Associate Professor of Political Science Jowei Chen has received a 2020 Confronting and Combating Racism Grant for his project titled, "Democracy’s Denominator: How Citizenship-Based Redistricting Impacts Racial Minority Voters." The Center for Social Solutions, in partnership with Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan made the competition available to faculty at the Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint campuses to pursue action-based research aimed at ending systemic and institutional racism in forms including systemic oppression, organizational exclusion, institutional discrimination, neglectful policy, and violence against the minds, bodies and cultures of people of color.

Jowei Chen's research interests include distributive politics, executive agencies and legislatures. He has studied how legislators' pork-barreling strategies are shaped by the electoral geography of their districts, and he has examined how government spending influences voters. He is also interested in the political control of executive agencies.