DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

"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.”

Join us for the third episode of EDU: Live—a conversation between David and Dr. Alvin Tillery, associate professor and founding director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University. A social scientist, DEI evangelist, and proud alumnus of Morehouse College and Harvard University, Alvin is one of the nation’s leading academics and researchers on issues of diversity and inclusion as well as the architect behind Northwestern University’s new “Leading Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” short course. Dr. Tillery is also the author of Between Homeland and Motherland: Africa, US Foreign Policy and Black Leadership in America (Cornell University Press, 2011), which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

"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."

Professor Alvin Bernard Tillery, Jr. (Northwestern University) spoke virtually about the Black Lives Matter movement at an event hosted by the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University on April 16th, 2021. This is a recording of his talk and the question and answer session that followed it.

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.”

Serving in the GOP controlled Indiana legislature has been painful for some Black lawmakers, after they were heckled during a debate. It highlights the lack of diversity within state politics.

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.

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.