RSA Early Career Grant Scheme
We are very pleased to announce the new Early Career Grant holders for the 2023 round. Congratulations to Kaitlin Alper and Ridhotama Shanti Ottemoesoe. Read below to find out more about them and their projects.
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Danish Centre for Welfare Studies (DaWS) at the University of Southern Denmark. In addition to teaching courses, I am involved in a project focused on the Politics of Insecurity led by Dr. Peter Starke. My primary research interests are in comparative welfare states and social policy, economic and social inequality, and the political economy of multilevel governance and decentralization in advanced industrial democracies. My work has been published in Social Forces and West European Politics. More information about my research can be found here.
Kaitlin says:
“I am both honored and excited to have received the RSA early career grant for my research on regional language use and political attitudes. I have been working on developing this project, which merges many of my research interests and advances my research agenda, for several years. Regional language use is an understudied aspect of regional distinctiveness, and I hope that The results of this study will help in understanding the heterogenous needs of citizens living in these regionally-diverse countries, and provide potential solutions for those wishing to govern linguistically and culturally diverse states.”
Governing Diverse Polities: How Regional Language Shapes Political Attitudes
Research on democratization, state-building and community formation stresses the importance of language and identity for building cohesive polities and fostering democratic legitimacy; and research shown that regionalism and regional identity have consequences for people’s political behavior and attitudes, including anti-democratic sentiment. Language is a major aspect of regional distinctiveness, and linguistic and psychological research has shown that language can shape people’s perceptions and the salience of different social conflicts, such as ethnic divides. Consequently, national governments have historically viewed language policy as integral for building and maintaining stable institutions. This project aims to link individuals’ regional language use to their political attitudes and behavior. Specifically, I will seek to test how the use of a regional language shapes a) attitudes towards democratic institutions at the regional, national and European levels, b) preferences over the territorial structure of governance and c) voting behavior. This is a mixed methods study, combining a survey experiment and qualitative interviews. Both the experiment and the interviews will focus on Catalonia as an exemplary case of a region in which regional identity is consistently salient and tension between the region and the central state is historically persistent.
Do rural banks help women’s microenterprises? [A case from Indonesia]
The low value and number of loans extended to women entrepreneurs in micro sectors is often associated with societal gender inequality. Previous studies have shown that in patriarchal societies, where gender bias against women is stronger, women tend not to apply for loans, relying instead on informal financial institutions. The extent to which gender stereotyping among loan officers contributes to this phenomenon has received little attention, with previous studies tending to look at gender and credit relations from the borrower’s perspective.
The aim of this research is to identify possible gender bias in lending markets and how it manifests in the banking sector, especially in rural banks. Rural banks in Indonesia have been mandated to support micro businesses; however, as small institutions, they have basic technology or tend to conduct manual assessments, increasing the subjectivity of loan application assessments. This research will look at the impact of gender stereotypes on loan applications and determine whether negative stereotypes tend to influence appraisals. Understanding loan officers’ gender biases might explain the differences in how analysts consider similar applications submitted by different genders. Lastly, this research will examine whether this bias tends to normalise when the credibility of the borrower increases.
‘I am very honored for being awarded for the Regional Studies Association (RSA) Early Career Research Grant Scheme. This grant allows me to explore and develop my research ideas about gender bias in lending markets and how it manifests in the banking sector, especially in rural banks. Rural banks in Indonesia have been mandated to support micro businesses; however, as small institutions, they have basic technology or tend to conduct manual assessments, increasing the subjectivity of loan application assessments. This research will look at the impact of gender stereotypes on loan applications and determine whether negative stereotypes tend to influence appraisals. Understanding loan officers’ gender biases might explain the differences in how analysts consider similar applications submitted by different genders. Lastly, this research will examine whether this bias tends to normalise when the credibility of the borrower increases.’
Early Career Research Grant Scheme
This award is open to individual applicants in their early career (five years maximum between the date showing on their PhD certificate and the application deadline). Applicants must be based within an eligible higher education institution and must be a current, early career member of the RSA and throughout the duration of the grant (please note that applicants may apply for membership at the same time as applying for the grant).
The RSA Early Career Research Grant (EC) is provided to support a discrete piece of regional studies and/or regional science research.
The value of the grant is up to £10,000 (c. $13,300; c. €11,800). The grant has a maximum time span of 18 months and reporting conditions apply. The full Terms and Conditions governing the grant are available in the EC Handbook. Instructions and link for applications can be found at the bottom of this page.