When Pittsburgh resident Amber Seligson, a Cornell University doctoral student in government, first heard she'd been awarded a national predissertation fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, she said, "I was thrilled. It's extremely hard to get."

That's putting it mildly. The council, which is supported by the Ford Foundation, gave out only 24 such awards, choosing from thousands of doctoral students across the United States. The process is so selective that Seligson was the first Cornell winner in five years.

Seligson's research proposal began with her observation that Latin American countries that have experienced democratic gains now seem to be electing former authoritarians -- even people who were known to have been torturers -- to public offices. She wanted to find out why this might be so.

"People's understanding of what constitutes democracy may be different in places like Bolivia, Venezuela and Argentina than it is in the United States," Seligson suggested. "Perhaps Latin Americans conceptualize democracy as a system that promotes economic security, low crime rates and miminal corruption rather than unlimited civil liberties." Her research base will be Argentina, where she'll conduct and analyze a public opinion survey to find out how people there define good government and what sways them to vote for particular candidates.

Seligson's parents, Mitchell Seligson and Susan Berk-Seligson, are both Latin Americanists at the University of Pittsburgh -- her mother is a professor of Spanish linguistics, and her father is a political scientist. She learned Spanish early, picking up the language while accompanying them on research jaunts to places like Costa Rica.

She earned her B.S. at Columbia University, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1996, with honors in political science. But while Seligson was always interested in

Latin American democratization, she began her doctoral studies in government at Cornell looking at the influence of evangelicals in Latin America, where she initially thought all the action was.

A course with Professor Vivienne Shue helped inspire Seligson to shift her research to the course's topic, political culture, with an emphasis on issues of democratization, her first love. Other government department faculty members at Cornell who influenced her studies are her committee chair, Professor Sidney Tarrow, who teaches Social Movements and Contentious Politics; Professor Valerie Bunce, who teaches Comparative Democratization; and Assistant Professor Hector Schamis, who teaches Political Economy.

"My Cornell experience has been outstanding," Seligson says. "The professors have been extremely helpful and available, and the courses I took were excellent."

The predissertation fellowship will allow her to spend a year taking university courses in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she has never been, to learn more about the political culture and history of the region, before she begins her year of field research in the country's northern provinces. She'll returns to Cornell to complete her dissertation. After that she hopes to teach at the university level and continue her research.

Her most exciting involvement at Cornell this year was taking part in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, a cross-disciplinary series involving government, history, sociology and anthropology. As part of the series, she and other participants read papers throughout the year on democratization from professors all over the country. "It was a phenomenal experience," she says.

In addition to her research studies, Seligson has a penchant for creative writing, which she once taught. She still writes poems on the side and stays in touch with an inspirational teacher, Margherita Faulkner, whom she met when she was 9. Her hobbies also include weightlifting, African dance and cooking anything with asparagus.