election patterns a reasonable place for change to begin.

“I’m hoping my work lays a foundation for further research that will look more closely at other groups,” Jaeger says. “For now, I’m only focusing on Latinos and African Americans. Clearly, there is a huge Asian population, and that by itself consists of a number of distinct groups. So there’s a lot of room for future research.”

The Newman award, Jaeger says, allows her to bring a new focus to her studies. “I actually really enjoy teaching and doing research for my professors. And I’ve learned a lot doing that. But having the opportunity to have a whole year to just work on this project is going to be very, very helpful.”

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