DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

Linked fate, the concept introduced by Dawson almost three decades ago, reoriented the study of racism and political behavior in the United States. The scholarship traditionally had focused on the racial psychology of whites and how racism seeps into their political views and actions. Dawson proposed the Black utility heuristic theory and linked fate, its associated measure, to investigate the political behavior of Blacks, the minority group most harmed by racism. Since then, linked fate has become a ubiquitous variable of interest in research on minority group politics. Yet the research program around linked fate is due for some extension. Most studies gloss over the fact that the Black utility heuristic theory is historically and socially conditional.

This book provides readers with a clear and unbiased understanding of what it means to be LGBTQ in the United States in the 2020s. Beginning with the origins of LGBTQ identity and history, the book addresses the current status of the LGBTQ community; gender expectations and performance in American culture; transgender and non-binary identity; behaviors and outcomes associated with LGBTQ people; and, finally, diversity within the LGBTQ community. Utilizing authoritative sources and lay-friendly definitions and explanations, this work punctures myths, misconceptions, and incorrect assumptions about sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expectations and norms.

Over the last two decades, nonprofit “alt-labor” groups—a diverse lot of organizations consisting of community-based worker centers and other social and economic justice groups whose primary missions include fighting for workers’ rights—have emerged in numerous cities around the nation to help nonunionized, low-wage workers combat exploitation. During this time they have become increasingly adept at using public policy, rather than collective bargaining or direct economic interventions, to achieve their goals and to strengthen basic workers’ rights.

Al discusses the inspiration for his innovative CREED model, how his upbringing in New Jersey drove him to study racial justice, and why he believes corporations are not ready for Gen Z.

A study of Boston’s racial wealth gap made headlines in late 2017 when it revealed that the median net worth of the city’s Black households was only $8, compared to $247,000 among white households (Hill 2017; Johnson 2017; Muñoz et al. 2015). The gap in Boston may have been starker than in the nation as a whole, but the latter was also striking. In 2016, the median net worth of Black and Hispanic households nationwide was $17,000 and $20,700, respectively, compared to $171,000 for whites (Dettling et al. 2017). The disparities amongst households with children were even more pronounced. In 2016, Black households with children held 1 percent of the wealth of non-Hispanic white households with children (Percheski and Gibson-Davis 2020: 1).

In calling for articles for this special issue we sought to feature the institution of the US presidency and its implications for racial and ethnic politics in the United States. It was our sense that the race, ethnicity, and politics (REP) literature would benefit from such an emphasis by increasing and complementing the modest amount of extant research on the presidency within the subfield. At the time, bringing in racial dimensions would enrich the presidency research. While presidency scholars have often used case studies about issues racial and ethnic politics to develop theories about the functioning of the institution (see, for example, Graham, Reference Graham1990; Milkis et al., Reference Milkis, Tichenor and Blessing2013; Tichenor, Reference Tichenor2016), presidential studies writ large has been slow to adopt core theoretical perspectives from the REP subfield.

Dr. Alvin Tillery, Dr. Michael Minta and Dr. Jamil Scott discuss the growing power of Black and Latinos in Congress in relation to the BLM protest movement and if Congress and more mainstream Black and Latino civil rights organizations are addressing the priorities of the BLM movement.

Dr. Alvin Tillery, Dr. Michael Minta and Dr. Jamil Scott discuss the growing power of Black and Latinos in Congress in relation to the BLM protest movement and if Congress and more mainstream Black and Latino civil rights organizations are addressing the priorities of the BLM movement.

“If the school district wants to ensure that they’re talking to all the people, much like when we do the Census, you have to do the work of actually knocking on the doors and getting people who wouldn’t ordinarily come out, to come out,” said Sally Nuamah, a Northwestern University researcher who studies public participation in schools. “It’s about commitment and investment.”

More than one in three Afghanistan and Iraq veterans said in a survey that they perceived extremism as existing within the military and within the veteran community, the head of a veterans’ organization told the House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday. According to an ongoing survey of over 3,500 former members of military members by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, more than one-third of the veterans also said they have directly experienced extremism, IAVA CEO Jeremy Butler told the committee.

On entend peu parler de la commission d’enquête sur les événements du 6 janvier, les plus violents au Capitole américain depuis que les Britanniques l’ont incendié en 1814. Pourtant, cet événement tragique aurait pu faire encore plus de victimes et de nouvelles révélations suggèrent que l’ex-président Trump avait bel et bien l’intention de manipuler le processus pour rester en poste malgré le verdict de l’électorat.

Listen to Marina Henke and Julian Wucherpfennig provide an overview of the theoretical dimensions of deterrence to launch speaker series. On October 4, 2021, Marina Henke, Professor of International Relations at the Hertie School and Director of the Centre for International Security, and Julian Wucherpfennig, Professor of International Affairs and Security also at the Hertie School, spoke about the art and science of deterrence.

The Block Museum is excited to announce the 2021-2022 cohort of Block Museum Student Associates. This annual program renames and reimagines the museum’s former Student Docent program to better reflect the key role that this group of Northwestern scholars plays in animating the vision of the museum.

The Biden administration should open new embassies and increase its diplomatic force in Pacific island nations if it hopes to counteract a rising China, foreign policy and diplomatic experts told a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. Leveraging unique advantages that only the United States holds -- like close personal and historical ties, military cooperation and long-standing soft power programs -- should be a core priority of the Biden administration's Indo-Pacific Strategy, they said.

More than one in three Afghanistan and Iraq veterans said in a survey that they perceived extremism as existing within the military and within the veteran community, the head of a veterans’ organization told the House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday.

On entend peu parler de la commission d’enquête sur les événements du 6 janvier, les plus violents au Capitole américain depuis que les Britanniques l’ont incendié en 1814.

The Office of Diversity and Inclusion is pleased to announce our 2021–22 diversity and inclusion interns. The primary focus of the interns will be collaborating with the associate dean of diversity and inclusion, select TGS staff members, and campus and external partners to assist with the research, planning, and execution of TGS diversity, inclusion, and retention events and initiatives. This year's interns are as follows:

In her winning paper "The Federal Case for #JudicialReview", Prof. Delaney revisits @JeremyJWaldron 's "The Core of the Case Against Judicial Review" (https://bit.ly/3mMrCJv) and argues that in #federations things look very different, indeed.

The iLCSS members will present three projects, followed by Q&A. 1. All Minorities at Risk (AMAR, https://ilcss.umd.edu/amar), which analyzes the status and conflicts of over 1200 communal groups around the world. Hanna Birnir is leading efforts for an AMAR 2.0 that uses NLP to update the existing manually coded dataset. 2. The research in partnership with the fact checker organizations in Latin America and the Inter-American Development Bank, which test for the content sharing mechanisms that explain the amplification of false content as well as the amplification of corrections. 3. Experimental research that combines social media data and randomized survey experiments.

The Block Museum is excited to announce the 2021-2022 cohort of Block Museum Student Associates. This annual program renames and reimagines the museum’s former Student Docent program to better reflect the key role that this group of Northwestern scholars plays in animating the vision of the museum.

Stephen Nelson's (Northwestern) research explores a variety of topics fundamental to sovereign debt markets, including the politics of IMF lending and the political dynamics of borrowing in developing and emerging market countries. We are huge fans of Steve and his work, which tackles important questions in unfailingly original ways. He joins us to talk about how domestic politics affects the imposition of capital controls and about the risk that IMF lending programs might lead to worse human rights outcomes.

Too often, communities that have come to be seen as minorities are lumped together as a homogeneous unit subject to the whims of larger more powerful groups. In this way, things happen to 'the Armenians' or 'the Kurds". Rarely do they act on their own, and when the do, such acts are often described as the gesture of a collective bloc - if they are described at all.

In this chapter, we explore a role for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the emerging military artificial intelligence (AI) governance architecture. As global powers compete for capabilities that AI can offer, NATO has the challenging task of recalibrating strategic relationships in the coming years. NATO has begun to recognise technological change as a necessary variable, and in turn adapt its organisational composition and strategy to increase the Alliance’s capacity to meet emerging security challenges.

Too often, communities that have come to be seen as minorities are lumped together as a homogeneous unit subject to the whims of larger more powerful groups. In this way, things happen to 'the Armenians' or 'the Kurds". Rarely do they act on their own, and when the do, such acts are often described as the gesture of a collective bloc - if they are described at all. It is against this homogenizing shorthand, which incidentally is employed by outside observers, nationalists, and ethnic entrepreneurs alike, that Tsolin Nalbantian is writing in her new work, Armenians Beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon their Own.

This episode of the Global Lunchbox podcast features a conversation with political scientist Kevin Mazur about his new book Revolution in Syria: Identity, Networks, and Repression (Cambridge University Press).

As the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Quebec Studies, he will be studying the institutional legacies of the French colonial regime in North America.

In the realm of international security, deterrence is one of the most widely used political strategies, yet its’ application is complex and often poorly understood. Thus, this year’s iteration of the Centre for International Security’s speaker series “Challenges in International Security” will shed light on the various aspects of deterrence and how it operates in the different international security domains: conventional, nuclear, legal, economic and cyber.

Is South Sudan coming to terms with the violent five-year civil war that left 400,000 dead, and millions displaced? By 2018, a peace deal recommitted both sides to establishing a Hybrid Court for South Sudan, along with a truth-telling mechanism and reparations. The peace agreement that supporters and opponents of President Salva Kiir had agreed to now hangs by a thread. To date, none of the peace agreement’s transitional justice mechanisms are operational. And, in an apparent setback, the United States reportedly pulled its funding for the court, a move some analysts see as a quiet signal that U.S. officials have given up on the court. Why did parties initially commit to establishing this court, rather than pursue cases through South Sudan’s domestic legal system or the International Criminal Court? And what happens now to the hybrid court?

Lucien Ferguson is a JD/PhD candidate in a combined program with Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and the Department of Political Science in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. His research examines the legal, political, and intellectual traditions of rights in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history. Lucien is a 2021–22 Franke Graduate Fellow and a teaching assistant with the Center for Legal Studies. How would you describe your research and/or work to a non-academic audience? I study the histories of abolition and civil rights in the U.S. with special attention to how activists in those movements theorized what they were doing. In my dissertation, I look at how many of these activists saw themselves as combatting global systems of “caste,” a form of subjection they traced to the processes of European colonialism.

This year's iteration of our speaker series Challenges in International Security examines the concept of deterrence, often defined as “the action of discouraging an action or event through instilling doubt or fear of the consequences” (Oxford Dictionary). In the realm of international security, deterrence is one of the most widely used political strategies, yet it’s application is very complex and often poorly understood. The speaker series will shed light on the various aspects of deterrence and how it operates in the different international security domains: conventional, nuclear, legal, economic and cyber. To kick us off, Professor Marina Henke and Professor Julian Wucherpfennig will provide an overview of the theoretical dimensions of deterrence. How is it supposed to work in theory?

U.S. Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee and Al Green — both Houston Democrats — testified Monday at the Texas Capitol against proposed district maps that would break up communities of Black voters and pit the two incumbents against each other. “It doesn’t look right for the only two persons in the state of Texas to be running against each other in a congressional district from the same party to be of African ancestry,” Green said at a hearing of the the Texas Senate Special Committee on Redistricting. Green and Jackson Lee are two out of five Black members of Texas’ 36-person congressional delegation, but in the proposed redrawing of the districts, Lee is drawn out of her own district and looped into Green’s.

The settler-colonial and republican principles of early U.S. politics tend to be studied as paradoxical ambitions of American nation-building. This article argues that early republican thought in the United States developed through what I call ‘ideological code-switching’, a vernacular practice that allowed popular actors to strategically vacillate between anti-colonial and neo-colonial discourses as complementary principles of revolutionary change. I illustrate these claims by tracing a genealogy of anti- and neo-colonial thought from the founding of the United States to its transnational emergence in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I demonstrate that ideological code-switching first appeared as a rhetorical strategy among the Federalist debates, where Publius argued for the feasibility of expansionist republics via a hemispheric account of American exceptionalism.

This new strategic partnership announced last week between the United States, the U. K and Australia felt for some, particularly in Europe particularly France, like a diplomatic bomb had just been dropped on them. So Marina , I wanted to start by asking you now that the dust has settled a bit, what's the view in Europe? And is this like the death of transatlantic system, as some statements and headlines have led us to believe?

Affective polarization—the tendency of ordinary partisans to dislike and distrust those from the other party—is a defining feature of contemporary American politics. High levels of out-party animus stem, in part, from misperceptions of the other party’s voters. Specifically, individuals misestimate the ideological extremity and political engagement of typical out-partisans. When partisans are asked about “Democrats” or “The Republican Party,” they bring to mind stereotypes of engaged ideologues, and hence express contempt for the other party. The reality, however, is that such individuals are the exception rather than the norm.

Sen. Ted Cruz’s challenge to a federal election law limiting how candidates can recoup loans they make to their own campaigns has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court on Thursday added Federal Election Commission v. Ted Cruz for Senate, et al. to its docket. If the justices affirm lower courts’ rulings in favor of the Texas Republican, the case would mark another conservative legal victory striking down campaign spending limits under the First Amendment.

Katharine Floros' conversation with Northwestern PhD Candidate Justin Zimmerman couldn't fit into the regular Classroom schedule, so the conversation continued in Office Hours, a bonus episode of The Politics Classroom.

"The papers reveal that dynamics that may be imperiling democracy do not straightforwardly reduce to affective polarization. There are more nuanced dynamics to which we need to attend. For example, when it comes to anti-democratic behaviors, other possible forces include racial/ethnic antagonism or partisan extremity. For violence, perhaps anti-establishment attitudes orientation matter. This is not to say affective polarization does not matter as I think there is sufficient evidence that it can under particular conditions. However, how it matters may be less than straightforward."

Trained as a political scientist, Sally Nuamah’s research sits at the intersection of race, gender, education policy, and political behavior. Her work is focused on using both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the political consequences of public policies for Black people across the United States, as well as in Ghana and South Africa. Nuamah's forthcoming book, Closed for Democracy, investigates the political consequences of mass closures on Black Americans' relationship with government. Research from this book was recently published in the American Political Science Review and Perspectives on Politics. Her newest research is focused on the punishment of Black women and girls and its consequences for their participation in American democracy. An article based on this work was named the 2021 “Best Paper on Intersectionality” from the American Political Science Association.

Understanding how people form opinions about climate change has proven to be challenging. One of the most common approaches to studying climate change beliefs is to assume people employ motivated reasoning. We first detail how scholars in this area have applied motivated reasoning perspectives, identifying a variety of different judgment goals on which they have focused. We next argue that existing findings fail to conclusively show motivated reasoning, much less isolate which specific goals guide opinion formation about climate change.

Indeed, if you look beyond the partisan media’s name-calling, you can find surprising amounts of bipartisan activity, as political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong showed in her 2015 book “Is Bipartisanship Dead?” The same is true in a more recent working paper by Harbridge-Yong and fellow political scientists Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman. They found that lawmakers who cosponsor more bipartisan bills are more effective in passing legislation.

"Es difícil hacer pronósticos, algo que tiene el voto voluntario es que es precisamente difícil saber quiénes a último momento se van a acercar o no a las urnas y por eso las encuestas están fallando tanto".

This episode of the Politics Classroom podcast features a conversation with political scientist Justin Zimmerman about Race, Ethnicity and Politics. Justin Zimmerman is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University Studying Race and Institutional Trust

“It’s very disturbing the way he owns a title which many would feel very uncomfortable with,” Mneesha Gellman, associate professor of political science at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, told i. “He came in as a strong-arm leader, he’s shown that every step of the way.”

The Gabriel A. Almond Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best doctoral dissertation in the field of comparative politics. David Peyton is a Donald R. Beall Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School. He will begin work in the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the U.S. Treasury Department in the fall of 2021.

Does affective polarization—the tendency to view opposing partisans negatively and co-partisans positively—undermine support for democratic norms? We argue that it does, through two mechanisms. First, in an age of elite polarization, norms have been politicized. This leads affectively polarized partisans to oppose particular constitutional protections when their party is in power but support them when their party is out of power, via a cue-taking mechanism. Second, affective polarization may generate biases that motivate voters to restrict the other party’s rights. Using nationally representative surveys, we find strong support for the cue-taking argument. In 2019, with a Republican administration in power, affectively polarized Republicans opposed constitutional protections while affectively polarized Democrats supported them. The reverse was true in 2012 during a Democratic administrat

During the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying recession, millions of low-wage workers have become increasingly vulnerable to exploitation. Limited scholarly attention, however, has been paid to the relationship between rising unemployment, labor standards violations, and government enforcement capacities during periods of economic recession. In this article, the authors begin to draw out these connections. First, they turn to the case of the Great Recession of 2008-2010 in the United States to examine the relationship between rising unemployment and minimum wage violations, using Current Population Survey data to estimate minimum wage violation rates by industry and demographic group. They find that minimum wage violations rose in tandem with rising unemployment, were shouldered by some groups of low-wage workers more than others, and unexpectedly affected certain industries more than

There is a common perception that the US military predominantly recruits individuals from the most disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds with limited other career options. This column argues that this is no longer the case. Skill-biased technological change has led the US military to recruit more higher-skilled personnel since the 1990s, and while in 1979 the probability of joining the military was clearly higher for those with lower-than-average family income, for the 1997 cohort the probability was much more evenly distributed.

Kevin Mazur, a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University, talks about his latest book, Revolution in Syria: Identity, Networks, and Repression, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book shows that the challenge to the Syrian regime did not erupt neatly along ethnic boundaries, and that lines of access to state-controlled resources played a critical structuring role; the ethnicization of conflict resulted from failed incumbent efforts to shore up network ties and the violence that the Asad regime used to crush dissent by challengers excluded from those networks. (Starts at 0:48). Faten Ghosn of the University of Arizona joins the podcast to discuss her article, “The Journey Home: Violence, Anchoring, and Refugee Decisions to Return” (co-authored by Tiffany Chu, Miranda Simon, Alex Braithwaite, Michael Frith, and Joanna Jandali), published by Cambridge University Press. (Starts a

In the United States, politics has become tribal and personalized. The influence of partisan divisions has extended beyond the political realm into everyday life, affecting relationships and workplaces as well as the ballot box. To help explain this trend, we examine the stereotypes Americans have of ordinary Democrats and Republicans. Using data from surveys, experiments, and Americans' own words, we explore the content of partisan stereotypes and find that they come in three main flavors—parties as their own tribes, coalitions of other tribes, or vehicles for political issues. These different stereotypes influence partisan conflict: people who hold trait-based stereotypes tend to display the highest levels of polarization, while holding issue-based stereotypes decreases polarization. This finding suggests that reducing partisan conflict does not require downplaying partisan divisions

Leaders of Black Lives Matter intended an intersectional movement, but BLM is not always interpreted as intersectional by the public. I theorize how Black Americans think about intersectionality in BLM and report the results of a survey experiment to test the effect of three of these frames—Black Nationalist, Feminist, and LGBTQ+ Rights—on the mobilization of African Americans. Exposure to these frames generates differential effects on respondents’ willingness to support, trust, and write representatives about the Black Lives Matter movement. These findings raise new questions about the deployment of intersectional messaging strategies within movements for racial justice.

This Forward integrates international law, international relations, and global history scholarship to understand two global trends that are in tension with each other: 1) the shift from European colonial dominance to a law-based multilateralism, which enabled a more equal and inclusive international law and 2) global capitalism which across time has been a political and economic force that, left to its own devices, promotes exclusion and inequality. Alter builds an encompassing conception of global economic law to show the interplay of colonial law, private law, domestic law and international law in enabling and constraining global capitalism across time.

“It’s hard for political scientists who are doing this analysis with tons and tons of data to effectively sort out, so it could be really hard to sort out here,” she said. “We may need to do just a little bit more work to sort through what specifically happened, and it may speak to how challenges differ across different women of color.”

What does the superhero—an icon of the American imaginary—communicate about the politics of violence? Responding to nationwide protests of police brutality in 2020, law enforcement officers adopted the skull logo of The Punisher, an exceptionally violent fictional vigilante. That adoption signals what I call the privilege of violence: the force individuals may deploy based on normative expectations concerning gender and race. Comparing Marvel-Netflix productions including The Punisher series, I identify three modes of violence in operation: the unrestricted rage of a white male vigilante, the vulnerability of a feminist heroine, and the sacrificial control of a Black male hero. The article demonstrates the gendered and racialized conditions under which heroic violence is rendered legitimate to American audiences. As I conclude, Punisher’s unrestricted violence valorizes white male

Cet article analyse l'effet du changement des règles de procédure sur la dynamique des discours parlementaires à la Chambre des communes du Canada entre 1901 et 2015. Au cours de cette période, plusieurs nouvelles règles ont été introduites afin de réduire les possibilités de prise de parole des députés pendant les débats, de sorte que le gouvernement puisse mener à bien ses travaux dans un délai acceptable. Notre analyse porte sur l'impact de ces changements de règles sur le contenu et l'orientation de tous les discours individuels prononcés par les députés. Nos résultats indiquent que les règles parlementaires ont eu un effet important sur le sujet et la durée des débats. Nos résultats confirment également que les changements de procédure ont contribué à accroître la polarisation partisane au sein du Parlement canadien au fil du temps, et ont réduit de façon disproportionnée

“Corporate America has an opportunity to maximize value by making DEI systemic, by recruiting and retaining the best talent, by enhancing the ingenuity and creativity of their employee teams, by strengthening current relationships with customers, clients, and investors, by generating new client and customer opportunities, and by building stronger and more flexible organizations.”

"What we’re hearing: Alvin B. Tillery Jr., a professor of American politics at Northwestern University, will head the DEI practice."

This summer’s series of extreme wildfires, hurricanes, and tropical storms have made it more apparent than ever that the effects of climate change are here. Limiting the damage caused by future disasters will require a whole-of-government approach — one not limited to what the federal government can do. There’s a host of ideas that states and municipalities could implement to curb greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in some of the world’s biggest polluters: American cities.

This year marks the end of a 20-year joint NATO mission in Afghanistan. The withdrawal of American and German troops is marked by negative headlines. The strengthened Taliban took over many parts of the country, the president fled the country, and military troops surrendered the territory to the Taliban and only slightly opposed the takeover. Pictures and reports from Kabul airport state of chaos and desperation of Afghans trying to flee their country. A debate is sparked in EU countries about the safe admission and transfer of local forces. Moreover, the non-exclusive military support, which also included development aid in infrastructure, women's rights and stabilisation of the political system, is dismissed as being ineffective. This panel discussion not only looks at the current developments, responsibilities of NATO cooperation and the state of affairs for the international

Inequities in science have long been documented in the United States. Particular groups such as low income, non-White people, and indigenous people fare worse when it comes to healthcare, infectious diseases, climate change, and access to technology. These types of inequities can be partially addressed with targeted interventions aimed at facilitating access to scientific information. Doing so requires knowledge about what different groups think when it comes to relevant scientific topics. Yet, most data collections on science-based issues do not include enough respondents from these populations. The researchers discuss this gap and offer an overview of pertinent sampling and administrative considerations in studying underserved populations. A sustained effort to study diverse populations can help address extant inequities.

"Since the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, the country and its allies have been in an ongoing battle against terrorism. It is a struggle on all levels: military, police, secret service, diplomatic and social. The balance sheet is controversial. There have been no comparable acts of terrorism since then, but new trouble spots have emerged and Islamism remains dangerous. What's next?"

On July 1, 1997, sovereignty over Hong Kong was transferred from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China, and, so the story goes, the sun finally set on the British Empire. Except it didn’t. As Paul Scott masterfully explicates in The Privy Council and the constitutional legacies of Empire, the Empire endures, both in terms of ongoing control over Overseas Territories unlikely to become independent, and in the retention of formal mechanisms of constitutional governance which hide this imperial residue from the domestic constitutional order.

The study of voter competence has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, but at this point there are diminishing returns to the endeavor. Voter competence is unlikely to improve dramatically enough to make much of a difference to our politics. By contrast, the competence of officials can and does vary substantially over short periods of time. To understand variations in government performance, therefore, we would do better to focus on the abilities and performance of officials, not ordinary citizens. We elaborate on this argument, emphasizing the “incompetence multiplier”: the way that the properties of hierarchies can amplify the incompetence of those in powerful positions. We illustrate our argument with an extended discussion of the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Latino and Black workers are far more likely to be paid below minimum wage than their white counterparts and found that from 2009 to 2019, the lowest-paid workers nationwide lost 21 percent of their incomes because they were paid less than their states' minimum wages.

Como dice la canción de Billy Joel Nosotros no empezamos el fuego. El 9 de agosto pasado Naciones Unidas presentó un informe alarmante sobre el calentamiento global. El informe del Grupo Intergubernamental de Expertos sobre el Cambio Climático (IPCC) emitió un código rojo a la humanidad, advirtiendo de que la emergencia climática es irreversible y que el mundo seguirá sufriendo desastres ambientales cada vez más frecuentes y violentos. Aunque los gobiernos tomaran acciones radicales de forma inmediata, los expertos alertan de que continuarán el derretimiento de los hielos polares, el aumento del nivel del mar, inundaciones, la desertificación, las sequías, las islas de calor urbanas y otros efectos del cambio global.

In 1841 the German political economist Friedrich List published The National System of Political Economy, a scathing attack on the principles of free trade espoused by Adam Smith. A better alternative, in List’s view, was the position of Edmund Burke, who supposedly understood that the economic policies of a state must be determined by its particular national interests, even if that meant ditching free trade for protectionism. This reading of Burke as an anti-Smithian economic nationalist has not aged well, and in recent decades scholars have begun to regard Burke and Smith as more aligned on economic matters than previously assumed.

Joining France 24 is Dr. Romain Malejacq, Professor at the Centre for International Conflict Analysis and Management (CICAM) at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Dr. Malejacq is also the author of "Warlord Survival: The Delusion of State Building in Afghanistan." In the book, he explains how the war in Afghanistan, in the aftermath of 9/11, quickly morphed into a state-building mission. Reflecting on the "huge failure" of US foreign policy, Dr. Malejacq submits that it is impossible that "the international community, as the West, can impose a state through war. There is a possibility to do peacebuilding, to negotiate, to bring people to the table. But not by changing regimes." What we can deduce from the longest war in US history, explains Dr. Romain Malejacq, is that "changing regimes and trying to build a state, according to our own vision, according to our own principles

Karen J. Alter is the Norman Dwight Harris Professor of International Relations, and an expert in international relations and international law and global economic governance. She is the author or editor of six books and over sixty articles and book chapters. Her interests span international relations, multilateralism, the law and politics of international courts, international regime complexity, global ethics and global capitalism and law. You can read about Alter’s newest work examining the legal underpinnings of global capitalism here She also has new work on backlash politics and the contested authority of international institutions.

“We’re looking forward to finding out the extent to which students now reconnect with schools and show up again,” Skogan said, pointing out that COVID-19’s continued spread has made parents “very leery about sending their kids back to school right now.”

MPOSS is a Zoom seminar series on minority politics in comparative politics, American politics, and political psychology. We take a broad perspective on what kind of research falls within the scope of Minority Politics. Social scientists have long been involved in studying the ways that groups define themselves according to national origin, ethnicity, religion, race, caste, tribe, region, gender, and/or class markers. All of those who are interested in learning more about groups, defined alongside these dynamic lines, will find a home in this seminar series.

While part of the opposition seeks to hasten the fall of the presidency of Pedro Castillo, another group of actors seems determined to extend it. In Peru, democracy no longer seems like the only game on the table.

As we discussed in a blog last week, practitioners in the Transparency, Participation and Accountability (TPA) sector face an important question: how can portfolio-level Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) help us to learn about the collection of evidence of TPA’s impacts? And in doing so, how might this help us move beyond supposed “existential threats” to the sector.

Why did you choose Northwestern? Northwestern's stellar reputation and doctoral program in political economy provided the best balance between social scientific rigor and area studies expertise. How would you describe your research and/or work to a non-academic audience? What was it then and/or what it is now? I analyze the national policy-private sector nexus in how governments try to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship. I started out as a Japan-specialist but have since expanded to a pan-Asian focus including such economies as China, India, and Singapore.

"Biden hasn't had the courage of changing course in Afghanistan. People feel that the U.S. just does whatever it wants. Everyone is talking about it, and everyone is seeing that we - these scenes from the Kabul airports. And this will stay."

Shootings throughout all of Chicago this year have risen by about 10% over last year, according to Chicago Police Department data, while expressway shootings during the first nine months of the year have already increased more than 24% over the whole of last year. There were 52 expressway shootings in 2019 and 43 in 2018. “I think it’s an extension of precisely the horrific problems these neighborhoods have,” said Wesley Skogan, emeritus professor of political science at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Skogan noted that the expressways with the most shootings — usually the Dan Ryan and the Eisenhower — run through historically high-crime areas, in some cases linking different cliques or gangs.

"Because of the misconceptions swirling around CRT, let’s first be very clear about what it is, and isn’t. Simply put, CRT is an intellectual movement focused on how systemic racism has shaped our legal history, says Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., an associate professor of American politics at Northwestern University who researches CRT. Legal scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, and Richard Delgado helped lay down the groundwork beginning in the 1970s. Tillery says they make a set of arguments he thinks most people would agree with: Race is socially constructed — typically through the law and government institutions — not biologically based. As a result, racism is a permanent feature of American society that we need to deal with as it surfaces — it won't "evaporate into thin air" as our attitudes toward communities of color change, Tillery explains. Finally, we can make big gains

Effective immediately, about 55,000 people in North Carolina who had been prohibited, by law, from voting can now do so. It came earlier this week after Judge Lisa Bell extended a preliminary injunction against those on "community supervision" - a group that includes those who have been convicted of a state or federal felony and are still under supervision, but are not in prison. As reporter Jordan Wilkie explains, it's the largest expansion of disproportionately Black enfranchisement since the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

How should we "fix" digital technologies to support democracy instead of undermining it? In Designing for Democracy, Jennifer Forestal argues that accurately evaluating the democratic potential of digital spaces means studying how the built environment--a primary component of our "modern public square"--structures our activity, shapes our attitudes, and supports the kinds of relationships and behaviors democracy requires. This book is available for preorder and ship later this year.

In virtually all respects, the Trump presidency has disrupted patterns of presidential governance. However, does Trump signify a disruption, not merely in political style but in regime type in the United States? Assessing Trump's potential impact on democratic institutions requires an analysis of how these institutions—including especially the executive branch—have developed over time as well as an examination of the intersecting evolution of political parties, racial ideologies, and governing mechanisms. To explore how time and temporality have shaped the Trump presidency, editors Zachary Callen and Philip Rocco have brought together scholars in the research tradition of American political development (APD), which explicitly aims to consider how interactions between a range of institutions result in the shifting of power and authority in American politics, with careful attention paid

"In discussions about the connection between migration and the Arab uprisings, perhaps no expression has been more commonplace than 'refugee crisis.' Commentators have typically invoked this term to refer to Europe's struggle with large numbers of refugees and migrants reaching European borders since 2015. They sometimes also invoke it with reference to countries in the Middle East and North Africa, where the overwhelming majority of the region's forced migrants continue to reside in their countries of the first refuge. But what does 'refugee crisis' mean for refugees themselves? I explore this question based on open-ended interviews that I have conducted with more than 450 displaced Syrians across five continents since 2012. I discuss a major crisis that emerges repeatedly in those conversations, as it does across various mediums of Syrian self-expression: the crisis of dignity.

"The crisis in Afghanistan has attracted enormous attention, raised concerns and also raised numerous questions. It is not the end of the United States, NATO or the West, as some have said. The United States and NATO allies are leaving Afghanistan not because they are defeated militarily, but because they are politically less and less interested in the country considered, rightly or wrongly, of little relevance compared to other challenges (pandemic, climate change and China). Getting rid of a source of cost is not usually the reason why empires collapse, quite the opposite."

Weinberg College recognizes that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the research of many faculty members. In response, 27 faculty were awarded the Weinberg Research Recovery Grant to provide support for research recovery. The grant proposals were reviewed by a faculty panel for quality, creativity, the potential impact of the proposed research, and the potential to address pandemic-related research recovery. The Weinberg Research Recovery Grant supports either one course release or?one quarter of graduate student support and may include a request for research funds, and may include a request for research funds.

The concept of rural consciousness has gained a significant amount of traction over the past several years, as evidenced by hundreds of citations and its inclusion within the most recent pilot of the ANES. However, many have questioned whether rural consciousness is appreciably different from racial prejudice. We assessed this issue by distributing a survey study to Wisconsinites living in rural and urban communities, and by examining the relationships between rural consciousness, racial resentment, and political attitudes in the ANES 2019 Pilot Study. The survey study revealed that participants living in rural parts of Wisconsin—unlike those living in urban parts—tended to think of city dwellers as possessing more negative attributes. In addition, the survey study revealed that rural participants thought of Milwaukeeans, specifically, as possessing stereotypically Black attributes.

A Northwestern University study released in July stated that the vaccination rate among those who used only Facebook as a source for information is 40% lower than for those who use multiple sources for information on Covid-19.

Why did it come to this, who has what interests and what happens now? Questions from Mitri Sirin to the professor for international politics Marina Henke.

"Kabul fell, the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan and it was therefore necessary to anticipate the withdrawal of the United States and the Coalition. What to do now? The answer depends on what you want to achieve."

"According to Malejacq, it is a realistic scenario that this group will come under fire. “Maybe the leaders claim not to retaliate, but they can't vouch for all commanders. It is quite possible that the Taliban capture, torture or kill this group. A person I have worked with has already traveled overnight from Herat to Kabul with his family. Now the Taliban is already there. What should he do now? ' 'What emotions do I feel? I am angry, sad and worried. I would like to reassure my contacts, but nothing I say will make the situation better. I have no words for the current situation. It is so very difficult.'"

Afghanistan, the anatomy of a strategic debacle and a human tragedy They talk about it: Mimosa Martini., Michele Boldrin, Andrea Gilli and Mauro Gilli.

Political scientist Malejacq does not currently see a hugely increased threat from Afghanistan for international terrorism. The Taliban are mainly concerned with Afghanistan itself. But Al-Qaeda and IS are still present in the country. He believes the ties between al-Qaeda and the Taliban are important for the new rulers in Kabul: an outright break with the terror group could be bad for some of the Taliban's rank and file. In Khorasan province, there is a branch of IS that, according to Malejacq, has little support in Afghanistan, is relatively small and is at war with al-Qaeda.

“The way the Taliban has taken over so quickly this week reveals how shallow the U.S. effort really was: A Potemkin village in Kabul funded by U.S. taxpayers and kept standing by never-ending U.S. military activity. Since 2002, the U.S. has been propping up a puppet government in Kabul for week after week, decade after decade, president after president. Repeated promises by the U.S. military that victory was just around the corner were fantasy. Biden deserves a lot of credit for taking the U.S. out of the picture."

"They could have tried to empower the regime, the government, and really condition the withdrawal on progress in the Taliban government negotiations. And they didn't. They said we're going to be gone by September 11 and then by August 31. And they just rushed towards the exit, and they really abandoned the military and the people of Afghanistan."

"There was little doubt given the heavy concessions made to the Taliban, almost without compensation, in the context of this catastrophic agreement. One of its clauses certainly provided for suspending the withdrawal of American troops until the progress of the “inter-Afghan dialogue” in which the Taliban had committed to participate. But it soon became clear that the Trump administration was determined to pack up quickly, no matter what."

In the aftermath of the fall of the Afghan capital, Kabul, in the hands of the Taliban , Romain Malejacq, specialist in Afghanistan , believes on franceinfo Monday August 16 that "the Taliban have absolutely no interest in exerting violence" but he ensures that their ideology "has not changed" , 20 years after the end of their regime. Professor of political science at the University of Radboud, in the Netherlands, he underlines that the Taliban are "still very close to Al-Qaeda" even if the links, in particular financial, have changed. And he qualifies as "terrible" the silence maintained so far by the American president, Joe Biden.

The Taliban insurgents seized on Wednesday the city of Faizabad, the eighth provincial capital that came under their control in six days, strengthening their grip on northern Afghanistan against a backdrop of withdrawal from the country of American forces and NATO. The Taliban now control 65% of Afghan territory and are on the verge of seizing 11 provincial capitals, a senior European Union official said. For Romain Malejacq, Professor of Political Science at the Center for International Conflict Analysis and Management (CICAM), "this is really the big turning point". He warns that "if Mazar falls, the situation will become catastrophic and we will not be able to prevent the Taliban from regaining power." Mazar-i-Sharif is the largest city in the north of the country besieged by insurgents. Mr. Malejacq observes that "the humanitarian crisis is underway. We can see that the Afghan popula

"Studies of policy feedback have produced an increasingly nuanced understanding of when, why, and how public policies generate—or fail to generate—political effects that entrench the policies themselves and provide benefits to their proponents. Left open, however, is the question of whether policies can paradoxically generate political benefits for those who opposed them. This paper extends the study of policy feedback by exploring the mechanisms through and conditions under which organized groups can counterintuitively use policy losses to build power moving forward. It then demonstrates how post-loss power building operates by exploring the National Rifle Association’s historical use of gun policy losses to reinforce a shared identity among its supporters, which it later uses to spur collective action on behalf of gun rights. The analysis shows how policy outcomes can interact with the

"The politics of environmental justice increasingly feature in environmental governance across multiple levels. Environmental defenders risk their lives to protect land, water, and forests. Non-human actors like rivers are gaining rights. Frontline environmental justice communities now include nation-states like Fiji that faces existential threats from climate change. Indigenous Peoples’ fights for self-determination illuminate how deeply connected and inseparable are the politics of sovereignty, representation, and environment. This chapter explores these developments to chart and examine how a politics of environmental justice can inform environmental and social policies by treating environmental justice as a driver, rather than unintended consequence, of policy and politics. Through this critical, comparative review, the chapter illuminates how and why environmental justice concerns

Northwestern Political Scientist Mary McGrath looks into this question in her paper “Economic Behavior and The Partisan Perceptual Screen.” By combing through data about survey responses and spending patterns before and after presidential elections, she investigates whether partisans truly believe it when they say the economy is getting better when one of their own occupies the White House. If partisans do believe what they say, shouldn’t their financial decisions change accordingly? And if these decisions don’t change, what does that mean for how we should think about survey responses in general?

Collaborative methodology may take a range of forms across many different kinds of research projects. This article explores the importance of collaboration with indigenous communities who are key stakeholders in research, meaning that they ultimately are the ones living with the reality that is being researched and thus have a vested interest in the research process and findings. At the same time, there are real logistical challenges to collaboration that are worth discussion. How is trust built in relation to researcher positionality? How much control are researchers willing to relinquish to facilitate truly collaborative processes? Empirically, this article draws on a multi-year project on youth identity consolidation and resistance to culturecide – cultural genocide – with the Yurok Tribe of Northern California and a Zapotec community in Oaxaca, Mexico.

National security experts rarely consider the complexities of the American diet and food systems being tied to United States (U.S.) military readiness and effectiveness. Similarly missed is the link between food insecurity and environmental damage or climate change, which contribute to second- and third-order effects that could undermine U.S. national interests. Most views only narrowly focus on the end states of Western profligacy as threats to American national security. They especially note the medical costs of unhealthy military personnel and how obesity levels undermine military readiness. In some cases, they note relationships between food insecurity, insurgency, and political instability; however, policy prescriptions are more reactive to, than proscriptive of, the root causes fueling such issues.

Peru: What does Pedro Castillo's first week as president leave behind? We analyze it with the political scientist Rodrigo Barrenechea, from Lima

The Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) is pleased to welcome its 2021-2022 cohort of faculty, postdoctoral, and graduate student affiliates. This year’s affiliates represent institutions spanning the Research Triangle and the globe, including North Carolina Central University, Stanford, Princeton, ITESO University (Mexico), and Oxford. They bring expertise in mis- and disinformation, health communication, surveillance, public policy, far-right media ecosystems, and more.

"Not only are few US airports among the world’s best, but overall, they are in bad shape: In 2021, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave America’s aviation system a D+, largely because airports’ basic inefficiencies and lack of space lead to problems like delays and overcrowding. The airport grade was worse than those of other, oft-maligned parts of US transportation infrastructure, like bridges, which earned a C, and roads, which were given a D. However, federal help for airports may be on the way. The White House and a bipartisan group of senators are working on a plan for a roughly $1 trillion investment in US infrastructure, a number that includes $25 billion for airports."

Recent attacks on US humanities and social sciences scholars have reignited discussions of digital harassment in academia. These events, including Rep. Mark Green’s attack on Lynne Chandler García and Virginia GOP Chairman Rich Anderson’s attack on Larry Sabato highlight the barrage of online harassment some scholars experience. Pew Research defines online harassment as “offensive name-calling, purposeful embarrassment, stalking, physical threats, harassment over a sustained period of time, or sexual harassment” via the internet.

How does protest advancing diverse claims turn into violent conflict occurring primarily along ethnic lines? This book examines that question in the context of Syria, drawing insight from the evolution of conflict at the local level. Kevin Mazur shows that the challenge to the Syrian regime did not erupt neatly along ethnic boundaries, and that lines of access to state-controlled resources played a critical structuring role; the ethnicization of conflict resulted from failed incumbent efforts to shore up network ties and the violence that the Asad regime used to crush dissent by challengers excluded from those networks. Mazur uses variation in the political and demographic characteristics of locales to explain regime strategies, the roles played by local intermediaries, the choice between non-violent and violent resistance, and the salience of ethnicity.

Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, Spruyt explains the political organization of three non-European international societies from early modernity to the late nineteenth century. The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires; the Sinocentric tributary system; and the Southeast Asian galactic empires, all which differed in key respects from the modern Westphalian state system. In each of these societies, collective beliefs were critical in structuring domestic orders and relations with other polities. These multi-ethnic empires allowed for greater accommodation and heterogeneity in comparison to the homogeneity that is demanded by the modern nation-state.

According to Srivastava, the project is guided by two questions: “What are the major political harms (e.g., mass surveillance and behavior modification) related to Big Tech?” and “How well does regulation (e.g., government law suits and public hearings) around the world remedy those harms?”

""The first of the 2021 child tax credits hit parents’ bank accounts in July — but not for everyone. For many of the parents who need it most, accessing the money may be more of a struggle. That’s because the IRS — an agency that knows little about the lowest-income Americans, who often don’t file taxes — has been tasked with distributing the money, up to $300 per month per child. On July 15, the day payments first went out, the IRS said it sent $15 billion to 35 million families, 86 percent of which was sent via direct deposit. That suggests that the vast majority of initial recipients were from families who earned income and filed taxes, many of them middle- or lower-middle-income parents whose names, addresses, and bank accounts are on file from tax returns.""

What do we expect from the next government? In this Special Edition, our team talks about the beginning of Pedro Castillo's government in the framework of the Bicentennial of our Independence. Aarón Quiñón (political scientist), Valeria Reyes (lawyer) and Daniel Encinas (political scientist) analyze the issue.

Four faculty members received the 2020 Daniel I. Linzer Grant for Innovation in Diversity and Equity. Tabitha Bonilla used the award to develop a new undergraduate class that explores intersectional identities and policy. Claudia Haase, Quinn Mulroy, and Regina Logan received the grant to foster diversity and inclusion of students from marginalized backgrounds interested in pursuing a PhD through a “first look” weekend with HDSP faculty and graduate students.

"From Social Security to Medicare, the Civil Rights Act to the Affordable Care Act, Democrats have long treated policy success as if it were tantamount to political success, assuming that the enactment of significant legislation would create supportive constituencies that would reward the party at the voting booth. President Obama appears to have made the same calculation. Instead of working to strengthen his party organization with an eye toward improving Democrats’ electoral prospects across the board, he focused almost exclusively on achieving significant policy accomplishments, assuming that those policy successes would redound to the party’s electoral benefit (Galvin 2010, 2016)."

While the researchers state that their results do not indicate that social media platforms are “killing people,” as Biden said, they do find, however, that those who relied on Facebook for COVID-19 news had substantially lower vaccination rates than the overall U.S. population. Those who received most of their news from Facebook also displayed lower levels of institutional trust and greater acceptance of misinformation. “We certainly cannot say the platform causes vaccine hesitancy, but it does seem like a place where such people gather,” said IPR political scientist James Druckman. “That makes it all the more important to ensure the provision of accurate information on Facebook.”

“The data make clear that the effects of the pandemic are far from over and continue to be endured more by those with fewer resources,” James Druckman, one of the researchers in the project and associate director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern, said in the release. The results of the research found a faster decrease in isolation among religious and older Americans. The study also found that for respondents earning $25,000 a year or less, the degree of social isolation did not improve between the first waves of the pandemic and June 2021. Meanwhile, those with more resources are feeling less isolated, and, thus, more productive.

IPR social policy expert Tabitha Bonilla’s research project with IPR political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong and IPR sociologist Beth Redbird examines the pandemic’s disproportionate effects on Black and Latinx communities. They are also assessing levels of trust in the government among Black and Latinx communities to determine if there is a connection between the pandemic, institutional action, and public trust. IPR political scientist James Druckman’s project extends his ongoing research with the COVID States Project, a consortium of researchers from Northwestern, Harvard, Northeastern, and Rutgers that conducts large-scale national surveys of American public opinion on various topics.

As with Benjamin Page at Northwestern University in the US, he notes that philanthropists are statistically conservative and lean to the political right, and that higher taxation on the wealthy might be a better way to fight poverty and bring urgently needed social change. It seems Bill Gates agrees: “I’ve paid more taxes than any individual ever, and gladly so. I should pay more.” But among the world’s 2,700 billionaires, I suspect he is in a minority. I don’t think Musk or Bezos are yet thinking about taxes in space.

Northwestern University has announced the recipients of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation Pandemic Response Policy Research Fund, an initiative launched in April to evaluate policies and actions during the current pandemic and to advance effective recommendations for the future. The effort was made possible by a $1 million grant from the Peterson Foundation, a non-partisan organization that promotes fiscal and economic sustainability and increases public awareness of key fiscal challenges.

"Religious freedom as a political ideal has enjoyed the support of many Americans and members of Congress. Yet, elevating religion above other factors in foreign policy risks doing damage to the cause of religious diversity and tolerance. The best way to support religious tolerance abroad is to step back from religious freedom as a guiding principle in favor of justice, equality and respect for diversity."

The ENMISA Book Award, sponsored by the ENMISA Section, recognizes the best book published over the past two years in the study of the international politics of ethnicity, nationalism or migration. The Award Committee is particularly interested in books that engage multiple areas of analytical interest to ENMISA members.

How does protest advancing diverse claims turn into violent conflict occurring primarily along ethnic lines? This book examines that question in the context of Syria, drawing insight from the evolution of conflict at the local level. Kevin Mazur shows that the challenge to the Syrian regime did not erupt neatly along ethnic boundaries, and that lines of access to state-controlled resources played a critical structuring role; the ethnicization of conflict resulted from failed incumbent efforts to shore up network ties and the violence that the Asad regime used to crush dissent by challengers excluded from those networks. Mazur uses variation in the political and demographic characteristics of locales to explain regime strategies, the roles played by local intermediaries, the choice between non-violent and violent resistance, and the salience of ethnicity.

This article develops a framework for the causal analysis of critical events in case study research. A critical event is defined as a contingent event that is causally important for an outcome in a specific case. Using set-theoretic analysis, this article offers definitions and measurement tools for the study of contingency and causal importance in case study research. One set of tools consists of guidelines for using theoretical expectations to arrive at conclusions about the level of contingency of events. Another set of tools are guidelines for using counterfactual cases to determine the extent to which a given event is necessary and sufficient for a particular outcome in an individual case. Examples from comparative and international studies are used to illustrate the framework.

We applaud the work our national security enterprise is doing to build on LGBTQIA+ presence and voices in our own institutions, and to advance LGBTQIA+ rights here and abroad. As President Biden proclaimed, “This Pride Month, we affirm our obligation to uphold the dignity of all people, and dedicate ourselves to protecting the most vulnerable among us.” We are happy that our honorees have already done so much to affirm this obligation, and we acknowledge that these efforts too often are overlooked or unnoticed. So, we hope you’ll join us this year by reviewing this stellar lineup of individuals and recognize their hard work with us, especially as we celebrate Pride Month.

The committee is enthusiastic in awarding Nelsen this prize. Nelsen asks an important, yet understudied question: how do schools shape the political lives of young citizens? In particular, he brings a careful lens to a question that could not be more timely: how does civic education matter in affecting how students, across racial groups, engage and make sense of politics. Pushing against work that claims that the content of civics education doesn't matter, Nelsen's multi-method (lab-in-the-field, focus groups, interviews, content analysis, extensive survey work) project showcases how critical pedagogy-a civics education that centers the lived experiences and voices of marginalized communities-can positively influence how young people of color feel about politics and their place in it. The theoretical and methodological work of the dissertation is first-rate and impressive.

The HistoryMakers, the nation’s largest African American video oral history archive, has chosen Northwestern University sophomore Chloe Porter (Political Science and African American Studies) as one of its 2021-2022 Student Brand Ambassadors.

Understanding how Public Service Motivation (PSM) is tied to ethical or unethical conduct is critically important, given that civil servants and other public sector employees throughout the world have been shown to exhibit high PSM levels. However, empirical evidence about the relationship between PSM and ethical or unethical behavior remains limited, due in part to the challenges of observing unethical conduct and overcoming social desirability bias in self-reported measures. We address these challenges by employing incentivized experimental games to study the relationships between PSM and two types of unethical behavior – corruption and dishonesty – as well as one type of ethical behavior: altruism.

This article puts Arendt’s conception of non-human animal appearance into a productive dialogue with recent developments in critical animal studies (CAS) and animal rights theory (ART) within which notions such as (dependent) agency, zoopolis, and animal agora play an important role. By reinterpreting the animal condition in Arendt’s account of the human condition, it demonstrates her potential contribution to political theory in a world where non-human-animals and nature are seen as making claims of entry into the political community.

According to a 2014 study by political scientists Laurel Harbridge, Neil Malhotra, and Brian F. Harrison, respondents preferred legislation when their party got more of what it wanted and when it dominated the coalition that passed the bill versus the outcomes that were more bipartisan-oriented. In fact, respondents sometimes viewed bipartisan tradeoffs as the equivalent of a legislative defeat for their party.

“Often, solutions to climate change and other environmental challenges can inadvertently produce new injustices for marginalized communities, so we are excited to have an opportunity for the kind of slow relationship-building that is needed to come together with these community leaders to co-create an ethos for relationship-driven research that not only tackles current injustices and environmental challenges, but creates a new trajectory for environmental research that prevents similar injustices in the future,” said Suiseeya.

El Salvador struggled through centuries of Spanish colonization before becoming an independent state in 1821, followed by economic manipulation and the concentration of land in the hands of wealthy elites. In 1980, civil war began. Leftist revolutionaries of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front – FMLN in its Spanish acronym – attempted to overthrow the country’s U.S.-backed dictatorial and corrupt government. The war lasted until 1992 and killed 75,000 Salvadorans.

The politics of religious asylum is ripe for reassessment. Even as a robust literature on secularism and religion has shown otherwise over the past two decades, much of the discussion in this field presumes that religion stands cleanly apart from law and politics. This article makes the case for a different approach to religion in the context of asylum-seeking and claiming. In the United States, it suggests, the politics of asylum is integral to the maintenance of American exceptionalism. Participants in the asylum-seeking process create a gap between Americans and others, affirming the promise of freedom, salvation, and redemption through conversion not to a particular religion or faith but to the American project itself. This hails a particular kind of subject of freed om and unencumbered choice. It is both a theological and a political process.

Annually helps University departments and faculty with important programs not included in their annual budgets. Past funding has gone to research, speakers, conferences, equipment, and study-related travel for faculty and students.

Concerns about misperceptions among the public are rampant. Yet, little work explores the correlates of misperceptions in varying contexts – that is, how do factors such as group affiliations, media exposure, and lived experiences correlate with the number of misperceptions people hold? We address these questions by investigating misperceptions about COVID-19, focusing on the role of racial/ethnic, religious, and partisan groups. Using a large survey, we find the number of correct beliefs held by individuals far dwarfs the number of misperceptions. When it comes to misperceptions, we find that minorities, those with high levels of religiosity, and those with strong partisan identities – across parties – hold a substantially greater number of misperceptions than those with contrasting group affiliations. Moreover, we show other variables (e.g., social media usage, number of COVID-19 cases

Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, Spruyt explains the political organization of three non-European international societies from early modernity to the late nineteenth century. The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires; the Sinocentric tributary system; and the Southeast Asian galactic empires, all which differed in key respects from the modern Westphalian state system. In each of these societies, collective beliefs were critical in structuring domestic orders and relations with other polities. These multi-ethnic empires allowed for greater accommodation and heterogeneity in comparison to the homogeneity that is demanded by the modern nation-state.

This episode of the Global Lunchbox podcast features a conversation with political scientist Kim Marion Suiseeya about her current research on the justice gap in global forest governance. Marion Suiseeya is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she is also affiliated with the Environmental Policy and Culture Program and the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. Her research examines the interactions between norms, institutions, and justice in global forest governance.

"Thurston points to Los Angeles as one city that has struggled to control the virus because of overcrowding. “One of the reasons that their cases went so high, so quickly was the affordability crisis in the region,” Thurston said. “Many families were living in more crowded settings and in work situations where they couldn't really protect themselves from COVID-19.” She said President Biden’s proposal to tie federal funding to cities who ease restrictions on zoning is an intriguing policy that could help increase affordable housing and address historic exclusions. “Local zoning policies and ordinances are one of the contributors to the lack of affordable housing in many communities,” Thurston said. They limit multifamily housing units, making these communities unaffordable."

Political science Prof. Mary McGrath faced increased at-home caregiving expectations in addition to her academic responsibilities. Instead of focusing on conducting research or publishing articles, she was taking care of her children, then ages 2 and 4, while her husband self-isolated due to health concerns from his kidney transplant. “It was like me and my two boys thrashing in these waves,” she said. “I didn’t know what else was going on in the world, except from seeing what was happening in The New York Times.”

Outsourcing Empire may be considered a sequel to the authors’ previous book, International Order in Diversity: War, Trade and Rule in the Indian Ocean.[2] In that work, Phillips and Sharman situated the company-states, primarily the Estado, EIC, and VOC, alongside other diverse vessels of international ordering in Asia like the Mughal Empire and the Marathas. Outsourcing Empire focuses entirely on company-states and widens the regional scope to include the Atlantic. This is an ambitious and welcome follow-up. The inclusion of more cases beyond Asia allows for a comparative investigation to complement recent company-state histories.[3] While the authors re-trace some of their earlier work when describing the rise and fall of the EIC and VOC, they bring new material to light in studying the arcs of the HBC and the African companies.

“I felt like an outsider my entire life, and it’s the people who were accepting who made the difference for me.” As a child, Jesse Humpal ’15 MA, ’20 MA, ’21 PhD drifted in and out of special education classes. He almost failed out of his undergraduate program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and at Northwestern he almost threw in the towel on higher education entirely during a course on linear regression. But Humpal persevered and defended his dissertation on April 30. In June, Humpal will go to Fort Bragg Joint Special Operations Command in North Carolina, where he will develop training and strategy for special operations forces. And in the fall of 2022 Humpal will face a new challenge as an assistant professor of political science at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs."

For the past two weeks, Colombia has seen massive street demonstrations. Notwithstanding being overwhelmingly peaceful, the protests were met with violence. Domestic and international NGOs have reported at least 55 people dead and hundreds of people injured. Despite these numbers, people are still in the streets voicing grievances that vastly outweigh the tax reform that originally sparked the demonstrations. In this conversation, we will discuss the underlying problems that have led people to protests in Colombia, the government’s response to these (and other) mobilizations, and the potential pathways that all the actors involved could take to start resolving the conflict.

"Prominent scholars in recent years have expressed alarm about political polarization, weakened civil liberties, and growing support for authoritarianism in the United States. But discussions of democratic backsliding pay short shrift to the value citizens place on one of the most fundamental democratic institutions: the act of voting."

"Inequality is everywhere in American life. Political movements, social discourse, and economic trends have dramatically increased the salience of issues of inequality over recent decades. These developments have, of course, been paralleled by the creation of enormous literatures about inequality in the social sciences."

School voucher programs—loosely defined to encompass a range of policies that indirectly subsidize private school attendance—grew slowly over the second half of the twentieth century, seeing a modest but short-lived rise in the decades following Brown v. Board. It was not until the 2000s that vouchers took off. In 2000 there were a total of eight such programs. Yet by 2019, there were 62, across 28 states, serving more than 500,000 students. As vouchers rose in prominence over the last 20 years, core design features of the new policies also changed, shifting from tuition grants funded through legislative appropriations toward a model more reliant on indirect subsidies through the use of tax expenditures.

The Office of the Provost has announced 11 spring recipients of the Provost Grants for Research in Humanities, Social Sciences and the Arts.

In the Middle East, "even small riots could quickly lead to an escalation again," said Prof. Marina Henke, expert on security policy.

"At one time, Chilean politicians and political scientists toured universities around the world talking about the benefits of the Transition. Today our battered and questioned democracy has once again been put in the vanguard thanks to the joint mechanism. In these columns, two political scientists from the team that designed the mechanism and promoted it in Congress explain how parity redrew the political arena. "Women have enormous challenges and a great deal is expected of them," write the authors. They urge to extend the mechanism to all elections, because where there was no obligation of parity, women did not reach the lists. “For mayoralties, only 22.6% of the candidacies correspond to women; the figure rises to 39% for councilors ”, they describe."

"Scholarship on multimethod case selection in the social sciences has developed rapidly in recent years, but many possibilities remain unexplored. This essay introduces an attractive and advantageous new alternative, involving the selection of extreme cases on the treatment variable, net of the statistical influence of the set of known control variables. Cases that are extreme in this way are those in which the value of the main causal variable is as surprising as possible, and thus, this approach can be referred to as seeking “surprising causes.” There are practical advantages to selecting on surprising causes, and there are also advantages in terms of statistical efficiency in facilitating case-study discovery. We first argue for these advantages in general terms and then demonstrate them in an application regarding the dynamics of U.S. labor legislation."

Contrary to what the polls predicted and with a proportional counting system that favours major political parties over smaller ones, the independents achieved an unprecedented result and will be the leading force at the convention. The independent candidates include feminists, environmentalists and other reform-prone groups. ”The independents obtained a great result but the biggest surprise is the absolute collapse of the right-wing that, despite going on a unified list, they did not achieve their goals,” analyst Julieta Suárez-Cao was quoted as saying by the Spanish news agency EFE.

The requirement for gender parity forced political groups to look for competitive female candidates, Julieta Suarez-Cao, an academic at the Catholic University's Political Science Institute, told the Diario Financiero newspaper. "This shows Chile is not a macho country, that if you find the competitive and good candidates - and there are many - people will vote for them," she said.

"Chile’s constitutional reform started after massive social protests in 2019. With gender parity, reserved seats for indigenous people, and a significant number of seats for independent delegates, Julieta Suárez-Cao argues that the country's assembly is on track to rebuild democratic legitimacy in the years to come Over the weekend of 15 May, Chileans went to the polls to elect delegates to a constitutional assembly. The assembly will draft the document that will replace Dictator Augusto Pinochet’s constitution. Reform follows a social uprising in October 2019 that sparked weeks of peaceful demonstrations and cacerolazos (pot banging). The uprising also resulted in barricades, looting, and riots."

Laurel Harbridge-Yong, Associate Professor, Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences – “The Polarizing Effects of Primaries” Stephen Nelson, Associate Professor, Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences – “Best Laid Plans: The Political History of Economic Development Plans, 1950-2000”

In 2017, the American Political Science Association (APSA) Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession launched an initiative to lower the cost of Division (i.e., organized section) membership for students to promote graduate students’ professional development and to advance Division interests. This article assesses the effect of this intervention on Division membership. Using APSA membership data, we find that almost two thirds of Divisions that charged fees in 2017 reduced or eliminated student fees between 2017 and 2019, nearly halving the average student dues (i.e., from $11.57 in 2017 to $5.84 in 2019).

https://bit.ly/3hRkevh

Mayekar’s path is one he never anticipated as a political science major at Weinberg College, but one that emerged as he learned about himself and the world. After graduating from Northwestern in 2006, Mayekar took a consulting job at Marakon Associates. Two years later, he left that role to join Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. “President Obama’s platform was something I believed in,” says Mayekar, who as budget manager helped raise nearly $900 million for Obama’s first presidential bid. The part he relished most was working with a cohesive, enthusiastic team that lived by the motto “Respect, Empower and Include.”

In September 1994, my first PhD semester in the United States, I had the pleasure of taking classes with Kenneth Janda, Professor of Comparative Politics known for his work on the structure and organization of Political Parties. The seminar took place the semester in which Bill Clinton's first midterm elections were held, haunted by a bad economy and furiously resisted by the Democratic base.

After days of violent protests, Mayor Claudia López says President Duque should reach out directly to young people to address poverty and inequity.

Several female Northwestern faculty members are planning to protest the promotion of an athletics department employee tied to controversy. Mike Polisky is taking over as Athletic Director. He's a defendant in an ongoing lawsuit filed by a cheerleader who says Polisky ignored her complaints of being harassed and exploited at school-sanctioned events.

This year, Dr. Sally Nuamah (Northwestern University) was selected as the recipient of the 2021 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award. This award was established to highlight field-based urban scholarship and promote the dissemination of work by activist urban scholars. The award is co-sponsored by SAGE Publishing and UAA. The inspiration for this award is the career of Dr. Marilyn J. Gittell, former Director of the Howard Samuels Center and Professor of Political Science at The Graduate School at City University of New York. Dr. Gittell was an outstanding scholar and a community activist who wrote seminal works on citizen participation, and was founding editor of Urban Affairs Quarterly, (now known as Urban Affairs Review). Thus, the award seeks to honor the contributions of a scholar whose research record shows a direct relationship between activism, scholarship, and engagement wit

Companies are more prone to cheating employees of color and immigrant workers, according to Daniel Galvin, a political science professor and policy researcher at Northwestern University. His research, based on data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, shows that immigrants and Latino workers were twice as likely to earn less than the minimum wage from 2009 to 2019 compared with white Americans. Black workers were nearly 50% more likely to get ripped off in comparison.

Chang, whose research is archive-based, said he has been affected by travel restrictions and archive closures. His dissertation on Indigenous and Black insurgency movements requires traveling to Latin America but his travel plans were canceled because of the pandemic. Ph.D. candidate Kumar Ramanathan said certain kinds of research are more challenging to conduct remotely. Similar to Chang, primary source documents play an important role in his dissertation on the construction of a civil rights agenda in the United States from 1940s to 1960s.

Political science assistant professor Chloe Thurston, who studies the role of social movements and organizations in shaping policy, says movements can spotlight individual grievances, increase their visibility and then connect them to a broader context.

This article analyzes the political trajectories of female congresswomen in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile between 2009 and 2016. Their trajectories are classified according to their previous experience and the territorial levels where they won elections before entering Congress, these may be newcomers or professionals. The professionals had previous political experience, either at the national or sub-national level, including re-elected (incumbents). Despite the different institutional designs of each country, for the vast majority, the first position they held in politics was at the national level, in Congress (novices). Among the professionals and incumbents, for Chile, Ecuador and Peru most of the congresswomen began their career at the national level, while in Colombia and Bolivia they began at the subnational level.

"Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy professor Tabitha Bonilla has developed a new undergraduate class that explores how viewing identities as "intersectional" can shift our understanding of policy. The seminar-style course, called “Intersectionality, Policy, and Measurement” was made possible by Bonilla’s 2020 Daniel I. Linzer Grant for Innovation in Diversity and Equity, an award given to help fund innovative faculty projects related to improving diversity and inclusivity at Northwestern."

"Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy professor Tabitha Bonilla has developed a new undergraduate class that explores how viewing identities as "intersectional" can shift our understanding of policy. The seminar-style course, called “Intersectionality, Policy, and Measurement” was made possible by Bonilla’s 2020 Daniel I. Linzer Grant for Innovation in Diversity and Equity, an award given to help fund innovative faculty projects related to improving diversity and inclusivity at Northwestern."

"This week, congressional Democrats and the Biden administration announced a paid family and medical leave proposal as part of an expansive plan to remake social policy in the United States. The plan, which builds on proposals supported by a broad coalition of advocacy organizations, would provide 12 weeks of paid leave to workers who are ill, pregnant, new parents, or caregivers for ill family members. As advocates, scholars, and journalists often point out, the United States is the only industrialized country which does not guarantee paid maternity leave. This plan would finally bring the US in line with other countries."

On April 20, Americans waited for the jury’s verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd last year. Local officials across the country, including in Minneapolis, prepared for a not-guilty verdict that could set off angry protests. Governors deployed the National Guard to support city police. In a message to potential protesters, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said at a news conference right before the verdict: “Don’t test us. We are prepared.”

"What role does trust play in global climate governance? For decades, claims of mistrust and distrust have dominated climate change policy arenas: doubts about climate change science and disagreements over rights and responsibilities related to mitigation, adaptation, loss, and damages undermine trust, impeding progress toward effective global climate action. And although frequently invoked in explanations of weak or failed climate action, there is limited research exploring the role of trust as a distinct concept in global climate governance. Here we seek to address this gap by developing a relational framework that focuses attention on how trust dynamics shape cooperation in four types of relationships: reliance, reciprocity, responsibility, and recognition."

Congratulations to the new cohort of Graduate Franke Fellows for 2021-2022! "My dissertation examines how caste discourse shaped the development of civil rights law and politics in the U.S. during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I argue that Black and abolitionist activists used caste language to critique forms of racial subjugation, to imagine solidaristic, post-caste futures, and to theorize novel legal and political strategies for their realization."

At a time when some talk of Asian Americans as “honorary whites,” the mass murders at Atlanta-area spas reminded us that those of Asian ancestry can also experience intense marginalization. This micro-syllabus presents a wide range of scholarship exploring these complexities and investigating the place of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in a deeply contested racial terrain.

The Summer of 2020 saw the United States’ biggest protests for racial justice and civil rights in a generation, when deaths of African Americans in police custody brought a national reckoning with systemic racism. As we near the one year anniversary of some of the largest demonstrations in U.S. history, Dr. Alvin Tillery, Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, discusses: what the recent verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial means for racial equity in the United States, how current racial justice movements, like Black Lives Matter, fit within the broader history of the U.S. civil rights movement, and how today’s efforts differ from past American racial justice initiatives.

Family and medical leave policy in the United States is often noted for its lack of wage compensation, but is also distinctive in its gender neutrality and its broad coverage of several types of leave (combining pregnancy leave with medical, parental, and caregiving leave). This article argues that the distinctive design of leave policy in the United States is explained by its origins in contestation over the civil rights policy regime that emerged in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, women's movement advocates creatively and strategically formulated demands for maternity leave provision that fit an interpretation of this new policy regime's antidiscrimination logic. Because of this decision to advance an antidiscrimination claim, advocates became committed to pursuing a leave guarantee on gender-neutral grounds, which in turn enabled the broad-coverage leave design.

"Thoughts and prayers. Psychological counseling. Promises of reform. We’re far too familiar with these phrases and ideas, but they aren’t proof of tangible change. These are bromides — statements intended to placate us with the hope of improvement — but they’re not solutions. Can they be well-intentioned? Yes. Can they help? Potentially. But will they make bad things better? Not likely."

UM professors Scott Greer and Elizabeth King and colleagues in Brazil analyzed early government responses from 34 countries on five continents to the emerging COVID-19 pandemic and how those decisions impacted their citizens’ health and lives. They brought together a team of about 70 public health researchers and political scientists who dove into understanding policy and politics to measure the effectiveness of governments’ responses—instead of looking at classical data like the number of deaths and the contagion curve of the disease.

This episode of the Global Lunchbox features a conversation with three historians about how they pushed back on a controversial article that trafficked in historical denialism. Recently, an academic article on "comfort women" by the Harvard Law School professor Mark Ramseyer caused a huge controversy and inspired a wave of condemnation. Contrary to decades of historical research, Ramseyer claimed that the Korean women who were conscripted, trafficked, and held captive at brothels serving the Japanese military during the Pacific War were in fact well-compensated sex workers subject to standard contractual arrangements. Amy Stanley of Northwestern, David Ambaras of North Carolina State University, and Hannah Shepherd of the University of Cambridge, together with two other scholars, formed a transnational network to analyze and deconstruct Ramseyer's work.

The Simon Fraser University Department of Political Science is proud to present Professor Alvin Bernard Tillery, Jr. of Northwestern University, who will be giving a virtual talk on "The Performance of Power: Black Lives Matter and American Democracy." This free, online event will take place on April 16th at 10 a.m. PT.

"Weinberg Prof. Karen Alter raised the prospect of bringing in a third party to perform a financial audit to verify the Board of Trustees’ position on retirement contributions and clarify the underpinnings of Northwestern’s financial decisions. “It just gives you that set of information,” she said. “It doesn’t then say that the money has to go into restitution for faculty, it can’t go into this—it tells you how much money you have, how much money existed or was available. Alter said faculty at Johns Hopkins University were able to attain pension restitution due to insight about the university’s finances uncovered by an independent audit."

Pedro Castillo and Keiko Fujimori will compete in the second electoral round for the presidency. Both are conservatives and with dubious democratic credentials. What solutions are there to this bleak outlook?

Kuntzelman's doctoral research examines variation in political knowledge of rights, responsibilities, restrictions, and governance actors and processes among urban refugees in Uganda. Kuntzelman's research overall, intersects with studies of refugees as protection and service providers, the roles of refugee-led organizations that serve their fellow displaced, and African politics. Kuntzelman has extensive experience beyond research, as an advocate to unaccompanied minors seeking asylum, as well as work for family reconnection and reunification with the Red Cross. Kuntzelman also has extensive mentorship experience to undergraduate students.

That means governors must weigh what the public would be willing to do as they consider how to respond to a resurgence of cases fueled by the new variants, said James Druckman, a political science professor at Northwestern University in Illinois who is part of the survey consortium. “It’s unrealistic to engage in complete shutdowns or closing of public spaces at this point,” he said. “I think you’d see a lot of people, including business owners, not following those types of things.”

On August 13, 2020 the US government proudly announced what it called a peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). While then President Donald Trump’s administration heralded the deal as a decisive step toward lasting peace in the Middle East, the announcement sent shock waves through Muslim communities around the world.

The relaxing of censorship in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century led to an explosion of satires, caricatures, and comic hoaxes. This new vogue for ridicule unleashed moral panic and prompted warnings that it would corrupt public debate. But ridicule also had vocal defenders who saw it as a means to expose hypocrisy, unsettle the arrogant, and deflate the powerful. Uncivil Mirth examines how leading thinkers of the period searched for a humane form of ridicule, one that served the causes of religious toleration, the abolition of the slave trade, and the dismantling of patriarchal power.

"The recent literature on epistemic injustice has convincingly showed that injustice is often self-concealing, because those who suffer it lack the hermeneutical resources to talk about it. How, then, are the victims of epistemic injustice capable of denouncing and resisting it? My paper seeks an answer to this question by inquiring into what Judith Shklar calls the “sense of injustice.” Following Shklar, I argue that the identification and critique of injustice relies on feeling rather than established moral values. In order to clarify how feelings can be the source of universal claims, I turn to an interpretation of Kant’s analysis of the feeling of the sublime developed by Jean-François Lyotard. According to this interpretation, any act of communication generates a silence that calls to be expressed."

The prison-industrial complex, for which police are foot soldiers, is responsible for the current reality of mental health treatment in this country. Deinstitutionalization, a phenomenon that started in the 1950s, has served to rid our country of long-term mental health care options. According to NPR, private mental health hospitals can cost up to $30,000 per month, leaving those without the resources few alternatives. As these private hospitals do not accept insurance, low-income individuals seeking treatment must rely on Medicaid, but the federal government is not allowed to pay for long-term care in an institution.

Climate inequality also shapes the limits of climate resilience (Sovacool 2018.). Scholars and activists in the field of environmental justice have been making this case for a long time (Konisky 2009; Mohai et al. 2009; Harrison 2014; Agyeman et al. 2016). The articles in this virtual special issue (VSI), a curated collection of case-studies and data-driven research that span the Global South and the Industrial North, make significant contributions to the study of climate change and environmental justice.

Scandals matter less in a polarized era Not surprisingly, scandals polarize the public. Yet even in the face of clear and undisputed charges, partisans backed Trump despite what critics say was evidence of illegal and “impeachable” activities. Even in cases involving serious charges of sexual harassment, Republican partisans do not strongly penalize their own candidates (although Democrats are more likely to penalize their own).

IPSI alum @mephenke, recipient of the @isadiplomacy Book Award for her recent title, Constructing Allied Cooperation: Diplomacy, Payments, and Power in Multilateral Military Coalitions

On March 22, Ahmad Al Alawi Alissa allegedly shot and killed 10 people in a Boulder, Colo., supermarket. In a now-deleted tweet, Vice President Harris’s niece Meena Harris remarked, “Violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.”

Focusing on housing, an area where the city can point to a clear history of racial discrimination, will make the programme more likely to survive the inevitable constitutional challenges, says Alvin Tillery, director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, also in Evanston. “Given the conservative jurisprudence around racial equity in America, governments are really constrained in terms of what they can do. Programmes have to be ‘narrowly tailored’ to meet the specific harm and in this case that harm is redlining,” he told the Financial Times in an interview.

Background United under the rallying call, “nothing about us without us,” refugees have demanded inclusion in global policy and decision-making processes that impact their rights, protections, and provision. Moreover, refugees demand direct representation and participation in the academic research that critically informs governance decisions and humanitarian responses to migration crises. Refugees have reiterated their demands at the regional and international levels- including at the inaugural 2019 Global Refugee Forum held in Geneva, Switzerland and at the 2019 inaugural Africa Refugee Leaders’ Summit held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Despite their advocacy efforts, refugees remain excluded from meaningful participation in academic and policy research, including in shaping the agenda for this research.

Purdue University Prof. Nadia Brown and Tulane University Prof. Mirya Holman presented theories of Black and White feminism within anti-racist movements in a Wednesday discussion. The event, hosted by the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, was a part of the center’s Anti-Racism in Thought and Action Speaker and Discussion Series.

Experimental political science has transformed in the last decade. The use of experiments has dramatically increased throughout the discipline, and technological and sociological changes have altered how political scientists use experiments. We chart the transformation of experiments and discuss new challenges that experimentalists face. We then outline how the contributions to this volume will help scholars and practitioners conduct high-quality experiments.

El domingo, el Presidente de la República, Sebastián Piñera, anunció que presentará un proyecto para postergar las elecciones del 10 y 11 de abril por el escenario sanitario en el que se encuentra el país: "Consideramos que llevar a cabo la elección en este contexto puede agravar la situación, no solo por el acto eleccionario, sino que principalmente por las actividades anexas a la votación".

"Since January, more U.S. healthcare workers have said they are ready to get vaccinated, with rates of vaccine hesitancy dropping from 37% to 29%, according to a new survey from a research consortium that includes Northwestern University. The same survey finds a similar drop in the hesitancy rate for workers outside of healthcare, falling from 41% to 31%. "Early on a lot of people expressed outright hesitancy, but they seem to be moving as more and more people get vaccinated without major incidence," said IPR political scientist James Druckman, who co-leads the ongoing, national survey of more than 25,000 Americans. The researchers from Northwestern, Harvard, Northeastern, and Rutgers are investigating changes in attitudes about the vaccine and vaccination rates among healthcare workers from previous data collected in February. The survey also shows the rate of vaccination has double

How do racial and gender stereotypes shape public perceptions of Black Girls and support for their punishment? What are the political consequences for black women and their political labor?

"I believe that what makes America exceptional is the fact that we're a meritocracy that you can be anything — that you can come from anywhere and go and have success in any capacity. And I think the question Democrats have to reconcile with right now is whether or not, race and gender are more important than qualification," McCain said on Wednesday's show, reacting to Duckworth saying she would not support any more of President Joe Biden's non-diverse nominees until he appoints more Asian Americans to his Cabinet.

As the NRA has shifted further right and more mass shootings have occurred, the organization has started to lose its political strength.

"With mass shootings back in the news following a massacre in Boulder, Colorado — less than a week after a series of armed attacks on spas in the Atlanta area — an open question is whether the National Rifle Association is still a politically powerful organization."

This paper introduces a new conceptualization of hierarchy where the sovereign rights of the subordinate state are understood as a resource that can be controlled by multiple dominant states. As with other resources, different types of property regimes can be developed to organize access and extraction of sovereignty, such as common property resources regimes. Finally, an explanation of common-pool hierarchy regimes is developed and explored using two case studies: European imperialism in the nineteenth-century China and the scramble for Africa.

"A writer reflects on her relationship to home in Beirut. "Why the windows of the room did not shatter from the August 4 explosion is still a mystery. The building is only five kilometers away from the port of Beirut, and the windows of the neighbors’ apartment broke. In other buildings nearby, even the aluminum frames came off; photos circulating showed the big metal pieces, mixed with glass shards and drops of blood, covering disordered furniture""

"A new survey by IPR and @PoliSciatNU prof. James Druckman shows parents are more hesitant to get vaccines for their kids, with young mothers largely driving the resistance"

While coronavirus vaccines are yet to be approved for children, public health officials worry that the increasing numbers of parents skeptical of vaccinating their children for any disease could affect overall vaccination rates for the coronavirus. A new survey aims to understand how prevalent this attitude is among parents compared to adults without children.

"“You can’t fight something with nothing.” For opponents of national health reform, this has become something of a proverb. This phrase — conceived by the California public relations firm of Whitaker and Baxter for its client the American Medical Association (AMA) — was first employed in 1949 as a strategy in the fight against the rising tide of support for national health insurance. The AMA had long fought against any type of insurance, government-sponsored or private insurance, as a financial threat to the industry."

Even before 2020 polling errors became evident, analysts wondered if we could trust the polls. After the election, concerns spiked — overall errors were even larger than in 2016. Frank Luntz went so far as to declare, “the polling profession is done.” We disagree. We think polling has a strong future if the proper methods are used — but these methods may come as a surprise.

"“The group is severely limited by the reliance of its member countries on China as a customer, a source of goods, and a partner in many other endeavors,” said Ian Hurd, professor of political science and director of the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern. “It’s impossible to imagine the Quad expanding to NATO-scale because of the fundamental co-dependence among China, the U.S., Japan, Australia and India in the world economy,” he said. Hurd said these countries may not be willing to use actual tools of influence that they have. It’s hard to imagine, for example, Australia impeding sales of minerals to China or the U.S. denying access to its markets. And the U.S., Hurd added, is unlikely to persuade China to give up its effort to control maritime space."

From right to left, notions of religion and religious freedom are fundamental to how many Americans have understood their country and themselves. Ideas of religion, politics, and the interplay between them are no less crucial to how the United States has engaged with the world beyond its borders. Yet scholarship on American religion tends to bracket the domestic and foreign, despite the fact that assumptions about the differences between ourselves and others deeply shape American religious categories and identities.

"Lee's interview was after Rep. Michelle Steel (R-CA) and her Congressional colleagues asked for answers in a letter following the surge of stocks like GameStop on the Robinhood app. “Trading apps aren't just neutral onramps into financial markets for small-dollar investors,” said Erin Lockwood, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. “Despite marketing themselves as tools of financial inclusion, they're not providing a public service; they are for-profit companies with their own incentives and their own regulatory obligations, some of which entail, directly or indirectly, imposing limits on what trading activities are allowed.”"

For members of the young online left, the high-speed rail map has become a ubiquitous fixture of politics Twitter. Created by graphic designer Alfred Twu in 2013, the map depicts a system of interconnected high-speed rail lines, linking Los Angeles to New York and Minneapolis to Miami, among other projects. (High-speed rail refers to lines that typically run over 160 miles per hour.) Even with America’s resident Amtrak champion, Joe Biden, now in the White House, and the administration preparing a $2 trillion green infrastructure proposal, a network like the one in Twu’s map is at best decades away.

We are proud to host this opportunity for our communities to learn about mutual aid from the people who are living, doing, teaching, and writing about it.

Arryman Scholar Yoes Kenawas describes his research on dynastic politics

Ely Orrego-Torres talked about the recent Pope's visit to Irak with journalist Gustau Alegret from the television news channel NTN24.

“Even before the pandemic, female faculty were disadvantaged in nearly all metrics university leaders use to assess faculty quality and impact. Numerous studies show that grants to female faculty are lower, citations and teaching evaluations are lower, and salaries are lower. These studies, which control for so many factors, bolster the lived experience of female faculty. It is hard not to conclude that gender bias is at play."

In the wake of Samuel Paty’s murder, the French government proposed a “draft law to strengthen republican values” aimed at reinforcing the principles of French laïcité. Laïcité, often translated as secularism, refers to the French Law of 1905 on the Separation of Churches and State which legally established state secularism. Today many question the extent to which this historic legal settlement and cultural tradition is equipped to accommodate minority religions and meet the needs of an increasingly diverse society. Yet President Macron has advanced a law against “separatism” to defend laïcité, describing Islam as a religion “that is in crisis.”

El @Pontifex_es llega a #Irak en una visita histórica «como un peregrino» para «consolar a los cristianos» perseguidos en ese país. El análisis del viaje con @ElyOrrego politóloga experta en conflictos religiosos

In November 2020, Floridians made the historic decision to move an estimated 2.5 million Floridians closer to a living wage with the passage of Amendment 2. The state minimum wage increase goes into effect in September 2021, increasing from $8.65 to $10 per hour, then rising by $1 per hour each year until it reaches $15 in 2026. Failing to pay workers the minimum wage is but one of many forms of wage theft. However, given the timeliness of Amendment 2, wage theft in this report refers solely to minimum wage violations among low-wage workers (those with incomes in the bottom 20 percent) unless otherwise indicated.

Joshua Freedman of Oberlin College discusses his new article, “The Recognition Dilemma: Negotiating Identity in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” published in International Studies Quarterly. (Starts at 18:17).

Devorah Manekin of Hebrew University of Jerusalem talks about her latest book, Regular Soldiers, Irregular War: Violence and Restraint in the Second Intifada, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book presents a theoretical framework for understanding the various forms of behavior in which soldiers engage during counterinsurgency campaigns—compliance and shirking, abuse and restraint, as well as the creation of new violent practices. (Starts at 32:41). Jeannie Sowers of University of Hampshire and Erika Weinthal of Duke University speak about their new article entitled, “Humanitarian challenges and the targeting of civilian infrastructure in the Yemen war,” published in International Affairs. (Starts at 0:54).

“Voices Across Time'' features a live screening and conversation with members of Grace House and Beyondmedia Education with moderation by Professor Sally Nuamah from the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern. In addition to the live event, two supplemental films from the Beyondmedia collection will be available to watch on the Block's Vimeo from March 3 through March 7. The event will have captions.

This chapter discusses the historical context of military assistance missions, which have been a mainstay of international politics, more so over the last 200 years. It shows that security force assistance (SFA) has increasingly become the newly institutionalised way of war for the West. The chapter also discusses the allure and challenges of modern SFA becoming normalised and bureaucratised in the West. Preoccupying most militaries has been the unconventional military mission of providing security assistance to weak and failing states. However, industrialisation alongside the rise of colonialism changed the depth and scale of security assistance missions. The trends are indicative of the normalisation and bureaucratisation of SFA as a modern Western way of warfare.

This episode of the Global Lunchbox features a conversation with Dan McAdams about his book The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning (2020). McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern. A key figure in the recent emergence within the social sciences of narrative approaches to studying human lives, his previous books include The Art and Science of Personality Development (2015) and The Redemptive Self (2006).

We agree that a chief cause of the feeble US response to economic inequality is the weakness of the US working class. And we agree that a crucial cause of that weakness is racial division among workers, sometimes inflamed by opportunistic politicians or self-interested employers who benefit from a low-paid and powerless workforce. We would add two points. Increased capital mobility, the global labor market, and automation have strengthened capital versus labor in all advanced countries. But specific undemocratic features of US political institutions and processes have further increased the relative influence of the affluent and wealthy here, so that in the United States—more than in Western Europe—public policies have failed to offer much help. Our two books do not really disagree much about this: they just emphasize different parts of the story.

Ph.D. candidate Justin Zimmerman is a race, ethnicity, and politics scholar with an interest in Black political thought. The 2020 American Political Science Association First Generation Scholar in the Profession Accessibility Grant recipient earned his bachelor’s and masters at the University of Alabama. He then worked in the U.S. Department of State as a press assistant, and later as an acquisition consultant at Diplomatic Security and consultant to the Department of Treasury. In 2017, he returned to academia to focus on what he wanted to do in the first place: research that dealt with Black People. In this question-and-answer session, Zimmerman discussed the power of research, his forthcoming papers, and his hopes for the new presidential administration. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Arryman Scholar Gde Metera, PhD in Political Science, successfully defended his doctoral dissertation in December 2020 and he will graduate at the end of Winter Quarter 2021! Below he responds to questions about his research interests and his dissertation, Coercion in Search of Legitimacy: The Secular State, Religious Politics, and Religious Coercion in Indonesia Under the New Order, 1967-1998.

Because of the COVID-19 threat to in-person voting in the November 2020 election, state and local election officials have pivoted to mail-in voting as a potential solution. This method of voting—while safe from a public health standpoint—comes with its own set of problems, as increased use of mail voting risks amplifying existing discrepancies in rejected mail ballots. While some mail ballot rejections are to be expected, a lack of uniformity in whose ballots get rejected among subgroups of voters—whether for mistakes on a ballot return envelope (BRE) or lateness—raise concerns about equal representation. We draw on official statewide voter file and mail-in ballot data from the 2018 midterm election in Georgia, a state that until the pandemic did not have widespread use of mail voting, to test whether some voters are more likely to cast a mail ballot that does not count.

Before 2006, the National Basketball Association (NBA) required 18 years of age and high school completion to enter their draft. Since 2006, the NBA requires players to be at least one year removed from high school and 19 years of age, effectively, requiring NBA hopefuls to participate in college basketball for at least one season. This raises the question, what is the impact of college basketball on elite high school players’ NBA production and prosperity?

As COVID19 vaccinations campaigns are rolling out across Latin America, surveys of 6 major Latam countries explore citizen willingness to receive vaccination - both in terms of general and immediate willingness to get vaccinated - before then seeking to experimentally understand the extent to which hesitancy is driven by limited information, collective action problems, and political messaging. Our findings will both illuminate the causes of vaccine hesitancy, and the efficacy of potential policy response.

"The language I have to discuss my experiences feels like a very gender essentialist view of human beings in many ways. Because this is my blog, I do not have language outside of my own experiences to express them otherwise. In no way does this encapsulate the range, depth, and complexity of human experience, particularly in regard to gender."

In a far-reaching project measuring American attitudes and behavior during the pandemic, researchers from Harvard and three other universities have polled people in all 50 states for nearly a year, reporting each week not just on evolving views toward the virus but on how the tumultuous political events helped shape the public response.

We welcome Zoe Marks from Harvard Kennedy School and Will Reno from Northwestern University to talk about doing research in insecure or conflict-affected situations, and learning how to keep our research participants, our teams, and ourselves safe.

The Global Governance in the Age of COVID project has convened leading professionals in history, law, politics, and global affairs to discuss what the COVID-19 crisis is revealing about our lives and institutions. The essays that follow represent a diverse snapshot of views that aim to make sense of our current condition and its relation to the past and the future. They are a complement to the webinars hosted by the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies in the autumn of 2020.

"This episode of the Global Lunchbox features a conversation with anthropologist Robert Launay about his book Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder. Robert Launay is Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. His previous books include Traders without Trade, Beyond the Stream: Islam and Society in a West African Town, and Foundations of Anthropological Theory."

Southern Somalia has attracted substantial military aid and assistance for decades. As the state disintegrated in the late 1980s, clan dynamics became more critical, warlords emerged, and power bases shifted. Since 2008, the number of foreign military forces and advisors (including private military contractors) has substantially increased, as has the creation of numerous Somali security units. Such actions are symptomatic of broader trends concerning multilateral attempts to rebuild security forces in fractious states, where security assistance activities lack unity or common national interests. This has resulted in various Somali military forces with different loyalties (domestic and international), capabilities, and priorities in each Federal Member State (FMS).

Erin Lockwood, a political science professor at UC Irvine who has studied the 2008 financial crisis, says progressive enthusiasm for Baradaran over Barr likely has something to do with the break she would represent from the traditional Washington approach to financial regulation, a system Lockwood describes as “preventing banks from doing bad things” rather than taking proactive steps that could lessen inequality.

This research note unveils new archival evidence from Amnesty International's first twenty-five years (1961–1986) to shed light on the realization of international human rights as Amnesty balanced “nonpolitical politics” through multifaceted government relations. The research draws from minutes and reports of eighty meetings of Amnesty's executive leadership and interviews from the 1983 to 1985 Amnesty Oral History project, all collected from the International Institute of Social History. The records show that during this time Amnesty relied on government and foundation funding to exit a severe financial crisis. Amnesty also cultivated a private diplomatic network with governments for access and advocacy and conducted side bargains with closed countries for access and reforms

Across the country, communities have needs ripe for innovative solutions -- from rethinking transit and housing affordability to operating safe schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Civic Innovation Challenge, led by the U.S. National Science Foundation in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Department of Homeland Security, seeks to empower communities to address those needs by establishing research partnerships that can achieve not just local impacts but potentially be scaled up regionally, or even nationally. The Civic Innovation Challenge has now taken a major step by naming 52 teams across 30 states as well as tribal regions, Washington DC and Puerto Rico as Stage-1 awardees.

This episode of the Global Lunchbox features a conversation with historian Geraldo Cadava about his book The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump. Geraldo Cadava is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Latina & Latino Studies Program at Northwestern. His work focuses on Latinos in the United States and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The Global Lunchbox series, hosted by the Center for International & Area Studies at Northwestern University, features conversations with scholars in the social sciences and humanities about their current research on a range of critical global issues.

Join us this Friday Feb 12 2:30pm EST for our first of three @JMUpolisci Virtual Symposium on Teaching & Learning the Politics of Racial Justice panel featuring @meganfrancis @povertyscholar @JZPhilosophy. More info https://www.jmu.edu/civic/racial-social-justice.shtml Cosponsored by @aaadstudies @JMUCivic

“We’ve found that housing practices, since the 1930s, have discriminated against women and racial and religious minorities who are disproportionately less likely to benefit from policies for new homeowners,” says Prof. @ChloeThurstonDC of @IPRatNU and @WeinbergCollege .

That may not be the future of GOP foreign policy, according to my political science research. I analyzed four surveys taken during the Trump administration asking Americans about foreign policy issues. Breaking down responses by both party and age, I found that younger Republicans diverge from Trump’s “America First” agenda. In fact, on some foreign policy issues, from China to trade, young Republicans are closer on the ideological spectrum to the Democratic mainstream than to their Republican elders.

Cody is currently a partner at Fenway — a strategic communications firm focused on executive leadership, speechwriting and messaging. He’s also working on a book of his own. As Variety notes, “‘Grace’ will be released in 2022. Keenan’s book will focus on 10 days in Obama’s presidency, during which he helped write addresses for the president dealing with everything from a public debate on the Confederate flag to Supreme Court rulings on healthcare and gay marriage.” Among other topics, Mixing Board founder Sean Garrett and Cody talked about leadership and taking risks by stepping into hot societal topics — from political leaders to CEOs. Following are excerpts of that conversation.

Currently, she is focused on her work as coordinator of the Network of Political Scientists in Chile, an organization present in 26 countries that seeks to “promote, make visible and enhance the work of women dedicated to Political Science” and that promotes the #nosinmujeres campaign. Julieta Suarez-Cao sat down to answer the questionnaire Constituent of Context Factual and here you can read all the most personal opinions of political scientist.

Political science Prof. James Druckman is working with researchers from Harvard, Northeastern and Rutgers to survey thousands of Americans every month for the COVID States Project — the largest ongoing national survey tracking people’s opinions and behavior during the pandemic.

"Ph.D. candidate Kumar Ramanathan has researched a wide variety of topics from Chicago politics to immigrant participation to white racial attitudes. As a 2020-21 American Bar Foundation/Northwestern University Doctoral Fellow, Ramanathan will participate in seminars and workshops with other fellows and research faculty, and receive mentorship on his research projects. His dissertation, "Building a Civil Rights Agenda: The Democratic Party and the Origins of Racial Liberalism” investigates how liberal politicians in the northern Democratic Party contested and constructed a civil rights legislative agenda in the mid-20th century, forming racial liberalism as we know it today. In this interview, Ramanathan explains how his diverse interests intersect in his dissertation. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity."

Two-thirds of respondents (67%), whether students or parents, say they are concerned about the quality of K–12 learning during the pandemic, according to a new national survey of more than 25,000 people by Northwestern, Northeastern, Rutgers, and Harvard universities. The finding holds across respondents from different racial backgrounds, incomes, and political affiliations. “The shift to virtual learning was impressive in many ways, but after nearly a year, it is clear that concerns are growing,” said IPR political scientist James Druckman.

"This episode of the Global Lunchbox features a conversation with sociologist Wendy Griswold, who takes a comparative and international look at access, desire, and the future of the reading class. Wendy Griswold is Professor of Sociology and Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University. She directs the Culture and Society Workshop and is affiliated with the Program of African Studies and the Comparative Literary Studies Program. Her books include American Guides: The Federal Writers' Project and the Casting of American Culture (2016), Regionalism and the Reading Class (2008), Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria (2000), and Renaissance Revivals: Revenge Tragedy and City Comedy in the London Theatre, 1576 - 1980 (1986)."

“This kind of schism over the loyalty to Trump, I think, creates the opportunity for potentially more [primary] challengers [in 2022],” Northwestern University political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong told VOA during a recent Skype interview. She added that banishing anti-Trump Republicans could make the party less palatable to the general voting public. “It points to how members are more focused on a small number of people in their constituency — their primary electorate, and even within that, an ardent base — whose interests might not be the same as the rest of their constituents,” Harbridge-Yong said. “It means that legislators are acting in the interests of a small minority rather than the interests of the majority of their constituents, much the less the majority of the country as a whole.”

“Professor Shank will be required to begin mandatory diversity, equity and inclusion training with a highly-experienced trainer selected by the President: Dr. Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., Ph.D., Founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University,’’ according to the summary

"This episode of the Global Lunchbox features a conversation with Nitasha Tamar Sharma on the theme of "Conducting Comparative Race Studies: Black Studies, Native Studies, and Black Residents of the Hawaiian Islands". Sharma is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies and Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern. She is the author of Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness (2010) and Hawai'i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (forthcoming in September 2021)."

Amid the protests and turbulence of 2020, Americans set a new record for gun purchases, with the FBI tallying a new high of 21 million background checks over the year. That was an increase of 26% over the 2016 record of 15.7 million. In a new national survey that took place between December 16 and January 11, nearly 9,000 of 25,000 Americans said they bought guns in 2020. The researchers then asked about why they bought them. Gun sales were especially high in March when the pandemic and lockdowns became widespread and in June at the peak of the Black Lives Matter protests. "These events generated feelings of uncertainty and threat, and Americans apparently felt some security in buying guns.” said IPR political scientist James Druckman.

In the newest #APSR "Conversations with Authors" @Jamil_Scott_ interviews @TabithaBonilla & @AlvinBTilleryJr about their article examining the impact of different identity frames for BlackLivesMatter on support for and mobilization among Black Americans.

Racial linked fate, the concept introduced by Dawson (1994) almost three decades ago, reoriented the study of racism and mass political behavior in the U.S. The scholarship traditionally had focused largely on the racial psychology of whites, how racism seeps into their political views and actions. Dawson proposed the black utility heuristic theory and linked fate, its associated measure, as an empirical framework to investigate the political behavior of blacks, the racial minority group most harmed by racism. Since then, linked fate has become an almost ubiquitous variable of interest in the research on minority group dynamics in American politics.

"These articles of impeachment are more position-taking than an actual threat against Biden," Harbridge-Yong explained. They may not even be brought to a vote, considering the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee decides whether Congress will pursue the articles. “My understanding of these articles of impeachment,” Harbridge-Yong said, is that they are “contributing to the kind of alternative facts and alternate realities that members of the two parties seem to exist in these days, in terms of working off of very different versions of what they see as the truth.”

Northwestern’s Sarah Bouchat, meanwhile, has a more cunning explanation. The military, Bouchat said, knows it will always have the most power in Myanmar. But what it could gain through the electoral process was legitimacy. If its political arm could win elections, then its full control of the country would have national, democratic support.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) has been one of former President Donald Trump’s loudest — and only — critics among Republicans in Congress. Now, after recently voting to impeach the former president for a second time, Kinzinger is launching a political action committee to support anti-Trump Republicans and purge the GOP of Trump’s influence.

More than a month after the latest COVID-19 relief bill became law, millions of Americans are still waiting for the money. Plus: No, silver is not the next GameStop.

"Congress begins with a budget reconciliation bill that sets out the spending targets. It's a chance to take one of their spending priorities and say what needs to change in current law to kind of fit within that framework. Over time obviously strategic politicians recognized that this was a great way to avoid the super majored requirement." "But it certainly suggests that the democrats would not have to move legislation as close to the preferences of the legislators in the republican party as they would if they were passing legislation in the world where the filibuster was an option."

Northwestern University researchers conducted a survey experiment focused on how #BlackLivesMatter messages about police reform were landing on Democratic-leaning voters in Georgia during the peak of the runoff election cycle.

Greek life plays a strong and damaging role at Northwestern. A system where you have to pay to socialize will only be accessible to those who can pay, meaning society’s racial wealth gaps will always be reflected in membership. Even if these organizations try to make financial accommodations for those who can’t pay, the cost barrier to membership is a signal to low-income students that the chapters are not actively invested in their inclusion. If you’re a low-income student who would struggle to pay dues in the first place, you can only assume that more challenges will follow. Even with dues covered, you may not be able to afford Ubers downtown to bar nights, spring trips to faraway places, the formal attire expected at events, or meals on the days where your Greek house doesn’t provide food. Meanwhile, so many of the other members can pay for those things without a second thought.

After more than half a century at Northwestern, I can honestly say that I see a substantial lack of leadership on the part of President Schapiro and Provost Hagerty exemplified by the exchanges between the administration and representatives of NU Community Not Cops. Students feel unsafe and that is not a good thing.

In acceding to the notion that Trump did not believe in his rhetoric, or that he might eventually behave presidentially, Scandal inadvertently acknowledged what would become a new reality: Television writers were unable to craft storylines as captivating as the daily stories coming out of the campaign trail and, eventually, the Trump White House. Indeed, while political drama was a hallmark of Bush and Obama-era television, it would essentially fade during Trump’s tenure. Scandal, like its counterparts House of Cards and Veep, began during the Obama years and ended early into Trump’s tenure. One might have thought that a scandalous administration with unprecedented levels of absurdity would be fodder for fictional political television. The opposite, however, turned out to be true. Political dramas sputtered because they couldn’t keep up.?

"This episode of the Global Lunchbox features a conversation with Kate Masur, Associate Professor of History at Northwestern and author of Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (2021). The point of departure for the conversation was Professor Masur's article "Yes, Wednesday’s attempted insurrection is who we are" published on the Washington Post blog Made by History on January 8, 2021 (co-authored with Gregory P. Downs)

With American cities’ socio-economic cleavages and ethnic diversity growing, policy making on urban public school issues has become ever more complex. For instance, what happens when the majority of voters are of a different racial group than a majority of the students in a city? One of the primary responsibilities of municipal government is the provision of public goods for its residents. Public education is one of the most substantial of these public goods. Decisions about education are often controversial; local education policy and politics are hotly contested and the outcomes can dramatically impact the lives of metropolitan residents.

Less than two weeks after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Trump administration released its 1776 report, a guide to “restore patriotic education.” The report, released on Martin Luther King Day, aimed to discredit accounts of U.S. history that view the enslavement of Black people as central to the nation’s founding. In particular, the report rebukes the New York Times’s Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project and earlier popular histories, such as Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”

This episode of the Global Lunchbox features a conversation with Freda Love Smith, drummer with indie rock bands the Blake Babies, Antenna, The Mysteries of Life, and the Sunshine Boys, and author of Red Velvet Underground: A Rock Memoir, with Recipes.

As President Joe Biden promises to vaccinate more than 100 million Americans by the end of his first 100 days in office (April 29), new research offers several critical insights for those in charge of managing such a massive national public health effort. The researchers, who hail from four major U.S. universities including Northwestern, surveyed approximately 25,000 individuals from around the nation between December 16 and January 10. They accounted for participants’ race, gender, age, education, political affiliation and where they lived.

Sally Nuamah, who researches the social and political consequences of institutional closures at Northwestern University, noted how people who live in and around Bronzeville have watched hospitals and schools close over the years, and housing disappear. Mercy’s proposed testing center, she said, would reveal disparities that the public knows already exists, without providing solutions. “The question then, is how does the care center improve the health care needs of the community?” Nuamah asked.

The American liberal world order was based on a set of ideals which lead to an open flow of information, people and trade; Things that not only stood in direct contradiction with the de-facto values of the communist world, but that also reinforced the American position within the Western system. However, since the high at the turn of the millennia, America’s position in the world has waned, at least in the eyes of the public. For instance, the number of people in Germany, a key U.S. ally in western Europe, who said they held a “favorable” view of the U.S. in 2000 was 78% according to a Gallup poll. In 2020, that number is down to 26%[1].?

Topic: - They require Servel to meet parity in the list. - Lists where the parity criterion is not met. Drive: Eduardo Castillo.

Ora and Peter welcome Christina Greer from Fordham University, Wendy Pearlman from Northwestern University, and Paul Staniland from the University of Chicago to discuss local knowledge, perhaps the most important aspect of field research.

Many are hopeful that Joe Biden’s presidency will quickly restore federal climate change measures and catalyze substantial new efforts, such as a "green new deal." Many also hope for the United States to play a leadership role in fueling far-reaching international cooperation around climate change. Are those expectations warranted or unrealistic? What can we expect from the new administration? A panel of Northwestern University political science, environment, and economics experts came together for a Northwestern Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs webinar to discuss these questions and more.

It's finally over. For Donald Trump, for the US and for the world. The time between the election and the assumption of office of Joe Biden was felt to be particularly painful because the usual rules and traditions were violated here. What does the new president do with his predecessor's legacy? Can Biden fix what Trump has done? Is "America first" a thing of the past?

Today, Jaime Harrison will be elected chair of the Democratic National Committee. Harrison is an institution builder. By choosing him, President Biden suggests he may be willing to become modern history’s first Democratic presidential party-builder — that is, the first Democratic president who prioritizes building up his party as well as enacting policy.

Natasha is worried that President Biden might drag Europe into new wars.What does Professor Henke think? "I don’t think so. As I said before, the US is on a trajectory of retrenchment or restraint. This is the result of the last two decades, since 9/11. The US responded to the terrorist attack by deploying military abroad and fighting the terrorist attack on foreign soil. As many of your readers know, this hasn’t been very successful. The middle east is still extremely unstable, and so is Afghanistan. What you can see now in Washington, not just under the Trump but also under the Obama administration, is a change in strategy. There is a reluctance to get engaged outside. There is even a reluctance in upholding the liberal world order, spreading democracy and even in upholding human rights."

Nothing changed and everything did. In Mar Mikhael, one of the areas of Beirut most damaged by the explosion last August, there were more signs of reconstruction than destruction when I visited last month. New glass storefronts were being mounted; inside pubs, furniture was set up for reopening. Across the highway, the remains of the 48-metre-high silos at the port stood charred and desolate.

You can’t come up with a better team to walk into the Frances Perkins Department of Labor and fight for worker power, unions, racial justice, misclassified workers, and UI.

Northwestern Political Science Faculty reflected on the Trump presidency and its implications on future U.S. politics in a Tuesday event. The virtual event, moderated by political science Prof. Wendy Pearlman, featured fellow political science Profs. John Bullock, Ricardo Galliano Court, Laurel Harbridge-Yong and Jeffrey Winters to offer reflections and answer questions on the last four years. The event was held on the eve of the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, marking the end of a fraught transition period.

On the eve of the inauguration of a new president, join the Department of Political Science to take stock of the last few weeks and last four years in U.S. democracy and think through implications for the future. Four faculty members will offer brief reflections and then open up for questions and discussion.

"It's more like a wartime inauguration than a normal inauguration," said Alvin Tillery Jr., director of Northwestern University's Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy. "It's going to look a lot more like FDR and the economic crisis of the Great Depression or Lyndon Johnson and the crisis of the civil rights movement." As a result, he said, Biden's speech needs to be "a much more stirring defense of the institution of democracy" than the typical inauguration address – or the typical speech by Biden, usually a plain-spoken person.

Seen against that history, the upsurge in White nationalist violence under Trump seems less like a new phenomenon than the resurgence of an old one -- a determination to use force to maintain a clear racial hierarchy. Political scientist Alvin Tillery, director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, says Trump's success at mobilizing an electoral coalition resistant to demographic change underscores the country's imperfect progress toward creating a true multiracial democracy. While America has formally been a democracy since its birth in the 1700s, he notes, for most of our history those democratic rights were limited solely to White men.

This reflection article presents insights on conducting fieldwork during and after COVID-19 from a diverse collection of political scientists—from department heads to graduate students based at public and private universities in the United States and abroad. Many of them contributed to a newly published volume, Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (Krause and Szekely 2020).

As Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th President of the United States, the inauguration occurs in the shadow of a violent siege on the Capitol Jan. 6 by pro-Trump supporters protesting ratification of the electoral vote. Northwestern experts in law, politics and history reflect on the significance of these historic days, as well as the challenges the incoming administration will need to address during a period of historical social unrest, political division and a public health and economic crisis.

American exceptionalism in at-will employment has pernicious consequences for workers and US workplaces. As we explain in this brief, at-will employment corrodes enforcement of workers’ labor, employment, and civil rights (e.g., Blades 1967; McGinley 1996). At-will employment also leaves workers vulnerable to arbitrary and unfair treatment by managers and supervisors. Workers already likely to experience discrimination or illegal treatment from their employer—for example, Black and brown workers, workers with lower levels of formal education, and low-wage workers—are especially vulnerable under at-will employment. On a more fundamental level, at-will employment erodes workers’ dignity and diminishes the possibility of real workplace democracy.

Nothing changed and everything did. In Mar Mikhael, one of the areas of Beirut most damaged by the explosion last August, there were more signs of reconstruction than destruction when I visited last month. New glass storefronts were being mounted; inside pubs, furniture was set up for reopening. Across the highway, the remains of the 48-metre-high silos at the port stood charred and desolate.

The coronavirus pandemic and resulting recession combine to create a uniquely dangerous time for low-wage workers. U.S. unemployment hit record highs in April 2020 and remains persistently elevated. And employers are more likely to break labor laws and take advantage of low-wage workers, both in sectors where labor law violations are traditionally high and in sectors that normally have higher rates of compliance. These dangers confront workers because in a pandemic-induced recession they are in even weaker positions to speak up for themselves, report violations, or find new jobs.

At the same time that union density in the United States has declined and labor law has withered, employment law has flourished, proliferating at the subnational level and expanding into new substantive domains (see Figures 1 and 2 below). As a result, for the vast majority of 21st century workers, what rights and protections remain come not from labor law and the mechanism of collective bargaining, but from employment laws and the mechanisms of regulation and litigation.

Arizona teachers’ victories and setbacks raise broader questions about the causes and long-term consequences of the upsurge in teacher labor activism over the past two years. Where did these protests come from — and what role did individual teachers, activists, and formal union organizations play in them? Why did the wave of activism appear in some states and not others? Why did it take varying forms, and which of these forms was most effective? How should we think about the current wave against the longer historical arc of mass public sector strikes? And what is likely to be the effect of the strikes on education politics as well as the labor movement? These are some of the timely questions tackled by Strike for the Common Good:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest funder of the arts and humanities in the US, announced today that grants totaling more than $72 million have been awarded to winners of its Just Futures Initiative—supporting teams of scholars who are studying past periods of crisis and disruption in order to lead us to cultural and social transformation. The 16 projects will receive grants of up to $5 million to be used over a three-year period to support multidisciplinary and multi-institutional collaborative teams producing solutions-based work that contributes to public understanding of the nation’s racist past and can lead to the creation of socially just futures.

Though historians now tell a much more complex story about religion in early America, the notion that the United States invented and perfected religious freedom remains firmly ensconced in U.S. public discourse. Since the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, U.S. promotion of international religious freedom advocacy is also written into the law. Legal guarantees of religious freedom appear as riders in trade agreements, aid packages, and humanitarian projects. The foreign policy establishment is abuzz with talk of freedom, toleration, and rights. Proponents defend efforts to export religious freedom globally, with the United States proudly at the helm.

"The most important reason to do it is to show there is accountability for his actions. So whether or not he is physically removed from office before his terms ends in the presidential transition occurs I think it's important to show that our democratic institutions are stronger than the pressure he has put on them to overturn free and fair elections and I worry without accountability this could become a political norm. That any losing candidate unhappy with the election tries to prevent the certification of votes, encourages supporters to overturn a free and fair election and that is not the way our democratic institution should work."

Prof. Sally Nuamah’s (Weinberg Doctorate ’16) scholarship isn’t constrained to the limits of traditionally academic research. A filmmaker, political scientist, author and non-profit founder, Nuamah has used various mediums to examine the education and political participation of Black women. Social policy Prof. Jonathan Guryan, her colleague in the Institute for Policy Research, said the scope of Nuamah’s work goes beyond what is typical for social scientists. “She publishes books, she publishes articles in peer reviewed academic journals,” Guryan said. “And then in addition to that, she also shares her ideas in ways that are more likely to reach non-academic audiences.”

President-elect Joe Biden will ask Congress to immediately cancel $10,000 in student debt for all borrowers and to extend the payment pause that’s scheduled to lapse this month, an aide told reporters Friday afternoon. Not all Democrats may be on board for student debt forgiveness and even if they were, procedural rules in the Senate generally require legislation to garner 60 votes. It will be hard to get nine Republicans in support of a debt jubilee. “With Democratic control of government, the Republicans are likely to re-assert their interest in the federal deficit and government spending,” said Laurel Harbridge-Yong, associate professor at Northwestern University.

Political considerations can cause recognition, and its absence, to matter more than it otherwise should, just as they can cause others to view recognition campaigns as vulnerable and ontologically harmful pursuits. This article proposes both an instrumental model of recognition and a theory on the recognition dilemma needed to explain these competing attitudes. In doing so, it shifts attention away from social structure, and relations, in order to take domestic processes seriously as a forum for both the construction and contestation of recognition politics.

That problem of racial and socioeconomic relations can also be seen in how different people don’t — or won’t — encounter each other, whether in our schools, in colleges, or even at the grocery store, said Gellman. U.S. schools must overhaul their curricula to stop perpetuating stereotypes and racism, and marginalizing groups. “Let’s rewrite our history books to tell the truth,” said Gellman. “Let’s make curricula respectful and honest. Tell [young students] that it was founded on a genocide of Native Americans, and not the Mayflower, the pilgrims and Thanksgiving.”

Druckman is a member of the 50-state COVID-19 project, which was launched in March 2020 by a multi-university group of researchers with expertise in computational social science, network science, public opinion polling, epidemiology, public health, communication, and political science. The consortium aims to help practitioners and governments make informed decisions and allocate resources effectively. The research seeks to identify links between social behaviors and virus transmission, as well as and the impact of messaging and regulation on individual and community outcomes during the COVID-19 crisis.

Six Northwestern political scientists signed a letter calling for President Donald Trump’s removal following the Capitol’s siege by Trump supporters seeking to stop the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. For political science Prof. Laurel Harbridge-Yong, signing the letter was about holding officials accountable and preventing such attacks from becoming commonplace. She noted that the Center for Systemic Peace no longer designates the United States as a democracy following the Capitol’s invasion. “We cannot just ignore them and expect politics as normal to resume and fix things,” she said in an email to the Daily. “That is why I think that cabinet officials and Congress need to consider ways of sanctioning Trump’s behavior. I don’t know the best path forward but simply ignoring the problem does not seem to be an appropriate solution.”

“Between the ways that the COVID-19 protestors, with their long guns, were treated in places like Wisconsin and Michigan and the ways that Black Lives Matters protestors were treated — 95% of the Black Lives Matter protests had no property damage. They were peaceful, and you had the National Guard there waiting for them. So this is that double standard that people have been talking about all year on display."

“The reality is we have not seen anything like this in modern American history. We’ve seen this in state houses in the 19th century: 1874 to 1876, the counter reconstruction movement, where the klan and democratic allies threatened violence and entered statehouses in this way. And we’ve seen violence in state houses this summer in Michigan and places like that in response to the COVID-19 restrictions. But we have never seen this in the television age at the US capitol.”

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues.

"Pursuing a PhD is a years-long marathon. It’s important to focus on caring for ourselves and maintaining a collaborative—not competitive—attitude when interacting with our fellow graduate students.”

“I try to defend public deliberation for slightly different reasons than deliberative democrats usually defend p d for… it is a common good, it is very important. It can help keep citizens informed … it can also help citizens to get to know the views of other citizens. It can also help find solutions… but those are not the ones that really are important and we need to be focusing on … my claim in the book is that public deliberation in a functioning public sphere has a distinctive democratic significance … that common deliberation for citizens is allowing them to testify their political views … and to have a conversation about why they have differences in opinion.”

"I've been looking at scandals and how they affect presidential popularity and survival in office. Scandals in recent years have had a very little effect on politicians. A decade ago, it might have been a debilitating scandal. We also know executive officials typically survive in office. It's hard to get an incumbent president out of office through scandal. The president has shown himself to be a survivor politically. Trump is like political Teflon."

"In this episode of the Global Lunchbox, Tessie Liu, Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, discusses her forthcoming book, A Frail Liberty: Anti-Racism and the Challenge of Universality in the French and Haitian Revolutions. The Global Lunchbox series, hosted by the Center for International & Area Studies at Northwestern University, features conversations with scholars in the social sciences and humanities about their current research on a range of critical global issues."

Connecticut already has Election Day registration. There’s pretty compelling evidence that when you have both early voting and Election Day registration, they can do a lot to retain voters and boost new turnout,” Suttmann-Lea said. “From the perspective of increasing access to ballots, the state has shown it has the infrastructure to run something like expanded mail voting quite well, even when they’re doing it on the fly.”

What role does trust play in global climate governance? For decades, claims of mistrust and distrust have dominated climate change policy arenas: doubts about climate change science and disagreements over rights and responsibilities related to mitigation, adaptation, loss, and damages undermine trust, impeding progress towards effective global climate action. And although frequently invoked in explanations of weak or failed climate action, there is limited research exploring the role of trust as a distinct concept in global climate governance. Here we seek to address this gap by developing a relational framework that focuses attention on how trust dynamics shape cooperation in four types of relationships: reliance, reciprocity, responsibility, and recognition.