Congratulations to Ignangeli Salinas-Muniz for receiving a 2024 Anti-Racism Graduate Research Grant!
The Anti-Racism Collaborative, a provost-funded initiative of the National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID), has awarded 19 summer research grants, totaling more than $94,000, to individuals and teams comprised of University of Michigan (U-M) graduate students. Along with the NCID, the student-focused grant initiative is co-sponsored by the Rackham Graduate School. It aims to support research projects focused on racial inequality, racial equity, and racial justice while advancing graduate student progress toward a degree. Additionally, the program provides ongoing professional development and support to the grantees.
Ignangeli Salinas-Muniz is a Ph.D. student in Political Science. Her research is supported by the NSF Graduate Fellowship Program. She broadly studies representation, accountability, and decolonial possibilities within the United States empire—with a particular focus on the U.S. territories and other U.S. geographical pockets where racial and ethnic minorities are subject to autonomy-limiting institutions. However, her interest in United States imperialism guides her work at various intersections. She is a proud alum of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute and the Summer Research Opportunities Program.
Her project, titled "Governed Unequal: A Study of Autonomy and Accountability in Puerto Rico," considers how the salient removal of local governing autonomy affects local accountability and governance. The United States of America is an empire where citizens are governed differently based on their connection to race and land. Institutions like territoriality and fiscal oversight limit the governing autonomy of elected officials and their racialized constituents. These institutions are often justified on the premise that local elected officials are corrupt and incompetent and that taking power away from them will result in better governance. However, I argue that removing governing power might result in worse governance by decreasing the incentives for local elites to act responsibly and respond to their constituent needs. The unequal power-sharing environment might blur the clarity of responsibility in ways that reduce the accountability and blame of local elected officials while giving them an electoral campaigning advantage. I test this by fielding an online survey experiment in Puerto Rico, a United States territory that has also been subject to fiscal oversight. This work contributes to scholarship aimed at disentangling the mechanisms and justifications under which institutionalized racism and unequal governance operate in the United States.
