School of Social & Political Sciences

Niccole Pamphilis joins the School in September 2014 as Lecturer in Quantitative Social Sciences for Q-Step. She completed her PhD in Political Science at Michigan State University in August of 2012.  Additionally, she has received quantitative training at the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research’s (ICPSR) Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research and mixed-methods experience the Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods’ (CQRM) Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research.  Her dissertation applied a spatial proximity model to government expenditures to study the variation in spending priorities within and across democratic states. After relocating to Scotland in 2012 she spent two years as a Research/Teaching Assistant in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh working on policy variation in the German Lӓnder.

Niccole has spent the past several years teaching quantitative methods to undergraduate and graduate students, focusing primarily on introductory and intermediate statistics and regression analysis. Over the next several years, as part of the Q-Step Centre, she will be involved with helping to embed quantitative approaches in existing courses and developing new courses at the undergraduate level.

Niccole is currently finishing up a project that examines whether or not federal reforms in Germany resulted in greater policy variation at the regional level. She is preparing to start a new project focused on policy variation at the regional level in states with differing degrees of regional authority (unitary, devolved, and federal systems) and if this is associated with a varied ability to hold incumbents accountable for policy outcomes.

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First published: 15 September 2014