Gabi Gies
Author: Gabi Gies | Majors: Political Science & Psychology | Semester: Fall 2022
My name is Gabi Gies, and I am a senior political science and psychology student in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. I’m working with Dr. Geoboo Song, Associate Professor of Political Science, to analyze potential correlation between pharmaceutical political action committee contributions and legislative voting actions. This spring will be my third funded semester working on my thesis. After graduating, I will be taking a gap year to work and apply for law school.
After taking Dr. Karen Sebold’s class “Money and Politics” (PLSC 4343) during the fall of my junior year, I knew I wanted to learn more about the relationship between money and our political system. Media portrays lobbyists and politicians in very poor light, often painting the picture that politicians just take money from lobbyists for selfish gain and blindly follow the wishes of corporations and industries over the common citizen. This class gave me a newer perspective of the benefits of lobbying, including that experts in a niche industry can give an informed perspective to politicians balancing hundreds of issues.
Throughout high school, I worked at local pharmacy Collier Drug Store and observed first-hand how important affordable pharmaceutical access is and how many barriers there are to people getting necessary medicine. Living through the COVID-19 pandemic furthered this understanding of how important medical access is. My long-term professional goals include expanding affordable medical care, so this passion and my experience in Dr. Sebold’s class helped birth my thesis project.
One of my mentors in college was my advisor at the Volunteer Action Center. Bri Huett advised the Dream BIG volunteer program that I served on the leadership board for during my sophomore year. She was pursuing her PhD in public policy and Dr. Geoboo Song was her dissertation advisor. At the time, I was deciding whether to switch majors to political science and Bri connected me with Dr. Song. He was incredibly helpful in talking through future plans and career options. A year later, I reached back out to Dr. Song to discuss my thesis idea and to serve as my advisor. Dr. Song has been very supportive of my research and overall academics, especially for grant applications.
This semester, I have been working on compiling my data set. Using data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the Library of Congress, I’ve collected financial and legislative data. One initial hurdle was determining what legislation was relevant to look at. After discussions with Dr. Song, we decided to look at any legislation that would increase regulation of the pharmaceutical industry. We looked at the 116th Congress because it was recent and had many legislative pieces that related to pharmacy. We ended up with five pieces of legislation to analyze. I pulled voting records and legislator information from the Library of Congress website. Then, I pulled the PAC contributions of the top 5 pharmaceutical PACs to all legislators who voted on the pieces of legislation. Demographic information, including gender, race, party, leadership positions, and time in office were also collected.
Collecting the data and organizing it was a taxing process, but I was able to get help from Dr. Song and fellow students who had more experience using Excel than I do. Now that I have finished my data collection, I will spend January performing data analysis and the rest of the semester writing my thesis. If time allows, I may look to expand my data set now that the data collection process has been established. This semester, I also formed my thesis committee, which will consist of Dr. Karen Sebold and Dr. Kate Chapman. I will also apply to present my research during Undergraduate Research Week in the Poster Competition on campus.