DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

The recent popularity of nationalist movements bears witness to the continued power of national feeling in politics. This article considers the potential relationship between different kinds of national attachments and what we call active and allegiant citizenship—support for democracy, community participation, and prosocial behavior. We analyze these relationships using data from two waves of the European Values Study. We find that a set of attachments often called civic nationalism—including patriotism, national identity, and respect for one’s country’s institutions—are connected with better citizenship on virtually all of our outcomes, whereas ethnic nationalism is frequently connected with worse citizenship. These associations, however, tend to be weaker in the postcommunist states which have a different experience with both nationalism and democracy.

This article uses survey experiments to assess whether administrative procedures fix cognitive bias. We focus on two procedural requirements: qualitative reason-giving and quantitative cost-benefit analysis (“CBA”). Both requirements are now firmly entrenched in U.S. federal regulation-making. Multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, OECD, and EU have encouraged their broad diffusion across many national contexts. Yet CBA, in particular, remains controversial. Supporters of CBA claim it leads to more rational regulation, with Sunstein (2000) explicitly proposing that CBA can reduce cognitive biases. By contrast, we argue that procedures should be conceptualized as imperfect substitutes subject to diminishing marginal benefits. We hypothesize that procedures will only fix cognitive biases if they disrupt bias-inducing mental processes.

Belief in inaccurate political claims was most common among those who endorsed vaccine misperceptions. The survey found 71% of those also believed false vaccine claims also believed inaccurate political claims. In contrast, just 32% of those who correctly identified all false vaccine claims believed inaccurate political statements. “We suspect that the relative prevalence of political misperceptions versus vaccine related misperceptions stems from politics being a more contested domain without consensus experts,” said political scientist James Druckman, one of the project’s principal investigators.

Building on Debra Satz's argument that we can design our way out of noxious markets, this essay shifts toward questions of process, paying particular attention to the constraints posed when noxious markets generate supportive political constituencies. Using the case of U.S. housing policy, I make two claims. First, even intentional efforts at using market design to harness the capacities Satz identifies can produce cross-cutting effects, strengthening democracies on some dimensions and weakening them on others. Second, noxious markets can generate supportive constituencies that may undermine reform efforts. Ultimately, a moral housing market requires political supports that can help to broaden communities of fate, build political capacities of those who are persistently underrepresented in local deliberations, and encourage participants to reflect on the consequences of market design.

The election was defined by voter concerns about crime, which has become a major issue in mayoral races across the country. Lightfoot faced scrutiny from both the left and right over her record on crime and policing, as she sought to stake out the center in the sharply divided race. Vallas, who received the most votes Tuesday night, ran on a platform of expanding the city's police force. Tillery told Newsweek that concerns about crime grew following the COVID-19 pandemic. Following widespread shutdowns across the United States, several cities saw increases in crime, though these numbers have since dropped. Furthermore, a focus on crime by local media and political candidates has fueled voters' concerns, he said.

The nation may not be in recession, but Americans are reckoning with a classic recessionary symptom: feeling poorer. “People don’t like to fire sitting presidents, even vulnerable ones,” said Alvin Tillery, Jr., a political scientist and director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University. “It’s only happened three times in the modern era,” with Carter, George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Donald Trump in 2020.

With the war in Ukraine hitting its one-year mark, Russian President Vladimir Putin remains so publicly committed to his military efforts that many analysts believe he will never willingly accept anything other than victory. William Reno, professor and chair of the political science department at Northwestern University, told Newsweek that, for now, Putin plans to keep dragging the war on. "At the one-year mark, I'd say that Russia is waiting out the clock and the Ukrainians are racing against the clock. Public support in the West for assistance to Ukraine is still high but declining," Reno said. "The Russians figure they win by staying in the fight." He added that it "looks increasingly likely that Putin personally has no intention of backing down, given where Russia is now."

a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, has transformed into a political battleground with President Joe Biden's choice to visit Ukraine ahead of the embattled town deemed "a slap in the face" by its local mayor. ... Jeffrey Winters, professor of political science at Northwestern University, echoed these comments, adding that the term "White House official" had "long been synonymous with membership in the president's cabinet and that despite Regan's office being outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it didn't prevent him from being deemed as such. The director of the EPA is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate," Winters added. "Having an office on the White House grounds is not a basis for referring to someone as a White House official”.

The United Nations General Assembly voted in overwhelming support to adopt a resolution condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine less than a day before the war in eastern Europe reaches its one-year mark. Ian Hurd, director of Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University, told Newsweek on Thursday that while many members of the UN are "appalled at Russia's invasion," "many also have other concerns and opposing Russia might not be at the top of their list of priorities. The General Assembly can't take decisive action because the founders of the UN did not want it to have any muscle—the vote today was a strong symbolic condemnation by a large majority of countries of Russia's invasion, and of Putin's militarism," Hurd said. "It is a strong statement that signals the broad opposition Putin has made for himself."

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.

I thought we had a deal with my country. It was supposed that in Peru you suffer but you also enjoy. When the political crisis started, at least we had football. Do you remember, Peru? The anguish of seeing us draw with Colombia still allowed us to reach the playoffs. Then we wept with emotion, marveling. Cuevita gave that goal pass to "Jefferson Agustín Farfán Guadalupe for his mamacita" and the doors of the 2018 World Cup in Russia were opened for us. We were able to enjoy. That was supposed, dear Peru, to be our deal. I know that we do not stop being an imperfect, unequal and unfair country . The social sciences never stopped noticing it . But we were beginning to close gaps during the last decades. Or, at least, there were better conditions to undertake the necessary changes. Today, instead, there is only suffering.

The Michigan shooting was the 77th mass shooting in the country this year, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker website. There were 753 mass shootings across the US last year, compared with 339 in 2013, it said. Nearly 5,800 people in the US had died this year as a result of gun violence by Sunday, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit national group that keeps track of shootings. Biden said on Friday that US communities are "being torn apart by gun violence". He made the statement hours after six people were shot dead in a rural Mississippi town. Also, more than 6,540 guns were intercepted by the Transportation Security Administration at airport checkpoints nationwide last year. That figure, equating to about 18 guns a day, was an all-time high for guns intercepted at US airports. "We have the highest rates of gun deaths in the world..."

We propose and explore the possibility that language models can be studied as effective proxies for specific human subpopulations in social science research. Practical and research applications of artificial intelligence tools have sometimes been limited by problematic biases (such as racism or sexism), which are often treated as uniform properties of the models. We show that the “algorithmic bias” within one such tool—the GPT-3 language model—is instead both fine-grained and demographically correlated, meaning that proper conditioning will cause it to accurately emulate response distributions from a wide variety of human subgroups. We term this property algorithmic fidelity and explore its extent in GPT-3. We create “silicon samples” by conditioning the model on thousands of sociodemographic backstories from human participants in multiple large surveys conducted in the United States.

In the past decade, the people of Syria have suffered the unparalleled hardships of war and mass displacement. Earlier this month, Syrians were struck by another calamity as a historic earthquake destroyed entire towns in Turkey and Syria and buried tens of thousands of people under rubble. The desperate need for humanitarian aid has reignited a debate over U.S. sanctions against Syria and whether the U.S. government should lift them to accelerate rescue and relief efforts. The regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is using the earthquake to renew calls to lift sanctions — a call that has been echoed by some progressive and Arab American groups and activists in the United States. “After the earthquake, aid took several days to make its way to northwestern Syria, which is under opposition control..."

An Illinois-based club of amateur balloonists says one of its small balloons is “missing in action” after last reporting its location over Alaska on Saturday, the same day the U.S. military shot down an unidentified object in the same region. While the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB) has not blamed the U.S. government for taking out one of its 32-inch-wide “Pico Balloons,” the group of hobbyists notes in a post on its blog that its last transmission near a small island off the west coast of Alaska occurred after the balloon had been airborne for more than four months and circled the globe seven times. “Pico Balloon K9YO last reported on February 11th at 00:48 zulu near Hagemeister Island after 123 days and 18 hours of flight,” the NIBBB blog post, dated Feb. 14, states. Attempts to reach the NIBBB have been unsuccessful.

One year ago, on Feb. 24, 2022, Putin initiated a new world order. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the dynamics of interstate relations are centered around geopolitics and great power competition, rather than the globalization of the 1990s or the threat of terrorism in the 2000s. Had Russia's invasion gone as planned, we would already be living in a world in which dictators again find it permissible to impose their will on weaker neighbors by force. The consequences would have been immense, affecting everything from the territorial integrity of NATO members such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to China's calculations about its policies toward Taiwan. The rest of the western world should recognize how indebted we are to Ukrainians, who so far have repelled Putin's unlawful invasion but at the cost of immense suffering.

A recent story saying the United States was behind September's attack on Russia's Nord Stream gas pipelines could give Russian President Vladimir Putin something he's likely been wanting in the form of bad publicity for the U.S., according to some analysts. The story about the alleged U.S. role in the attack was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh and published Wednesday on his Substack. The details of Hersh's report could not be independently verified by Newsweek. "It's classic information warfare," political science professor at Northwestern University William Reno told Newsweek. Reno continued, "Critical and inconvenient interventions such as Hersh's story are inherent in a free press and are 'vulnerabilities' that authoritarian adversaries don't possess. Putin is leveraging that advantage, as he does with Tucker Carlson's statements."

There is substantial concern about democratic backsliding in the United States. Evidence includes notably high levels of support for undemocratic practices among the public. Much less is known, however, about the views of elected officials – even though they influence democratic outcomes more directly. In a survey experiment with state legislators, the researchers show that these officials exhibit much lower levels of support for undemocratic practices than the public. However, legislators vastly overestimate the undemocratic views of voters from the other party (though not the views of their own party’s voters). These inaccurate “meta-perceptions” are significantly reduced when legislators receive accurate information about the views of voters from the other party, suggesting legislators’ own support for undemocratic practices are causally linked to their inaccurate meta-perceptions.

On July 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) will mark the 25th anniversary of the adoption of the Rome Statute, its founding treaty. The Statute constituted a remarkable transfer of authority from sovereign states to an international institution: The ICC is the first permanent court charged with prosecuting individuals, including senior political and military leaders, for atrocity crimes. Per the Statute, the ICC was designed with the goals of ending impunity for these crimes, contributing to their prevention, and delivering justice to victims. To what extent has the ICC achieved these and other goals in the Rome Statute? The ICC’s upcoming anniversary provides an opportune moment to examine this question and take stock of the Court’s performance.

Non-state armed groups such as drug traffickers, militias, gangs, guerrillas or paramilitaries operate in several Latin American countries. What are the differences between the communities where these groups have been present and the communities where they have not been present? Studies on the impact of organized crime and armed conflicts tend to focus on people and communities that have been victims of violence, for obvious reasons. However, armed groups impact the societies where they operate in many other ways. As one of us pointed out in a previous post ten years ago, the “violence” of these organizations is not necessarily a good proxy for their “presence”. When we focus solely on the victims or on places where high levels of violence have been recorded, we may be ignoring the people and communities that have been impacted by other aspects of the presence of these organizations.

Scholars disagree about the ability of people to use heuristics to make political judgments, with some arguing that heuristics are easy-to-use pieces of information and others arguing that applying heuristics may require some degree of political expertise. We argue that these debates have been somewhat intractable because most prior work has not considered the ecological rationality of political judgments—that is, the potential for cues to yield accurate judgments about a clearly defined reference class. In this paper, we present the results of two studies exploring whether people use party labels to make judgments about a random sample of U.S. Representatives’ voting behaviors.

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby on Wednesday discussed the recent decision by the United States to provide 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. Among the topics Kirby talked about during a press conference were certain issues Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's military forces may experience with the tanks, including the potentially large problem of fueling the battle vehicles. Abrams tanks run on a "gas turbine engine which needs jet fuel," Kirby said. "So there's a specific type of fuel that powers the Abrams, and we've got to make sure that pipeline—literally and figuratively—is available to Ukraine." William Reno, a professor and chair of the political science department at Northwestern University, told Newsweek that the Abrams can run on JP-8, a type of kerosene that's commonly used by the U.S. military and NATO.

According to a new analysis, the total number of people employed full-time by the U.S. federal government remained largely unchanged by the end of the Trump administration, but with significant variation in growth, downsizing, and turnover between agencies. Brian Libgober of Northwestern University and Mark Richardson of Georgetown University present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on January 18, 2023.

The world is inundated with waste. Waste is a universal feature of contemporary global capitalism and experiences with waste are widely disparate. Should we frame – in line with many environmental justice advocates and scholars – waste as a hazard to the environment and the people who live in proximity to it? Or perhaps, can we understand waste as something more complex: an environment in and of itself; a set of infrastructures that reveal both reified systemic constraints and dynamic political improvisation?

Presidents and executive branch agencies often have adversarial relationships. Early accounts suggest that these antagonisms may have been deeper and broader under President Trump than under any recent President. Yet careful appraisals have sometimes shown that claims about what President Trump has done to government and politics are over-stated, require greater nuance, or are just plain wrong. In this article, we use federal employment records from the Office of Personnel Management to examine rates of entry and exit at agencies across the executive branch during President Trump’s term. A key challenge in this endeavor is that agencies vary in size dramatically, and this variability makes direct comparisons of rates of entry and exit across agencies problematic.

Scholars derive intellectual fulfillment from an enormously wide range of endeavors. For those who may not have the resources to get to the field, the family flexibility to spend time there, or the personality to enjoy extensive human interaction, the pandemic-catalyzed innovations and acceptance of digital fieldwork may feel like a relieving step forward. For me, in-person fieldwork has been the most fulfilling work I have done as a scholar. The pandemic pause was something I have waited out impatiently. I love talking to people and being in the spaces of others as a way to reflect on and analyze the world. Despite insufficient training in ethnographic methods in graduate school, fourteen years ago I flung myself into the field for doctoral research and never looked back. Like any modality, there are highs and lows with in-person fieldwork.

Doreen Lustig, an associate professor of law at Tel Aviv University, frames her book Veiled Power: International Law and the Private Corporation 1886–1981 as an effort to get beyond the “failure narrative” that focuses on how corporations escape responsibility for actions that if undertaken by a state would be a violation of international law. She sees law schools’ curricula as perpetuating the failure narrative and reinforcing the idea that: “Sovereignty is a concept of political or public law and property belongs to civil or private law" (p. 2). Lustig wants to bring in a historical understanding that demonstrates the longstanding interaction between corporations and international law.

This article presents an analysis of de/centralization in Mexico during the period 1824–2020, building on an original dataset that coded three subdimension of the politico–institutional arrangement, 22 policy areas and 5 subdimension of the fiscal sphere for each year during that time. The country evolved from a decentralized federation at the outset to a relatively centralized one nowadays. The Mexican case also sheds light on the importance of regime type and the ruling elite's ideological orientation to explain de/centralization patterns. Centralization was prevalent during two long authoritarian periods since the last quarter of the XIX century. On the contrary, dynamic decentralization occurred once the authoritarian regime began to erode in the 1980s. The ideological orientation of the ruling elite helped to strengthen those trajectories.

Pensé que teníamos un trato con mi país. Se suponía que en Perú se sufre pero también se goza. Cuando la crisis política empezaba, al menos teníamos fútbol. ¿Lo recuerdas, Perú? La angustia de vernos empatar con Colombia igual nos permitió llegar al repechaje. Luego lloramos de emoción, maravillados. Cuevita le dio ese pase de gol a “Jefferson Agustín Farfán Guadalupe por su mamacita” y se nos abrieron las puertas del mundial Rusia 2018. Pudimos gozar.

I mean, think there’s 2 kinds of questions. One, what Will happen in another? What should happen? I think what Will happen is that we’ll see ongoing suffering at the border that has been, you know, to think that in place for the last several years.

L'intelligence di Kiev dice che Putin starebbe preparando una nuova chiamata alle armi. Mauro Gilli, senior researcher al Center for security studies del Politecnico di Zurigo, non esclude che si tratti solo di tattica. Mosca si starebbe preparando a ordinare la mobilitazione di altri 500.000 coscritti a gennaio dopo i 300.000 chiamati ad arruolarsi lo scorso ottobre. Lo ha annunciato Vadym Skibitsky, vice capo dell’intelligence militare ucraina, citato dal Guardian. I nuovi coscritti servirebbero a lanciare nuovi attacchi che la Russia ha intenzione di sferrare in primavera e in estate nell’Est e nel Sud dell’Ucraina, ha spiegato.

Our everyday life is entangled with products and services of so-called Big Tech companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook. International relations (IR) scholars increasingly seek to reflect on the relationships between Big Tech, capitalism, and institutionalized politics, and they engage with the practices of algorithmic governance and platformization that shape and are shaped by Big Tech. This collective discussion advances these emerging debates by approaching Big Tech transversally, meaning that we problematize Big Tech as an object of study and raise a range of fundamental questions about its politics. The contributions demonstrate how a transversal perspective that cuts across sociomaterial, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries and framings opens up the study of the politics of Big Tech.

Silvia Otero Bahamón is an Associate Professor at the School of International, Political, and Urban Studies at Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, Colombia.?She completed her PhD in Political Science at Northwestern University (2016) and a master's degree at the same institution (2013). Silvia's research topics include social policy, political economy of inequality, comparative politics of Latin America, state formation, and qualitative methods. Specifically, her research agenda focuses on the subnational dimensions of inequality, on which she is currently writing a book on subnational social inequality in Latin America and is advancing a research project on the reduction of income inequality in four Colombian cities. She has published her studies in World Development, Latin American Politics and Society, Geoforum, Studies in Comparative International Development, Health Affairs, and Revist

Understanding the nature and functioning of wartime governance is crucial because it has important ramifications for state building after war. “When people think about war, they usually think about destruction and anarchy. And if you look at conflict zones, what you find is that that is often not true. There is a new form of order, and that order is the structure or the influence by armed groups on the civilian populations they interact with.” - Ana Arjona

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and its spread to new territories and states. Today, under the sway of Donald Trump, it is hardly recognizable as the party of Lincoln or even the party of Eisenhower. How and why has the Republican Party changed so drastically? Kenneth Janda sheds new light on the Republican Party’s transformations, drawing on a wide range of quantitative and qualitative evidence. He examines nearly three thousand planks from every Republican platform since 1856 as well as candidate statements and historical sources, tracing the evolution of the party’s positions on topics such as states’ rights, trade, taxation, regulation, law and order, immigration, environmental protection, and voting rights.

Professor Jeffrey Winters, a political scientist and oligarch expert from Northwestern University in Illinois, pointed out many of the dead were billionaires with bodyguards and access to the best healthcare money could buy. He told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that without thorough investigations there could only be speculation as to the causes, but dubbed the oligarchs’ deaths “highly unusual”. “They have access to the best healthcare. They fly to top hospitals like the Mayo Clinic and receive concierge check-ups and treatments, paying full costs with no insurance,” he said. Most oligarchs also had an entourage or security detail in tow, making them difficult to kill, Winter noted.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has awarded Boeing a $426 million contract to produce 12 CH-47F Chinooks for the Egyptian Air Force, the company announced Tuesday. The contract comes more than seven months after the U.S. State Department approved the foreign military sale on May 26 for Egypt to buy 23 “F” models and related equipment for $2.6 billion. This is the first contract as part of that potential sale, and the country has the option to purchase 11 more, a spokesman with Boeing told Defense News.