DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

We introduce a dynamic dataset of all communications by state election officials (EOs) on social media during the 2022 election cycle and develop metrics to assess the effectiveness of trust-building strategies on voter confidence. We employ quantitative manual content analysis of 10,000 organic posts from 118 state EOs’ accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter between September 10 and November 30, 2022, and code for the presence of variables that measure EOs’ efforts to combat misinformation and build trusted networks of communications.

Following former President Donald Trump’s electoral win last Tuesday, six Northwestern faculty experts painted a worrying picture of his second term in office in a Monday post-election panel. They focused on topics ranging from international relations to immigration politics. Organized by the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the panel featured history Prof. Michael Allen, Pritzker Prof. David Dana, global health studies Prof. Sarah Rodriguez and political science Profs. Karen Alter, Julie Lee Merseth and William Reno.

Roughly 80 community members attended a Northwestern Institute for Policy Research panel on Monday afternoon about the 2024 election and threats to American democracy at Scott Hall. .... The three panelists — psychology Prof. Eli Finkel, political science Prof. Chloe Thurston and policy analysis and communication Prof. Erik Nisbet — briefly highlighted the findings of their studies related to the 2024 election.

El presente libro reúne, desarrolla y profundiza una serie de artículos publicados a lo largo de diez años, entre 2012 y 2022. Durante ese período nuestra investigación hizo foco en los estudios críticos de animalidad y sus implicancias para la filosofía política, en particular para repensar tanto la soberanía política como el concepto de dignidad humana en el Antropoceno. Desde nuestra perspectiva, la soberanía política y la noción de dignidad humana mantienen más afinidades de lo que suele admitirse, en especial porque despliegan, o eso intentamos argumentar en el libro, modos de separar y delimitar lo humano de lo animal muy semejantes

El presente libro reúne, desarrolla y profundiza una serie de artículos publicados a lo largo de diez años, entre 2012 y 2022. Durante ese período nuestra investigación hizo foco en los estudios críticos de animalidad y sus implicancias para la filosofía política, en particular para repensar tanto la soberanía política como el concepto de dignidad humana en el Antropoceno. Desde nuestra perspectiva, la soberanía política y la noción de dignidad humana mantienen más afinidades de lo que suele admitirse, en especial porque despliegan, o eso intentamos argumentar en el libro, modos de separar y delimitar lo humano de lo animal muy semejantes.

Alvin Tillery, founder of the Super-PAC Alliance for Black Equality, gave the party an early heads-up that Harris was losing the support of black men in particular, especially the younger generation. He joins us now to explain why, and why Mr. Trump picked up some of that demographic.

"The world's richest man backed US president-elect Donald Trump's successful campaign with his funds and his high profile. But what was in it for him? Experts say more money may not be Elon Musk's motivating factor. Steve Nelson, a political economist at Northwestern University, has observed the tendency of billionaires to pursue political office, although this has mostly been in autocracies. It's less common in democracies where partisans donate money to candidates they support instead. "For somebody like Musk, it's probably the case that you have a very strong personal interest in pursuing a particular policy agenda that you don't think can be controlled in a more indirect fashion," Nelson told DW."

Invoking the deaths of migrant children in Border Patrol custody and proclaiming solidarity with health care providers, freshman Rep. Lauren Underwood, Democrat of Illinois, urged her House colleagues in late September to vote for a measure that she said would help with a public health emergency at the border. “The humanitarian and medical situation on our southern border has reached crisis levels,” Underwood said.

"As part of the agreement that brought down the pro-Palestinian encampment at Northwestern University last spring, two scholars and five students from Gaza are arriving on the Evanston campus this fall. WBEZ’s Lisa Kurian Philip met with one of the scholars, a visiting professor of political science, who arrived in Evanston a month ago after fleeing Gaza for Egypt. He shared his personal story, which has been edited for brevity and clarity."

"For one Black pollster, the reasons behind Harris’s performance are not complicated. Alvin Tillery, a professor of political science at Northwestern University and founder of the super PAC Alliance For Black Equity, said the Harris campaign used failed strategies to engage Black men, “even after all the talk about how critical it was to get their vote.” “It was political malpractice,” Tillery said. Harris introduced an Opportunity Agenda for Black Men, outlining what her administration would do to support that voting constituency that seemed movable. That move gained her 10 points, to 71%, in the national polls his organization conducted two weeks before the election, Tillery said. But that effort was one of the few that addressed Black men directly, he added. “She needed 83-84% of the Black male vote,” he told NBC News.

NATO has an Anti-Strategy problem, good intentions for Ukraine but highly flawed planning. Translated into practice: Washington outsources escalation management to Moscow. It allows Russia to dictate the actions and reactions to its invasion and occupation of Ukraine on its own terms. Moreover, NATO’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia exhibits loose threads, critical asymmetries, and gaping holes in the NATO fabric. Of the loose threads the most errant is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the “illiberal democrat” who empathizes with Vladimir Putin, obstructs Ukraine support, and supports Russia’s war effort through Hungary’s continued dependence on Russian oil and gas.

"GUESTS: Delmarie Cobb, Democratic political strategist Jaime Dominguez, associate professor of instruction in the department of political science at Northwestern University Pat Brady, former chairman for the Illinois Republican Party Tessa Weinberg, WBEZ city government and politics reporter Chip Mitchell, WBEZ criminal justice reporter Matt Dietrich, public information officer, Illinois State Board of Elections Aaron Del Mar, Palatine Township Republican Chairman, former Cook County Republican Party Chairman"

Emerson Murray is a PhD candidate in Political Science in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. His research examines migration and border politics within the ‘Anglosphere,’ focusing on how the United Kingdom and its former settler colonies—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States—historically and presently collaborate on migration policy. Emerson was awarded a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Very delighted to have contributed a chapter on “Terrorism and the United Nations” in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Terrorism Studies: New Perspectives and Topics, edited by Max Abrahms. In the chapter, I trace the evolution of the UN’s approach to terrorism, identifying the functioning — and dysfunctioning — of three key interlocking and complementary counterterrorism regime complexes under the auspices of the Security Council. I aim in this study to achieve both academic insight and relevance to policy.

Northwestern University political science student and first-time voter Alexa Murphy highlighted the importance of local elections. “Voting in the national election is important, but voting in local elections can in many ways be more important,” she said. Some Evanston youth see voting as a critical chance to make a difference not just locally, but nationally. When young people participate, they cast their ballots with new political perspectives that may influence how society perceives their generation. First-time voters in Evanston that we spoke with recognize that voting is not just about choosing leaders. It’s a gateway to policies that dictate their future.

Crises abound: our economies, democracies, social relations, cultural identities, and the very planet that we live on are subjected to repeated and increasingly severe shocks. Have we entered an age of chronic crisis? From diverse disciplinary perspectives, the event will explore conceptual and theoretical approaches that might help us better to understand, engage with, and respond to our time as a time ‘out of joint’.

This week, we’re bringing you the post-Election Day events around campus. Whether you’re looking for a chance to dig into the latest in politics or take a few minutes to de-stress, we’ve got you covered. State of democracy: The Institute for Policy Research will bring together professors Eli Finkel, Chloe Thurston and Erik Nisbet to discuss the challenges facing U.S. democracy, from political polarization to misinformation in a panel moderated by Laurel Harbridge-Yong. The panel begins at noon on Monday, Nov. 11, in the Guild Lounge, Scott Hall, 601 University Place. A global gaze: Six Northwestern faculty experts will discuss the global implications of the election results from trade policy to global health during a panel organized by the Buffett Institute. Panelists will include professors Michael Allen, Karen Alter, David Dana, Julie Lee Merseth, William Reno and Sarah Rodriguez.

Two days before Election Day, Northwestern University Associate Professor Tabitha Bonilla joined Sunday's WGN Weekend Morning News with Sean Lewis and Jewell Hillery.

V posledních frenetických dnech prezidentské predvolební kampane v USA americká média publikují výsledky desítek pruzkumu verejného mínení každý den. Bežní ctenári, akademictí experti i stratégové obou hlavních politických stran pak tráví nespocet hodin nad casovými radami (Má popularita Harris vzestupný trend, nebo spíše stagnuje?), výsledky pro specifické podskupiny volicu (Nakolik si Trump polepšil mezi afroamerickými muži?) ci nad širšími postoji americké verejnosti (Do jaké míry zvýší potratové referendum v Arizone úcast v prezidentských volbách jako takových?) v sibylovské snaze odhadnout budoucnost.

Dr. Jim Moore is a professor at Pacific University and Director of Political Outreach at the Tom McCall Center for Civic Engagement. He earned his doctorate in political science at Northwestern University in 1995 and has been one of the most quoted political analysts in Oregon in the 21st century. He plans to retire this year. He joins the Exchange to share his perspective on the current state of political affairs in Oregon and across the nation.

The ideas shaping the modern world are generated by connections across fields, sectors and geographies. Our new "Breaking Boundaries" podcast features stories of successful collaborations fueling progress toward reaching the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Episodes will spotlight idea catalysts and innovators working across borders of all kinds to address complex global challenges ranging from the climate crisis and food insecurity to poverty and inequality.

Although policymakers have recently shown a keen interest in noncompete reform, a gap exists in the literature concerning what the U.S. public's preferences are regarding noncompetes. Therefore, this article presents the empirical findings of a nationally-representative survey of the American public on the noncompete law governing employees. Based on the results of a conjoint experiment within the survey, this article finds that the U.S public prefers that noncompetes be used to protect any types of confidential information, rather than simply customer lists or employee training investments. Additionally, the findings do not show clear support either for or against noncompete exemptions based on an employee's earnings level.

On October 30th, IGP Faculty Advisory Board Member and Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs, Alex Hertel-Fernandez, participated in a webinar hosted by The Scholars Strategy Network and Washington Center for Equitable Growth on how academics can write comments to the federal government to reduce administrative burdens. The webinar featured Sam Berger, Associate Administrator at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Kyle Gardiner, Policy Analyst at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Jordan Kyle, Research Fellow in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and Miranda Yaver, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wheaton College.

Schill’s announcement that Kellogg Prof. Efraim Benmelechwill lead the committee — alongside SESP Dean Bryan Brayboy — has also attracted some criticism. Benmelech served six years in the Israeli Defense Forces in the 1990s, eventually serving as a commander. The minimum required length of military service for Israeli men is two years and eight months. Political science Prof. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd said she worries Benmelech’s former service in the IDF could bias the committee toward certain kinds of hate. “The IDF is associated with the state of Israel, and so that person presumably is going to be attuned to or have an ear for anti-Israel sentiment,” said Hurd, who signed the Thursday Letter to the Editor by faculty and staff. “I’m afraid — as a scholar of religion and politics — that having your antenna up for anti-Israel sentiment

Dani Gilbert, an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University, joins ABC News Live anchor Stephanie Ramos to discuss the latest on hostage negotiations in Israel.

Plus, a CEO shake-up at the company behind ChatGPT – Open AI – and two turkeys avoid getting gobbled and receive this year’s presidential pardons.

Political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong will step into the role of associate director at Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research (IPR) on Sept. 1. Harbridge-Yong is known for her studies of bipartisanship, polarization, and how elections, institutions, and policy are connected in the United States. She joined Northwestern after receiving her PhD in political science from Stanford in 2009 and became a full professor this September.

Leonardo Martinez-Diaz is Managing Director for Climate Finance in the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate at the U.S. Department of State. Previously, he was Global Director of the Sustainable Finance Center at the World Resources Institute, a leading non-profit conducting research on climate and environment. During the Obama Administration, Martinez-Diaz served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy and Environment in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, as well as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Western Hemisphere. Prior to that, he served as Director of the Office of Policy at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Chile’s 2021–22 Constitutional Convention was the first in the world to feature mechanisms that guaranteed gender parity among constituents (Arce and Suárez-Cao 2021). This was not an easy win. Feminist activists and women politicians pushed for gender parity in 2020-21 in a country that had adopted gender quotas relatively late (Figueroa 2021; Reyes-Housholder, Suárez-Cao, and Le Foulon 2023; Suárez-Cao 2023; personal interview #1, April 21, 2023). Reserving seats for Indigenous groups and using other mechanisms to allow space for independent constituents further broadened the convention’s ostensible inclusiveness. After the September 2022 rejection of the 2021–22 Constitutional Convention’s draft, political parties immediately started over by crafting an elite-controlled process.

Mr Yoes Kenawas, a research fellow at Atma Jaya Catholic University, told ST: “Their theatrical performance became the talk of the town. It’s more the performative aspects, rather than the substantive ones, (that are used to attract voters).” Mr Yoes said that for the president and vice-president to be an effective team, technical knowledge is not enough, and that strategic thinking is also required to achieve bigger goals for the country. But he added: “It is hard to see the (Prabowo-Gibran) pair do that.” He acknowledged that Indonesia has progressed under Mr Widodo, but said many experts still had doubts whether the President’s policies and development strategies could ensure sustainable and equitable progress for the nation. Mr Yoes said: “Statistics show impressive achievements.

Colas set up a series of all-star phone calls, for her own education and for disconcerted WNBA players: Fiona Hill, a former senior White House adviser and universally well-regarded as one of the world's foremost experts on Putin and Russia; Malcolm Nance, a counterintelligence expert and MSNBC commentator; Danielle Gilbert, a political science professor (now at Northwestern University) and expert on state-sponsored hostage taking; Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania with expertise on Russia.

Does American democracy face dire ongoing challenges that threaten honest elections and effective government responsive to the majority? While the 2020 and 2022 elections were fair, doubters continue to spread unfounded charges of massive election fraud, restrict voter access, and subvert honest election administration and tabulations. What responses are appropriate and feasible? Join us for a lively conversation with a panel of political scientists on the future of American democracy.

The Tech, Law and Security Program (TLS) is comprised of leading experts in the program’s key areas. The expert team is particularly well placed to convene the relevant players and to ensure that TLS research and other output is timely, calibrated and positioned to have a high-level impact on policy and practice. Lena is research fellow, a visiting scholar at the Stockton Center for International Law at the US Naval War College, and a research affiliate at Cambridge University and the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on the intersection of international law and emerging military technology, particularly autonomous weapon systems. She has multiple projects examining human control throughout an autonomous weapon system life cycle. Previously, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Military Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Cities in the United States are well known for their segregation and sharply different experiences of policing across neighborhood boundaries. Extensive social science research has shown that “race-class subjugated neighborhoods” with concentrated populations of low-income Black and Latino residents experience harsh and punitive policing, whereas high-income and mostly-white neighborhoods experience limited police contact. In the former neighborhoods, residents also express frustration that policing does not address concerns about crime or violence, leading to these neighborhoods being simultaneously “over-policed and under-protected.”

In addition to sending delegates to COP28, several Northwestern faculty will lead two side events on site. Sera Young, associate professor of anthropology, will bring her expertise in water insecurity to a special event hosted by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) at the ‘Unite for Nature’ pavilion in the COP28 blue zone. Northwestern has been an organizational member of IUCN via the Trienens Institute since 2021, and this event will represent our second international event with the organization (the first having occurred at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in France in 2021). We will share coverage of Professor Young’s COP28 event as it becomes available. In addition, Associate Professor Kimberly Marion Suiseeya will participate in an official side event co-sponsored by the U7+ Alliance of World Universities, for which Northwestern serves as Secretariat.

Luis Diaz’s parents are free. On Oct. 28, Colombia’s Ejercito de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army, or ELN) kidnapped Luis “Mane” Manuel Diaz and Cilenis Marulanda, parents of Colombian soccer star and Liverpool forward Luis “Lucho” Diaz. Marulanda was rescued by the Colombian police a few hours after her abduction, but the elder Diaz was held in captivity for nearly two weeks.

Texas politician Beto O’Rourke discussed his campaign experiences, how to remain hopeful while fighting for political change and the state of Texas politics Tuesday evening in front of more than 200 attendees at the Northwestern College Democrats’ fall speaker event in Norris University Center. SESP Prof. Tabitha Bonilla moderated the discussion and asked O’Rourke, a former representative of Texas’ 16th Congressional District, questions submitted by students.

Summer Pappachen, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in political science, led the crowd in chants, calling it a “privilege of (her) life” to be in the fight alongside her fellow graduate workers. Pappachen criticized the administration for canceling the Tuesday meeting. “Every week that admin stalls is another week that we struggle to pay our bills,” Pappachen said. “It’s another week that we tolerate workplace abuse. It’s another week that we can’t go to the dentist, can’t go to the doctor.”

Samir Mayekar took the reins as managing director of the University’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation last month. Mayekar previously worked in the Obama administration as the director of national security personnel; served as the deputy mayor of Chicago for economic and neighborhood development under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot; and cofounded the NanoGraf Corporation, a renewable energy startup.

Megan Lebowitz (MDL/WCAS '22) joins NBC News as a Politics Reporter. Lebowitz is based in the Washington bureau. She has written about breaking politics news and U.S.-China relations.

In this episode, Dr. Victor Cha is joined by Dr. Katrin Katz to discuss the US-Japan-ROK trilateral relationship following the Camp David Summit, what to expect moving forward, and the challenges the US-Japan-ROK face in China, North Korea, and Russia.

In recent years, harassment, threats, and violence against elected officials, unelected public servants, and staff have been on the rise. This panel will focus on better understanding this concerning phenomenon, including who is targeted and why. We will address potential causes such as the role of partisan polarization, social media platforms, and social groups. We will also discuss some of the consequences of this phenomenon on elected officials, voters, and on American democracy more broadly. The panel will touch on possible solutions to increase the security of elected officials in the short to medium term, and what can be done to bring down the tone in American society more broadly.

Peace processes, two-state vs one-state solutions and nonviolent protests. In conversation with Professor Wendy Pearlman from Northwestern University, we take two of her books as a foundation to examine grassroots activism historically and to consider a potential future “just” solution. Wendy shares her views on realistic outcomes for the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli condition, and takes us through the history of Palestinian grassroots activism both in Palestine and internationally, delving deeper into the parallel between the apartheid in South Africa and in Palestine. Finally, we talk about the atmosphere on US college campuses right now — both for students and teaching staff. Wendy explains why she aims to speak to all her students in the classroom, regardless of where they stand on the Palestine issue.

Shmulik Nili, a political scientist and associate professor at Northwestern University, discusses the latest on the Israel-Hamas conflict, the recent evacuation order in northern Gaza and more.

For someone interested in environmental policy and biodiversity conservation, Kimberly Marion Suiseeya was excited to work in Laos, the small landlocked country bordered by Thailand and Vietnam. Laos, after all, boasted a model conservation program. It was the first Southeast Asian country with a scientifically designed national park system, one in which 20 percent of the nation’s land was protected and every ecosystem was represented. Yet more, the government did not expel or relocate communities outside of the parks once they were established. On paper, the country’s approach seemed progressive, thoughtful, and sharp – a model Suiseeya could potentially export to other parts of the world interested in safeguarding habitats and promoting biological diversity. But once in Laos, Suiseeya found reality telling a different story.

Please join the Impossible State live podcast for a special discussion on the US-Japan-ROK trilateral relationship following the Camp David Summit in August, 2023. The conversation is moderated by Dr. Victor Cha and featured Dr. Katrin Katz, adjunct fellow (non-resident) of the Korea Chair at CSIS and a professor of practice in the Department of Political Science and the Master of Arts in International Administration (MAIA) program at the University of Miami. In this episode, they discuss the US-Japan-ROK trilateral relationship following the Camp David Summit and what to expect moving forward.

Not long ago, the eldest son of President Joko Widodo of Indonesia was running a catering business and a chain of dessert shops. Now he is the symbol of a budding political dynasty and the beneficiary of family maneuvering. With the help of a high court ruling led by his uncle, the president’s son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, 36, has emerged as the leading candidate for vice president in next month’s national elections. If his ticket wins, he would become Indonesia’s youngest vice president ever. The machinations have rattled critics, who warn that Mr. Joko is moving to undermine democratic overhauls that were adopted after decades of dictatorship and that helped Mr. Joko himself win the presidency in 2014.

Platform Problems: Assessing Global Social Media Harms and Political Responsibility

The scheme of transition and institutional recomposition in which the function of the TRC can be located would allow us to think that it had two missions in one. The mandate to investigate the events and crimes committed during the period of armed violence constitutes a central mission, whose meaning can be divided into a strictly humanitarian sense and another ethical-political sense. This split is consistent with most definitions of transitional justice, which describe it both as a set of actions aimed at enforcing the rights of victims and as a set of measures to ensure peace and make the communities sustainable. democracies after an authoritarian or violent past.

Dr. Tabitha Bonilla, co-founder of the 2040 Strategy Group and an expert on voting behavior, told Newsweek that the decline in congregation attendance was partly a cultural trend, as younger people are less likely to hold strong religious beliefs. "There has been a generational decline in church attendance. Pew's data estimates about a 13% drop in attendance of a Black church from the oldest generations to the youngest. And, in addition to being less likely to attend a Black church, younger generations are simply much less religious in general and less likely to be connected to a Black church at all. .... Dr. Alvin Tillery, founder of the Alliance for Black Equality, told Newsweek that Harris' alternative campaigning style has paid off. "Vice President Harris has the potential to get to where she needs to be with Black male voters in order to win on November 5th.

"Washington 30. októbra (TASR) - Prvý novembrový utorok sa budú v USA konat prezidentské volby. Výsledky v mnohých štátoch sú už viac-menej jasné, kedže americká spolocnost je už niekolko volebných cyklov rovnomerne rozdelená medzi dve hlavné politické strany - demokratov a republikánov. O všetkom preto rozhodne malá skupina nerozhodnutých siedmich štátov (tzv. swing states), v ktorých sú šance na vítazstvo oboch kandidátov mimoriadne vyrovnané. Klúcová bude najmä Pensylvánia, uviedol analytik Asociácie pre medzinárodné otázky (AMO) Matej Jungwirth pre TASR. "Swing states sú už z definície štáty, ktoré v nedávnej histórii volili kandidátov oboch strán, a preto sú v nich výsledky (predvolebných) prieskumov také tesné," ozrejmil Jungwirth. Hlavným znakom týchto štátov je ich nejednoznacná politická orientácia, ktorá sa však casom môže zmenit, ked sa jednotlivé štáty zacnú priklánat k "cer

In May 2018, the speaker traveled to China to engage with local international law specialists, motivated by China's ambitions to enhance its role in global law and governance, particularly with rising concerns about U.S. leadership under President Trump. The speaker formulated key discussion points related to multilateralism, administrative rule of law, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), noting that despite China's rhetoric about leadership, they ultimately observe a more counter-hegemonic approach focused on disrupting existing international systems rather than leading transformative change. The speaker reflects on their academic experience analyzing major shifts in international law and how these changes typically arise from transnational advocacy movements that promote visions for better governance. They critique China's stance, suggesting that while its propaganda portrays a vis

"Overt political retribution, typically considered outside the bounds of American democracy, has recently risen to the surface of American political discourse. How do voters respond to elected officials wielding their powers of office for retributive purposes? In the current partisan political climate, do voters’ views of retribution depend on whether the official is a member of their party? Politicians in both parties have demonstrated willingness to threaten or pursue retaliation against corporations for using their political voice to publicly express opposition. Due to the American public’s ambivalence about the role of business in politics and the rights of corporations to political speech, the scenario of corporate political speech provides a useful case in which to test for partisan acceptance of the use of political retaliation.

A new paper looking at Donald Trump's gains among Hispanic voters puts forward a provocative argument to explain some of that movement. It contends that Hispanic voters who hold socially conservative, anti-LGBTQ views but might otherwise have voted Democratic have become turned off by Democratic politicians’ use of the gender-neutral term “Latinx,” which is being used “to explicitly include gender minorities and broader LGBTQ+ community segments.” Based on their analysis of a set of population surveys conducted in recent years, Marcel Roman, an assistant professor of government at Harvard, and Amanda Sahar d’Urso, an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University, say Latinos are less likely to support a politician who uses the term “Latinx” in their appeal to voters.

Vice President Kamala Harris drew sharp contrasts between herself and former President Donald Trump during a speech dubbed her “closing argument” on Tuesday in an appeal to voters a week before the election. At the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., Harris highlighted the dangers of a second Trump term and presented herself as a candidate of change, combining a core message of President Joe Biden’s 2020 strategy with a trademark of her own campaign. “America, we know what Donald Trump has in mind, ” Harris said. “More chaos, more division and policies that help those at the very top and hurt everyone else. I offer a different path.” The Harris campaign reported on X that over 75,000 people attended the speech, held at the same venue where former President Donald Trump rallied supporters on January 6, 2021 — a site associated with the political turmoil.

A 2023 study by Northwestern University political scientist Daniel Krcmaric and two colleagues found that 11 percent of those on the international Forbes billionaire list have held or sought a formal political office, including by appointment. The rate was far higher in authoritarian countries than the United States, where less than 4 percent had sought direct political involvement and the very wealthy prefer a lower profile. “The difference is Musk wants everyone to know about it,” Krcmaric said, “whereas others want to keep it quiet.”

En las últimas semanas se ha discutido intensamente el último informe de la Oficina de las Naciones Unidas contra las Drogas y el Delito (Unodc) que reporta un crecimiento moderado del 10 % en el número de hectáreas cultivadas con coca entre 2022 y 2023, y un aumento en 53 % de la producción potencial de clorhidrato de cocaína. Antes de preocuparnos por las medidas para controlar la expansión de estos mercados es necesario entender qué representa la economía de la coca en el país, especialmente en las zonas en las que se desarrolla este cultivo.

“This poll is an encouraging sign that Vice President Harris has the potential to get to where she needs to be with Black male voters in order to win on Nov. 5. In just three weeks, she has made serious gains with young Black men and increased their support of her by 10 points,” said Dr. Alvin Tillery, co-founder of 2040 Strategy Group and founder of the Alliance for Black Equality.

“This poll is an encouraging sign that Vice President Harris has the potential to get to where she needs to be with Black male voters in order to win on November 5th. In just three weeks, she has made serious gains with young Black men and increased their support of her by 10 points,” Alvin Tillery, co-founder of 2040 Strategy Group and founder of the Alliance for Black Equality, said in a statement. “These numbers provide evidence that Black men are not holding back their votes from Harris because of her gender, and that Harris needs to keep doing what she’s doing: reminding voters of Trump’s threats to Black life and civil rights. If she continues along this path, I suspect her support from Black men will only keep growing.”

The 2024 United States Presidential Election is one week away, and presidential candidates Kamala Harris (D) and Donald Trump (R) are battling it out for a key group of voters: the Latino community. From Mexicans to Afro-Latinos, the community spans 33 countries, and a clear divide is impacting the voting bloc. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center study, the number of Latino voters in the upcoming election is projected to reach a historic high of 14.7% of eligible voters, or 36.2 million. The increase stems from young Latino voters, like myself, who will participate in their first national election. As election deadlines approach, candidates will continue to focus on election battleground states Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Latino voters are deciding who will represent them and their interests.

Despite various polls indicating that as much as a quarter of Black men under the age of 50 said they planned to vote for Trump, Dr. Alvin Tillery, the founder of Alliance of Black Equality, previously told theGrio that his polling found that Black men are persuadable into casting their ballot for Harris. “When you tell young Black men the straight facts about Kamala Harris and who she is, they like her overwhelmingly,” said Tillery, who has polled 20,000 to 30,000 Black voters throughout the election cycle. Tillery said highlighting Trump’s record, including his support for a national stop-and-frisk policy, and the anti-DEI proposals from the Trump-aligned Project 2025 have been effective in bringing Black men back to the Democratic Party.

Michelle Bueno Vásquez, Northwestern University Blurred Black/Latino Lines: Race, Latino Ethnicity, and What This Means for Afro–Latinos. Michelle Alexandra Bueno Vásquez is a rising scholar at Northwestern University, pursuing dual degrees as a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and a Master’s candidate in Applied Statistics. Specializing in race and ethnic politics, she delves into the nuanced realm of race classification among Latinos and the crucial issue of Afro-Latino statistical visibility. Michelle’s research has not only been groundbreaking but also impactful, earning her recognition in the form of the prestigious Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and as a Council of Race and Ethnic Studies Fellow at Northwestern University. Michelle’s scholarly contributions extend beyond academia.

Though favorable for Harris, “it’s not anywhere near where she needs to be,” said Alvin Tillery, a Northwestern University professor who created the PAC through the 2040 Strategy Group, a boutique consulting firm focused on polling and strategic communications. The group has run 12 tracking polls since September 2023, surveying close to 30,000 Black voters in swing states, according to Tillery and his partners in the firm, Tabitha Bonilla and Tom Ogorzalek. “We became really concerned that the Biden-Harris campaign was losing Black voters in large part because of generational replacement. Their messaging wasn’t landing with millennial and Gen Z Black voters,” Tillery said. The data so alarmed Tillery that he decided to take leave from the firm and launch the super PAC, which cut ads targeting Black millennial and Gen Z voters. They’ve been up for about two weeks on social media platforms

Wittgenstein’s insights on language-games, forms of life, and the role of judgment in forming meaning reveal how we become acculturated into the habits of language that we practice and share with others. This chapter centers on two further implications of these insights: how processes of meaning shape the relationship between individuals and the language communities of which they are a part, and the temporal features of meaning, which can seem static at times but are also malleable and ever-changing. The aim is to understand the complex and dynamic interplay of both our individual, idiosyncratic ability to make meaning, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the calcified features of our inherited language usage.

Andrew Day, Connor Echols, and a SPECIAL MYSTERY GUEST discuss items from the Earthling, the weekend edition of the Nonzero Newsletter.

Alter criticizes Daniels and Krige’s historical ‘national security way of seeing’ claims as failing to understand US domestic export control politics. Drawing on Hugo Meier’s book Trading with the Enemy: The Making of US Export Control Policy toward the People’s Republic of China, published in 2016, and Michael Mastanduno’s seminal book Economic Containment: CoCom and the politics of East-West trade, published in 1992, Alter argues that US export control politics reflect longstanding interagency and inter branch contestation between competing camps. A group of Control Hawks wanting higher and wider export controls can always be mobilized, yet rarely does this camp get its way for long. Instead, a counter-alliance usually wins out because US export controls can only succeed insofar as they can garner multilateral support.

"Although gas prices are a well-established stand-in for economic issues, voters say they are more focused on rising costs for housing, food and utilities. “The decrease in gas prices doesn’t seem to be making as much of a difference this year,” said Laurel Harbridge-Yong, a political science professor at Northwestern University."

You could tell by the weather forecast on Tuesday that the day would be special. A bright and sunny 75-degree October day, Chicago couldn’t have scripted it any better for the introduction of new Sky head coach Teresa Weatherspoon. Inside Wintrust Arena, the second floor overflowed with cameras, catered food filling the outskirts. Rows of seats for media personnel were lined up in front of a table with three microphones. On the heels of a challenging season, the excitement in the arena was infectious.

What if we think of landlords as petty tyrants? I argue that this specifically political question has been missing in analyses and diagnoses of the crisis in housing. Approaching the political conditions within landlord-tenant relations, I argue that rental housing is a sphere where people are subject to substantial unaccountable power in ways that drastically limit their autonomy, that is, domination. First, I develop a theoretical analysis through Elizabeth Anderson's concept of private government, extended by radical republican and feminist interventions. Then, drawing on interdisciplinary housing literatures, I build the case for understanding landlords’ dominative power at both structural and interpersonal levels. I look to institutional dynamics and landlord practices to unpack the details of private government in rental housing.

Back in the day, Jesse Jackson told us to keep hope alive. And when Barack Obama first ran for president, his image became almost synonymous with hope (maybe you still have one of the posters). We’ve spent this season learning about all the obstacles standing between Black people and the ballot box. But hope IS alive. A 2022 poll by the African American Research Collaborative found Black Americans are actually some of the most hopeful about democracy, while white Americans are the least. Dr. Andrene Wright from the University of Wisconsin-Madison helps us unpack the data and what’s behind it. And Dr. Andra Gillespie from Emory University joins us to talk about a group that gets a lot of attention around Election Day, but little respect the rest of the time: Black women voters.

Back in the day, Jesse Jackson told us to keep hope alive. And when Barack Obama first ran for president, his image became almost synonymous with hope (maybe you still have one of the posters). We’ve spent this season learning about all the obstacles standing between Black people and the ballot box. But hope IS alive. A 2022 poll by the African American Research Collaborative found Black Americans are actually some of the most hopeful about democracy, while white Americans are the least. Dr. Andrene Wright from the University of Wisconsin-Madison helps us unpack the data and what’s behind it. And Dr. Andra Gillespie from Emory University joins us to talk about a group that gets a lot of attention around Election Day, but little respect the rest of the time: Black women voters.

"At a roundtable discussion with University of Arizona professors Thursday night, the public can learn the results of new polls of Arizona voters. Profs. Chris Weber, Samara Klar, and Lisa Sanchez will talk about forecasting the issues and candidates who will define the 2024 election."

Alvin J. Schexnider, Ph.D., will deliver the keynote address during Grambling State University’s 123rd Founder’s Celebration on Thursday, October 31. With the theme, “Achieving Excellence Through Service,” the event will be held at 10 a.m. in the Fredrick C. Hobdy Assembly Center.

The U.S. Constitution is among the hardest constitutions to amend in the world. Constitutional amendments would be the obvious answer, but given the country’s partisan territorial alignments, it is highly unlikely these issues would be successfully addressed via the amendment process. There may be other strategies, for example non-partisan commissions in the states to draw up congressional districts, or “pacts” between states to make Electoral College allocations proportional to the popular vote in the state. Such changes would not face the obstacles of a constitutional amendment process. However, they would face significant political and partisan obstacles that would prevent them from being adopted nationally.

The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. From this vantage point, the article calls for a new research agenda that will expand political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by recovering public administration as a major thematic throughline in the five-thousand-year global history of human political ideas.

Dr. Alvin Tillery, a pollster and CEO of the super PAC Alliance for Black Equality, tells theGrio that he has qualitative data that shows that while Harris and Democrats do struggle with young Black men, those voters are persuadable. Recent polling commissioned by Dr. Tillery shows that Kamala Harris can improve her approval with young Black male voters 8-15% by tailoring her campaign messaging on how Donald Trump poses direct threats to Black men, namely as it relates to policing and the rolling back of civil rights and diversity and equity programs. “Democrats have played this wrong, and they put themselves in a position to lose,” said Tillery, who said he warned the then-Biden campaign last fall about polling data showing young Black men drifting away from Democrats.

"The NRA was already weakened organizationally in 2020, when Trump lost the presidential election, and remains so today. While other gun rights groups, like the Firearms Policy Coalition, have grown at the NRA’s expense, the organizational support behind the gun rights movement isn’t as strong as in the past and is certainly more fragmented, which may impact the election to the benefit of Democrats. The gun violence prevention movement, on the other hand, is in a stronger position than in the past. Gone are the days when guns were perceived by national Democratic candidates as a losing issue. In the past, Democratic candidates often shied away from it; during his two successful presidential campaigns, for example, Barack Obama—although supportive of gun regulation—chose not to emphasize the issue, apparently due to a belief that making it more salient would benefit his opponents."

With just two weeks before Election Day, the topic of voter suppression is at a fever pitch. Northwestern University associate professor Tabitha Bonilla has been studying the issue and joined CBS News Chicago to discuss her findings.

In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transformed peaceful protests into one of the most devastating conflicts of our times, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. In this Crown Seminar, Wendy Pearlman, in conversation with Basileus Zeno, will explore how this violence not only drove Syrians from their homes but also forced them to rethink the meaning of home itself. Drawing from her new book, The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (Liveright 2024), Pearlman will analyze the Syrian refugee crisis as a transformative diaspora experience that offers broader insights into migration, identity, community, and belonging, especially amid intensifying anti-migrant rhetoric across the world.

With just two weeks before Election Day, the topic of voter suppression is at a fever pitch. Northwestern University associate professor Tabitha Bonilla has been studying the issue and joined CBS News Chicago to discuss her findings.

In the final weeks before Election Day former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are turning to nontraditional media platforms to reach key voter groups crucial to their campaign strategies. While these approaches have proven effective at connecting with young, independent voters, some experts say interviews conducted by non-journalists lack the level of scrutiny typically offered by mainstream media.

LaOtraCaradelaMoneda | El presidente #GustavoPetro aseguró que el Gobierno iniciará la compra estatal de cosecha de coca a campesinos, en concreto a los del pueblo El Plateado, Cauca.

"Andrene Wright, an assistant professor of African American studies at UW-Madison, said while it’s true that Black men are not supporting Harris at the same level they did Obama, the concerns over this may misrepresent how this constituency has supported the Democratic party for years. “What's most effective for Barack Obama aligning himself with the Kamala Harris campaign is getting at these undecided, moderate voters amongst several different racial and ethnic groups that have supported them before, and [are] not showing that same kind of level of support,” Wright said."

Alvin Tillery, founder of Alliance for Black Equality and co-founder of 2040 Strategy Group, told Newsweek: "These voters are younger, have greater economic precarity, and likely have already had encounters with police that have left them shaken. I would also bet my house that most of them either participated in or posted about the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 after the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd."

Alvin Tillery, founder of Alliance for Black Equality and co-founder of 2040 Strategy Group, told Newsweek: "These voters are younger, have greater economic precarity, and likely have already had encounters with police that have left them shaken. I would also bet my house that most of them either participated in or posted about the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 after the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd."

"For Weinberg senior and cross country runner Ava Earl and Weinberg sophomore and swimmer Sydney Smith, shaping civic habits as student-athletes is an integral part of their time at Northwestern. This year, Earl and Smith were selected as part of the second-ever cohort of The Team’s Engaged Athlete Fellowship."

On 20 October 2024, Indonesia’s State Palace witnessed its first ever direct dynastic succession. Outgoing president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, became the youngest person ever to be sworn in as Vice President. He was inaugurated along with President Prabowo Subianto, who had picked him as a running mate in the 2024 presidential election to cement his alliance with his former rival, Gibran’s father.

October 21 NEWSROOM TOKYO Bangkok Live Lineup 1. Indonesia's Prabowo swears in large cabinet 2. Analysis: Indonesia's Prabowo swears in large cabinet 3. ISIS-K stokes fears Afghanistan may return as terror base

Dr. Alvin Tillery, founder of the political action committee Alliance for Black Equality and CEO of consultancy firm 2040 Strategy Group, joined Forbes Senior writer Jabari Young on "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss reparations.

In this episode of The Headmaster Help, our Founder, Sakshi Agarwal, has the pleasure of sitting down with Maya Novak-Herzog, a PhD candidate at ?@NorthwesternU? , where she focuses her research on sexual consent. Maya also serves as the Head of Growth and Partnerships at ?@lumiereeducation8026? , bringing a unique blend of academic expertise and industry experience to the table. During this insightful conversation, Maya shares her wealth of knowledge on how students can approach writing research papers with confidence and precision. She delves into strategies for choosing compelling topics, structuring arguments, and presenting findings in a way that captivates readers and meets academic standards. Maya also provides invaluable industry insights from her role at Lumiere, offering practical advice for students on how to stand out in the competitive world of academia and beyond.

Dr. Alvin Tillery, founder of the political action committee Alliance for Black Equality and CEO of consultancy firm 2040 Strategy Group, joined Forbes Senior writer Jabari Young on "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss stop-and-frisk and Vice President Kamala Harris's message of being a former prosecutor.

El presidente Gustavo Petro aseguró que el Gobierno iniciará la compra estatal de cosecha de coca a campesinos, en concreto a los del pueblo El Plateado, Cauca Algo de evidencia sobre la ineficiencia de las incautaciones para restringir la oferta y dinámicas de producción que aumentan la productividad de los cultivos. Acá la entrevista completa.

Robert Wright, Andrew Day, and Connor Echols discuss items from the Earthling, the weekend edition of the Nonzero Newsletter.

My research examines the role of perceived threats to national status in domestic and international politics. I ran an experiment in March 2024 with 1,079 Americans, aimed at trying to understand how their concerns about national decline affect their foreign policy opinions.

Northwestern researcher James Druckman discusses a new survey on masks and at-home tests.

Dr. Alvin Tillery, founder of the political action committee Alliance for Black Equality and CEO of consultancy firm 2040 Strategy Group, joined Forbes Senior writer Jabari Young on "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss why Democrats are lagging with Black voters under 40.

Wage theft remains a widespread problem in the U.S. In response, worker advocates have pushed for stronger laws to deter violations and promote compliance with wage-hour laws. Having such laws “on the books,” however, may not be enough to compel compliance. As many scholars and observers have noted, state departments of labor often fail to use the full extent of their authority to conduct vigorous enforcement. This raises an empirical question: to what extent do enforcement agencies use the various tools in their toolbox, and what are the implications of this use and nonuse for wage theft? This paper draws upon a novel national survey of U.S. state departments of labor, new measures of the strength of state minimum wage laws, and estimates of minimum wage violations to answer these questions.

Join us for a conversation with Syrian writer & former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh moderated by Wendy Pearlman & Danny Postel.

Fac. Historia, Geografía y Ciencia Política UC

El Dr. Juan Cruz Olmeda, profesor e investigador del Centro de Estudios Internacionales de El Colegio de México, analiza los resultados de la primera vuelta de las elecciones municipales en Brasil.

Dr. Alvin Tillery, founder of the political action committee Alliance for Black Equality and CEO of consultancy firm 2040 Strategy Group, joins Forbes Senior writer Jabari Young on "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss the impact of Black male voters on the U.S. Presidential Race.

As the 2024 US presidential election approaches, the work of American Bar Foundation (ABF) Research Professor Traci Burch takes on heightened importance in understanding how policing practices and voter eligibility verification systems impact political participation—especially for marginalized communities. With over a decade of research experience at the intersection of criminal justice and political participation, Burch is uniquely positioned to provide insights into how barriers to participation, including voter registration and ID requirements and what she calls “problem policing,” affect voter turnout and broader democratic engagement.

Cody Keenan, former director of speech writing for the Obama administration, will deliver the 2024 James C. Bowling Executive-in-Residence Lecture at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 22 in the Grand Courtroom of the Rosenberg College of Law. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Department of Integrated Strategic Communication and the College of Communication and Information at the University of Kentucky. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Bowling Lecture.

Scholars studying organizations often work with multiple datasets lacking shared identifiers or covariates. In such situations, researchers usually use approximate string (“fuzzy”) matching methods to combine datasets. String matching, although useful, faces fundamental challenges. Even where two strings appear similar to humans, fuzzy matching often struggles because it fails to adapt to the informativeness of the character combinations. In response, a number of machine learning methods have been developed to refine string matching. Yet, the effectiveness of these methods is limited by the size and diversity of training data. This paper introduces data from a prominent employment networking site (LinkedIn) as a massive training corpus to address these limitations.

A symposium on Samantha Frost’s Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics offers an opportunity to revisit one of the most original contributions to Hobbes scholarship in the last few decades. The book’s originality resides not only in recuperating Hobbes’s materialist metaphysics for contemporary ethics and politics, but in making Hobbes’s take on matter inform novel conceptual approaches to social and non-social reality, such as new materialism – a philosophical school that conceives matter as vibrant and agentic, rather than inert.

As the 2024 US presidential election approaches, the work of American Bar Foundation (ABF) Research Professor Traci Burch takes on heightened importance in understanding how policing practices and voter eligibility verification systems impact political participation—especially for marginalized communities. With over a decade of research experience at the intersection of criminal justice and political participation, Burch is uniquely positioned to provide insights into how barriers to participation, including voter registration and ID requirements and what she calls “problem policing,” affect voter turnout and broader democratic engagement.

With Election Day less than a month away, new polling by NBC News showed the presidential race tighter than ever, with both candidates head-to-head at 48% among registered voters. The results, released Monday, mark a change from the September NBC News poll, which found Harris leading Trump by 5 points. All the results are within the poll's 3.1 percent margin of error. One of the main developments in the September poll was Harris' double-digit increase in popularity - at 48% positive. In October, that dropped to 43% positive, with the decline coming mainly from independents and young voters.

Analytik Matej Jungwirth tvrdí, že k velmi výraznej zmene v náladách Americanov došlo práve po oznámení Joea Bidena, že odstupuje z boja. „Odstúpenie bolo impulzom na strane demokratických volicov, ktorí zacali vidiet nádej. Okrem toho je cítit napätie a ocakávania, pricom volby budú nesmierne tesné, rozhodovat sa bude v šiestich až siedmich takzvaných swing states,“ tvrdí analytik.

A symposium on Samantha Frost’s Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics offers an opportunity to revisit one of the most original contributions to Hobbes scholarship in the last few decades. The book’s originality resides not only in recuperating Hobbes’s materialist metaphysics for contemporary ethics and politics, but in making Hobbes’s take on matter inform novel conceptual approaches to social and non-social reality, such as new materialism – a philosophical school that conceives matter as vibrant and agentic, rather than inert.

"One of the main developments in the September poll was Harris' double-digit increase in popularity - at 48% positive. In October, that dropped to 43% positive, with the decline coming mainly from independents and young voters. “On the Harris campaign, I think it’s about her not being out there enough," said Northwestern University Political Science Professor Jaime Dominguez. "I think after awhile voters begin to tune out, but that’s why it’s important, particularly after these next few weeks, that both the campaigns get their message out, but more importantly that they get the ground game going because at the end of the day, that’s where it’s going to be decided.""

In a long war, attrition of highly trained personnel is to be expected. So as Ukraine’s defensive war grinds on through its third year, training Ukrainians is increasingly important simply to keep its fighting positions manned and its operational options maximized. As a 2024 RUSI report notes, “Ukrainians may have lost over 70% of their combat experienced personnel since 2022.” Though the new mobilization law has allowed Kyiv to conscript more soldiers to address the manpower shortage, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have struggled to provide sufficient high-quality training to the newly mobilized troops due to a lack of trainers and suitable facilities. According to Ukrainian commanders at the front, their infantry forces are “grappling with exhaustion and flagging morale, leading some to abandon their positions and allow Russia to capture more land.”

"Lake is one of the best national examples of the conundrum some ardent MAGA Republicans pose in winnable states like Arizona: Winning issues can’t always outrun losing candidates. The cracks started showing in 2020 when President Biden flipped the state blue. Aside from a victory for Bill Clinton in 1996, the state had voted for Republican presidential candidates since Harry S. Truman. “What we’ve seen over the last 20 years or so, are the Republicans winning Arizona elections by smaller and smaller and smaller margins over time,” said Samara Klar, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona."

I couldn't be happier that my article "Motivation Alignment, Historical Cleavages, and Women’s Suffrage in Latin America," published in @PoPpublicsphere, has received the Mary Parker Follett Prize of APSA's Politics and History Section.

"Analytik Matej Jungwirth tvrdí, že k velmi výraznej zmene v náladách Americanov došlo práve po oznámení Joea Bidena, že odstupuje z boja. „Odstúpenie bolo impulzom na strane demokratických volicov, ktorí zacali vidiet nádej. Okrem toho je cítit napätie a ocakávania, pricom volby budú nesmierne tesné, rozhodovat sa bude v šiestich až siedmich takzvaných swing states,“ tvrdí analytik."

The third cohort of fellows of the Extractivism.de project brought a large and very diverse set of scholars from Latin America and the Maghreb to the universities of Kassel and Marburg in this 2024 summer. The project, which is financed by the #BMBF, received this year 15 fellows from Brazil, Algeria, Argentina, United Kingdom, Venezuela, Tunisia, Morocco, Colombia, Cuba, Egipt and Spain. Here, you can check them discussing the main outcomes of the project, the definition of #extractivism as a #development model, its importance to understand the many #cultural, #societal, #economic and #international factors that define extractivist societies and how to move forward. As the project enters in its second phase, we are excited to share our research results in publications, policy briefs and conferences.

Andrew Day and Connor Echols discuss items from the Earthling, the weekend edition of the Nonzero Newsletter.

Northwestern University's Alvin B. Tillery, Jr. is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy (CSDD)

This July 2025, the #UnversitätKassel hosted our second international conference which focused on extractivist regimes and the many pathways towards #sustainability that countries and actors in different parts of the world are pursuing. Extractive regimes cover the set of formal and informal institutions, crucial actors, and the relational constellations they form, and the many social practices they employ to regulate the input, extraction, processing, distribution and consumption of #rawmaterials and the corresponding #energytransition. The video was recorded during the conference.

One irony of the Hamas-led attack on October 7, and the mass violence meted out by Israel that has followed, is the resurrection in official circles of what is commonly referred to as a “two-state solution”. The majority of the Global South and formerly communist countries have already recognized Palestine as an independent state. Several European holdouts, such as Spain, Norway, and Ireland, have finally joined most of the rest of the world in recognizing a Palestinian state, while others like the United States, France, and the United Kingdom continue to drag their feet. Yet, even those proponents of the two-state solution in the West do not envision a truly sovereign or secure Palestine; instead, these advocates promote a state subjected to Israeli security and political priorities.

"“The complexity makes it unriggable,” Suttmann-Lea said, but simultaneously creates an information vacuum among voters. For America’s democratic-republic government and society to persist, Suttmann-Lea said “confidence in election administration is paramount.”"

Maya Novak-Herzog is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research questions why institutional sexual violence prevention efforts, like Title IX, have struggled to reduce sexual violence. Maya’s work examines how people understand sexual consent and why these perceptions often don’t align with policy. She is a fellow with the Brady Scholars Program in Ethics and Civic Life, and the Mellon Cluster in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

The upheaval of these civilians' lives has many calling it a direct impact of extreme political rhetoric. Dara Gaines, a visiting assistant professor in the political science department at the University of Arkansas, offered a brief explanation of how political rhetoric directly impacts everyday citizens. "Political rhetoric refers to anything that is being said by either an elected official, a candidate or a proxy, a person that's working on behalf of a party, on behalf of a campaign, or supporters of people on TV talking about different issues and trying to influence the way that a person might feel about whatever issue," Gaines said.

"Ma l’industria bellica svizzera riuscirebbe a stare in piedi anche senza l’export di armi? La RSI lo ha chiesto a Mauro Gilli, esperto di sicurezza e di strategia militare al Politecnico federale di Zurigo. Mauro Gilli: Direi che dipende molto da azienda ad azienda. Cioè ci sono delle aziende che come mercato hanno principalmente quello svizzero, per queste chiaramente la questione non si pone. In generale, però, possiamo dire per tutti i Paesi occidentali, le esportazioni giocano un ruolo centrale, per la semplice ragione che si discute ormai da più di due anni a questa parte, del fatto che i Paesi occidentali spendono molto poco in difesa.

The ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine underscore the serious concerns voters will consider in November as they weigh the different approaches to foreign policy and international security as presented by Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Northwestern University experts in political science and international diplomacy share their points of view on the recent report by the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, and the current threats facing the U.S. "The November election is consequential…Harris is in line with Biden policy. Trump is much harder to read." -- Political scientist William Reno.

Desde que llegó a la cúspide del poder hasta que murió en libertad, el expresidente fue tanto beneficiario como agente del caos en el Perú (...) El problema es que, como Meñique, Fujimori decidió que su papel no era exclusivamente resolver el desorden sino aprovecharlo.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former U.S. State Department director of policy planning, spoke about contemporary issues as well as her hopes and predictions in international law at a Buffett Institute for Global Affairs event Tuesday. The event, titled “International Law in Turbulent Times: What Makes a Difference?” was moderated by political science and law Prof. Karen Alter.

Following Northwestern’s recent move toward institutional neutrality and the announcement of new demonstration policies, some faculty members have expressed concern about the lack of transparency regarding enforcement of these protocols and their implications on academic freedom. Political science Prof. Jacqueline Stevens said these actions “make it clear that (Schill) is not somebody who actually upholds those kinds of values.” Coronado and Stevens are both on the executive committee of NU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, dedicated to advancing and protecting academic freedom and its principles at the top of the Faculty Handbook.

Ian Hurd, director of the Weinberg Center for Inational and Area Studies at Northwestern University, joined “NewsNation Now” to explain how infighting in Washington may impede funding to Ukraine in its fight against Russia.

The Division of Academic Affairs is pleased to welcome 34 new faculty for the 2024-25 academic year. We look forward to supporting our new faculty as they excel in teaching, scholarship, and service. Together, they will enrich their respective departments, colleges, and CSULB's monumental initiatives. Meet our new faculty... Angela Maione Political Science.

"There are swing states of Senate races going on right now. And the Democratic candidate is actually leading in places like Nevada, Arizona," said Jaime Dominguez, professor of political science at Northwestern University.

Professor of Political Science and Jane Long Professor of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University talks about her newest book, The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora. Dr. Pearlman talks about her background and what inspired her to collect and publish this collection of interviews with displaced Syrians as they share their stories and reflections on the meaning of home.

President Joe Biden's debate against Donald Trump has raised concerns Friday in Illinois ahead of the 2024 Chicago Democratic National Convention.

From passion projects to policy recommendations, Jun Park and other Northwestern students are conducting research on every topic imaginable with support from the University. Park is looking at Singapore’s public transport because he said it is known for being reliable and safe and cutting down car usage. Park’s research question is whether Singapore’s centralized governance — the Land Transport Authority — is more effective than Chicago’s divided agencies — the CTA, Metra and Pace particularly for minority populations. Park received the Ginsberg Research Grant through the political science department to fund his flight to Singapore.

Americans have a long history with debt. They also have a long history of mobilizing for debt relief. Throughout the nineteenth century, indebted citizens demanded government protection from their financial burdens, challenging readings of the Constitution that exalted property rights at the expense of the vulnerable. Their appeals shaped the country’s periodic experiments with state debt relief and federal bankruptcy law, constituting a pre-industrial safety net. Yet, the twentieth century saw the erosion of debtor politics and the eventual retrenchment of bankruptcy protections. The Political Development of American Debt Relief (U Chicago Press, 2024) traces how geographic, sectoral, and racial politics shaped debtor activism over time, enhancing our understanding of state-building, constitutionalism, and social policy.

This week’s episode of the Irregular Warfare Podcast examines how states use hostages and hostage diplomacy to achieve their interests. Our guests begin by addressing why states and non-state actors engage in hostage taking, as opposed to relying on other, more traditional instruments of power. They then talk about how the U.S. and other states have traditionally approached hostage crises to secure the safety of their citizens. Finally, our guests conclude by discussing how countries can employ traditional international relations concepts, like deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment, to safeguard their citizens from malign actors in the future.

Blog / Op-Ed

Please join us for a Capital Cable discussion on a new report published by CSIS and the George W. Bush Institute that looks at China and Russia's role in North Korea's human rights abuses. The North Korean regime focuses all available resources on its top strategic objective: its own survival. While all political regimes strive to survive, North Korea’s case is exceptional because of the extreme human rights violations it perpetrates in attempting to dominate all aspects of the lives of its citizens. The February 2014 U.N. Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) specifically details the North Korean regime’s gross human rights violations against its own citizens. However, the roles played by authoritarian leaders in Beijing and Moscow in facilitating North Korea’s human rights violations are less frequently examined.

The trouble is, Northwestern University political science professor Chloe Thurston told Tatyana Tandanpolie, the GOP has already put structural barriers in place to prevent voters actually expressing their preferences on abortion.

Rising powers typically seek to play a larger role in international economic affairs, but we know little about the impact of this overseas expansion on domestic publics. This paper examines the domestic political consequences of rising states’ efforts to increase their foreign economic influence. We argue that public approval for these governments depends on whether they succeed or fail to expand their country’s global economic influence. To test this argument, we fielded three survey experiments in China, each focusing on a different component of China’s foreign economic strategy. In all three experiments, informing individuals that China has failed in increasing its role in the global economy reduced average levels of government satisfaction. Our evidence suggests that this drop in government approval operates through a weakened sense of national pride, rather than other channels based

Chloe Thurston, a Northwestern University political science professor who has written on abortion policy, told Salon that Americans' far-reaching but overwhelmingly supportive preferences on abortion policy aren't always reflected in their state's laws. The lower visibility and salience of state-level elections give voters with stricter preferences on abortion policy a leg up in deciding policy because voters who don't pay as much attention skip out on the polls, she explained. Baked-in barriers to advancing ballot referendum and legislative hurdles like gerrymandering, which can create an elected majority that opposes abortion regulations despite constituents' wishes, also play a role in boosting the discrepancy between voters' desires and the policies their state legislators implement.

Samara Klar & Andra Gillespie join S.E. Cupp breaking down their thoughts on the VP debate, and the impacts it could have in both Arizona & Georgia with a month to the election.

Campaign contribution limits are one of the few mechanisms in place to prevent wealthy special interests from spending unlimited money to rig the political system in their favor. But there are some states where it’s just too easy to skirt around these limits and other states that actually don’t have limits at all. In this episode of Democracy Decoded, host Simone Leeper highlights how without campaign contribution limits, the vast financial resources of special interests can outweigh the priorities of everyday citizens. Experts and advocates discuss the intricacies of the electoral playing field, and how to best protect the voter’s right to elect candidates who truly represent their values. They highlight the work of grassroots coalitions and advocacy groups working together for fair and equitable campaign finance laws in states like Illinois and Oregon.

When asked about NATO's defense spending, Northwestern University political science professor William Reno told Newsweek that "Trump is right, but right in the same way that a broken clock is on time twice a day." "The situation is more complex than a lack of will among feckless allies," he said. "It is hard to ramp up production." Reno added that defense "contractors live in an unpredictable world" where the Biden Administration has to try to increase munitions "within a budget deal with House Republicans that limits defense spending." "It's true that NATO—including the U.S.—has under-invested in production of munitions. It's hard to explain to voters why they should pay more taxes to produce something that ideally sits on a shelf," Reno said.

The trip was the first for the new Global Engineering Trek in Energy Storage & Critical Minerals. Developed through the Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience (CESR), this immersive Global Engineering Treks Initiative was offered through McCormick Global Initiatives (MGI) in partnership with the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy and the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. The cohort was led by Jennifer Dunn, professor of chemical and biological engineering and (by courtesy) mechanical engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering; Kimberly Marion Suiseeya, associate professor of political science at Northwestern’s Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences; and Rafael Urbana Casanova, a PhD candidate in plant biology and conservation through Weinberg and the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Presentation by Cammie Bolin and Justin Zimmerman. Leading up to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, the University at Albany’s Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy is hosting a series of events, covering a range of topics impacting the election and future of the nation.

Who is Ishiba Shigeru, the former two-time defense minister and newly-elected leader of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and the new Prime Minister of Japan? What should we expect from him and his polices toward Korea, China, the U.S. and the world? Mark Lippert, Dr. Sheila Smith from the Council on Foreign Relations, Ms. Yuki Tatsumi from the Stimson Center and Mr. Nicholas Szechenyi and Dr. Katrin Katz from CSIS discussed this and more. The Capital Cable is made possible through general support to CSIS.

Support by Black and Latino voters for Democrats has declined somewhat in polls and in recent elections, raising questions about the scale, possible sources, and broader implications for American party politics. How does the current moment compare to the past? Is this part of a general shift away from the Democratic Party and towards Republicans by conservative and working class voters? And to the extent that changes are afoot, what might explain them?

Anche se Netanyahu potrebbe essere tentato ora di alzare il tiro e colpire la Repubblica islamica in modo esiziale, sarà difficile che si realizzi la sua utopia di un nuovo Medio Oriente pacificato e prospero e soprattutto mondato dalla minaccia sciita. Lo dice a Start Magazine Mauro Gilli, ricercatore ed esperto di strategia militare al Politecnico federale di Zurigo, che in questa conversazione entra nel merito dell’accelerazione impressa agli eventi della regione dalle ultime mosse di Tel Aviv e di Teheran.

"Mobilization is typically what determines the outcome of an election," Samara Klar, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona, told AFP, noting that women voters in states where abortion was under threat helped the Democratic Party exceed expectations in the 2022 midterms.

Experts say people hate them and want civility but they're also effective.

Battleground: The Swing States dives into the aftermath of the vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance. With just 34 days until election day, we analyze how the debate could impact tight races in key battlegrounds like Arizona, Georgia and Michigan. We also gauge reactions from swing state voters on who won the showdown. Joined by top analysts and on-the-ground reporters, Battleground brings you the latest on the fight for the Midwest and beyond as Kamala Harris leads in 6 of 7 crucial swing states.

"Want to check out some new conspiracy theories? Social media is a great place to find them. But will it make you believe them? That’s the question asked by a new working paper looking at conspiracy theories surrounding the Donald Trump assassination attempt on July 13. (Gotta love it when academia moves quickly!) It suggests that, while social media is a productive source of conspiracy discovery, you’re more likely to believe theories you hear from friends and families. The paper is by Katherine Ognyanova (Rutgers), James N. Druckman (Rochester), Jonathan Schulman (Penn), Matthew A. Baum (Harvard), Roy H. Perlis (Harvard), and David Lazer (Northeastern)."

El Dr. Juan Cruz Olmeda, profesor e investigador del Centro de Estudios Internacionales de El Colegio de México, analiza el impacto al medio ambiente de los incendios forestales que están afectando a Sudamérica. Noticiarios Pulso 96.5 FM y 1060 AM Radio Educación. Secretaría de Cultura. México.

El Dr. Juan Cruz Olmeda, profesor e investigador del Centro de Estudios Internacionales de El Colegio de México, analiza el impacto al medio ambiente de los incendios forestales que están afectando a Sudamérica.

Race and Democratic Backsliding in the U.S. Dr. Andrew Thompson is a Political Science Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on how attitudes on racial demographic change can shift how Americans think about democracy and can give rise to stronger anti-democratic views.

In this paper, by studying the fragmentation of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 2004, I identify two distinct pathways to rebel fragmentation: one that is triggered by democratization in the home country (EU-anchored democratization in Turkey) and the other by the empowerment of a rival co-ethnic organization in a neighboring country through foreign military intervention (American invasion of Iraq and the empowerment of Iraqi Kurdish leadership). The paper broadly contributes to the literature on rebel fragmentation, the effects of democratization on civil war processes, international dynamics of civil wars, transborder ethnic-kin, and rebel alliances in civil wars.

An international relations expert at Northwestern University is calling the attack back-and-forth: a classic tit-for-tat escalation, adding these situations never end well. "What we've got are extremists on both sides that are driving for escalation, thinking that that helps them in their political position. But, of course, the costs along the way are terrible for the people who have to live in these places under threats of these missiles going in all directions," said Ian Hurd, a Northwestern political science professor. Hurd said, while it's impossible to characterize the feelings of an entire population, war is generally unfavorable.

Battleground: The Swing States dives into the aftermath of the vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance. With just 34 days until election day, we analyze how the debate could impact tight races in key battlegrounds like Arizona, Georgia and Michigan. We also gauge reactions from swing state voters on who won the showdown. Joined by top analysts and on-the-ground reporters, Battleground brings you the latest on the fight for the Midwest and beyond as Kamala Harris leads in 6 of 7 crucial swing states.

Lieutenant Colonel Jahara ‘FRANKY’ Matisek (PhD) is a Military Professor in the National Security Affairs department at the US Naval War College and Research Fellow at the European Resilience Initiative Center. He is a US Air Force Command Pilot with over 3,700 hours of flight time in the C-17, E-11 BACN, T-6, and T-53.

Gilbert says that Hamas’s decision to take hostages is a continuation of these prior practices and also a continuation of the group’s alleged efforts to use civilians as “human shields.” Hamas has often been accused by Israel of locating its bases or launching weapons in Gaza near or in residential areas. Recently, Israel claimed Hamas’s headquarters is located under one of Gaza City’s main hospitals, for example, an accusation Hamas has refuted. In this case, Hamas could be using the presence of hostages in Gaza’s tunnels to protect its operatives.

While in Hawaii, I observed some societal patterns and themes that were interesting to me. One of the first examples was at the airport. Directions and announcements were first stated in Native Hawaiian, then in English. Having done research with Indigenous groups in the past, this small detail has a broader impact regarding their status in the state.

The Center for Civic Engagement Fellows are peer leaders, liaisons between the Center and the student body, and student staff for CCE programs and services. NU Votes is a non-partisan initiative of Northwestern University’s Center for Civic Engagement, designed to provide the NU community with accessible and understandable information about voter registration and voting procedures. Working with partners across the university, NU Votes also serves as a resource to promote informed voter engagement throughout the Northwestern community.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election highlighted two concerning trends in contemporary America: increasing rates of depression and the possibility, if not the reality, of political violence. Despite frequent simplistic portrayals between mental health and political violence, little is known about whether and when the two relate to one another. Recent work makes clear that mental health can have notable effects on politics–depression reduces turnout and can be a byproduct of polarized elections. In this paper, we extend work on mental health and politics by exploring the relationship between depression and support for political violence. We theorize that depression on its own is unrelated or possibly negatively related to support for political violence.

It’s been roughly two weeks since Israel’s military directed the evacuation of more than 1 million people in northern Gaza within 24 hours. The move seemed to signal an imminent ground invasion to seek out and destroy members of Hamas, the U.S.-designated terror group responsible for the surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that killed more than 1,400 people. While Israel has performed raids in Gaza, the larger ground invasion hasn’t happened, and the delay could expose further challenges for Israel’s operations.

The authors introduce an original dataset of formal political participation for over 2,000 individuals included in the Forbes Billionaires List. They find that billionaire politicians are a surprisingly common phenomenon: Over 11% of the world’s billionaires have held or sought political office. Even compared to other elite groups known for producing politicians from their ranks, this is a high rate of political participation. Moreover, billionaires focus their political ambitions on influential positions, have a strong track record of winning elections, and lean to the right ideologically. They also document substantial cross-national variation: a country’s number of billionaire politicians is not simply a product of its total number of billionaires, but is instead related to regime type.

Today, Dani Gilbert, expert in hostage taking and recovery from Northwestern University in Illinois, on how their freedom was negotiated and whether more hostages can be saved.

In his twenty-third year teaching at the University of Maine, political science professor Richard Powell has extensive experience in both his discipline and the field of education. He has taught at numerous universities in America and China and is the founding director of the Cohen Institute for Leadership and Public Service. This semester, Powell is teaching an array of political science and leadership studies courses along with working on numerous projects related to his discipline.

Just three days after he became a member of the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI) in September 2023, Indonesian President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo’s youngest son, Kaesang Pangarep, was appointed the party’s chairman. Kaesang’s ascendancy to PSI’s leadership caps what is probably the fastest political rise ever seen in Indonesian politics for someone who is not the founder of a political party.

"When [Biden] sees Hamas having basically genocidal intent, he's just unequivocal and opposing it," Nili said. "When he says Hamas makes ISIS look rational, I think it's both on point objectively. And I don't know if he sort of takes it personally, he would often say at different points that one doesn't have to be Jewish to be a Zionist. I think that's a heartfelt conviction he has."

Please join the Impossible State live podcast for a special discussion on the US-Japan-ROK trilateral relationship following the Camp David Summit in August, 2023. The conversation is moderated by Dr. Victor Cha and featured Dr. Katrin Katz, adjunct fellow (non-resident) of the Korea Chair at CSIS and a professor of practice in the Department of Political Science and the Master of Arts in International Administration (MAIA) program at the University of Miami. In this episode, they discuss the US-Japan-ROK trilateral relationship following the Camp David Summit and what to expect moving forward. This event is made possible through general support to CSIS.

Philosophizing the indefensible asks what distinctive contributions political philosophers might make when reflecting on blatant moral failures in public policy - the kinds of failures that philosophers usually dismiss as theoretically un-interesting, even if practically important. This book argues that political philosophers can and should craft “strategic” arguments for public policy reforms, showing how morally urgent reforms can be grounded, for the sake of discussion, even in problematic premises associated with their opponents.

Northwestern University experts are available to discuss the evolution of the conflict between Palestine and Israel, hostage recovery and the ethics of war. Connect with faculty using their contact information below or reach out to media relations for assistance. Sociocultural anthropologist Jessica Winegar can speak to views of the conflict in other countries of the Middle East, U.S. media bias in covering the events, activism in support of Palestinian rights in the U.S. and the general situation in Gaza under Israeli occupation.

"The bottom line is Gaza is an open air prison. No one's going in or out until and unless the there's an agreement that involves Egyptians, the Israelis and Hamas," said Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a Northwestern political science professor and Middle East expert. Hurd said with more than 100 aid trucks waiting to get in and thousands of people in need, there are security questions about who's crossing and whether an Israeli bombing campaign has damaged the gate mechanism. It may all come down to who blinks first. "Yeah, I mean it very well could be I think that we'll probably see some kind of compromise for a temporary opening of the gate and a very careful exchange have certain individuals who will be allowed out some of the dual nationals some of the foreigners in exchange for a limited amount of aid going in. I would expect to see that compromise very soon"

As Israel continues to reel from the weekend’s surprise assault by Hamas militants—in which at least 1,400 Israelis were killed in what was the deadliest attack in Israel’s history—many families, including Ariev’s, have been left in the dark about the fate of their loved ones, an estimated 199 of whom are believed to have been taken into Gaza as hostages, among them soldiers and civilians, young and old, foreign and dual nationals. In an address on Monday, President Joe Biden said that it is “likely” American citizens are among them.

We write as NU faculty members who are scholars of the Middle East and North Africa to present a perspective on the current violence in Palestine and Israel that is distinct from the one offered by University leaders in recent communications to the NU community. We also write as faculty who care for all of those in our community who are affected by these events. We condemn all violence that kills civilians and we mourn the deaths of Palestinians as well as Israelis. We grieve with their loved ones. There are omissions in several of these recent messages from leadership. For example, University President Michael Schill’s communication on Oct. 12 made no mention of the violence that the Israeli military has undertaken against Palestinians in Gaza since last Saturday, and that is occurring as we write.

The North Korean regime focuses all available resources on its top strategic objective: its own survival. While all political regimes strive to survive, North Korea’s case is exceptional because of the extreme human rights violations it perpetrates in attempting to dominate all aspects of the lives of its citizens. The February 2014 U.N. Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) specifically details the North Korean regime’s gross human rights violations against its own citizens. However, the roles played by authoritarian leaders in Beijing and Moscow in facilitating North Korea’s human rights violations are less frequently examined.

Lauren Baker is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern. Her research examines the domestic impact of hosting global environmental governance events such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties (UNFCCC COPs). Using ethnographic methods, her dissertation project focuses on the politics of garbage to illustrate how the spectacle of these mega-events are constructed and the political possibilities they create and foreclose. She is a graduate assistant and instructor with the Northwestern Middle East and North African Studies (MENA) cluster and taught several courses with Chicago Field Studies. She previously worked as Assistant Director at the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) and Associate Editor at The Monkey Cage, a political science blog hosted by The Washington Post.

Jeff Feng is a STRONG Manoomin Collective Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. Their research and teaching focus on the intersections of climate justice and queer liberation, environmental justice, and social movements. They examine the contributions of queer, trans, and Two-Spirit activists to fighting climate injustices and analyze how power, privilege, and marginalization shape climate justice policies and movements. As a scholar-activist, they advance climate justice by researching alongside organizers, such as those in the Central Coast Climate Justice Network, and by teaching courses that pair students with environmental justice partners to complete collaborative projects. They have published in Energy Research & Social Science and AAPI Nexus and contributed to Edward Elgar’s A Research Agenda for Human Rights edited volume.

Sociology and political science Prof. Anthony Chen kicked off the Institute for Policy Research’s Fay Lomax Cook fall colloquium series with a talk Monday. In the discussion, he contextualized the June U.S. Supreme Court decision: Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. He said the decision reflects the counter-majoritarian difficulty ? unelected institutions like judges or courts making decisions that go against the popular will. Authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the 2023 case concluded that Harvard’s and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. “SFFA made it clear that applicants could still discuss their racial backgrounds in application essays, but took pains to indicate that only the individual qualities that were believed to have developed out of racial

The trip was the first for the new Global Engineering Trek in Energy Storage & Critical Minerals. Developed through the Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience (CESR), this immersive Global Engineering Treks Initiative was offered through McCormick Global Initiatives (MGI) in partnership with the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy and the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. The cohort was led by Jennifer Dunn, professor of chemical and biological engineering and (by courtesy) mechanical engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering; Kimberly Marion Suiseeya, associate professor of political science at Northwestern’s Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences; and Rafael Urbana Casanova, a PhD candidate in plant biology and conservation through Weinberg and the Chicago Botanic Garden.

AI-powered program ‘Ask A Wildcat’ is bringing students a new way to connect with the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences’ 80,000-person alumni network. The Austin J. Waldron Student-Alumni Connections Program partnered with artificial intelligence data company Protopia to provide a way for students to directly ask NU alumni for career advice. The user-friendly interface launched the first week of Fall Quarter. The program asks a student to input a short headline, brief introduction, question for the alum and closing sentence.

Usually, if someone marks Hispanic and Brazilian on the survey, they are recoded as “not Hispanic” when the numbers are crunched. Not including Brazilians, or Haitians for that matter, in the definition of Hispanic or Latino, means that large numbers of Afro-Latinos aren’t counted, Michelle Bueno Vásquez, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Northwestern University, wrote the Office of Management and Budget. “The OMB as it stands fails Latinos, especially Afro-Latinos who continually suffer double discrimination and marginalization, on top of statistical invisibility, in the United States,” she said.

"The founding myth of the Olympics is that sports bring people together and can bridge political divides. Governments may clash and politicians disagree, but the Games show what is possible when people compete in the Olympic spirit of “friendship, solidarity and fair play” on the playing field. Like all fantasies, the ideal of world peace through sport has only a slim connection to reality. It has helped the International Olympic Committee become immensely profitable, but it masks the strategic decisions that guide the Olympics, especially in times of war, conflict and authoritarian rule. The Olympics are enmeshed in global politics, though the committee doesn’t like to talk about it."

Researchers surveyed the mainland Chinese public about their familiarity with and acceptance of LGBTQ people. This study examines participants’ attitudes toward policy issues such as discrimination at work, same-sex marriage, and same-sex couples raising children.

ABSTRACT: In this review essay, I discuss some of the arguments that Miguel Vatter develops in his book Divine Democracy. The first section articulates arguments concerning the primary contributions of democratic political theology from Vatter's standpoint and elucidates its implications for the redefinition of an old problem (the issue of sovereignty). In the second section, I navigate how Vatter's book could resonate and speak broadly within global contexts of political theologies. I finish my review essay by exploring potential future trajectories of political theologies and how the book opens new paths for comprehending the intersection of religion and politics within political theory.

There’s the Olympics that you know and the Olympics you don’t. The Games and the spectacles are familiar, as are the scandals. But few people know the Swiss tax code and the web of nonprofit organizations that bring the Games into being. The global machinery behind the Olympic Games is rich, powerful and very weird. When the Games begin in Paris, the events on television are the conjunction of three sets of organizations. First, each sport has an international federation that sets rules and organizes competitions, and second, each country has a national Olympic committee that chooses the country’s best athletes. Holding it together is the International Olympic Committee, the strange Swiss heart of it all.

"She's got the name recognition, the money. She can beat back the Republican legal challenges. None of those other candidates can do, with the exception of Governor Pritzker, who's wealthy enough to self-fund because, unlike Donald Trump, he is a real billionaire," said Alvin Bernard Tillery, a Democratic pollster and professor of political science at Northwestern University.

""The question for the Harris campaign is going to be, can you resonate differently?" said Alvin Tillery a Democratic pollster and professor of political science at Northwestern University. Tillery noted that Illinois is a "solidly blue state," where the overall voting patterns are not expected to change—but communities such as Orland Park could reflect the small percentage of undecided voters. Undecided female voters have been the subject of much attention, but Tillery said there are other groups to take a look at in this time of flux. "This election is going to come down to can Kamala Harris convince Black voters under 40—particularly Black men—and Latino voters under 40 to give the Biden-Harris campaign, or her campaign, a second look," Tillery said. Tillery said the true undecided vote isn't big right now."

Biden's staying power. 'I think we'll look back on this moment in history as sort of an incredible turning point for our politics,' said Alvin Bernard Tillery, a Democratic pollster and professor of political science at Northwestern University. If Harris becomes the nominee, she has weeks to pick her running mate. Tillery said her options lack name recognition. 'We have none of that,' he said. 'I mean, Harris has universial name recognition among young voters.

The Bhumjaithai Party is cementing its status as the quintessential power broker in Thai politics. Widely known as the party founded by Buriram-based politician-turned-sports-mogul Newin Chidchob, the Bhumjaithai Party is emerging as a major political force after candidates affiliated with the party dominated the Thai Senate election in June. Despite being the third-largest party in the House and adhering to a traditional political blueprint centred on patronage and dynastic politics, Bhumjaithai has demonstrated the potential to become an unexpected yet credible champion of the conservative status quo, countering the push for further pro-democracy reforms.

"The joint speaker series, presented this spring at Northwestern, was co-hosted by the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Studies Program, the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies and the Buffett Institute. “With seven speakers on meaningful historical topics, the series was practically the equivalent to a class — just without assignments or grades,” said Wendy Pearlman, interim director of the MENA Studies Program. "I hope our series shows how taking a risk can be worth it.”"

The Asian American Journalists Association is proud to announce our 2024 scholarship, internship, grant and fellowship winners. This year’s recipients were chosen from a competitive selection of highly qualified candidates who have demonstrated passion and expertise in different areas of journalism. AAJA annually offers up to $20,000 in scholarships and grants to journalism students. Angela Zhang studies journalism and political science at Northwestern University. Angela covered national security for Medill News Service, reporting on Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court. She interned for China Documentary International Media Co. in Beijing and Midstory Media ThinkHub. Her investigative video work has nominated her for a collegiate Emmy. Angela’s driven by the press’ power to inform the public on policy—a movement she hopes to be a leader in one day.

"In his new book Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights (Russell Sage Foundation, 2024), IPR political scientist Daniel Galvin traces the rise of alt-labor organizations, nonprofits that organize and support low-wage workers. Low-wage workers make up roughly 44% of the U.S. workforce, earn $10 an hour on average, and include a disproportionate number of Black and Latinx workers, immigrants, and women. Galvin also recently launched the Workplace Justice Lab at Northwestern, a sister organization of the Workplace Justice Lab at Rutgers University. The lab supports state and local agencies in enforcing labor standards and collaborates with alt-labor groups."

"This election will be decided, in no small part, by Black voters. For decades now, most of them have aligned themselves with the Democratic Party. However, more voters in this election are said to be Trump-curious. We'll discuss the factors influencing Black voters' decisions and the potential impact on the upcoming election. GUESTS: Alvin Tillery, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, Northwestern University; Co-founder, CEO, 2040 Strategy Group"

Lam Research Corp. (NASDAQ: LRCX) today announced that Ava Harter has joined its executive leadership team as senior vice president and chief legal officer. Reporting to President and Chief Executive Officer Tim Archer, Harter will oversee all of Lam's legal functions as well as government and regulatory affairs.

"An analysis of global assassinations published last year by economists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken found that a national leader has been assassinated around the world in nearly two of every three years since 1950. “Whether or not objectionable or illegal, assassination and assassination attempts are a persistent feature of the political landscape,” wrote Jones of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois, and Olken, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. On average, they wrote, successful assassinations of dictators resulted in sustained moves toward democracy.

The APSA Spring Centennial Center Research Grant Program (previously known as Small Research Grant Program) supports research in all fields of political science. The intent of these grants is to provide funding opportunities for research conducted by: Political scientists in non-tenure track or contingent positions who are ineligible for departmental funding. Political science faculty of all ranks who are employed in departments that do not grant PhDs. Graduate students in Political Science or a related discipline such as Politics or International Relations.

"After the 2023 general election, the Pheu Thai Party agreed to a grand compromise with the conservative parties, allowing Pheu Thai candidate Srettha Thavisin to take office as prime minister. A new strategic triangle of progressives, conservatives, and Thaksinites has locked Pheu Thai and the former members of the conservative Prayut Chan-o-cha coalition into a marriage of convenience. Mapping Thailand’s political parties based on their stance on the status quo and the extent to which they successfully mobilised votes through nationally programmatic or localist strategies, makes it possible to illustrate the nature of Pheu Thai’s shift in political position. Thailand’s party system is likely to remain destabilised as the shift in Pheu Thai’s political brand may produce major changes in voter linkages to the party."

In their Policy Brief Defense Expenditure in EU Countries, Carlo Cottarelli and Leoluca Virgadamo provide an informative, data-driven, and objective analysis of European defense, focusing on trends in military expenditure, fragmentation in the demand and supply, industrial dependencies, and possible EU institutional mechanisms to finance future defense spending.

Boris Litvin received his PhD in political science at Northwestern University in 2019. His research and teaching interests are in political theory, focusing especially on the place of spectators and spectatorship in democratic life. Boris’s scholarly publications have appeared in the American Political Science Review, the European Journal of Political Theory and the Review of Politics, among other outlets. His book manuscript, You the People: Political Theory and the Construction of Popular Audiences, investigates how political thinkers across intellectual history adapt emerging literary genres such as plays and novels in their efforts to invoke “the people.” Because Boris’s teaching usually centers on the history of political thought, his courses seek to impart a sense of urgency when approaching old and foreign texts.

Sidra Hamidi’s research and teaching interests are in international law, global governance, and nuclear politics. She was previously a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and previously taught at Eckerd College and Stetson University in Florida. Her book, After Fission: Recognition and Contestation in the Atomic Age, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press and explores the politics of recognition in the nuclear programs of Israel, India, and Iran. Her classes focus on key ethical, legal, and governance challenges in world politics and analyze enduring questions—What are the origins of the modern international system? Why do states go to war? Does international law constrain state behavior? —among many others.

Professor Stevens' research helped catalyze lawsuits charging GEO, the owner of Tacoma’s immigration detention center, with violating labor laws.

“Mr. Trump has not made a strong case for why voters of color should consider voting for him.” - Political scientist Alvin B. Tillery Jr. “Pollsters on both sides of the partisan divide recognize that the 2024 presidential election will come down to which party can make inroads with low-propensity voters in Black and Brown communities. Despite Mr. Trump’s showing in the debate, he has not made a strong case for why voters of color should consider voting for him in 2024. His reference to immigrants ‘coming for Black jobs’ provoked widespread mockery on social media in the days following the debate. I will be watching to see what Mr. Trump does in Milwaukee to try to gain traction with these voters. Perhaps the most important open question is: Will Mr. Trump select one of his stalwart surrogates like Tim Scott or Byron Donalds to be his running mate?”

Based on 3,392 planks culled from all existing 45 Democratic Party platforms since 1840, it documents the party’s evolution from slavery to equality over three eras: extolling States' Rights from 1828 to 1896, practicing Cooperative Federalism from 1900 to1948, and embracing National Authority since 1952.

Alvin Tillery is a political science professor at Northwestern University. "The notion that you're going to replace POTUS with someone more popular younger, more... that's going to I just, I just think that that's fantasyland," Tillery said. "And again, I think all of this stuff is just a huge waste of time and energy that's writing ads for the Republicans."

"Congratulations to Menaka Philips who recently received a 2024 Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) award. Menaka Philips received the C.B. Macpherson prize established to honour the life and work of the late, distinguished, Canadian political scientist, Crawford Brough Macpherson and is awarded to the author of the best book published in English or in French in the field of political theory."

The Clarence Stone Scholar Award recognizes up to two young scholars who are making a significant contribution to the study of urban politics. The award is to be given to up to two post-PhD scholars who are in their career (pre-tenure, or recently advanced within the last 3 years).

A collection of interviews with Syrian refugees about their conceptions of home. When Pearlman, author of We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled, began interviewing Syrian refugees in 2011, she thought she was going to write about the Arab Spring. When the theme of home emerged from her conversations with more than 500 participants, she began to seek deeper truths. “Commentators have analyzed the Syrian war through lenses such as protest, violence, geopolitics, sectarianism, extremism, and refugee crisis,” she writes. “Fewer have considered what Syrians’ extraordinary experiences can teach us about something so commonplace that it touches every human life: home.” A stunningly curated text that “strikes at the core of what it means to exist as a person in the world.”"

"It may come as no surprise that the first modern Olympics were a men-only affair. The second, in Paris in 1900, included 22 women, and from then on, every Olympic Games has wrestled with whether, and how, to treat men and women differently. The concepts of equality and fairness are murky at the point where sports meets gender, and Olympic history is full of stories that show how hard it can be to muddle through. Sex segregation is as much a part of the Olympic movement as medals, anthems and bribery scandals. There is no Olympic sport that is indifferent to gender in the sense of allowing everyone to join without regard to sex. As a result, every Olympic sport tries to regulate the boundary between men and women — and keeping up the distinction is a tremendous amount of work."

Globally known lottery expert Kurt D. Freedlund has joined the lottery team at Gaming Laboratories International (GLI®) as Senior Lottery Solutions Account Executive. He will work with GLI lottery customers providing world-class insights and strategy solutions regarding lottery products and operational modernization consulting support, governance, strategic planning and execution, procurement optimization, and business analysis.

“To me, this all kind of goes together into a story about people just being more dissatisfied with government and more unhappy with what they think American democracy should be,” said Tabitha Bonilla, a political scientist at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

Sidra Hamidi’s research and teaching interests are in international law, global governance, and nuclear politics. She was previously a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and previously taught at Eckerd College and Stetson University in Florida. Her book, After Fission: Recognition and Contestation in the Atomic Age, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press and explores the politics of recognition in the nuclear programs of Israel, India, and Iran. Her classes focus on key ethical, legal, and governance challenges in world politics and analyze enduring questions—What are the origins of the modern international system? Why do states go to war? Does international law constrain state behavior? —among many others.

Gari is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses broadly on the politics of income inequality, on economic elites, and on social policy. Her work on this topic has been published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, Social Policy and Administration, and forthcoming in Oxford Open Economics. She has also worked on projects regarding multidimensional child poverty, social expenditure, gender inequality in the labor market, and care policies. This research has been published in Latin American Research Review and International Security Review, as well as in multiple policy papers.

Schulman is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics as a Postdoctoral Fellow. He received his PhD from Northwestern University in 2024. He is currently on the 2024-2025 academic job market! His research interests include American foreign policy, public opinion, status threat, trust, and quantitative and qualitative methodology. His book project is titled “Falling Behind: How Americans’ Anxiety over Status Affects U.S. Foreign Policy.” Check out the research tab for more on his research and awards. Browse around to find more info on my research, teaching, social media, and other updates!

Zhihang Ruan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Hunter College, the City University of New York. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2023. His research interests include comparative political economy, international development, labor politics, and land institutions. His regional foci are China and Vietnam. His work has been published in The China Quarterly, and he has received awards from the Vietnam Studies Group of the Association of Asian Studies and the Southeast Asia Research Group.

Sebastian Karcher is the Associate Director of the Qualitative Data Repository and Research Assistant Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. His main interests are in research transparency, management and curation of qualitative data, and the interaction of technology and scholarship. He is an active contributor to several scholarly open-source projects, including Zotero and the Citation Style Language, and has taught widely on digital technology and data management. Sebastian’s work has been published widely in social science journals such as International Studies Quarterly and Socio-Economic Review as well as information science journals such as Nature Scientific Data and Data Science Journal. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Sloan Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.

Because of increasing political polarization in many democracies, politicians who try to make amends for past harms will often find that their reputation in the eyes of the other side is irredeemable. In such cases, publicly playing up rather than toning down those attributes that have made one an “archvillain” will often be a more effective way of making amends—whether by mobilizing an opposing camp with which one now secretly sympathizes, by increasing the chances of moderate candidates to win crucial elections, or by increasing the chance that the dangerous camp to which one pretends to belong will self-destruct. I explore several possible explanations for why repentant political wrongdoers might have a moral duty to “play the villain” to such ends.

D.J. Flynn is Assistant Professor of Political Science in the School of Politics, Economics, and Global Affairs and Faculty Affiliate at the Global Policy Center and Center for the Governance of Change at IE University in Madrid. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Program in Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College. He received his PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University. His research uses field and survey experiments to study how misinformation affects public opinion and political behavior. His methodological interests are in survey and experimental design with particular focus on the measurement of knowledge... *July 2024: Research grant from Fundación Caixa to support surveys and RCTs on digital literacy among European youth (co-PI with Carlos Lastra Anadón). 114,466€.

Greetings! I am a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Berkeley Center for American Democracy (University of California, Berkeley), studying political behavior and political psychology. In my research, I investigate ways to create greater understanding between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans in the United States. Beyond establishing a vague tolerance, like agreeing to disagree, are there ways to push individuals toward a fuller understanding in which they see legitimate rationales for the other side’s beliefs? I received my PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University. My work is supported by the Rapoport Family Foundation, and has been published in Political Psychology and the Economics of Education Review.

IN THE EARLY YEARS of the Syrian civil war, many who crossed by land from Syria into Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, or Iraq hardly thought of themselves as refugees. Rather, they had left home temporarily to wait for the lull in violence that they expected would come any day. Then days became weeks, weeks became months, and months became years. This dilemma of extended displacement affects refugees around the world, including some who are born, raised, and then have children and grandchildren of their own in refugee camps.

The literature on policy implementation has primarily focused on regime type, institutional capacity, and leadership will in explaining policy success, while giving less attention to the details of policy design. This article argues that, when explaining unevenness in policy implementation, the devil is in the details. It turns to four Chinese environmental policies: Pollution Penalty, Cap-and-Trade, Coal-to-Gas, and Environmental Protection Tax. Despite involving similar stakeholders and sharing the same goal of pollution control, the outcomes of these policies vary enormously: over-implementation of Coal-to-Gas, sporadic implementation of Pollution Penalty, symbolic implementation of Cap-and-Trade, and effective implementation of Environmental Protection Tax. Uneven implementation is best explained by the varying costs associated with the ‘start-up’ and ‘maintenance’ of these policies.

Northwestern Athletics announced two leadership positions for Aaron Hosmon and Jane Wagner. Hosmon has been named Senior Associate A.D. for Compliance and Regulatory Affairs, while Wagner has been named Associate A.D. for Sport Administration. A 2003 graduate of Northwestern's School of Education and Social Policy, Hosmon has spent the majority of his career at his alma mater. He started his career in the institution's financial aid and admissions office and then helped organize and launch a data collection center for a Mellon Foundation-supported college athletics study housed at Northwestern before accepting his first full-time position in NUDAR in January 2008. Hosmon served in a series of progressive roles in Northwestern's Athletics compliance office and ultimately led the office from May 2015 through June 2019 as the Associate A.D. for Compliance.

Today we joined @repdeliaramirez, @RepCasar and @RepKamlagerDove to launch the Global Migration Caucus, uplifting global solutions and grassroots voices for a future where both the right to stay and the right to leave are protected, and where people everywhere can thrive.

“The science of international politics is in its infancy.” E.H. Carr opened The Twenty Years’ Crisis with a tone both hopeful and lamenting. He looked forward to scholarship that would identify the driving forces behind peace, war, and disorder and help policymakers avoid the mistakes of the past. Today, the scientific study of international order thrives among scholars who share Carr's faith that behind the complexity in world politics lie consistent mechanical forces that generate macro outcomes. The scientific literature on the causes of world order searches for evidence of this machinery in the patterns of international history. Hurd explores this literature and find that the operationalization of order as a dependent variable leads to a depoliticized conception of order.

“The science of international politics is in its infancy.” E.H. Carr opened The Twenty Years’ Crisis with a tone both hopeful and lamenting. He looked forward to scholarship that would identify the driving forces behind peace, war, and disorder and help policymakers avoid the mistakes of the past. Today, the scientific study of international order thrives among scholars who share Carr's faith that behind the complexity in world politics lie consistent mechanical forces that generate macro outcomes. The scientific literature on the causes of world order searches for evidence of this machinery in the patterns of international history. I explore this literature and find that the operationalization of order as a dependent variable leads to a depoliticized conception of order.

Luther teamed up with U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Jahara Matisek of the U.S. Naval War College to create a proposal for a Defense Education and Civilian University Research (DECUR) Partnership grant under the DoD's Minerva Research Initiative. Matisek, a command pilot and military professor, has a Ph.D. in political science and specializes in national security.

As the presidential election heats up and Biden continues to struggle with young voters, his campaign is banking on a now-familiar issue: student debt relief. In swing states such as Pennsylvania, the Biden campaign is trumpeting its commitment to over-indebted borrowers, while accusing Republicans of fighting to deprive Americans of the opportunity for upward mobility. And just last month, the administration announced that it had managed to cancel the loans of around 160,000 student borrowers. Though this strategy is familiar from Biden’s previous campaign, which featured explicit promises to provide relief, it also runs counter to a long-held view about the politics of personal debt.

“A county with higher proportions of same-sex couples is more likely to be at risk for extreme weather disasters.” Indeed, a report published in April by UCLA’s The Williams Institute found that LGBTQIA+ people are more likely to live in counties that face greater risk of climate change impacts. The researchers looked at all sorts of risks, including hurricanes but also wildfires, heat waves, and more. The authors found that a single percentage point increase in the proportion of same-sex couples in a county is associated with a roughly 6% increase in their projected risk of extreme weather disasters. “Essentially, that finding is saying that a county with higher proportions of same-sex couples is more likely to be at risk for extreme weather disasters,” said report author Ari Shaw, senior fellow and director of international programs at The Williams Institute.

Chile’s constitutional reform started after massive social protests in 2019. With gender parity, reserved seats for indigenous people, and a significant number of seats for independent delegates, Julieta Suárez-Cao argues that the country's assembly is on track to rebuild democratic legitimacy in the years to come.

Tulia Falleti, currently Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is this year’s recipient of the Daniel Elazar Distinguished Scholar Award. The Award Committee was unanimous in concluding that Professor Falleti’s many eminent contributions to the field of comparative federalism, subnational politics, and intergovernmental relations, making her fully deserving of this recognition. Professor Falleti’s work has focused on the politics of decentralization in Latin America, a region that in recent decades has been at the forefront of efforts in the developing world to decentralize government and policymaking. Her work has laid essential empirical, theoretical, and methodological foundations for analysis of politics of decentralization, and for our historical understanding of how subnational institutions shape politics over time.

Tulia Falleti, currently Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is this year’s recipient of the Daniel Elazar Distinguished Scholar Award. The Award Committee was unanimous in concluding that Professor Falleti’s many eminent contributions to the field of comparative federalism, subnational politics, and intergovernmental relations, making her fully deserving of this recognition. Professor Falleti’s work has focused on the politics of decentralization in Latin America, a region that in recent decades has been at the forefront of efforts in the developing world to decentralize government and policymaking. Her work has laid essential empirical, theoretical, and methodological foundations for analysis of politics of decentralization, and for our historical understanding of how subnational institutions shape politics over time.

Research on authoritarianism and culture highlights shared values, beliefs, behaviors, symbols, meanings, and affective orientations and considers how they shape and are shaped by the inception, resilience, functioning, and decline of autocratic rule. Reviewing scholarship on cases from around the world, the chapter traces how scholars increasingly shift away from older understandings of culture as a reified set of influences determining regime type and instead emphasize culture’s dynamic, intersubjective, and relational character.

Jack Garigliano (Northwestern University) will examine the relationship between a person’s confidence in their ability to improve their working conditions and their political efficacy and engagement. The Russell Sage Foundation is pleased to announce 32 awards made in the third round of its Dissertation Research Grants program. Six grants are co-funded with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and five grants are co-funded with The Policy Academies. This initiative supports innovative and high-quality dissertation research projects that address questions relevant to RSF’s priority areas. Applicants can request up to $10,000 in funding.

I couldn't be happier that my article "Motivation Alignment, Historical Cleavages, and Women’s Suffrage in Latin America," published in @PoPpublicsphere, has received the Mary Parker Follett Prize of APSA's Politics and History Section.

Swati Srivastava is Associate Professor of Political Science and University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University and Visiting Scholar at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. At Purdue, she is the founding director of the International Politics and Responsible Tech (iPART) lab. Srivastava is also the current President of ISA-Northeast. Srivastava broadly researches global governance, including the political power and responsibility of Big Tech. She is the author of Hybrid Sovereignty in World Politics, and numerous articles in top disciplinary journals. Srivastava received her doctorate in political science from Northwestern University. Her research has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and the International Studies Association.

Twenty years ago the drone was a rarity in conflict. In 2003, the first year of its war in Iraq, America had a paltry 163 drones, around 1% of its entire fleet of aircraft. Now they have come to dominate the battlefield and have also spread around the world (see chart 1). Russia and Ukraine are both reliant on drones to spot targets or destroy them directly. Many are small and cheap airframes that can be produced in large numbers: the average Ukrainian battalion is getting through 3,000 a month, says Jahara Matisek, a professor at the US Naval War College. But a forthcoming paper published by the Centre for a New American Security (cnas), a think-tank in Washington, DC, shows why a drone war over Taiwan is likely to look very different from the one which has played out in Ukraine.

“Democrats need to focus on messaging, money and mobilization,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political scientist who has written a new book about former Gov. Rick Perry titled Rick Perry: A Political Life. “This is a cycle where reproductive rights is potentially an explosive issue, and Democrats are looking to take advantage.”

“We came to this topic from three different angles. In 2020, Jamie Druckman, Jon Green, and I were part of a team of researchers leading the COVID States Project, a monthly 50-state survey examining the impact of Covid-19 on American society,” explained corresponding author Matthew Simonson, a senior lecturer at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-author of Black Networks Matter. “After reading about an unprecedented spike in gun purchases, we added a question about gun buying to the survey, and we recruited Matt Lacombe who had just published a book on the role of gun ownership in American politics. This is now the second study we’ve published on pandemic gun buying together.

In today’s drastically polarized society, how can Americans continue to connect with each other in productive and meaningful ways? What are the causes and consequences of our nation’s historic levels of partisan polarization? Just how far can democratic backsliding go before we reach a point of no return? The American Politics Speaker Series (APSS) brings together scholars who are researching and addressing these and other important questions. Hosted jointly with the Center for American Political Studies and chaired by Professors Benjamin Schneer and Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, each session highlights a scholar whose research is at the forefront of the study of American politics.

I want to stay with last week's theme of the state of academic freedom at our premier research university - Makerere University. A university campus, especially of the calibre and standing of Makerere, holds a special place in society. A university is not just a school for passive or slavish learning, it is a place of critical inquiry and radical ideas that challenge established practices and received wisdom.

In today’s drastically polarized society, how can Americans continue to connect with each other in productive and meaningful ways? What are the causes and consequences of our nation’s historic levels of partisan polarization? Just how far can democratic backsliding go before we reach a point of no return? The American Politics Speaker Series (APSS) brings together scholars who are researching and addressing these and other important questions. Hosted jointly with the Center for American Political Studies and chaired by Professors Benjamin Schneer and Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, each session highlights a scholar whose research is at the forefront of the study of American politics.

I want to stay with last week's theme of the state of academic freedom at our premier research university - Makerere University. A university campus, especially of the calibre and standing of Makerere, holds a special place in society. A university is not just a school for passive or slavish learning, it is a place of critical inquiry and radical ideas that challenge established practices and received wisdom.

Tabitha Bonilla, an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University and the author of The Importance of Campaign Promises, told The Daily Beast that despite the obvious reasoning behind Trump’s strategy, his promises could backfire. “Voters are really distrustful of candidates—and this is just a big picture thing—most voters don't believe campaign promises at all,” she said.

People face stigma and barriers in so many areas, including housing, employment, education, health care and mental health. There are also obstacles for returning citizens in repairing community and family relationships ruptured by years behind bars. Buoying self-esteem and opening doors for upward mobility by helping people look great and feel great are admirable projects, and I salute Bindle & Keep for that. But I think as a society we can do even better.

A new book by some of the foremost scholars on polarization, including University of Rochester political scientist James Druckman, offers an answer to that question by distilling empirical evidence as to the consequences of partisan animus. The upshot? Partisan hostility alone is unlikely to lead to the collapse of American democracy. But it nonetheless does have a deleterious effect on democracy and could erode democratic institutions and functioning over time. This is detailed in "Partisan Hostility and American Democracy: Explaining Political Divisions and When They Matter," published on June 12. (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Its authors, in addition to Druckman, are Samara Klar, of the University of Arizona; Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan, of the University of Michigan; and Matthew Levendusky, of the University of Pennsylvania.

In “The Spirit of Caste: Recasting the History of Civil Rights,” Lucien Ferguson writes a compelling account of the civil rights movement and the constitutional protections on which it depends through the lens of caste. Ferguson’s project is an ambitious one in which he engages with the political thought of Black theorists like Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois to recover their understanding of the integral importance of social mobility and the eradication of caste in the fight for civil rights, a tradition Ferguson calls anti-caste constitutionalism. This focus on social mobility, Ferguson argues, significantly overlaps with the struggle for women’s rights and highlights the importance of intersectionality in the movement.

"Dan Butler, Political Science (WUSTL), Sarah Anderson (University of California Santa Barbara), and Laurel Harbridge-Yong (Northwestern University) were recently awarded a $60,000 grant by Unite American for their impactful research studying the 2024 Primary Elections. The Primary Election Study (PES) was first funded by a SPEED grant from the School of Arts and Sciences at Wash U. Unite America awarded the professors at an additional $60,000 to supplement the SPEED grant and allowing Professor Butler and his colleagues to lead a collaborative study how voters made decisions during the U.S. Senate primary elections during 2024. In 2024, the PES is studying primaries in California, Nevada and Michigan. The survey will allow the researchers to better understand why some people vote in primaries and others don't and what factors affect their decision-making in primary elections."

Samantha Serban WCAS '26, was named Spring 2024 Academic All-Big Ten honoree in fencing! Eighty-nine Northwestern student-athletes earned Academic All-Big Ten honors, the conference announced on Wednesday. To be eligible for Academic All-Big Ten selection, students must be on a varsity team (as verified by being on the official squad list as of May 1 for spring sports), have been enrolled full time at the institution for a minimum of 12 months and carry a cumulative grade-point average of 3.0 or higher.

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Wendy Pearlman about the voices from the new Syrian Diaspora. They discuss the various reasons for telling Syrian stories, protests around the world, the ongoing Syrian conflict, concept of home and internal displacement. They also talked about leaving Syria and rebuilding elsewhere, maintaining culture, future of the Syrian diaspora, and many other topics. Wendy Pearlman is Crown Professor of Middle East Studies and Interim Director of Middle East and North Africa Studies Program at Northwestern University. Her main interests are comparative politics of the Middle East. She has her Bachelors from Brown University and her PhD from Harvard University. She is the author of numerous books, including the most recent, The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the new Syrian Diaspora.

As a political science and international studies major with a minor in Asian humanities, Miller's post-grad plans are to work as an advocacy associate at the Woodstock Institute.

Since 2021, the authors have worked as a research team that has visited numerous locations across Europe to observe Ukrainian troops being trained. This article analyzes the European Union’s Training Mission in Support of Ukraine (EUMAM UA) and seeks to identify its impact on the EU’s security policies.

Suzanne LaFrance announced her transition team selections on Thursday as she prepares to take over the office of mayor next month. Following May’s runoff election race that saw her comfortably beat out incumbent Dave Bronson, LaFrance will be sworn in July 1. The announcement comes days after the former Assembly Chair named Katie Scovic and Becky Windt Pearson as her chief of staff and municipal manager, respectively. Transition team members fall into one of three categories: good government; safe streets and trails; and building our future.

The Presidential Fellowship is funded by the President of the University and awarded by The Graduate School. This highly competitive award is the most prestigious fellowship awarded by Northwestern. Monique Newton is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. A mixed-method scholar of American politics and Black political behavior, Monique employs ethnographic, interview, and experimental methods to examine Black political behavior in American cities. Overall, her research explores how local Black communities respond to state violence. Monique's research also delves into the local reparation movement in the United States.

ust over a decade after graduating from Northwestern herself, entrepreneur Nikki Okrah returned to Evanston to deliver the 2024 Weinberg Convocation address Saturday. Okrah, Founder and CEO of Chaku Foods, recalled her struggles finding her purpose as an undergraduate, sharing pieces of wisdom with over 1,000 students in the Weinberg graduating class of 2024. “It was during my junior year at Northwestern that I learned my most important life lesson: I needed to find my own voice,” Okrah said. “My internal voice should always be louder than the external voices and influences that surround me.”

"Makerere University is a special place. It's Uganda's academic jewel, a giant widely recognised and highly respected. I am a proud alumnus. Wherever I go, I wear my Makerere badge with a deep sense of pride."

With immigration being on the ballot alongside the abortion access initiative, things will start to heat up in the political arena in Arizona, according to University of Arizona political science professor Samara Klar. “Well, we already have one pretty high-profile ballot measure on the ballot, which is the abortion ballot measure” Klar said. “So this is going to raise the stakes a little more and get, you know, a lot more mobilization efforts going to try to get voters out to vote who might not otherwise be particularly enthusiastic about either candidate.”

Arya Prachand sat with a 6-year-old boy who had nearly overdosed on drugs, monitoring his vitals as the ambulance raced from an emergency medical center to a hospital. The Weinberg first-year was responding to the last call of her 13-hour shift as an Emergency Medical Technician trainee, and it was her highest-stakes response yet. Prachand is part of the Northwestern Emergency Medical Organization, a student-run club that partners with Medical Express Ambulance Service to provide students with emergency medical training. The 95-student course, which Prachand applied for in the fall, runs from January to May and culminates in the upcoming National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians exam in June. Should she pass the test, Prachand will be able to apply for an Illinois EMT license.

Drawing on a rare cross-regional comparison of Kenya and India, Playing with Fire develops a novel explanation about ethnic party violence. Combining rich historical, qualitative, and quantitative data, the book demonstrates how levels of party instability can crucially inform the decisions of political elites to organize or support violence. Centrally, it shows that settings marked by unstable parties are more vulnerable to experiencing recurring and major episodes of party violence than those populated by durable parties. This is because transient parties enable politicians to disregard voters' future negative reactions to conflict. By contrast, stable party organizations compel politicians to take such costs into account, thereby dampening the potential for recurring and severe party violence.

Laura Montoya is an Assistant Professor at The Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD from the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she also completed a Masters in Statistics. She equally has a Master’s in economics from the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She works on comparative politics, public policy, and research methodologies. Her research explores economic inequalities in Latin America and its relations with development and violence. Currently, she is writing a book entitled “Escaping Inequality Traps: State Formation, Elites, and the Myth of Progress”, in which she identifies the causes of economic inequality traps.

I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as an Assistant Professor in International Relations at the University Diego Portales in Chile!

Professor Maxwell is Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Public Trials: Burke, Zola, Arendt, and the Politics of Lost Causes (Oxford UP, 2015), the co-editor of Second Nature: Rethinking Nature Through Politics (Fordham UP, 2014), and the co-author of The Right to Have Rights (Verso, 2018). Her articles have appeared in Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, and Theory and Event. She is currently completing a book, entitled Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling, and beginning a new project in environmental and queer political theory.

In March 2021, the city council in Evanston, Illinois, began distributing reparations funds to Black residents in the form of $25,000 housing grants. In doing so, Evanston became the first city in the United States to provide publicly funded reparations to Black people for generations of racist policies, including redlining. Why did the reparations program first emerge in Evanston? This article provides an in-depth look at the politics of the policy design process and describes the unique political circumstances that allowed this historic policy to pass with near-unanimous support. As communities throughout the United States consider how to deliver reparations to Black Americans, the debate over Evanston’s ordinance serves as a cautionary tale for how ambitious historic policies may become watered down when political expedience trumps the political insights of Black residents.

As to the issues driving Latino votes, safety is at the top of the list. And in Chicago, 46% of Latino voters identified crime as the most important issue, according to a study on the 2023 mayoral race conducted by BSP Research for the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern. “Latino voters want what every voter wants: Jobs, the economy and health care,” said Jaime Dominguez, a political science professor at Northwestern University.

Over the past decade alone, religious communities around the world have demanded state recognition, exemption, accommodation, or protection. They make these appeals both in states with a declared religious identity and in states officially neutral toward religion. In this book, Mona Oraby argues that the pursuit of official recognition by religious minorities amounts to a devotional practice. Countering the prevailing views on secularism, Oraby contends that demands by seemingly marginal groups to have their religious differences recognized by the state in fact assure communal integrity and coherence over time. Making her case, she analyzes more than fifty years of administrative judicial trends, theological discourse, and minority claims-making practices, focusing on the activities of Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahá'í in modern and contemporary Egypt.

Quinn Mulroy has supported and mentored numerous graduate students and founded several ambitious programs at Northwestern, like the Connections program and the politics and Policy Lab. Mulroy received the Ver Steeg award for her dedication to supporting graduate students, especially those from historically marginalized communities. Named for Clarence Ver Steeg, a former Northwestern University professor in history and Dean of The Graduate School, the award annually recognizes one outstanding graduate faculty member and one staff member for excellence in working with students at The Graduate School.

With deep sadness, we write to share the news that Richter Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Provost Emeritus Charles Edward Gilbert died peacefully in Newtown Square, Pa., on Monday, March 11. He was 96. Gilbert was born in Albany, N.Y., and spent his early years on the family farm in nearby Feura Bush. He served a year in the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II before enrolling at Haverford College, where he earned a B.A. in political science in 1950. Gilbert then spent a year at the London School of Economics and Political Science before coming to Northwestern University to continue his graduate studies. At Northwestern, he met his future wife, Lee Schendorf, also a political science graduate student.

On 4 July 2021, Chile made history with the world’s first constitutional convention where men and women held an equal number of seats. One year later, Chile made history again, when the delegates presented a thoroughly feminist draft constitution. What made the draft ‘feminist’ was not just guarantees of legal equality for individuals of all genders, but provisions that sought to undo the historically unequal power relations between men and women. The draft charter contained rights to sexual health education and legal abortions. It envisioned a universal care system that would include state funding for childcare and elderly care. It required judges to decide cases using a ‘gender perspective’, meaning that they should account for how gender inequality affects women’s lives.

Napon Jatusripitak's new article explores tension in Thailand between the government and the Bank of Thailand. The two institutions disagree regarding the government's new debt relief measures and this disagreement highlights questions about who controls Thailand's economic policy and whose strategy, if any, will be implemented.

The Nonproliferation Review and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) are pleased to announce that an article examining the George W. Bush administration’s policies toward the nuclear programs of Iran and South Korea, “A tale of two fuel cycles: defining enrichment and reprocessing in the nonproliferation regime” by Sidra Hamidi and Chantell Murphy, has won the Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Award’s grand prize.

In this CNN interview, Gabby Birenbaum and Mariana Alfaro discuss Donald Trump's reemergence on the national stage as the Republican presidential frontrunner. More specifically, they discuss Trump's rhetoric and its potential impacts on the Republican Party and the 2024 election.

Why is China's household registration system so resilient, and why are migrant workers consistently excluded from equal urban welfare? By disaggregating the hukou and land components of the rural–urban dualist regime, this article argues that dualist land ownership, formalized in China's 1982 Constitution, perpetuates the hukou system and unequal welfare rights. On the one hand, dualist land ownership results in an abundance of low-cost, informal housing in urban villages. This reduces the cost of short-term labour reproduction and diminishes migrants’ demands for state-defined urban rights. On the other hand, dualist land ownership enables local governments to amass significant revenues from land sales.

This article talks about the disproportionate level of eviction faced by Black Americans versus White Americans. Potential solutions to this issue, proposed by Dara Gaines, include increasing wages, providing education, increasing available housing, and offering child care. Gaines states “During the pandemic we saw the eviction rate drop substantially, and we see it’s creeping back up, and it’s because a lot of the assistance programs are over.”

Since the 2011 beginning of the Syrian uprising, more than 800 Syrians have become registered residents of Japan. Japan is an unusual destination for these refugees due not only to its geographical and cultural distance from the Middle East and lack of Arab diasporic communities, but also to what we call neoliberal humanitarianism: an approach by which states adopt policies and programmes to reduce refugees’ suffering while also regarding refugees as potentially profitable workers responsible for their own economic survival and social integration. In Japan’s case, the driver of neoliberal humanitarianism is its interest in keeping par with G7 peers in ‘doing something’ in the face of a global ‘refugee crisis’ on the one hand, and its lack of political or social will to receive refugees, on the other.

In this article, Professor Alvin B. Tillery, Jr. talks about the recent downward trend in support for the Democratic party among Black voters. He shows that, after record high support in the Black community for Barack Obama, support has wained in successive elections. Especially in today's climate of razor thin margins, Democrats cannot afford losses, especially from a bloc that is historically so supportive. Professor Tillery suggests that a platform adjustment may be in order for Democrats if they aim to keep Black voters in the 2024 election cycle.

In a recent interview with Hugo Balta, Michelle Bueno Vasquez shared some of the results of her research into the Afro-Latino diaspora. She also breaks down aspects of the US Census to explain the underrepresentation of Afro-Latinos in America. Michelle also shares aspects of her personal experience and how it impacted her perspective and her research.

Our Academic publishing excellence has been recognised at this year’s annual PROSE awards, with five of our titles named subject category winners and an additional nine chosen as finalists. Since 1976, the annual Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) awards have recognised publishers who produce books, journals, and digital products of extraordinary merit that make a significant contribution to a field of study. This year, 118 finalists were named along with 41 category winners. Our five category winners will now be eligible for the next level of PROSE honours - the Awards for Excellence winners, which will be announced in the coming weeks.

In a recent interview with Hugo Balta, Michelle Bueno Vasquez shared some of the results of her research into the Afro-Latino diaspora. She also breaks down aspects of the US Census to explain the underrepresentation of Afro-Latinos in America. Michelle also shares aspects of her personal experience and how it impacted her perspective and her research.

Sinema will leave the Senate at the end of 2024. University of Arizona professor Samara Klar explores impact on election year.

News 4 Tucson and Samara Klar (Ph.D. '13) discuss the shakeup in the Senate caused by the departure of Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema

Congratulations to PhD Candidate Nicolette Alayón on her selection as a University of Pennsylvania Provost Predoctoral fellow!

Professor Alvin Tillery, Jr. commented on former President Donald Trump's anti-DEI rhetoric, stating: “They are trying to take apart the legacy of these laws that made us a multiracial democracy ... Trump is just picking up the mantle."

Professor Alvin Tillery Jr. commented on recent efforts by Republican lawmakers to limit the power of tenured university faculty. Tillery Jr. shares: “Let’s be clear, they are succeeding. I think the reason that we have a mostly untenured faculty in American higher education today is because you have Republican governance and a lot of these states that attack university budgets and don’t invest in these institutions in such a way to make wages livable for faculty.”

Professor Mneesha Gellman examines the recent reelection of Nayib Bukele as President of El Salvador. Professor Gellman breaks down Salvadorians' reasoning for reelecting Bukele, as well as the democratic backsliding being experienced in the country as a result of Bukele maintaining the country's state of exception, a form of emergency rule that suspends many rights and gives the president emergency powers.

The visibility of populations, policies, and the state matters greatly for questions of power, inequality, and democratic life. This article builds on existing scholarship by examining how visibility operates as a lever and effect of social control in a racially and economically stratified society. By doing so, the article identifies a paradox. Race- and class-empowered groups often pressure state actors to implement punitive policies or otherwise visibly contain and control disadvantaged populations. But they also tend to decry and disavow the necessary public costs of these disciplinary interventions. This creates a conundrum for authorities: how to satisfy popular demands for social control while concealing resource commitments.

In "Doing Good Qualitative Research," over 40 experts are brought together to provide a thorough overview of how to use qualitative methods in the social sciences. In Professor Pearlman's chapter, she specifically analyzes how to conduct quality interviews, specifically on vulnerable populations.

In a recent interview with The 101, Napon Jatusripitak provided a new interpretation of a classic argument regarding the structure of Thai politics, called the Two Democratic Cities theory. In the wake of the 2023 Thai elections, Jatusripitak and others reinterpreted the original theory with "A New Tale of Two Democracies? The Changing Urban-Rural Dynamics at Thailand's 2023 General Elections." This paper explores the changing dynamics in Thai politics and what the future may hold for Thailand. (Article and title translated to English from Thai, original text is linked https://www.the101.world/napon-jatusripitak-interview/)

In Episode 18 of their podcast, Mara Suttman-Lea is joined by Pamela Smith, the CEO of Verified Voting, to discuss democracy, what it means to her and what its future looks like in an time of democratic decline.

The White House only announced President Biden's own visit to Brownsville, Texas, a few days ago and the president's trip is another indication that Democrats are scrambling to respond to an area of perceived weakness. More than 6.3 million migrants have been detained crossing into the US illegally during President Biden's time in office - a higher number than under previous presidencies - though experts say the reasons for the spike are complex, with some factors pre-dating his government. "He needs to get down there, show his face, and get the pulse of what's happening," says Jaime Dominguez, a professor of politics at Northwestern University. President Biden has been criticized for failing to engage on this issue until now, he notes, and "perception is reality".

Illinois has witnessed a profound demographic transformation over the past two decades, with its Latino population experiencing a significant increase. This change has not only altered the state's demographic landscape but has also brought to light the untapped political potential within the Latino community. Political science experts, like Jaime Dominguez from Northwestern University, have underscored the political ramifications of this shift, pointing to the Latino demographic as the fastest-growing group in Illinois between 2000 and 2020. Despite their increasing numbers, the Latino voter turnout remains low, particularly among the youth, signaling a vast reservoir of untapped electoral influence.

Ogi Ifediora, who holds a BA in political science from Northwestern University, was recently awarded a record deal by ARTium Recordings/Atlantic Records.

“The Latino population is the number one growing demographic in the state,” Dominguez said. "It has been, particularly over the last 20 years. In fact, the Latino population particularly in Chicago in 2000 actually was able to prevent the city from losing another congressional seat as a result of the growth of the population, so politically it’s been significant.”

Ph.D. candidate Matej Jungwirth, along with two co-authors, wrote an opinion piece for "The Daily Northwestern" outlining their demand for dependent healthcare coverage negotiations as a part of existing negotiations between Northwestern Leadership and the Northwestern University Graduate Workers (NUGW). Matej explains the financial hardship that is all too common among graduate students with dependents and the importance of lowering the cost of quality healthcare in attracting graduate students to the university.

Romain Malejacq's recent article presents a fresh account of the potential value of rebel governance as a response to civil war, especially in areas that are historically not politically stable.

Professor Tillery shares insight on Nikki Haley's potential motivations for remaining in the 2024 presidential race, expressing that, with her opponent facing federal and state charges throughout the country, this is not a typical election year. By remaining in the race, even after crushing losses in several primary elections, Haley is poising herself as a natural next choice if Donald Trump becomes unable to complete his campaign.

“So you now have many Republicans who are more willing to fight quite hard against the Democrats because they don’t want to give a win to Biden,” Harbridge-Yong wrote. “However, even if individual members think they’re representing their constituents, representation at the aggregate level can be poor. What the public as a whole – which tends to be more moderate – wants is compromise and resolution.”

In this podcast, four undergraduate students, including poli sci majors Valentina Parra and Jezel Martinez, share their experiences as First-Generation, Low-Income (FGLI) students. Topics include Northwestern's Bridge program and the transition from high school to college.

In the chaos that characterizes Peruvian politics, nothing seems to last over time. Not even the best scriptwriter for a Netflix series could come up with the twists and turns that the country has experienced in recent years. Nor can we conceive of a cast of actors with such high turnover, starting with the six presidents we have had since 2016. In this country of constant change, however, there are hidden patterns or recurrences that structure politics and allow political actors to occupy a known “place” or “role” in our historical trajectory. In a work recently included in the book Legados de un Pasado Irresuelto , published by IDEHPUCP on the occasion of the twenty years of the final report of the CVR (Encinas and Zúñiga 2023 [1] ), we focus on one of these recurrences: the insistence of radicalism.

Xie, who holds a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University in Chicago and had spent six years living and studying in the U.S., emphasized the importance of firsthand observation in understanding U.S. politics. "Studying U.S. politics requires immersing oneself in the U.S. and feeling its heartbeat. Despite studying U.S. politics, I had never attended a presidential primary or caucus before. I need to observe this [process] firsthand at least once in a lifetime," Xie told Beijing Review.me,"

Congratulations to Northwestern Poli Sci alumnus Mara Suttmann-Lea on her new status as a tenured professor at Connecticut College!

The NRA forged “a political identity around guns, where guns weren’t seen as tools for recreation and defense, but instead as sort of symbols of their values and political beliefs,” said Matthew Lacombe, a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University who researches the group.

We begin with the US vetoing a UN resolution put forth by Algeria for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza while offering an alternative draft resolution urging a temporary ceasefire on the condition that all hostages are released. Joining us to discuss the plight of the Palestinians trapped in the crowded enclave at the Egyptian border as the death count approaches 30,000 is Wendy Pearlman, a professor of political science and director of the Middle East and North Africa studies program at Northwestern University. Her books include Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement and Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States That Host Nonstate Actors, and we discuss her essay in New Lines Magazine, “The Erasure of Palestinian Society.”

On January 3, 2024, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele ordered the destruction of San Salvador’s Monument of Reconciliation, an enormous sculpture on the west side of the capital that had been inaugurated in 2017 under Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) President Salvador Sánchez Cerén. Intended to celebrate 25 years since the signing of the Peace Accords, which brought El Salvador’s civil war to an end, the monument featured two bronze figures—an FMLN fighter and a soldier with arms interlocked and releasing a flock of aluminum pigeons. Behind them, a turquoise bare-breasted woman meant to represent a mother of the Salvadoran people held out her arms, a ring symbolizing peace on one of her fingers.

Jonathan Schulman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He is interested in U.S. foreign policy and the ways that public opinion and social mobilization (in the U.S. and abroad) can affect foreign policy outcomes. His work also explores how trust in scientists and researchers drives key outcomes related to public health, political violence, and the legitimacy of elections. Jonathan received the Doris Graber Award at the 2023 Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research (MAPOR) Conference for the best graduate student paper on public opinion.

This episode is part of "A Closer Look: Indonesia After Jokowi", looking at what's next for the Southeast Asian giant now that the hugely popular President Joko Widodo is preparing to hand over power to former general Prabowo Subianto, the winner of the February 14 elections.

In this article, Professor Pearlman recounts the International Court of Justice (ICJ) trial in which Israeli lawyers defended against South Africa's case that Israel is committing genocide. Professor Pearlman draws special attention to the fact that Israel mentions Hamas while not making a distinction between Hamas and Palestinians. Professor Pearlman claims that this nonrecognition of Palestinian society is not new and not unique to Israel and she expands upon this history of nonrecognition and disenfranchisement.

Professor Wendy Pearlman joins "Background Briefing" with Ian Masters to discuss the crisis in the Middle East between Palestine and Israel. She pays special attention to the Biden Administration's response, including its unwillingness to call for a ceasefire and their continued cooperation with the Israeli government.

Jeff Feng is a STRONG Manoomin Collective Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. Their research and teaching focuses on the intersections of climate justice and queer liberation, environmental justice, and social movements. They examine the contributions of queer, trans, and Two-Spirit activists to fighting climate injustices and analyze how power, privilege, and marginalization shape climate justice policies and movements. As a scholar-activist, they advance climate justice by researching alongside organizers, such as those in the Central Coast Climate Justice Network, and by teaching courses that pair students with environmental justice partners to complete collaborative projects.

This open access book investigates how representation of Native Americans and Mexican-origin im/migrants takes place in high school history textbooks. Manually analyzing text and images in United States textbooks from the 1950s to 2022, the book documents stories of White victory and domination over Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) groups that disproportionately fill educational curricula. While representation and accurate information of non-White perspectives improves over time, the same limited tropes tend to be recycled from one textbook to the next. Textual analysis is augmented by focus groups and interviews with BIPOC students in California high schools. Together, the data show how misrepresentation and absence of BIPOC perspectives in textbooks impact youth identity.

Professor Reno's quote sheds light on a potential justification by Congressional Republicans for tying further Ukrainian Aid packages to border security measures. Reno states "Because those in the Republican Party, for example, that support continued assistance, [...] they would probably benefit from public pressure, because then they could rationalize to their colleagues and Congres, why they have to support assistance, and create pressure to come to a deal."

Professor Reno's quote sheds light on a potential justification by Congressional Republicans for tying further Ukrainian Aid packages to border security measures. Reno states "Because those in the Republican Party, for example, that support continued assistance, [...] they would probably benefit from public pressure because then they could rationalize to their colleagues and Congress, why they have to support assistance and create pressure to come to a deal."

How much does it cost to run elections in the United States? The answer is not as simple as you might think. In this episode, Mara and Zach talk about Zach's journey from being a more or less casual observer of elections at the presidential level to a becoming a full blown election nerd bringing his expertise in accounting to the world of election science. Zach talks about the mind-boggling challenge of collecting data on election administration budgets in the United States. He also spotlights the people who make elections happen -- local election officials and workers -- as he muses on what voting means to him.

The International Security Program develops and trains new talent in security studies by hosting pre- and postdoctoral research fellows. Elizabeth is exploring women's representation in peace processes. Specifically, she is researching the influence of gender-based power dynamics on women's involvement in peace negotiations.

Most states do not have majority thresholds for primary elections, which means that “plurality primary victors” (who won the primary with less than 50% of the vote) often advance to the general election. Harbridge-Yong and Hutchinson examine whether plurality primary victors harm their party in general elections. Building on the divisive primaries literature, of which “plurality primaries” share several characteristics and likely mechanisms, they hypothesize that candidates who win their primary election with a plurality of votes perform worse than majority primary victors, relative to expectations. They examine U.S. House, U.S. Senate, and gubernatorial partisan primaries from 2010–2022 in which three or more candidates ran.

Professor Gans-Morse adds to the discussion of the War in Ukraine by explaining how military aid and spending in Ukraine can benefit the US economy and create jobs domestically. He also sheds light on Vladimir Putin's mindset as Russia continues its aggression in Ukraine.

Israel has a long and troubled history responding to hostage crises, but the nature and scale of Hamas’s hostage taking on October 7th is unprecedented. In this webinar, Danielle Gilbert will discuss the long history of hostage taking in war, the evolution of hostage diplomacy, and what lessons can be drawn from the current hostage crisis in Gaza.

The arbitrary arrest, detention, or sentencing of foreign nationals by a state to exercise leverage over a foreign government is an emerging but increasingly serious issue that requires international attention. Also known as “hostage diplomacy,” arbitrary detention used for diplomatic leverage exposes all persons who travel, work, and live abroad to risk and undermines the basic principles of international relations, including mutual trust and peaceful settlement of disputes between states. It also contravenes international law, threatens state sovereignty, and destabilizes the rules-based international order.

Robinson Markus, ’19, is investigating the intersection of housing, climate change and inequality in Quito, the Andean capital city of Ecuador. It’s Markus’ second research trip to the country — they first traveled there for their political science honors thesis during their undergraduate career at Northwestern. Now, he’s examining a government program offering a relocation subsidy to residents of neighborhoods deemed susceptible to climate-related risks like landslides and urban flooding. In partnership with FLACSO Ecuador and the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Ciudad (Quito Metropolitan Research Institute), Markus is hoping to find out what motivates residents to move or stay and how the choice affects residents’ climate vulnerability.

Monique Newton '18 One of the greatest athletes in school history, Newton was a three-time winner of the shot put indoors at the conference level. The 2016 NCAC Field Athlete of the Year, Newton won the shot put (48-06.25 / 14.79m) and was third in the weight throw in that season (52-08.75 / 16.07m). However, Newton was known to do her best work on the national stage. After placing second in the shot put at the 2016 NCAA Championships, Newton would go on to become the first female national champion in Oberlin history with a winning school-record toss of 51-00.75 (15.56m) at the 2017 NCAA Indoor Championships. Newton's illustrious career would end in historic fashion at the 2018 NCAA Outdoor Championships as she added another national title in the discus (164-06 / 50.14) and was second in the shot put (48-06 / 14.78m).

Congratulations to Sebastian Karcher, Ph.D. ('14) on his recent appointment as an associate editor of the American Political Science Review.

Mikayla Denault started at WMTV 15 News in January 2024 as an MMJ intern through the Northwestern Journalism Residency program. Mikayla is focusing on reporting and producing, and she is excited to grow with new experiences. She is graduating from Northwestern in June 2024 with a degree in journalism and political science.

This is a short video interview -- Matej's segment starts at 37:30 -- for the Czech national TV broadcaster about the recent media layoffs in the US. Jungwirth also discusses the worrying enlargement of the so-called "news deserts" in the US, or areas that are critically underserved by local news sources.

“The two most pressing issues for young Indonesians are finding jobs and education, On the ground, young voters are struggling to find jobs that suit their aspirations.”

In this recent interview with the European Resilience Initiative Centre, Dr. Mauro Gilli breaks down key events and tactics from the past two years of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In addition, Dr. Gilli looks forward and hypothesizes about what a potential end to the conflict may look like, alongside exploring how it might come about.

While the May 2023 general elections did not produce a government that faithfully reflects the Thai voters’ mandate, the withdrawal of military-backed elements, which had been at the forefront of Thai politics since 2014, ignited hopes for changes to the junta-drafted 2017 Constitution. This anticipated constitutional reform, however, is shaping up to be a complex and contentious process.

Free speech on campus, book bans, educational gag orders, the overturn of affirmative action, the resignation of former Harvard president Claudine Gay. All of these issues center on one hot-button topic: DEI. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has become a staple in national vocabulary after the so-called “racial reckoning” of 2020 brought demands for racial justice to the top of institutional priorities. From schools, to Fortune 500, companies to the film industry, DEI efforts had a steady surge…until they didn’t.

Optimizing the allocation of units into treatment groups can help researchers improve the precision of causal estimators and decrease costs when running factorial experiments. However, existing optimal allocation results typically assume a super-population model and that the outcome data come from a known family of distributions. Instead, we focus on randomization-based causal inference for the finite-population setting, which does not require model specifications for the data or sampling assumptions. We propose exact theoretical solutions for optimal allocation in 2K factorial experiments under complete randomization with A-, D-, and E-optimality criteria. We then extend this work to factorial designs with block randomization. We also derive results for optimal allocations when using cost-based constraints. To connect our theory to practice, we provide convenient integer-constrained pro

Optimizing the allocation of units into treatment groups can help researchers improve the precision of causal estimators and decrease costs when running factorial experiments. However, existing optimal allocation results typically assume a super-population model and that the outcome data come from a known family of distributions. Instead, we focus on randomization-based causal inference for the finite-population setting, which does not require model specifications for the data or sampling assumptions. We propose exact theoretical solutions for optimal allocation in 2K factorial experiments under complete randomization with A-, D-, and E-optimality criteria. We then extend this work to factorial designs with block randomization. We also derive results for optimal allocations when using cost-based constraints.

Olivia Olander is a Chicago-based state government reporter at the Tribune. She previously covered labor and employment policy for POLITICO in DC, including the Labor Department, Congress and unions. Olivia is a graduate of Northwestern University and grew up in the suburbs of San Diego.

A group of faculty, employees, and graduate students at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., has not only offered support to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) but has decided to establish a new entity to complement the chapter’s anti-Israel activities. After 200 individuals signed a statement in December advocating for SJP, some signatories joined to create a campus branch of Educators for Justice in Palestine (EJP). The group defined its principles, including support for the boycott, divest, sanctions (BDS) movement, “as a way to pressure Israel to end the occupation of Palestine and the curtailment of Palestinian rights in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel.”

“El Salvador’s presidential election results were predictable. After decades of gang domination, voters were willing to accept gross human rights violations in exchange for increased security for some. Votes for Bukele confirmed Salvadorans’ willingness to maintain the state of exception, which is likely to continue indefinitely and has already established authoritarian rule. The façade of democracy has fallen in El Salvador. Like Ursula LeGuin’s fictional story, ‘The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas,’ where one child is tortured in secret in order to maintain the happiness of everyone else in Omelas, more than 75,000 people are detained in El Salvador without the benefit of constitutional protections, and only a handful of detractors are willing to, in LeGuin’s language, walk away from Omelas and signal their dissent."

“El Salvador’s presidential election results were predictable. After decades of gang domination, voters were willing to accept gross human rights violations in exchange for increased security for some. Votes for Bukele confirmed Salvadorans’ willingness to maintain the state of exception, which is likely to continue indefinitely and has already established authoritarian rule. The façade of democracy has fallen in El Salvador. Like Ursula LeGuin’s fictional story, ‘The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas,’ where one child is tortured in secret in order to maintain the happiness of everyone else in Omelas, more than 75,000 people are detained in El Salvador without the benefit of constitutional protections, and only a handful of detractors are willing to, in LeGuin’s language, walk away from Omelas and signal their dissent.

The impending arrival of the trillionaire signals another step backwards in the fight for a more balanced economy and healthier democracy. The billionaire class, after all, skews the balance of power in the marketplace, in politics and in society. Its members own newspapers that shape public opinion. They donate to politicians who pass the laws that they want. According to one study, 11% of the world’s billionaires have held or sought political office, with the rate of “billionaire participation” in autocracies hitting an astounding 29%. Another study shows they tend to lean to the right: positions that typically help them keep their own wealth, and that of their peers, intact.

In front of a few dozen faculty and students in the basement of Chambers Hall on Monday, economics Prof. Charles F. Manski presented his recent research advocating for including race in clinical algorithms. Manski’s lecture was part of the Institute for Policy Research’s Fay Lomax Cook Colloquia, a weekly series for faculty to present politically relevant research from a variety of fields. “It’s a chance for me and other faculty to be a part of a broader intellectual community of what’s going on at the university, and also create friendships and opportunities to collaborate beyond what’s going on in your discipline,” IPR Fellow and political science Prof. Laurel Harbridge-Yong said.

I am honored to be part of the @NFL @nflnetwork recent documentary, "The Flyest Ever.” The documentary profiles the intersection of Black Aviation and Football. The special debuts Tuesday, 6 Feb at 2000 EST. Thanks, @osahontongo, for the opportunity.

The aftermath of the first few days of the WNBA free agency signing period has left the Sky with more questions about the roster than answers. As of today, the Sky has eight players under contract for next season: Kahleah Copper, Marina Mabrey, Elizabeth Williams, Dana Evans, Isabelle Harrison, Sika Kone, Li Yueru and newly signed point guard Lindsay Allen of the Minnesota Lynx. Arguably, the biggest roster need heading into free agency was solidifying the starting point guard position. The Sky’s first attempt at addressing this need was on Thursday when they signed 28-year-old free agent point guard Allen to a two-year contract for $90,000 per year.

The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University presents Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology brings together work by an intergenerational, transnational group of artists who use strategies of kinship, healing, and restorative interventions to foster a deeper and more urgent awareness of our interconnectedness with the earth. Join us for an interdisciplinary opening conversation on art; eco-anxiety and resilience; climate crisis science and impact; and the importance of cross-disciplinary thinking and problem-solving to affect change.

Gabor Mate - author of "The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture" suggests there are “4 As” that help move us towards healing and wholeness: authenticity, agency, healthy expression of anger, and acceptance. But what does this have to do with democracy? I provide some thoughts on this question in conjunction with my remarkable conversation with Noah Praetz, president of The Elections Group. Throughout the episode we talk about the self-actualizing power of working in democracy spaces, and we come back to the idea that, while flawed, messy, and imperfect—democracy is the best answer to the question of how we govern ourselves.

Political uncertainty in Thailand has heightened again. The Constitutional Court has ruled that the party’s actions to reform the country’s lèse majesté law amounted to an exercise to overthrow the constitutional monarchy. This has sent the Move Forward Party (MFP) — the top vote-getter in the 2023 general election with support from over 14 million voters — into a potential death spiral.

While there is increasing recognition of the role of race in shaping global politics, the extent to which the construction and operation of international order is entangled with race remains underexplored. In this article, I argue for the centrality of race and racialization in understanding the constitution of international order by theorizing the constitutive connections between race and international order and showing how the two can be examined as intertwined.

The book presents a thought-provoking argument and has predictably generated debate, as seen in this roundtable. Jahara Matisek’s review is generally positive. He praises Hazelton for “going boldly against the grain” and accepts that this will force many scholars—himself included—to rethink their works on counterinsurgency. He also helpfully notes the broader implications of Hazelton’s book, such as for literature on statebuilding. Asfandyar Mir’s assessment is more measured. He notes its “rich empirical analysis” but finds a few “gaps.” He calls for greater specify in the theorizing about elite engagement, questions the definition of counterinsurgency success, and raises concerns about “selecting on the dependent variable.”

Nelson Rauda Zablah tries not to think of the future too much. “Because if I do,” he says, “I can’t sleep.” The thirty-two-year-old journalist writes for El Faro, El Salvador’s most well-known online independent media outlet, and also contributes to international publications. We met in early January 2024 at a nondescript coffee shop in one of San Salvador’s numerous strip malls. Rauda’s writings and videos have explained, among other topics, Bitcoin’s inglorious path in El Salvador. In a January 2024 article for the Christian Science Monitor about President Nayib Bukele’s unconstitutional reelection campaign, “Breaking the law — in a popular way?,” he sums up the country’s confusing political landscape. Although nearly half the population thinks Bukele’s reelection bid breaks the law, Rauda writes, “a majority say they’ll vote for him.”

In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transformed peaceful protests into one of the most devastating conflicts of our times, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. The Home I Worked to Make takes Syria’s refugee outflow as its point of departure. Based on hundreds of interviews conducted across more than a decade, it probes a question as intimate as it is universal: What is home? With gripping immediacy, Syrians now on five continents share stories of leaving, losing, searching, and finding (or not finding) home. Across this tapestry of voices, a new understanding emerges: home, for those without the privilege of taking it for granted, is both struggle and achievement.

Over the last half century, two major developments have transformed the nature of workers’ rights and altered the pathways available to low-wage workers to combat their exploitation. First, while national labor law, which regulates unionization and collective bargaining, has grown increasingly ineffective, employment laws establishing minimal workplace standards have proliferated at the state and local levels. Second, as labor unions have declined, a diversity of small, under-resourced nonprofit “alt-labor” groups have emerged in locations across the United States to organize and support marginalized workers. In Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights, political scientist Daniel J. Galvin draws on rich data and extensive interviews to examine the links between these developments.

In recent years, democratic theorists have inquired into the aesthetic dimension of contemporary politics. Influenced by Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, these scholars claim that there is an analogy between democratic politics and aesthetic experiences, since both involve the confrontation of an indeterminacy that cannot be overcome through rational argumentation. Contributing to this perspective, but challenging some of Rancière’s insights, this article shows the importance of Jean-François Lyotard’s writings on aesthetics for understanding what I call ‘democratic aesthetics’.

Indonesian politics experienced significant plot twists in 2023, with President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo emerging as a central figure and orchestrating seasoned tactical moves in the lead up to 2024’s presidential and legislative elections. The political landscape was dominated by elite interests with minimal public participation, while ideological distinctions between candidates were blurred.

International aid organizations and donors have committed to localize aid by empowering local actors to deliver and lead in humanitarian response. While international actors do often rely on local actors for aid delivery, their progress on shifting authority falls short. Scholars suggest that while localizing aid may be desirable, the organizational imperatives of international actors and aid’s colonial past and present make it difficult at best. Can localization efforts produce locally led humanitarian response? Adopting a power framework, we argue that localization reinforces and reproduces international power; through institutional processes, localization efforts by international actors allocate capacity to, and constitute local actors as, humanitarians that are more or less capable, funded, and involved in responding to crises in the latter’s own countries.

This panel features the University of Toronto’s 46-partner decarbonization project, the Italian University Network (RUS)’ decarbonization guidelines, and the Climate Leadership Network's 450+ institution decarbonization plans, and the UK Universities and U7+ Climate Network leadership initiative. Speakers: Shatha Qaqish-Clavering (chair and co-moderator), Beth Martin (Co-moderator) Patrizia Lombardi, Michela Gallo, Patricia Crifo, Erwin Franquet, Carmela Cucuzzella, Paola Visconti Arizpe, Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya, Respect Musiyiwa.

Alvin Tillery Jr., professor of political science at Northwestern University and director of the university's Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, said that while the pushback over the holiday party in Boston may have been amplified because of the national debate over diversity, equity and inclusion practices, it's unlikely that a city like Boston, known for its liberal politics, will see efforts to ban DEI programs at public universities that have had success in states like Florida and Texas.

Monica Wyant, of East Grand Rapids, is the produce business manager for Meijer, Inc. and a former associate director of intergovernmental affairs for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She earned her Master of Business Administration and Master of Science in natural resources from the University of Michigan and her Bachelor of Arts in political science from Northwestern University. Wyant is reappointed to represent Democrats for a term commencing January 1, 2024, and expiring December 31, 2027.

Monique Newton (she/her) is a 6th-year Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science Department at Northwestern University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of race and ethnic politics, urban politics, political behavior, political psychology, and political violence. A mixed-method scholar, she employs ethnographic, interview, and experimental methods to examine Black political behavior in cities in the United States. Her dissertation project explores how traumatic events by state agents impact local Black political participation in the United States. In her work, Monique builds upon the Harris (2006) model of the evolution of collective memory and its impact on collective action as it pertains to the contemporary Black Lives Matter social movement.

Is "crisis of the African state" a valid concept when describing and analyzing state development in contemporary Africa? The concept of a crisis of the state is a core feature of Crawford Young's classic The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (1994). In that book, Young presented a conception of states in Africa as reflections of the different characteristics of earlier European empires from the imposition of colonial rule through its consolidation and the process of decolonization. the crisis arises from the difficulties of indigenizing a European-designed grid of administrative hierarchies within precisely demarcated borders in a continent that had its own widely varying experiences with state building amid a great diversity of political structures.

In the second half of this lecture, Professor Chloe Thurston continues her captivating exploration of modern debt challenges and financial policies. This session focuses on the #PoliticalDynamics and #RegulatoryChallenges of debt relief, the organizational dimensions of debtors, and the role of wage earners in the evolving credit landscape.

Much has been made of the prospect of Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the first Black and South Asian woman to hold the office of President of the United States. Harris’ rise to presidential nominee is the latest chapter in the long history of Black women’s participation in American politics. Professor Sally Nuamah teaches political science at Northwestern University. Her current research focuses on the civic engagement of Black women in the political process.

We begin with President Biden’s acknowledgement of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators at the DNC in Chicago in his speech last night when he said, “They have got a point” — referring to the desperate need for a ceasefire as the deathcount in Gaza passes 40,000. Joining us is Wendy Pearlman, a professor of political science and director of the Middle East and North Africa studies program at Northwestern University. Her books include Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement and Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States That Host Nonstate Actors; her forthcoming book is The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora. Yesterday she spent the day with the pro-Palestinian protests outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The D.N.C. was forced to adapt. The new reality meant that billionaire donors had a new lever to pull in politics. “The money is up everywhere,” Alvin Bernard Tillery Jr., a professor of political science at Northwestern, told DealBook. “It also means that the traditional committees don’t necessarily have control over everything like they did, say, 20 years ago.”

Jaime Dominguez is a professor at Northwestern University. He says the large numbers of migrants sent to Chicago and other cities ignited a broader discussion among Democrats. Jaime Dominguez: It did at least force the Democratic Party to begin to have a conversation, right, about, going forward, what kind of platform they were going to put forward when it came to immigration.

Whether a candidate’s promises about the economy even land with voters kind of depends on how the economy is doing ahead of the election, said Tabitha Bonilla, who teaches social policy at Northwestern University. “If the party in power is presiding over a weaker economy, that tends to make voters more skeptical of the promises that that campaign can actually be effective on the economy,” she said. But if the economy is in good shape and/or improving, voters may be a bit more inclined to give them another shot at running the government.

On today's program, we examine what will DEI policies look like in the next four years under a new president and what impact could we potentially see in Illinois. Our panel of experts include a representative from a non-profit that conducts research on DEI initiatives, a director from the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, the head of the Black Chamber of Commerce of Southern Illinois, and a Professor of Sociology and Political Science [Anthony S. Chen].

Jane Ann Gephardt, the wife of former Missouri Congressman Dick Gephardt, has died. They met while attending Northwestern University in 1960 where she majored in English and Political Science. Jane Gephardt is survived by her husband, three children, and eight grandchildren. She passed away peacefully while surrounded by family in Naples, Florida on Saturday at the age of 81.

We find that after the assassination attempt, both Democrats and Republicans were less likely to justify political violence. This difference is statistically significant but small. Critically, this means that the appetite for political violence did not increase in the weeks after the attempted assassination, and it may have declined a bit. This is good news for democracy.

New research by IPR political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong suggests that Republicans and Democrats think about electability differently during primary elections. She finds that Democrats believe moderate candidates have a better chance of winning in general elections, while Republican voters prioritize a candidate’s ability to fundraise. “Primary elections are unique because people may be thinking about what's going to happen in the second stage of the election—the general—while they're making decisions in this [primary] stage,” Harbridge-Yong said. “That's where we thought that electability was a really valuable thing to look at because electability is something that may lead people to think strategically about politics.”

On 7 August, Thailand’s Constitutional Court unanimously ruled to dissolve the Move Forward Party (MFP) and impose a ten-year ban on its executives, including prime ministerial candidate Pita Limjaroenrat. The dissolution conforms to a troubling pattern in Thailand where judicial bodies — particularly the Constitutional Court — intervene to shape political outcomes, often counter to popular will and with questionable regard for the rule of law.

Recent years have seen growing concerns among social scientists about the seeming erosion of democratic norms in the US. In a new study, Andrew Thompson and co-authors examine the influence of white Americans’ sense of racial threat on attitudes towards political violence. They find that when prompted to think about racial demographic change in the US, many white Americans express clear anti-Black, violent sentiments about how the country is changing. He writes that these findings may show that extreme views across the public on race may be more common than many media commentators have thought.

Karcher, a research associate professor in the political science department, recently became director of the Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry. He also directs the related Qualitative Data Repository. His work has been published in numerous journals across traditional disciplinary lines, including the Data Science Journal, International Studies Quarterly and Qualitative Health Research. In June 2024, he started a four-year tenure as an associate editor of the American Political Science Review. He has received funding from organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Sloan Foundation.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Zhihang Ruan won the best dissertation prize from APSA’s Class and Inequality section for his dissertation “Land Regimes and the Welfare of Migrant Workers: A Comparison of China and Vietnam.” The research traces the origins and evolution of land institutions and regulations on internal migrants in the two communist nations since the 1980s. Combining archival research, interviews, and participant observation, it finds that a seemingly minor divergence in land regulation in the early 1980s profoundly affected the capacity and incentives of the governments to provide welfare benefits to migrant laborers, shaping their contemporary economies.

The Home I Worked to Make is a collection of personal testimonials from Syrians who were forced to flee Syria after 2011 or found themselves unable to return to Syria. It shares their stories of losing home, searching for home, and ultimately rethinking the meaning of home. Organized in seven parts, the book roughly follows the chronological arc of displacement journeys, beginning with departures from a country of origin and passing through different experiences en route to or within countries of settlement. While this sequential structure upholds homemaking as a process unfolding in time, it does not intend to communicate that it follows a predetermined teleology.

The Home I Worked to Make is a collection of personal testimonials from Syrians who were forced to flee Syria after 2011 or found themselves unable to return to Syria. It shares their stories of losing home, searching for home, and ultimately rethinking the meaning of home. Organized in seven parts, the book roughly follows the chronological arc of displacement journeys, beginning with departures from a country of origin and passing through different experiences en route to or within countries of settlement. While this sequential structure upholds homemaking as a process unfolding in time, it does not intend to communicate that it follows a predetermined teleology.

What we’ve discovered, both from our survey and from how people voted, is that Americans are sending a clear message that they support democracy, and will fight anti-democratic measures—something that politicians of all parties might benefit from listening to if we want to keep our republic.

William Reno, professor and chair of the political science department at Northwestern University, argued that Harris may have a lasting advantage over Trump because she appeals to "ordinary people who are otherwise inattentive to politics because they were so disgusted with what was on offer in both parties." "Harris puts Trump on the defensive and runs the story now," Reno told Newsweek. "My guess is she will continue an upward trend in the polls ... She won't convince Trump supporters but she can mobilize a portion of Americans that opted out when it seemed that the choice was an old weirdo heavily into makeup vs. a broken down old man."

On Thursday, a massive and complex prisoner exchange marked a breakthrough in hostage diplomacy between Russia and the West. Sixteen prisoners held in Russia – including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former Marine Paul Whelan – are free in the largest prisoner swap since the Cold War.

This article presents Latinx political thought as a distinctive tradition in political theory that reworks central concepts in response to historical experiences of conquest, colonialism, migration, and transnational politics. In reconstructing this tradition, we argue that its problem space converges with US-based Latin American political thought. The article first traces a genealogy of Latinx political theory and then explores three realms of theorizing around which Latinx and Latin American political thought cluster: sovereignty and state violence, peoplehood, and transnationalism. We explain how the surveyed works disrupt and enrich political theory accounts of these problems. In arguing for the recognition of this field as a tradition, the article also aims to make it intelligible as an area of concentration for PhD students in political science.

Lucien Ferguson is the 2023-2025 Drinan Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston College Law School. His scholarship focuses on questions of race, capitalism, and democracy in the American legal system. Lucien completed his JD and PhD in Political Science at Northwestern University, where he was both a Law and Science Fellow and a Franke Fellow. His research interests are particularly informed by his previous professional experiences in Chicago, where he worked in civil rights and community justice and as a special education teacher in Chicago Public Schools.

I draw together theories of partisan polarization and motivated reasoning, which suggest that partisanship shapes information processing, and theories of accountability, which argue voters hold elected officials accountable through promise fulfillment. Here, I ask how partisanship influences voter understanding of promise fulfillment and accountability and if voters assess promises through a partisan lens. Two original survey experiments test how respondents react to promise fulfillment on the issues of immigration and human trafficking. I demonstrate that co-partisans differentiate between kept and broken promises, but out-partisans do not. Despite partisan differences, respondents evaluate promise-keeping when asked about accountability but not when asked about approval. Thus, even when voters recognize broken promises, accountability is influenced by partisanship.

"Whenever Americans come from being wrongfully detained abroad, they are brought to that military medical facility. They are given a full workup to make sure that they are coming out of this brutal captivity without any acute and long-lasting health concerns. But they also receive mental and emotional health support as well. They go through a full workup while they're in San Antonio, and then get the resources and connections that they are going to need in the very long and difficult months and years ahead as they grapple with their experience in captivity and try to recover long term."

Boris Litvin received his PhD in political science at Northwestern University in 2019. His research and teaching interests are in political theory, focusing especially on the place of spectators and spectatorship in democratic life. Boris’s scholarly publications have appeared in the American Political Science Review, the European Journal of Political Theory and the Review of Politics, among other outlets. His book manuscript, You the People: Political Theory and the Construction of Popular Audiences, investigates how political thinkers across intellectual history adapt emerging literary genres such as plays and novels in their efforts to invoke “the people.”

Kumar Ramanathan is a Bridge to Faculty Scholar in the Department of Political Science at UIC. He earned his Ph.D. in political science at Northwestern University, and previously held positions as a Doctoral Fellow at the American Bar Foundation and Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago. His research explores how the politics of law and public policy shape inequality in the United States. This includes projects on civil rights and social welfare policies, urban politics, immigrant politics, and democratic accountability. His work has been published in Urban Affairs Review, the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Studies in American Political Development, and Political Research Quarterly.

Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas at Arlington. She received her PhD from Northwestern University, and has received a Master of Legal Studies from the University of Chicago Law School. She is an IR scholar interested in researching areas of international law and institutions.

Before joining the American University in Dubai as an Associate Professor of Political Science, Dr. Güçler worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at Özyegin University in Istanbul and as an Adjunct Professor of Social Research and Public Policy in the Division of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Between 2016 and 2017, he also served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Government at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Andrew S. Kelly is Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health at California State University, East Bay. His research is at the intersection of American political development and US public policy, with a focus on health care, public health, and science policy. His work has been published in, among other venues, Health Affairs, Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, The Forum, and Studies in American Political Development. He received his PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University. After completing his PhD, Dr. Kelly was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Research Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Kelly has also held postodoctoral positions at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, San Francisco.

Danielle Gilbert, an assistant professor of political science and an expert on hostage taking and recovery at Northwestern, joins us to talk about what went into the prisoner swap between the U.S. and Russia.

Joining us today on AirTalk to share what we know about the swap is foreign policy reporter for The Hill, Laura Kelly and Danielle Gilbert, assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University.

Before joining Tulane as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Political Science, Dr. Miruna Barnoschi was a Fellow in International Security at Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). She finished her PhD in Political Science at Northwestern University where her primary field was international relations with a research focus in international and national security. She also finished an ad hoc MS in Statistics at Northwestern. An interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholar, she holds a MA in Philosophy from the University of Virginia and received a BA in International Relations and a BA in Classics and Philosophy from the University of Southern California. After reaching PhD candidacy, she taught national security and international relations courses at Northwestern and DePaul University.

Laura D. Ephraim Professor of Political Science le2?@williams?.edu 413-597-3366 Schapiro Hall Rm 218 Education B.A. Pomona College (2000) Ph.D. Northwestern University, Political Science (2010) Courses PSCI 130(F) SEM Introduction to Political Theory PSCI 172 / STS 135 SEM Politics after the Apocalypse (not offered 2024/25) PSCI 232 / PHIL 232 SEM Modern Political Thought (not offered 2024/25) PSCI 239 / WGSS 238 SEM Science, Gender and Power (not offered 2024/25) PSCI 270 / ENVI 241 SEM The Politics of Waste (not offered 2024/25) PSCI 273 / STS 273 SEM Politics without Humans? (not offered 2024/25) PSCI 305 / STS 305(F) SEM Environmental Political Thought PSCI 339 / JWST 339 TUT Politics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt (not offered 2024/25)

Dara Gaines Visiting Assistant Professor (ARSC)-Arts & Sciences (PLSC)-Political Science

The deal frees 24 prisoners from seven countries - three of whom have now returned to the US. This is "unprecedented" and suggests that "a tremendous amount of diplomatic negotiations have been going on for quite some time," says Danielle Gilbert, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Gilbert, who has advised the British, US and Canadian governments on hostage recovery, told BBC's Newshour that prisoner swaps are usually made one-for-one. She added that she "hasn't seen anything at this scale in the recent wave of hostage diplomacy".

We had been in Beirut for barely two days when the concierge told us we had only half a tank of water left to use in the apartment. At ten the next morning, he knocked on the door to say we were almost out. The water delivery truck was arriving a bit later, he said, and asked if I wanted to pay him in advance the 500,000 Lebanese liras (slightly more than five US dollars). We had not been at home much since we arrived and, when we were, had been consumed by the challenge of not overloading the power circuit. The concierge had made his disgruntlement clear the second time we asked him to flip the disjoncteur which he alone had access to, as demanded by the private generator company that provided most of our electricity. Now he was telling us we were nearly out of water.

uamah, the author of How Girls Achieve and Closed for Democracy, was promoted to associate professor of human development and social policy. Her work looks at the intersection–of race, gender, education policy, and political behavior. Education, she says, is one of the best ways to improve people’s lives. “Schools are a main vehicle for accessing economic, social, and political equity,” she said.

What does it mean to engage ethnography in the study of global environmental politics, particularly at sites of global agreement-making? This chapter explores how different forms of ethnography, including traditional field-based, digital, visual, and spatial approaches, can uncover and interrogate the hidden dynamics that shape the production of global environmental governance. The chapter introduces readers to how ethnographic approaches to these sites have inspired new ways of asking questions about global environmental politics. It considers the opportunities and challenges of adopting transdisciplinary and feminist approaches to ethnography, both in terms of practical concerns in the field and broader disciplinary concerns.

Even before the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action policies in college admissions, the nation’s top business leaders expressed concern over how the decision could affect their own diversity goals and hiring practices.

Ivy leagues have long served as a symbol of prestige, marked by high costs and low admission rates. But this year, top universities have begun to question their own elite classifications, examining the relevance and practicality of chasing a "top-tier" degree.

Two wealthy Republicans running long-shot campaigns for president have qualified for the first GOP debate – even as they remain their own top donors. The candidates, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota and former software company executive, have each contributed more than $10m to their own campaigns.

“Former president Donald Trump’s indictment on four federal charges of conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election is a turning point in the federal government’s approach to the Jan. 6th insurrection. Whereas most of DOJ’s prosecutorial efforts immediately following the sacking of the Capitol focused on the rioters, this indictment shows us that the government is now ready to hold the coup plotters accountable. While this is an essential moment in our nation’s history and represents a tremendous legal threat to Mr. Trump personally, the fact that the indictments are coming three years after the crimes and Mr. Trump has already ramped up his political campaign means that the indictments will pose a considerable threat to our democracy as Mr. Trump will use them to stoke anger and discord among his supporters. In short, the nation must brace itself for continuing political conf

"Last Saturday, 25 May, was Resistance and Liberation Day in Lebanon. It commemorates the date when the south of the country was freed from Israeli occupation in 2000. The Israeli army had entered Lebanon in June 1982 in pursuit of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, reaching as far north as Beirut, and had retreated to the south by 1985, where it remained for fifteen years until it was forced out by Hizbullah fighters. There was no celebration this year. The strip of formerly occupied villages has been heavily bombed since October."

A WGN News anchor begins the segment with questions right off the bat: “Ian Hurd is a professor at Northwestern and an expert on international relations, so we’re really glad you came in here to give us a little bit of insight here. First of all, President Biden said that this was an outrageous move here. Can you give us a little bit of context here and what do you think is likely to come from this move?”. Professor Ian Hurd is able to provide some background into what this all means: “Sure, well, this is the court that’s in charge of trying to figure out, whenever there’s an atrocity, how to hold people accountable. So it’s really not that controversial, it just comes out of the idea that there are certain acts that are just beyond the pale.

"In competitive races, candidates who win their primary with a minority of the vote are 11.3 percentage points less likely to win their general election than candidates who win their primary with a majority of the vote. Northwestern University Political Science Professor Laurel Harbridge-Yong and FairVote Senior Policy Analyst Rachel Hutchinson break down their latest research paper."

Thailand’s 250 junta-appointed senators have completed their five-year term. They will be replaced by a new batch of 200 senators who are self-elected from 20 social and professional groups. Despite no longer having a vote in the selection of a prime minister, the incoming Senate retains substantial powers that, given its vulnerability to elite capture, could further breed political instability and stifle democratic development in Thailand.

“I thought President Schill’s unwillingness to engage in that kind of discourse was really a good thing,”

Over the past year, the divergent paths of economies in the Indo-Pacific have become clear. On one hand, Japan fell into recession and lost its rank as the third-largest economy and China faced a property crisis that slowed economic growth. On the other, India’s economy experienced rapid growth at over seven percent and Indonesia is expected to soon surpass Russia’s economy in GDP per capita. These variations throughout the region suggest that studying markets in the Indo-Pacific through one lens is difficult, if not impossible. In addition, the highest Gini coefficients in the Asia-Pacific are in this region and economic growth will only entrench existing inequality if addressed improperly. Join us to gain a key understanding of the inter-relation of markets, equality, and economic practices in the Indo-Pacific.

It’s an EmMajority Report Thursday! She speaks with Daniel J. Galvin, professor of political science at Northwestern University, to discuss his recent book Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights. Then, she's joined by Richard Beck, senior writer at n+1 Magazine, to discuss his recent piece in the New Left Review entitled "Bidenism Abroad."

The European Union (EU) has deployed a wide variety of civilian missions that have sought to advise, train and build the capacity of internal security sectors in host coun­tries as part of its civilian Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). These mis­sions constitute integral parts of broader international programmes of Security Sector Reform (SSR) in conflict-affected countries. Their strategic objective is to con­tribute to the development of a civilian security sector that is efficient and accountable, and enjoys the trust of the public. This report looks at three case studies: EUPOL Afghanistan (2007–2016), EUCAP Sahel Mali (2014–) and EUCAP Sahel Niger (2012–2024). All three have engaged in civil­ian SSR activities amid ongoing armed conflict, and operated in broader national and international counterinsurgency contexts.

This research is part of a larger project intended to assess opportunities and inform strategies of local labor standards enforcement agencies within California—including those in Los Angeles (city/county), Oakland, San Diego (city/county), San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Clara (county), and Emeryville. However, due to CPS data limitations and regional commuting patterns, it not possible to reliably assess violation rates within these specific counties and municipalities. Given the structure of the CPS survey, metropolitan areas offer more reliable geographical units while encompassing most commuter sheds. We therefore focus on the four MSAs that include these jurisdictions.

"A Russian prison is bleak: That was life in the gray zone. Most everything was negotiable; you just had to find the right price. So write Brittney Griner and Michelle Burford in Coming Home, the bestselling new memoir about Griner’s ten months as a hostage in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Griner was describing the negotiations she witnessed within the prison economy, as inmates bribed corrupt guards to bend or break the rules. But she may as well have been describing her own harrowing experience as a captive and political pawn."

Mini Chefz President Alianna Taitano, a third year student at Northwestern University studying political science and Spanish, said the club has between 30 and 40 active members. The club includes “many little pop-up lessons we do weekly with kids. And the idea is that we want to teach them the basics of cooking and the basics of nutrition,” she said. “So we aim to do simple, healthy meals with the kids and it helps both our members and the kids learn how to cook.” The club previously worked out of the kitchen in Allison Hall, a residential hall on campus, but since it expanded, it now uses 1825 Hinman Ave., a not-in-use residential hall. The club meets on Mondays at Robert Crown Community Center, Tuesdays at C 24/7 After-School Program and Fridays at Family Focus and the YMCA.

Khan's decision to request warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders "puts Biden in an awkward spot," Dan Krcmaric, an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University, told Newsweek. "Biden has to be careful about opposing the ICC too aggressively. The Democratic Party is already split over Israel's war in Gaza. Attacking the ICC over the arrest warrants will not sit well with the party's progressive wing, which tends to agree with the ICC's assessment that Israeli leaders might be war criminals," he said. Krcmaric said it was not surprising that Biden's initial reaction was to denounce the move. "Biden has traditionally been a strong supporter of Israel, and criticizing the ICC is a way to stand by an ally," he said. "But the U.S. also has a self-interested reason to push back against the ICC in this case," he said.

“History has shown us to follow the lead of young people,” Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a professor of political science and religious studies and member of Northwestern University Educators for Justice in Palestine, said in a recent statement. “It is young people who spoke out clearly against the brutal war on Vietnam. … Yet again we must follow the lead of the young people who are calling for an end to genocide.”

According to the Associated Press, an Israeli airstrike killed 20 people in central Gaza, mostly women and children, as fighting rages across the north Sunday, as Israel’s leaders aired divisions over who should govern Gaza after the war, now in its eighth month. Northwestern University Professor of Political Science, Ian Hurd, joined LiveNOW from FOX to break down this ongoing conflict.

Among those of us who work with returning citizens, we know that getting a good job is one of the most critical steps in re-entry success. When people can leave prison with credentials from vocational training programs or with a college degree, they are more qualified for a range of employment options, which in turn are pathways to an economically sustainable livelihood. If employers discriminate based on someone’s conviction history, they are missing out on that person’s talent. Employers then also diminish the options that formerly incarcerated people have to gain upward economic mobility via taxpaying, rather than underground, employment.

Global politics has shown increasing interest in cities, particularly in the field of climate policy and governance. Yet, we still have little understanding of which cities engage the most in global urban climate governance. Answering this question is a first step towards understanding who decides for whom in a system that has decisive influence on wider global policy processes. In this article, we seek to identify and analyze the characteristics and position of cities in global urban climate governance to reassess its composition. To do so, we conduct a social network analysis of 15 transnational city networks. Results emphasize that global and large cities are the most central, but small and middle-size cities are the most numerous actors of the system. Global South cities are larger than their Northern counterparts in the system. Those less central and understudied actors likely have

CHAKRABARTI: [H]ow would you describe the Arizona electorate right now Samara? Is it 50/50 Republican, Democrat? What do we say when we're talking about Arizona voters? KLAR: It's even a little more complicated than that. If you look at the registration numbers, and I check in every so often to see where we're at, it's generally pretty stable in that we have about 35-ish% of Arizonans register as Republican, about 29% right now are registered as Democrats, and then we have about 33% registered as Independents.

The last decade has given rise to substantial concern about democratic backsliding in the U.S. Manifestations include decreased trust in government, conspiratorial beliefs, contentious protests, and support for political violence. Surprisingly, prior work has not explored how these attitudes and behaviors relate to gun-buying, an action that provides people with the means to challenge the state. We address this topic by focusing on the unprecedented gun-buying surge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a survey with over 32,000 respondents, we find that—relative to pre-existing gun owners (who did not buy during the pandemic) and the non-gun-owning public—pandemic gun-buyers are more likely to distrust government, believe in conspiracies, protest, and support political violence.

The Woman’s Club of Evanston bustled with attendees for the sixth annual Center for Native American and Indigenous Research Symposium on Thursday. Revolving around the theme of “Indigenous Futures,” the two-day symposium runs from Thursday morning through Friday afternoon. The event began at 8:30 a.m. with breakfast and a welcome by CNAIR director and SESP Prof. Megan Bang. The morning featured a panel on environmental policies moderated by political science Prof. Kimberly Suiseeya and a keynote address by leaders of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation.

Threats to wild manoomin have spurred restoration movements in Indigenous nations, and legal and educational institutions have stepped in to help. The White Earth Nation has sought to enforce the “rights of manoomin” under several historic treaties, and a number of Indigenous bands have partnered with universities for research and data collection. As Karen Diver, the senior adviser to the president of the University of Minnesota for Native American affairs, explained, “researchers are impacted and informed not just by science, but by understanding the cultural values of the tribe.”

"Samara Klar is a professor at the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. She tells us these differences of opinion should not come as a surprise. "To say how do Cubans compare with Mexicans is almost saying, like, how do Canadians compare with Japanese immigrants? I mean, these are two completely different countries, people who come here at different times under different circumstances.""

A team of researchers from UC San Francisco and Harvard University earlier this year surveyed 980 California workers at dozens of the state’s largest retail, food and other service sector companies. The workers reported frequent abuses over pay, work schedules and other issues.

William Reno, professor and chair of the political science department at Northwestern University, said that delivery of the jets was unlikely to come at the "optimal time," drawing a parallel with Ukraine receiving Western tanks after its fall 2022 counteroffensive. "There's a tendency for weapon systems to arrive after the point at which they would have been most effective," said Reno. "There was an optimal time for tanks... They were put to use when they arrived in 2023, but by then began to encounter drone attacks that exploited vulnerabilities in their armor and thus limited their utility."

What's new from LSI? We hope you'll join us in welcoming BAF Research Prof. Traci Burch, also of @PoliSciatNU, as coeditor alongside longtime editor Christopher W. Schmidt

A philosophical engagement with the chronic reality of violence pervading so many jurisdictions around the world; delves into a series of specific controversies, all revolving around affluent democracies' policy responses to the threat of pervasive violence abroad; and explores the difficult circumstances in which we must aside not just the assumption of a stable liberal democracy but even the dream of a clear path towards such democracy.

The article shows that Habermas’s modernism and Lyotard’s postmodernism are not as antithetical as they are often taken to be. First, we argue that Habermas is not a strong foundationalist concerned with identifying universal rules for language, as postmodern critiques have often interpreted him. Instead, he develops a social pragmatics in which the communicative use of language is the fundamental presupposition of any meaningful interaction. Second, we argue that Lyotard is not a relativist who denies any universal linguistic structure. Instead, he claims that language involves a universal element of dissensus that cannot be subordinated to consensus. Third, we show that neither does Habermas defend a new version of the kind of philosophy of history characteristic of the Enlightenment, nor is Lyotard a historical relativist, but instead they both seek alternatives to these positions.

The Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program provides philanthropic support for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that addresses important and enduring issues confronting our society. After a one-year pause in 2022, the 2024 Class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows marks the start of the program’s focus on developing a body of research around political polarization in the United States. The award is for a period of up to two years and its anticipated result is a book or major study. The criteria prioritize the originality and promise of the research, its potential impact on the field, and the scholar’s plans for communicating the findings to a broad audience.

"Evanston Public Library hosted “Why and How We Fight: New Perspectives on the Causes and Costs of America’s Wars,” with Columbia University Prof. Elizabeth Saunders and University of Minnesota Prof. Tanisha Fazal Wednesday evening. About 50 peole attended the event, which was co-sponsored by the department of political science at Northwestern. Political science Profs. Danielle Gilbert and Stephen Nelson contributed to the conversation. Gilbert also led a Q&A session afterward. Saunders’ book, “The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace,” and Fazal’s book, “Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War,” were both released in late March."

Mneesha Gellman is a political scientist and longtime educator of students both inside and outside prisons. In 2017 she founded the Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI) as a college-in-prison program. Now offered at Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk, EPI provides a pathway for incarcerated students to earn a bachelor’s degree from Emerson College. Since its launch, EPI has admitted three cohorts of students, granted degrees to eleven, and matriculated four students to Emerson’s Boston campus after their release.

University of Arizona Political Science Professor, Samara Klar, shares her insights on how she thinks undecided suburban women will vote knowing the details of former President Trump's New York hush money trial, and whether or not a potential conviction would change who voters choose. Samara also talks about the recent Arizona Supreme Court abortion ban that was then overturned by the Arizona State and House, and the current climate in the state about abortion rights. She speaks with Kailey Leinz on Bloomberg's "Balance of Power."

Rick Perry is both a biography of Perry as a politician and a study of the shifts in state politics that took place during his time in office. Demonstrating that Perry ranks among the most consequential governors in Texas history, Brandon Rottinghaus chronicles the profound ways he accumulated power and shaped the governorship.

"Assistant Professor of Government Mara Suttmann-Lea is one of 28 distinguished scholars out of a record high 360 nominees awarded the highly prestigious $200,000 Carnegie Fellowship in 2024, the Carnegie Corporation of New York announced today. Only a few of these fellowships have ever gone to researchers based at liberal arts colleges; of this year’s 28 fellows, 12 are junior scholars, 15 are senior scholars, 11 are employed by state universities, 16 by private universities and one is a journalist. Suttmann-Lea will study how state and local election officials can build trust with constituents through voter education, bolstering the public’s resilience to misinformation-driven polarization and bringing the public closer to a shared understanding of how elections are run in the United States."

How Rick Perry navigated and shaped Texas politics as the state’s longest serving governor. Rick Perry, the charming rancher, pilot, and politician from West Texas who was governor from 2000 to 2015, is one of the most important but polarizing figures in the state's history. Rick Perry is both a biography of Perry as a politician and a study of the shifts in state politics that took place during his time in office. Demonstrating that Perry ranks among the most consequential governors in Texas history, Brandon Rottinghaus chronicles the profound ways he accumulated power and shaped the governorship.

One of the first comprehensive introductions to using qualitative methods across the social sciences: includes contributions from over forty experts who have honed their craft by doing qualitative work; provides insight on all aspects of a qualitative research project, from the very first step (finding a research question) to the very last one (finding a publishing venue); teaches readers to undertake qualitative research in an ethical and reflexive way that is both robust and also grounded in self-care; and includes experts on qualitative methods who have been systematically and historically underrepresented in the social sciences.

Fiona Shen-Bayh's masterful new book gives the existing literature on authoritarian institutions its day in court. Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts is set in post-colonial British Africa, but Shen-Bayh's theory travels near and far (16–17). The book poses the questions: Why do autocrats bother taking their political rivals to court when simply locking them up or assassinating them would be cheaper and easier? Why put on a show of due process when everyone watching already knows the outcome? Shen-Bayh argues convincingly that these show trials are not just for show but for restoring cohesion and assuring compliance among elite regime insiders, whose support the autocrat counts on to stay comfortably in power.

Few thinkers have provoked such violently opposing reactions as Edmund Burke. A giant of eighteenth-century political and intellectual life, Burke has been praised as a prophet who spied the terror latent in revolutionary or democratic ideologies, and condemned as defender of social hierarchy and outmoded political institutions. Ross Carroll tempers these judgments by situating Burke's arguments in relation to the political controversies of his day. Burke's writings must be understood as rhetorically brilliant exercises in political persuasion aimed less at defending abstract truths than at warning his contemporaries about the corrosive forces - ideological, social, and political - that threatened their society. Drawing on Burke's enormous corpus, Carroll presents a nuanced portrait of Burke as, above all, a diagnostician of political misrule, whether domestic, foreign, or imperial.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a Northwestern University Professor of Political Science and Religious Studies, who is an expert in Middle East studies explains the three phases of Hamas' proposed cease-fire, and why the White House has described the negotiations as a "fragile and sensitive" process.

Pivotal legislators’ positions are critical to legislative outcomes, but does this heightened importance in policymaking translate into heightened electoral accountability or voter knowledge? Arguments about clarity of responsibility suggest that pivotal legislators, who are decisive in determining legislative outcomes, may be held to higher standards, while perspectives rooted in electoral incentives for position taking suggest they may not. Two survey experiments show that voters do not respond more strongly to pivotal legislators’ votes on policy. Moreover, observational data analysis rejects the expectation that constituents have more knowledge about the votes of pivotal moderate legislators compared to non-pivotal moderate legislators. These results suggest that pivotal legislators face similar, if not lower, accountability for their votes.

Kenya's anti-government protests are centred on demands for accountability from the government of President William Ruto.

Ana Cunningham knows the key to her success as an educator is investing in and listening to her students. So, promptly after being named Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ 2022-23 Teacher of the Year on Wednesday night, she thanked her students for showing her what it means to be “gritty, resilient and persistent.” “I am here because of our students,” Cunningham said. Cunningham, an English Honors teacher at Phillip O. Berry Academy of Technology, was chosen from nine finalists at the inaugural Gem Awards ceremony held at the Dale F. Halton Theater at Central Piedmont Community College. “There are so many inspiring, incredible leaders in CMS,” Cunningham said.

"Two of the most significant concerns about the contemporary United States are the erosion of democratic institutions and the high rate of depression. We provide evidence connecting these phenomena."

Global politics has shown increasing interest in cities, particularly in the field of climate policy and governance. Yet, we still have little understanding of which cities engage the most in global urban climate governance. Answering this question is a first step towards understanding who decides for whom in a system that has decisive influence on wider global policy processes. In this article, we seek to identify and analyse the characteristics and position of cities in global urban climate governance to reassess its composition. To do so, we conduct a social network analysis of 15 transnational city networks. Results emphasise that global and large cities are the most central, but small and middle-size cities are the most numerous actors of the system. Global South cities are larger than their Northern counterparts in the system.

This article draws on regime newspaper archives and the Arabic-language speeches of and interviews with Syrian president Bashar al-Asad over the last two decades to track how Syrian governmental rhetoric on the question of “terrorism” has changed over time. Engaging with the literature on how ideas, technologies, and contentious repertoires diffuse and spread and how regimes learn from each other, I show how the Asad regime has moved from a discourse that saw “terrorism” as a Western and/or Israeli concept used to delegitimize primarily Palestinian and Lebanese resistance sponsored by Damascus to a discourse that embraces the rhetoric of the “war on terror” in order to legitimize the regime's counterinsurgency policies during the current conflict.

A short interview for Czech language outlet Seznam Zpravy about the violent repression of pro-Palestinian protests on American campuses.

The Pheu Thai Party is seeking to push through its 10,000 baht digital wallet scheme. If it fails, there would be significant ramifications for the party. Yet, even if it succeeds, there is no guarantee that the party will regain its electoral dominance.

Participants returned to Deering Meadow on Wednesday evening to listen to political science Prof. Wendy Pearlman deliver a dialogue on Palestinian national mobilization and resistance. She remarked that the student organization’s efforts were not coincidental, saying “you’re not just a bunch of atomized individuals that all of a sudden come together.” Pearlman commended students’ efforts in organizing the more than 100-hour-long encampment on the Meadow. “I’m proud and incredibly grateful and in awe of what you guys were able to do,” Pearlman said. “I think it’s great that you guys have a bit of space now to make this movement sustainable. If it ever comes to the point of doing an encampment again, you guys will be in that much of a stronger place.”

The College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) at the University of Houston is proud to announce the recipients of the 2024 Distinguished Faculty Awards. This prestigious recognition was awarded to three senior professors who have demonstrated a transformative impact in their respective fields.

Yoes C. Kenawas is a political scientist with 15 years of experience working on democracy, political parties, subnational politics, and international relations in Southeast Asia. His dissertation research is on the subnational variation of dynastic politics in Indonesia. He combines quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis methods in his research. His research on dynastic politics has been featured in national and international media, including The Economist, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, South China Morning Post, Kompas, and Tempo. He is interested in two other issues that seem worlds apart: the use of blockchain technology to improve the quality of democracy and how mystical beliefs influence politicians’ behavior. He believes in the power of comedy to build a mature democracy. He is actively involved in various forums on democracy, both in Indonesia and the Asia-Pacific.

Charlotte's dissertation will study the reception of ancient Greek women in the work of East German writer Christa Wolf. It investigates how Wolf uses ancient Greek tragic figures to illustrate and critically assess women’s lives under heavy government surveillance and curtailed liberties, arguing that in both the Greek context and Wolf’s uptake thereof, presence, absence, and the relationship between human and pattern, are gendered.

How does democratic transition affect party polarization? While previous literature on party politics in post-transition environments describes a fragmented political system marked by multi-partism and the rise of weakly institutionalized parties, party polarization in young democracies is underexplored. We argue that democratic transition reduces party polarization by introducing a new set of parties which have not consolidated their issue positions yet. The ambiguity of party positions makes ideological attributes less salient and renders a less polarized party politics. To assess the impact of the party polarization in young democracies, we employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design (RDD).

Climate change represents a global challenge, but it also exacerbates existing disparities among individuals and communities. LGBT people face discrimination and exclusion, creating unique vulnerabilities that compound and heighten their exposure to climate-related harms. This report provides some of the first empirical documentation as to how LGBT people differentially experience the negative effects of climate change compared to non-LGBT people. Using U.S. Census data and climate risk assessment data from NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), we conducted a geographic analysis to assess the climate risk impacting same-sex couples.

Dr. Samara Klar, Professor at the University of Arizona, joins LiveNOW's Andy Mac to discuss the next steps after the Arizona House of Representatives voted last week to overturn the state's 1864 abortion ban.

For second-year graduate student Molly Schiffer, who has been at the encampment on and off since Thursday, the counterprotesters’ strategy did not seem like an effective way to garner support for hostages being held by Hamas, she said. “If they want to have their voices heard, it might be more effective for them to not try and physically intrude on the space students have created here,” Schiffer said. As a Jewish student, Schiffer said she opposes the war in Gaza in part because of the safety and well-being of hostages. But the encampment demonstrators are protesting the bigger picture actions of the Israeli military and government, Schiffer said. “I’m sympathetic, but what we’re protesting against is an army that’s currently engaged in digging mass graves,” she said.

“Cancel culture” has a bad reputation. There is growing anxiety over this practice of publicly shaming people online for violating social norms ranging from inappropriate jokes to controversial business practices.

“Cancel culture” has a bad reputation. There is growing anxiety over this practice of publicly shaming people online for violating social norms ranging from inappropriate jokes to controversial business practices. A group of smartphones with thumbs down icon on them Online shaming can be a wildly disproportionate response that violates the privacy of the shamed while offering them no good way to defend themselves. These consequences lead some critics to claim that online shaming creates a “hate storm” that destroys lives and reputations, leaves targets with “permanent digital baggage,” and threatens the fundamental right to publicly express yourself in a democracy. As a result, some scholars have declared that online shaming is a “moral wrong and social ill.”

Northwestern student Aniekan Odong said they plan on staying, "Until our demands get met, as simple as that." It's been just over 24 hours since students, staff and community members started occupying the space, calling on the university to stop supporting Israel. Odong is a Northwestern junior, studying political science. "It's important because people are dying and Northwestern is complicit with their investment and we need them to stop it," Odong said. "The people are on the right side of history. It means that there is humanity, there's empathy and there's people who want to see suffering end." Protesters could be seen yelling into a megaphone and holding signs. The encampment includes dozens of tents, generators for power, a medical area, and plenty of food and water. All violates rules Northwestern amended.

Amanda Sahar d’Urso is a government assistant professor at Georgetown University specializing in race and ethnicity politics. She says misrepresentation matters to racial groups such as Middle Easterners and North Africans, who were previously encouraged to identify as white on federal forms. Latinos and Hispanics will also be impacted by combining the separate ethnicity question on the census and making it an option alongside the other racial categories. The previous separation of race and ethnicity confused and failed to collect data on the distinctions of the varying races that Latinos and Hispanics may identify as. “Categorized as white, makes it really difficult in that group to make claims what they need, what we need for the American government,” d’Urso says.

This week on Sinica, Iza Ding, associate professor of political science at Northwestern University and author of The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China, joins to share her ideas on how American academia has framed and problematized authoritarianism, especially when it comes to China. A deep and subtle thinker, she offers thought-provoking critiques of some of the assumptions that have become nearly axiomatic in political science and other social sciences in their approach to understanding politics in China.

The greatest thrower in school history, Newton was the 2018 NCAC Field Athlete of the Year. A four-time outdoor conference championship in the shot put, Newton also claimed NCAC titles in the discus in 2015 and 2018, and in the hammer throw in 2018. The school record holder in the shot put (48-08.75 /14.85m), discus (164-06 / 50.14m), and hammer (182-06.00 /55.62m), Newton capped off her career with a national championship in the discus after previously winning the national championship in the shot put indoors in 2017. Richardson joined Newton to make one of the most prolific throwing duos in NCAA Division III history. A native of Eugene, Oregon, Richardson was the 2017 NCAC Field Athlete of the Year after winning the discus and the hammer that year. Richardson also won the league title in the hammer in 2016 and was a two-time All-American indoors in the weight throw.

"The real issue is not whether the deputy minister is corrupt. It is instead whether he, and—more to the point—Shoigu, have become centers of power in their own right," William Reno, professor and chair of the political science department at Northwestern University, told Newsweek. "Corruption in the current regime is a strategic asset that's tolerated and even encouraged to cultivate a person's loyalty and dependence on the political leadership and then used against them when they become a threat or need to be used as a convenient target of blame for the regime's shortcomings," Reno said. "Charging him with corruption at this juncture helps to undermine public trust and support for his boss, Shoigu.

There is high demand for the Introduction to American Politics and Government course. The section taught by Hankinson, with 178 students, is the largest of three offered this semester. (The third is taught by Assistant Professor Andrew Ifedapo Thompson.) Hankinson praises his three teaching assistants who lead discussion sections. “They’re doing yeoman's work,” he said.

Taboo has been broken in Europe. Only a few months ago, it would have been inconceivable for European leaders to propose sending European troops to Ukraine. But on February 26, French President Emmanuel Macron said the deployment of European forces to Ukraine could not be “ruled out.” Since then, other European officials have joined the chorus; the Finnish defense minister and Polish foreign minister have both suggested that their countries’ forces could end up in Ukraine.

Caste is a concept used to explain persistent forms of social hierarchy and group domination. While it is often associated with India, feudal Europe, and Latin America, scholars in recent years have asked whether it also makes sense to conceptualize the United States as a caste system. This recent discourse overlooks a centuries-long tradition of American civil rights activism—from Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. Du Bois—that understands the United States as a caste system and seeks racial justice through constitutional reform. Returning to this tradition, this talk explores both what the concept of caste misses and what it captures about racial inequality in the United States today.

“I think in general, most Americans, even a lot of Republicans, would at this point see the gun control side as being the more reasonable side,” said Matthew Lacombe, a gun politics professor at Case Western Reserve University. He believes that the NRA can avoid the political issue entirely by getting back to its roots: building robust firearms programs around the country to teach gun safety and host shooting sports.

In his public talk Ian Hurd reframes the debate on world order for IR around a concept of order that acknowledges its political content. It considers various definitions of order in International Relations and shows how these deploy distinct relations with historical facts, scientific models, and policy goals. A political understanding of the idea of world order leads IR scholarship away from causal models and objectivist ontology, and as a result makes it easier to understand the long history of contestation around how world order should be made and who gets to make it.

Menaka Philips, The Liberalism Trap: John Stuart Mill and Customs of Interpretation, Oxford University Press, 2023 The Liberalism Trap is a compelling work of intellectual political history that challenges the dominant interpretation of John Stuart Mill as a paradigmatic liberal thinker. Philips convincingly counters the hegemonic image of Mill as driven by ideological certainties. Instead, she paints a picture of Mill as a cautionary radical—a thinker of uncertainty— through her engagement with the often-overlooked Autobiography and through a fine comparative reading of Mill’s writings. With its evocative prose and rigorous analysis, The Liberalism Trap is a groundbreaking examination of liberalism, and of the man most associated with it.

Eden Melles is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She is deeply engaged in exploring the dynamics of race, ethnicity, and identity, with a specific focus on Black immigrants and diaspora, social movements, and political behavior. Eden has been honored as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Program Fellow and an American Political Science Association Diversity Fellow. Her research aims to illuminate the complexities of cultural and political integration processes, shedding light on the nuanced ways in which Black diasporic communities influence and are influenced by political landscapes.

El Departamento Nacional de Planeación (DNP) contrató y publicó recientemente, la evaluación institucional, de resultados y de impacto del Programa Nacional Integral de Sustitución de cultivos ilícitos (Pnis) para el periodo 2017-2022 (DNP-986-2022), que fue desarrollada por la unión temporal Ipsos-Uniandes 2023. Esta columna resume los hallazgos de la evaluación del DNP y de sus recomendaciones. Estos resultados son de la mayor importancia para la implementación de la política de drogas de este y los próximos gobiernos, en lo que concierne a los esfuerzos de transformación territorial en las regiones cocaleras.

Because of increasing political polarization in many democracies, politicians who try to make amends for past harms will often find that their reputation in the eyes of the other side is irredeemable. In such cases, publicly playing up rather than toning down those attributes that have made one an “archvillain” will often be a more effective way of making amends—whether by mobilizing an opposing camp with which one now secretly sympathizes, by increasing the chances of moderate candidates to win crucial elections, or by increasing the chance that the dangerous camp to which one pretends to belong will self-destruct. I explore several possible explanations for why repentant political wrongdoers might have a moral duty to “play the villain” to such ends.

Earlier this year voters in El Salvador went to the polls and handed a resounding mandate to presidential incumbent Nayib Bukele, who secured a second five-year term – largely propelled by support for his crackdown on the country’s powerful criminal gangs. His decision to seek a second consecutive term, which many legal scholars criticized as unconstitutional, has raised fears of a growing authoritarian creep in El Salvador. This has been compounded by growing allegations of human rights abuses leveled against Bukele’s anti-gang campaign.

To keep Tampa Bay clean, we could use tax breaks to reward pro-environment business behavior.

Because of increasing political polarization in many democracies, politicians who try to make amends for past harms will often find that their reputation in the eyes of the other side is irredeemable. In such cases, publicly playing up rather than toning down those attributes that have made one an “archvillain” will often be a more effective way of making amends—whether by mobilizing an opposing camp with which one now secretly sympathizes, by increasing the chances of moderate candidates to win crucial elections, or by increasing the chance that the dangerous camp to which one pretends to belong will self-destruct. I explore several possible explanations for why repentant political wrongdoers might have a moral duty to “play the villain” to such ends.

“The 70,000 plus people who have been incarcerated just in the last two years under the state of exception is in addition to the 30,000 people previously incarcerated in El Salvador — making it over a hundred thousand people in the state currently incarcerated, which is close to 2% of the population. El Salvador has become the highest incarcerating percentage wise country in the world, overtaking the U.S…. [A]nyone can be denounced without corroborating evidence, without proof means that there are tens of thousands of people who are not guilty of any format, form of gang affiliation in Salvador and prisons right now.”

Are you interested in teaching English abroad on a Fulbright? Meet Nuo (Anor) Chen, current Fulbrighter in Taiwan. Also meet Amy Kehoe, NU's campus contact for Fulbright teaching awards. Get your questions answered!

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell discussed technological competition with China, China’s role in the Russia-Ukraine War, concerns over Taiwan and future U.S.-China diplomacy at a virtual town hall Tuesday. Political science Prof. Iza Ding, a local organizer of the town hall, said she had noticed growing interest in discussing China-adjacent topics at NU and considers the event on Tuesday a success. Ding taught “Political Science 355: Politics of China” in Fall 2023, where she observed many students interested in the topic. She added that many NU faculty members and students are also working on “China-related projects.” “The larger goal is really to build a community … regardless of people’s political positions, we want to make the public more informed and be able to make up their own minds about their opinions on China,” Ding said.

"Following the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling Tuesday, April 9, some Republicans are coming out against the 1864 abortion ban. University of Arizona political science professor Samara Klar found in her recent study that nearly half of Arizona voters believe abortion should be between a woman and her doctor. And she said Republicans are trying to figure out how to move forward. “Democrats came ready to ban the ban, I guess you could say,” Klar said. “And Republicans are not quite ready to take action, and I think that’s because they need to figure out what their cohesive position is.” Following the court’s decision, Rep. Juan Ciscomani released a statement on X, calling it a disaster. Senatorial candidate Kari Lake did the same, echoing former President Donald Trump’s statement about state’s rights."

"Bloomberg Washington Correspondents Joe Mathieu and Kailey Leinz deliver insight and analysis on the latest headlines from the White House and Capitol Hill, including conversations with influential lawmakers and key figures in politics and policy. On this edition, Joe and Kailey speak with: Samara Klar, Professor of Political Science at University of Arizona, co-author of the book "Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction" on the Arizona Supreme Court's decision to reinstate a near total ban on abortion

Racial violence is central to the American polity. We argue that support for violence, specifically anti-Black violence, has a long historical arc in American politics dating back to chattel slavery. In this paper, we argue that the racial violence associated with the “great replacement” conspiracy is much more pervasive among the white American public because of the historical legacy of anti-Black violent sentiment. To investigate the prevalence of this idea, we conducted a preregistered simple priming experiment aimed to tap into top-of-mind ideas about racial demographic change. Our experimental design spans multiple data sources, including two probability samples, over the course of a year.

Join us for a conversation about recovering lost ground in the international effort to address North Korea’s human rights violations, featuring: Ambassador Julie Turner, U.S. Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, James Heenan, UN Human Rights Office representative in Seoul, Dr. Katrin Katz, Korea Society Van Fleet Senior Fellow, and Sean Chung, CEO of HanVoice, in conversation with policy director Jonathan Corrado. The United Nations Human Rights Council published its landmark report of the commission of inquiry on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea ten years ago. That report documented “systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights” in North Korea. But the international effort to ensure accountability, involving U.S. coordination with allies such as the Republic of Korea and through the United Nations, is only just beginning.

Support for anti-Black violence has a long historical arc in American politics dating back to slavery. A George Washington University research team led by Assistant Professor of Political Science Andrew Thompson conducted an experiment to try to tap into top-of-mind ideas about the changing demographics in the United States.

Faculty were nominated for one of three awards to recognize outstanding teaching in the School of Social Sciences. Additionally, the awards recognize a commitment to inclusive excellence and dedication to higher education through the use of innovative methods and mentorship. The selection was done by the school’s Executive Committee. The recipients each receive a $2,000 research stipend.

In March, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced a major change in how the federal government collects data about race and ethnicity. These updates will affect how federal agencies count people of Hispanic/Latino and Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) descent. The addition of a “MENA” category is a welcome change that will allow millions of MENA Americans to have formal representation in the American system. And this update means the federal government will now categorize their racial and ethnic identity in meaningful ways. But these recent changes introduce some caveats that are important to acknowledge – particularly related to the erasure of Black ethnic identity.

Andrew Thompson (Ph.D. '21) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania starting in July.

"The University of Idaho hosted Dr. Safa Al-Saeedi, an assistant professor of political science at Marist College, as part of the university’s annual Idaho Society of Fellows Speaker Series. Her lecture was titled “Monarchy, Media, and the Politics of Reform in Saudi Arabia” and was hosted in the IRIC atrium. Al-Saeedi shared her research with a keen audience of students, staff, and members of the public. She spoke about how Saudi Arabia has recently introduced social and economic reforms and cited three common explanations: international pressure, leadership change, and political economy."

In February, French President Emmanuel Macron created a stir among his European Union and NATO allies when he declared that the West should consider deploying troops to Ukraine. Though his remarks were immediately repudiated by several of his European counterparts, they reflect fears in Europe and the U.S. that Ukraine is losing the war against Russian aggression. Macron’s timing was no coincidence. It came just weeks after a lack of ammunition and artillery forced Ukrainian forces to retreat from the city of Avdiivka, despite four months of heavy fighting that cost Russian forces over 47,000 soldiers and 360 tanks. The growing concern about the Ukrainian military’s ability to resist the Russian onslaught in 2024 has been compounded by the political impasse in Washington over funding the next tranche of military aid for Kyiv.

"In February, French President Emmanuel Macron created a stir among his European Union and NATO allies when he declared that the West should consider deploying troops to Ukraine. Though his remarks were immediately repudiated by several of his European counterparts, they reflect fears in Europe and the U.S. that Ukraine is losing the war against Russian aggression. Macron’s timing was no coincidence. It came just weeks after a lack of ammunition and artillery forced Ukrainian forces to retreat from the city of Avdiivka, despite four months of heavy fighting that cost Russian forces over 47,000 soldiers and 360 tanks. The growing concern about the Ukrainian military’s ability to resist the Russian onslaught in 2024 has been compounded by the political impasse in Washington over funding the next tranche of military aid for Kyiv."

While backlash in politics isn’t new, political scientist and author Eric Patashnik said the way it has come to characterize the American political landscape is. Patashnik discussed backlash and the role it plays in policy, as well as his new book, “Countermobilization: Policy Feedback and Backlash in a Polarized Age,” at an American Politics Workshop on Tuesday. About 15 people attended the lecture in Scott Hall. “I think the study of backlash offers new insights into how new policies create a new politics,” Patashnik said. “We’re living in an era of extremely tight partisan competition. Voter backlash against specific policy moves can even affect partisan control.”

"Mert Arslanalp, assistant professor of political science at Istanbul's Bogazici University, said it was Erdogan's "severest election defeat" since coming to national power in 2002. "Imamoglu demonstrated he could reach across the deep socio-political divisions that define Turkey's opposition electorate even without their institutional support," he said. "This makes him the most politically competitive rival to Erdogan's regime.""

Using U.S. Census data and climate risk assessment data from NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), this study provides a geographic analysis to assess the climate risk impacting same-sex couples.

The Empirical Study of Gender Research Network is thrilled to announce the results of the 2023 prize competition. The EGEN prize committee selected 3 Prize Recipients and 6 Honorable Mentions. All of these projects confront crucial topics of gender and politics that stand to make important contributions to the field moving forward.

Davenport Junior Theatre is completing its 71st season with “Squirrel Girl Goes to College,” opening this weekend.

Civic associations underpin American democracy. How can politically cross-cutting associations engage members who hold divergent viewpoints amidst increasing partisan polarization and nationalization of politics? Hertel-Fernandez examines this question in the context of labor unions, studying how unions engage members who hold conservative views at odds with some of the union’s political actions. Using original surveys of local union presidents, members, and non-members along with in-depth interviews in selected local unions, Hertel-Fernandez shows how local union leaders can foster norms of participation among politically cross-pressured members.

In this timely episode, we sit down with Dr. Dara Gaines to dive deep into the complexities of the upcoming U.S. election and its impact on Black voters. As a political scientist and passionate advocate, Dr. Gaines breaks down the most pressing issues at stake—from civil rights and racial justice to the policies flying under the radar that everyone should know about. With a historic Black woman on the presidential ticket, we explore what this means for Black women in politics and the broader narrative around representation.

In this timely episode, we sit down with Dr. Dara Gaines to dive deep into the complexities of the upcoming U.S. election and its impact on Black voters. As a political scientist and passionate advocate, Dr. Gaines breaks down the most pressing issues at stake—from civil rights and racial justice to the policies flying under the radar that everyone should know about. With a historic Black woman on the presidential ticket, we explore what this means for Black women in politics and the broader narrative around representation.

Zackin and Thurston begin their history in the late 18th century. Today, a quick Google search will confidently inform you that “personal bankruptcy is a fundamental Constitutional right.” But as the authors show, things were not always so clear-cut. The provision of “government protection from insurmountable debt” is a “very old feature of US history,” but not a foundational or immutable one. The current consensus that the Constitution empowers Congress to insert itself between creditors and their debtors in order to protect the latter was anything but self-evident at the nation’s founding. Following the British example, and reflecting the founding fathers’ class biases (including a hostility to what James Madison called the “wicked project” of debt abolition), US bankruptcy laws were initially extremely punitive, seeking to help the creditor recover debts from borrowers.

Monique Newton is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She studies how police killings and traumatic events affect local Black political participation and the use of collective memory within the Black Lives Matter Movement. Monique is a 2024 recipient of the prestigious Presidential Fellowship and former Northwestern Prison Education Program instructor. Outside of academics, she is a lifelong athlete and avid sports fan.

The 2024 U.S. elections are bringing to the fore many issues on which political scientists have a lot to say. The essential knowledge, concepts, theories, and methods of our discipline could not be more relevant, and Perspectives on Politics is eager to fulfill its “public sphere” role by showcasing cutting-edge research to help make sense of the current moment. In this context, the two special sections in this issue bring together a diversity of works that shed light on crucial issues affecting the course of American politics at this juncture: partisanship, political division, and political communication.

Black women are “superlative participators in American democracy,” according to Northwestern professor Sally Nuamah, yet they remain underrepresented in national politics. “Post-Reconstruction, we've had two elected Black women senators,” Nuamah said. “And at the gubernatorial level, we've had no Black women governors. And then we obviously have had no Black women presidents. If you consider the fact that Black women vote more than most Americans – at least for the past 20 years – and if you consider the fact that in addition they're really critical to registering people to vote, organizing protests and rallies, fundraising and a whole number of other kinds of forms of engagement, this is sort of inconsistent with what you would expect from a representation standpoint.” In this episode of the Rundown podcast, Nuamah and host Erin Allen talked about why.

BERLIN — A Russian startup drone manufacturer has cashed in on the exploding demand for unmanned aerial vehicles spurred by the war in Ukraine, selling over 1,000 drones while working to avoid Western sanctions, according to documents reviewed by Defense News. Integrated Robotics Technologies, located in southeastern Russia’s Bashkortostan Republic, is an example of how Russian companies have switched to a wartime economy orchestrated by Moscow to prosecute the invasion of Ukraine.

"Balance of Power" focuses on the intersection of politics and global business. On the show today, Samara Klar, University of Arizona Political Science Professor, discusses the large amount of undecided voters, what could possibly sway them to either side, and how abortion rights might impact Arizona voters ahead of Election Day. Douglas Rediker, International Capital Strategies Manager Partner, discusses world leaders meeting this week in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly and if the most recent airstrikes from Israel targeting Hezbollah will be a major topic of conversation.

Samara Klar, University of Arizona Political Science Professor, discusses the latest New York Times/Siena College Poll that shows Trump leading Harris in Arizona, while the Democrats lead for the seat in the Senate. She also talks about the large amount of undecided voters, what could possibly sway them to either side, and how abortion rights might impact Arizona voters ahead of Election Day. Samara speaks with Kailey Leinz and Joe Mathieu on Bloomberg's "Balance of Power."

"The first thing I'll say just to level set the conversation is that Black Americans are the most reliable voters in the Republic. They far overperform their financial status and their educational status. When we think about what gets people voting, typically having higher education, advanced degrees, and higher income people vote more. Black people far outperform that. They vote at levels that are close to those of people with graduate degrees and high incomes, even though they are typically clustered in the middle to lower income ranks and have less access to Bachelor's degrees than other people."

When speaking about the upcoming 2024 presidential election, Professor Tillery makes poignant points on how to mobilize voters: "...So these young people need to feel like the person they're voting for is actually fighting for them, right?". He goes on to say "we win when we hyper mobilize the 45% of white folks who are progressive...and 85-90% of people of color".

Fulcrum editor Julia Lau discusses the latest dramatic political events and the new government in Thailand with Acting Coordinator of ISEAS' Thailand Studies Programme, Dr Napon Jatusripitak.

William Reno, professor and chair of the political science department at Northwestern University, said that Harris and her running mate Tim Walz "don't even register in terms of inflammatory rhetoric" based on his "research in political violence over the past 30 years." "Trump's rhetoric is a different matter," Reno said. "He points to 'out groups' to create a narrative of threat. He presents himself as the defender against such threats." "If one takes a survey of violent political acts over the past eight years (i.e., Charlottesville, January Sixth) Trump has made statements suggesting that people who carried out those acts were justified in their behavior," he added. "One doesn't see such rhetoric among other politicians at that level."

History suggests the overwhelming majority of Black residents will vote for Harris in November, but whether Democrats hit the numbers they need to win Wisconsin remains an open question. “I’ve been telling people that if we don’t get to numbers where Barack Obama was in 2008 and 2012, it is plausible that Kamala Harris could lose,” said Alvin Tillery, a Democratic political operative and director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University. “That’s absolutely a risk.”

Best Paper Prize: Isabel Güiza-Gómez & Laura García-Montoya for “Land Dispossession on Trial: Claim-Making and Judicial Behavior in the Colombian Land Restitution Program.”

Abstract: This article analyzes the development legacies of Italian colonialism in Africa. The comparative-historical analysis shows that colonial Italy pursued “settler colonialism” in areas conducive to colonial settlement and large-scale exploitation, and “plantation colonialism” in areas with fewer resource endowments and settlement opportunities. In the immediate aftermath, while settler colonialism had a positive influence and plantation colonialism exerted a negative impact on economic prosperity, both types of Italian colonialism had strong negative effects on human development.

Gardner found the choice to pursue teaching political science after bumping “around Europe for a few months” after receiving his bachelor’s degree. This period helped lead him to continue his education in graduate school at Northwestern University for political science as he felt it “seemed to be the most natural thing to do.” He started as a teaching assistant there and has been teaching “off and on since then.

Today I woke up in a dome for the first time. We spent the night at Alto Patache, a PUC research station dedicated to water reclamation research on fog banks. Our guide and station director Milton spends his time at the research station doing his best impression of Matt Damon in the movie Martian, with the benefit of plentiful water and oxygen. On a good day, Alto Patache collects 400 liters of water from the rolling fog using mesh. All of the station’s water needs are met by its fog collectors, including its greenhouse, where Milton grows lettuce and strawberries. Outside, he is developing an irrigation system.

En esta charla del viernes 13 de septiembre de 2024, María Alejandra Vélez y Lucas Marín-Llanes analizan los impactos sociales y económicos del gran aumento de la producción de coca entre 2014 y 2019, destacando su concentración en regiones ambientalmente sensibles como Putumayo, Nariño y Catatumbo. Su charla se basa en una investigación (en desarrollo), que busca examinar el impacto social y económico para el productor de coca y las dinámicas e impactos económicos regionales generados. Es una mirada sobre la producción de coca sin el estigma del narcotráfico.

This book argues that fundamental assumptions in contemporary political philosophy need to be rethought in the face of pervasive political violence. At an applied level, the book develops this broad claim by delving into a series of specific controversies, all revolving around affluent democracies’ policy responses to the threat of pervasive violence abroad. Examples include the ethics of giving refuge to beleaguered autocrats to avert civil war in their country; the ethics of prosecuting foreign officials who have colluded with drug cartels; and the admission of oligarchs who acquired their riches by distorting their country’s rule of law. At a more theoretical level, the book aims to show that the moral principles needed to adjudicate these particular controversies can illuminate broader issues in normative political theory.

Constitutional mechanisms originally designed to prevent power from slipping into the wrong hands have ironically fuelled the growth of Thailand’s political dynasties. A new Cabinet under Paetongtarn Shinawatra has been sworn in but behind the notable shifts in portfolios, such as the inclusion of ministers from the Democrat Party and the exclusion of figures linked to Prawit Wongsuwan’s faction in the Palang Pracharath Party (PPRP), a striking pattern of dynastic succession has emerged. This has earned the new Cabinet the nickname “sueb sandan” (hereditary cabinet), a term borrowed from the Netflix Thai drama “Master of the House”.

“En la región, las crisis políticas han emergido debido a una amplia gama de factores: las tensiones sociales, los escándalos de corrupción, las crisis económicas, la falta de liderazgo, los conflictos entre los poderes del Estado, la parálisis institucional y constitucional, así como la polarización y la violencia. Mientras algunas de estas crisis han sido de corta duración, otras han desencadenado una inestabilidad considerable, llevando a quiebras en el orden democrático y constitucional.”, señala Suárez-Cao.

Helfand serves on the board of directors for the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, on the executive committee of the Kellogg Real Estate Center at Northwestern, and on the Board of Visitors of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. He also serves on the NAREIT Advisory Board of Governors, as vice chair of the executive committee of the Samuel Zell and Robert Lurie Real Estate Center at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. Helfand received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Northwestern and an MBA from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Tonight, Vice President Kamala Harris faces former President Donald Trump in the second debate of thed 2024 presidential election campaign and the first after President Joe Biden’s exit from the race. A panel of politcal sicientists discuss what has changed since the last debate, what difference will the rules of the debate have on the end product and what might voters take away from all of this.

While her father was a visiting professor of economics in 1967-68, U.S. Vice President and Democratic candidate for president Kamala Harris and her family resided in a modest red brick house at 620 Library Pl., which was then used by Northwestern University as faculty housing. Today the home functions as headquarters for NU’s Program of African Studies, and staffers are surprised and intrigued by its provenance. “We’re all really thrilled to find out. Who would have guessed?” said Will Reno, a former director of the program. “I very much hope she comes to visit. We’ll give her a tour.” Reno teaches African politics among other subjects and maintains an office in the building. “I’m in the presidential bedroom on the third floor,” he quipped.

The Spotlight Scholars programs bring together early career scholars who use or analyze interpretive methods in their work. Spotlight Scholars work with a more senior mentor during the academic year and present their work in the spring of their tenure. In 2024-2025, we are delighted to welcome three Spotlight Scholars: Ronay Bakan, Lauren Baker, and Be Stone.

Professor Bonilla draws together theories of partisan polarization and motivated reasoning, which suggest that partisanship shapes information processing, and theories of accountability, which argue voters hold elected officials accountable through promise fulfillment. Here, she asks how partisanship influences voter understanding of promise fulfillment and accountability and if voters assess promises through a partisan lens. Two original survey experiments test how respondents react to promise fulfillment on the issues of immigration and human trafficking. She demonstrates that co-partisans differentiate between kept and broken promises, but out-partisans do not.

"El día que murió Abimael Guzmán, el líder de la organización terrorista Sendero Luminoso, recibí la llamada de un buen amigo con el que no conversaba desde hace meses. Nos pusimos al día y luego me dio la noticia con el deber de quien cumple en informar los últimos acontecimientos al compatriota que, aunque lejos (en mi caso, por estudios doctorales), sigue vinculado al país. Si bien han pasado casi tres años, recuerdo perfectamente su última frase: “derrotamos a Sendero, lo derrotamos totalmente”. Asentí de inmediato. Nos despedimos. Colgamos. Pero la frase siguió rondando en mi cabeza. Desde entonces, hay mucho en nuestra conclusión de una derrota total que me incomoda. No tengo la menor duda de que Perú se libró de un futuro atroz con la captura de Guzmán y que su muerte en prisión fue una victoria para el Estado de derecho que su organización terrorista se esforzó por destruir.

Jun Park is majoring in political science and international studies with a minor in environmental policy and culture. He plans to use the scholarship to support his research on different cities’ transportation policies, and how they can create injustices or be a force for rectifying them by giving members of disadvantaged communities mobility.

UCL Laws is delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Erin F. Delaney as the Leverhulme Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law, thanks to the prestigious Leverhulme International Professorship grant awarded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Shmuel Nili is an Associate Professor of political science at Northwestern University. His research in political philosophy ranges across meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. The applied aspects of his work focus on links between domestic and global injustice, with special attention to moral issues surrounding corporate agency, public property and corruption, and abuse of power. These themes are central to Nili’s first three books: The People’s Duty (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Integrity, Personal and Political (Oxford University Press, 2020), and Philosophizing the Indefensible (Oxford University Press, 2023). The same themes dominate an ongoing, fourth book project focused on rethinking fundamental assumptions in political philosophy in the face of pervasive political violence.

Although often overlooked by mainstream accounts of political theology and ecocriticism in the Global North, powerful visions of an ecopolis have been emerging in Latin America. In this article, Torres and Rossellow review the status of mainstream approaches to notions such as subject, citizen, and personal dignity and put them in a critical dialogue with Latin American Ecofeminist Political Theologies (LAEPT). They argue that those notions, often conceived from a Western and anthropocentric perspective, show their limits when interrogated from the perspective of LAEPT. Accordingly, they suggest that their main contribution lies not only in their critique of the Western paradigm but also in advancing alternative conceptions of an ecologically conscious political community that considers the Earth as sacred, and nature as a reflection of the divine.

Kasimis is a political theorist working across ancient Greek political thought, contemporary (critical) democratic theory, and feminist theory. Born and raised in New York City, she received her B.A. from Columbia College, Columbia University, where she studied philosophy and Hellenic Studies and edited The Columbia Daily Spectator. She returned to New York to do her M.A. in philosophy at Columbia, but her interest in reading texts in their political contexts led her to political theory. She completed her Ph.D. in Northwestern University’s political science department in 2010 and since then has been a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University; assistant professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach; assistant professor at the University of Chicago and, most recently, associate professor at the University of Chicago.

Family members of Travis King, the U.S. Army private who crossed into North Korea, is now begging American officials to fight for his safe return. Ian Hurd, director of the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern, discusses what North Korea may have in mind for King.

Ph.D. Sidra Hamidi joins Eckerd College as an Assistant Professor of Political Science, where she will continue her research is security studies, international law, and global governance. Hamidi was previously a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stetson University.

Dr. Ayodeji Perrin researches and teaches about international law, comparative constitutional law, human rights, and social movement legal mobilization. Dr. Perrin was previously a judicial law clerk in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, a staff attorney with the City of Philadelphia Board of Ethics, and a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct faculty member at Temple University in the Department of Political Science.

Ph.D. Safa Al-Saeedi joins MIT as a Postdoctoral Fellow, where she will continue her research on political communication, research methods, and Middle East politics. Previously Al-Saeedi was a pre-doctoral research fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs for the 2021-2022 academic year.

Ph.D. Napon Jatusripitak joins ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute as a Visiting Fellow, where he will continue his research on democratization, elite politics, patronage politics, political clientelism, machine learning, text-as-data.

Social Inquiry and Bayesian Inference takes as its premise the idea that Bayesian inference has the power to redefine methodology in political science. Putting itself in the company of works like Rethinking Social Inquiry (Brady and Collier 2010), Fairfield and Charman (2022) position the book as an intervention into the reified divide between qualitative and quantitative research, seeking to elevate Bayesian inference as the unifying framework through which to reposition qualitative research on par with quantitative approaches. The specter of “subjectivity,” however, haunts the project throughout, both limiting its capacity to achieve its goals of defining a unifying framework for social scientific analysis, and leaving fundamental questions about research best practices in a Bayesian approach largely unaddressed.

President Nayib Bukele’s slide toward authoritarianism has culminated in an unconstitutional reelection bid. His consolidation of power has cracked down on independent press.

The visibility of populations, policies, and the state matters greatly for questions of power, inequality, and democratic life. This article builds on existing scholarship by examining how visibility operates as a lever and effect of social control in a racially and economically stratified society. By doing so, the article identifies a paradox. Race- and class-empowered groups often pressure state actors to implement punitive policies or otherwise visibly contain and control disadvantaged populations. But they also tend to decry and disavow the necessary public costs of these disciplinary interventions. This creates a conundrum for authorities: how to satisfy popular demands for social control while concealing resource commitments.

Mainstream European left-wing parties have seen their traditional class base evolve in postindustrial economies. In response, these parties have adjusted their platforms to adopt policies that aim to secure positions for workers in a more volatile labor market through education and training. But how does the electoral appeal of this “social investment” paradigm compare to that of the older welfare paradigm that passively distributes benefits to the poor and inactive? Using cross-country data from two surveys, I find that the policy preferences of industrial workers respond differently to labor market precarity than do those of service sector workers, particularly sociocultural professionals. Further, industrial workers who prefer traditional welfare policies are less likely to vote for the center-left than professionals, even if those professionals hold similar policy priorities.

There is little doubt who will win the El Salvador presidential election when voters go to the polls on Feb. 4, 2024. Incumbent Nayib Bukele has the initiative heading into the vote, having made a series of eye-catching decisions since coming to power in 2019, such as making bitcoin legal tender, issuing policy through social media, and most significantly, declaring a nationwide “state of emergency” in response to gang violence

We’re delighted to announce that Patrick Svitek, who has delivered dominant coverage of politics in Texas at a consequential time in that state, is joining The Washington Post as a national politics breaking news reporter. Patrick will join a team that plays a vital role covering the 2024 presidential campaign, the White House, Congress and national politics.

Most governments around the world – whether democracies or autocracies – face at least some pressure to respond to citizen concerns on some social problems. But the issues that capture public attention — the ones on which states have incentives to be responsive – aren’t always the issues on which bureaucracies, agents of the state, have the ability to solve problems. What do these public agencies do when citizens’ demands don’t line up with either the supply of state capacity or the incentives of the central state?

Even though Cody Keenan (WCAS ’02) has enjoyed a career that’s taken him from couch-surfing in Washington, DC, while looking for a job, to working as a low-level staffer worker in legendary US senator Edward Kennedy’s office, to President Barack Obama’s chief speechwriter, there are lessons from his journey that are universally applicable. One of those lessons: there is no such thing as a set career path. “If I had sat down when I was in college and said, ‘OK, here is the trajectory I’m going to take and the decisions I’m going to make to be the chief speechwriter in the White House for the first Black president 10 years from now,’ that wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t happen,” Keenan said. “It only happens because you say yes to crazy things.”

Professor Samara Klar speaks with News 4 Tucson after political turmoil in Phoenix.

In an interview with the Slovak daily SME, Northwestern Political Science PhD shares his thoughts on the current state of the US primary race. He discusses the seeming inevitability of a Biden-Trump rematch and the consequences that Trump's election in 2024 would have for the security architecture of Europe.

Political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong will step into the role of associate director at Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research (IPR) on Sept. 1. Harbridge-Yong is known for her studies of bipartisanship, polarization, and how elections, institutions, and policy are connected in the United States. She joined Northwestern after receiving her PhD in political science from Stanford in 2009 and became a full professor this September.

Cody Keenan is a communications expert that formerly served as the White House director of speechwriting and is the New York Times bestselling author of Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America. Join us as Cody shares stories from his time at the White House and beyond, and learn how he tries to manage the chaos of life — from the highest levels of power to the everyday.

The League of Women Voters speaks with Laurel Harbridge-Yong (Professor, Department of Political Science; Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research), Shenna Bellows (Maine Secretary of State), and Jill Goldthwait (journalist and former state senator) to talk talks about the roll-out of semi-open primaries. Maine will be running semi-open primaries for the first time in 2024. We’ll explain to voters what to expect and what important deadlines and new procedures may pertain. And we’ll talk about how semi-open primaries might affect voter behavior and election outcomes.

The League of Women Voters speaks with Laurel Harbridge-Yong (Professor, Department of Political Science; Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research), Shenna Bellows (Maine Secretary of State), and Jill Goldthwait (journalist and former state senator) to talk talks about the roll-out of semi-open primaries. Maine will be running semi-open primaries for the first time in 2024. We’ll explain to voters what to expect and what important deadlines and new procedures may pertain. And we’ll talk about how semi-open primaries might affect voter behavior and election outcomes.

Thessalia Merivaki is an Associate Professor of American politics at Mississippi State University. Her research expertise is on Election Science, particularly voter registration reform and voter education policy. With Mara Suttmann-Lea, they run team #voteredu. In this episode, Lia tells me about her experiences growing up in Greece, the voting experience she had there, and her transition to the United States for graduate school. Lia tells us how the complexity and nuances of election administration in the United States motivated her to pursue a Ph.D. We reminisce over the Internet bringing us together and the origins of our voter education story, which really began with Lia and a curious, frustrated student in her classroom.

We are happy to announce that two great scholars are joining ERIC as Non-Resident Research Fellows: Prof. Jahara ‘Franky’ Matisek, a military professor at the US Naval War College, and Prof. William Reno, a conflict studies expert and a Northwestern University's department chair.

Alvin Tillery, a professor of political science at Northwestern University, said the idea of Harvard naming another Black woman—put forth by some discouraged allies of Gay—doesn’t have much practical grounding. Tillery said he believed there was little chance of the university choosing a president outside a narrow band of internal candidates who had been prepared for that possibility, with Garber the most obvious choice to remain in the job.

Hostage situations have been on the rise around the world in recent years. From the October 2023 mass kidnapping by Hamas to the rise in hostage diplomacy by Russia and Iran, hostage-taking violence plays an enormous role in international and domestic politics. What is hostage taking, and why does it matter?

The University of Houston’s Brandon Rottinghaus, a 46-year-old Plano native who’s taught political science at U of H for the past 17 years, said the “primary system by design is tailored for candidates to speak only a limited audience. Primary voters in the Republican Party, for example, are older, wealthier and are focused on a narrower range of issues.”

Elemica, a leading provider of Digital Supply Chain solutions and the premier Digital Supply Chain Network for B2B industries, today announces Eric Stine as Chief Executive Officer.

Thailand’s May 2023 general election produced an unexpected alliance between former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and the royalist conservative establishment. This was part of the deal to prevent the Move Forward Party (MFP), the election winner widely seen as a threat to the establishment, from taking power.

Following a welcome address by Northwestern President Michael H. Schill, consulting curator Smith will moderate a conversation between artists and researchers focused on art, eco-anxiety and resilience and climate science, as well as the importance of cross-disciplinary thinking and problem-solving to effect change. Participants include Dekila Chungyalpa, director of the Loka Initiative, Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Teresa Montoya, artist and assistant professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago; and Kimberly Marion Suiseeya, associate professor in the department of political science, and a faculty affiliate with the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research and a faculty fellow with the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern.

Thailand’s May 2023 general election produced an unexpected alliance between former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and the royalist conservative establishment. This was part of the deal to prevent the Move Forward Party (MFP), the election winner widely seen as a threat to the establishment, from taking power. To inhibit the MFP, Thaksin’s Pheu Thai Party was allowed to form the government with Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, supported by military-aligned parties and senators. Thaksin was permitted to return to Thailand and granted a partial royal pardon.

The dawn of the new calendar year means that WNBA free agency is approaching. Three years removed from a championship, the eighth-place Chicago Sky hired a new general manager, Jeff Pagliocca, and head coach, Teresa Weatherspoon, this offseason. This free agency period will be vital to restoring the Sky’s championship aspirations. From Jan. 11 to Jan. 20, WNBA teams can offer qualifying offers to reserve and restricted free agent players. On Jan. 21, unrestricted free agents can start talking with teams before officially being able to sign contracts on Feb. 1. The Chicago Sky have an estimated $511,448 in available salary cap room.

More credible ideas for addressing social problems are generated than can be tested or implemented. To identify the most promising interventions, decision-makers may rely on forecasts of intervention efficacy from experts or laypeople. We compare the accuracy of academic experts, practitioner experts, and members of the public in forecasting interventions to strengthen Americans’ democratic attitudes. Results show that academics and practitioners outperformed nonexperts.

Feminist standpoint theorists highlight how relations of power and inequality impact our knowledge of the social world (Smith 1974). The hierarchical positioning of different social groups creates a world in which the experiences and perspectives of certain people are acknowledged while others are silenced (Hartsock 1998; Hekman 1997). Moreover, a researcher’s personal background—her race, gender, class, and sexuality, among other factors—condition what she is able to learn and how (Collins 2000). Together, this literature underscores how the social world—and who we are within it—shapes knowledge production.

Both South Africa and Israel are party to the Convention Against Genocide, a treaty over which disagreements can be adjudicated by the ICJ, Ian Hurd, a political science professor at Northwestern University, told McClatchy News. The treaty “requires all countries to prevent genocide and to prosecute anyone suspected of committing genocide (or organizing it, or attempting it, or conspiring over it),” Hurd said.

Feminist standpoint theorists highlight how relations of power and inequality impact our knowledge of the social world (Smith 1974). The hierarchical positioning of different social groups creates a world in which the experiences and perspectives of certain people are acknowledged while others are silenced (Hartsock 1998; Hekman 1997). Moreover, a researcher’s personal background—her race, gender, class, and sexuality, among other factors—condition what she is able to learn and how (Collins 2000). Together, this literature underscores how the social world—and who we are within it—shapes knowledge production.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has become a flashpoint of elite political discord, yet how Americans actually perceive CRT is unclear. We theorize that Republican elites utilized a strong framing strategy to re-define CRT as an “empty signifier” representing broader racial and cultural grievances. Using a survey and a pre-registered experiment among U.S. adults (N = 19,060), we find that this strategy worked. Republicans exhibit more familiarity with CRT and hold more negatively valenced (and wide ranging) sentiments toward CRT, relative to Democrats.

Following welcome remarks by Northwestern President Michael H. Schill, consulting curator Smith will moderate a conversation between artists and researchers focused on art, eco-anxiety and resilience and climate science, as well as the importance of cross-disciplinary thinking and problem-solving to effect change. Participants include Dekila Chungyalpa, director of the Loka Initiative, Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Teresa Montoya, artist and assistant professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago; and Kimberly Marion Suiseeya, associate professor in the department of political science, and a faculty affiliate with the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research and a faculty fellow with the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern.

Leonardo Martinez-Diaz is Managing Director for Climate Finance in the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate at the U.S. Department of State. Previously, he was Global Director of the Sustainable Finance Center at the World Resources Institute, a leading non-profit conducting research on climate and environment. During the Obama Administration, Martinez-Diaz served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy and Environment in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, as well as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Western Hemisphere. Prior to that, he served as Director of the Office of Policy at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Climate change is a complex political problem often analyzed at global or national scales. In her new book, In Quest of a Shared Planet, Naveeda Khan presents her research on international negotiations at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) through the lens of individual experiences. Khan seeks to understand why people come to be involved and stay involved in the complex process of international negotiations on climate change. Her research explores participation at the Conference of the Parties (COP), the central meeting in the UNFCCC process, with a critical eye to entrenched power disparities, historical threads of current distrust, and varying levels of influence among state and non-state actors. Based on Khan’s ethnography of COPs from 2015-2019, the book focuses on actors from Bangladesh and the Global South.

The novel approach [presented by Khan] to studying a site of global environmental governance provides unique insight into international negotiations and opens the door for additional analysis of COP beyond the official outcomes. This book is fundamental reading for those interested in environmental politics and how individuals interact with and shape the structures, norms, and outcomes of international negotiations.

Chile’s 2021–22 Constitutional Convention was the first in the world to feature mechanisms that guaranteed gender parity among constituents (Arce and Suárez-Cao 2021). This was not an easy win. Feminist activists and women politicians pushed for gender parity in 2020-21 in a country that had adopted gender quotas relatively late (Figueroa 2021; Reyes-Housholder, Suárez-Cao, and Le Foulon 2023; Suárez-Cao 2023; personal interview #1, April 21, 2023). Reserving seats for Indigenous groups and using other mechanisms to allow space for independent constituents further broadened the convention’s ostensible inclusiveness.

“I view the incident with great sadness,” said Alvin Tillery, professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, who was just one year behind Gay at Harvard. “Claudine was absolutely the top of our field. She was the best graduate student of our generation, or one of the best graduate students in our generation. To watch her be ushered out after six months on the job by sort of restive donors, it really raises questions about whether they were ever going to support her or whether they would ever support any Black woman in the position.”

Public policy expert Kevin Mullinix discusses how policy reforms to reduce wrongful convictions depend on political sentiments in any given U.S. state, along with leanings of the governor and sway held by innocence-advocacy groups.

Ph.D. Mariana Borges joins University of Southampton as a Lecturer.

In a matter of days, homes were vacated, shops closed down, and churches heard their last prayers. The ethnic cleansing of Armenians from their ancestral homelands planned by the Azeri government came to fruition. On September 19, 2023, Azerbaijan launched full scale military attacks on Nagorno-Karabakh (“Artsakh”), an ethnic enclave previously home to 120,000 Armenians. Overnight, they were able to seize the region by force, ending centuries of Armenian existence on the land and a 30-year contention over the region. While many international organizations were shocked by the swiftness of this ethnic cleansing to be carried out in such a methodical manner, members of the Armenian diaspora, like myself, who had been calling for attention in the region, were not.

Not long ago, the eldest son of President Joko Widodo of Indonesia was running a catering business and a chain of dessert shops. Now he is the symbol of a budding political dynasty and the beneficiary of family maneuvering. With the help of a high court ruling led by his uncle, the president’s son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, 36, has emerged as the leading candidate for vice president in next month’s national elections. If his ticket wins, he would become Indonesia’s youngest vice president ever. The machinations have rattled critics, who warn that Mr. Joko is moving to undermine democratic overhauls that were adopted after decades of dictatorship and that helped Mr. Joko himself win the presidency in 2014.

Alvin Tillery, political science professor and director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, agreed that conservatives are “winning right now.” But Tillery, who is also the founder and chief executive of the 2040 Strategy Group — which consults with Fortune 500 companies on DEI issues — also expects blue states and liberal activists to start filing lawsuits of their own, charging that many companies have not adequately promoted equal opportunity and lack diversity. “There’s a lot of other issues that are going to drop,” added Tillery, who said he knew Gay when they both attended Harvard in the 1990s but did not remain close to her.

This has been a terrible week in the history of Harvard University and the nation. After enduring a racist crusade by rightwing activists, donors, and “academics,” Dr. Claudine Gay, the first Black woman to lead Harvard in its 387-year history, resigned in the face of charges that she did not do enough to combat antisemitism on campus and that she committed plagiarism in some of her academic writings. As I will show in the passages below, both of these charges are absolute nonsense. If the world were just, Dr. Gay would never have been subjected to the repugnant racialized attacks that we have witnessed play out over the past month and she would still have her corner office in Massachusetts Hall.

Sally Nuamah, associate professor of urban politics in human development and social policy at Northwestern University, said the tendency of adults to view Black youth as more adult-like than their white peers can shroud the mental health needs of Black children. In addition, the girls’ own positive behavior can mask their needs: In a study of the WOW program, participants were found to have strong school attendance and at least a B average, even as more than a third showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Even the most casual observers of the military technology space are sure to have encountered the term ‘responsible artificial intelligence.’ Responsible AI (RAI) has quickly emerged as a defining feature of the development and future use of AI-enabled military technologies. While it is difficult to argue against the utility and imperative of RAI, what it practically means and what steps are necessary to achieve it remain elusive. With the public debate on military AI being highly polarized and the academic research often siloed, we hope this symposium will allow for fruitful cross-fertilization of approaches and ideas. The goal of this symposium is, therefore, threefold. First, we wanted to gather a diverse and interdisciplinary group of experts to present thoughts and insights into the opportunities, challenges, and contours of RAI from their own backgrounds.

U.S. federal laws figure importantly in many research projects in political science, law, sociology, economics, and other disciplines. Despite their prominence, there is no authoritative, current, and comprehensive dataset of U.S. federal laws. In part, this is because such laws have been enacted over hundreds of years, resulting in a complicated patchwork of documents published in numerous and inconsistent formats. As a simplification, many scholars have relied upon selective lists of major legislative enactments or complete lists of relatively recent enactments. Here, I report on an effort to transparently and reproducibly assemble a complete database of US laws and their revision histories by combining data from HeinOnline, the Governmental Printing Office, and the National Archives and Records Administration. The result is a database of 49,746 laws spanning 1789 to 2022.

Professional News: I am happy to announce that I will be a Fellow in International Security at Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals. After finishing my PhD, I knew I wanted to continue the academic journey. Looking forward to this next chapter!

Richard M. Shafranek is a quantitative social scientist and survey researcher based in Chicago, IL. Shafranek earned his PhD from the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, where he specialized in American politics and quantitative research methodology. Dynata provides quick access to verified voters at the national, state or district level to help you make smarter campaign decisions, especially in swing states. Pollsters, PACs, public opinion groups, and nonprofits can access important behavioral and modeled variables to conduct political polling of panel members as well as targeted and non-targeted voters using List-Match, RDD, etc.

Political science graduate students have flocked to join #AcademicTwitter in recent years. However, navigating the social media landscape can be daunting for graduate students trying to find their stride. We highlight six different approaches for Twitter among political scientists to provide graduate students a blueprint for navigating the app. Specifically, we note that Twitter can help students find research, promote their own work, ask for advice, and network among other uses. We conclude with tips on maintaining boundaries and ensuring one's safety while using the app. **NOTE: This manuscript is part of Strategies for Navigating Graduate School and Beyond, a forthcoming volume for those interested in pursuing graduate education in political science (Fall 2022 publication).

I am an assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. I received my Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University. I study comparative and international politics, with a focus on nonviolent conflict processes including activism, displacement, and humanitarian response. I’m also interested in qualitative and multi-method research. My geographic focus is the Middle East, especially the Levant. My book project explains the relationship between international aid and nonviolent action among civilians and refugees during the Syrian war. It employs data from field-based immersion and interviews, as well as original social media data.

Phyllis Oakley, whose 25-year diplomatic career in the State Department almost didn’t happen because of an unwritten rule that forbade female foreign service officers from marrying, died on Jan. 22 at a hospital in Washington. She was 87.

The COVID States Project, co-led by political science Prof. Jamie Druckman, tracks varying attitudes and responses to public health guidance across the U.S. Three of their most recent reports examined COVID-19 data considering several socioeconomic factors, which second-year political science Ph.D. student Jennifer Lin said provides an understanding of the development of the pandemic in real time and information in the case of future outbreaks.

Some conservatives are taking aim at policies that allow doctors to consider race as a risk factor when allocating scarce COVID-19 treatments, saying the protocols discriminate against white people. The wave of infections brought on by the omicron variant and a shortage of treatments have focused attention on the policies. Medical experts say the opposition is misleading. Health officials have long said there is a strong case for considering race as one of many risk factors in treatment decisions. And there is no evidence that race alone is being used to decide who gets medicine.

Estimados lectores de Vanguardia. A partir hoy los acompañaré como columnista cada quince días. Hace mucho tiempo me formé en la sala de redacción de este periódico en un semillero de jóvenes llamado Sardinos, que publicaba una página quincenal con nuestros escritos. Me da mucha felicidad volver a estas páginas 25 años después para hablar sobre temas de actualidad política, y especialmente sobre las problemáticas que estudié en mi doctorado en Ciencia Política y que investigo como profesora de la Universidad del Rosario.

Is Constructivism best understood as a scholarly disposition, a body of theory, or an intellectual movement? Is it still relevant, or has it exceeded its shelf life? What if there are lots of Constructivists but they use different labels for their work?

Graduate programs present challenges for women that mirror those in society and are also compounded by entrenched norms within the academy and the discipline. This chapter seeks to guide women-identifying graduate students on navigating these challenges and combat the often isolating experience academia presents. The perception that women are less methodologically and theoretically rigorous in their research is only one of many stressors impacting women in the academy and political science. Through the various lenses of learning, teaching, and research, we provide tangible advice for women in the discipline to find success and balance while creating space for the things that brought you to study political science at a graduate level in the first place.

Our research, carried out with Lucas González and Antonella Perini, shows that how governments craft a pandemic response matters. National governments that created their pandemic policies in collaboration with other governmental and nongovernmental organizations tended to see fewer covid-related deaths. Collaboration, in this sense, saved lives.

"Campaign promises are a cornerstone of representative democracy. Candidates make promises to signal to voters their intentions in office and voters evaluate candidates based on those promises. This study unpacks the theorized pathway regarding campaign promises: not whether promises are kept, but what purpose promises serve, what they signal, and how they affect voter decision-making. The author explores the pathways and conditions influencing promises and finds that promises tend to have a polarizing effect on voters' opinions of politicians, attracting similarly-positioned voters and strongly repelling voters who disagree with a candidate's position. In addition, voters perceive promise breakers as less honest and less likely to follow through than candidates who more weakly took the same position.

Few principles are as central to American democracy as freedom of speech. Yet, some argue “cancel culture”—i.e., censoring offensive speech—undermines this crucial tenet. The authors offer a theory of why people “cancel” others and test it using a conjoint experiment with a representative sample of Americans. They find that when Americans engage in canceling, they do so because of what was said, regardless of the speaker’s identity. Cancellation reflects an attempt to redress speech considered harmful, not punishment borne of partisan or racial animosity. But the researchers also show that the public is significantly misinformed about cancellation: People overestimate the extent to which canceling occurs and they misconstrue why it happens. Even though partisan bias does not cause canceling, (mis-)beliefs about canceling could exacerbate partisan animosity.

"In 2012, the Chicago Public Schools board initiated the largest wave of school closures in U.S. history, shutting down 49 out of nearly 500 public schools. These schools were in predominately Black neighborhoods on the city’s South and West sides. In the American Political Science Review, IPR political scientist and social policy expert Sally Nuamah and political scientist Thomas Ogorzalek document how the closures changed the political behavior of Black Chicagoans who lived in communities targeted for a school closure. Despite relatively low participation rates in the democratic process before the closures, these citizens—who are from some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods—increased their political engagement. Their research supports a model of place-based mobilization, or the process of citizens responding to policy change concentrated in their local community.

"For five decades, the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ) has been committed to promoting greater knowledge and understanding about the role of women in American politics, enhancing women's influence in public life, and expanding the diversity of women in politics and government. Thanks to the generosity and commitment of Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company founded by Melinda French Gates, CAWP will fund twelve research projects – conducted by advanced graduate students and faculty – in 2022 that help to identify and address barriers and opportunities to women’s political power.

A new law in Illinois allows homeowners to change their housing deeds to remove racist clauses that were used to bar people of certain races and religious groups from buying homes or living in a particular neighborhood.

Images of Kazakh troops wearing United Nations-branded blue peacekeeping helmets, while handling stun grenades during protests in Almaty, crossed a blue line. Anti-government protests that began on January 2 have led to over 160 Kazakhs being killed, thousands injured, and thousands more detained. Despite the violence, the U.N. is not deployed in Kazakhstan. The U.N. has issued a statement asking Kazakh leaders to show “restraint,” and U.N. human right experts condemned the government for labeling the protestors as “terrorists.” Notwithstanding such “a war of words,” these “Little Blue Helmets” – fake U.N. peacekeeping troops – are using a false flag to repress Kazakh citizens. The international community must respond to the unsanctioned use of an internationally protected symbol.

Archive of select American state party platforms 1846-2017 in .txt format (2022-01-19)

Animal Labour is an important and much needed addition to the field of animal studies (Blattner, Coulter, and Kymlicka, 2020a). In the last few years, animal studies has become a vibrant field of scholarship comprising a broad range of academic disciplines, from animal ethics and critical animal studies to cognitive ethology, among others. But one of the most stimulating recent developments in the field has been the so-called political turn in animal rights theory (Milligan, 2015; Garner and O’Sullivan, 2016). Although the political turn in animal rights theory focuses mainly on issues of citizenship and political representation of animals’ interests, it has remained inattentive to the ethico-political implications of animal labor. Thus, by focusing on animal labor as “a site of interspecies justice” the book fills a void in the literature (Blattner, Coulter, and Kymlicka, 2020b, p. 12).

It is a given in most quarters that that the marginalization of ethnic groups from the corridors of state power is a primary cause of rebellion, particularly in poor countries with weak government control in rural areas open to rebel organizing. Rebellions, however, often emerge among groups that have a share of state power and fail to gain traction among groups that are excluded from power. This observation is at the heart of Janet Lewis's exploration of the earliest stage of rebellion in Uganda, host to 16 rebel groups that Lewis identifies since the current government fought its way to power in 1986. Through extensive field research, including interviews with many directly involved in forming rebel groups and fighting them, Lewis is well positioned to explain why rebel groups succeed or fail in their earliest stages.

So far, Evanston's efforts have yielded a $400,000 fund to be used for grants of up to $25,000 for Black homeowners, who resided in Evanston between 1919 and 1969, that can be used for mortgages or home improvements. This has been lauded as a step toward recognizing and redressing the city's role in racial economic disparities. It's also been criticized for being overly narrow in its eligibility criteria.

Narratives about Africa as dark, depraved, and diseased justified the exploitation of African land and people. Today, these narratives may still have a hold on people’s fears about disease. We test this in three (pre-COVID-19) experiments (N = 1,803). Across studies, we find that participants report greater worry about a pandemic originating in Africa (vs. elsewhere). In turn, they report greater support for travel bans and for loosening abortion restrictions. We then document these narratives in an archival study of newspaper articles of the 2015–2016 Zika pandemic (N = 1,475). We find that articles were more negative—for example, they included more death-related words—if they mentioned Africa. Finally, we replicate the experimental results within the COVID-19 context, using a representative sample (N = 1,200).

The holiday celebrating the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an important moment of reflection for me each year. As an African American born three years after the movement Dr. King and others led to make America a multiracial democracy, the course of my life has been fundamentally shaped by the impact of his efforts. Without Dr. King’s work, I would have grown up in a different neighborhood, been educated in schools of lesser quality, and have had far less freedom to move in this society which is typically hostile to Black bodies.

As the world becomes more complicated, so too does global governance. The political consequences of the rising density of institutions, policies, rules and strategies to address global phenomena has been a central focus of the scholarship on international regime complexity. This conclusion to a special issue grapples with the promise and perils of theorizing about international regime complexity in a constantly evolving world. It discusses the special issue contributions while uniting the different conversations about the increasingly complex global governance space we refer to as international regime complexity. The goal is to bridge existing debates about global governance, to expand the scholarly conversation by drawing from and better connecting to IR debates, and to ensure that we can address practical and pressing global governance challenges.

Chloe Thurston, an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University, authored a book on housing discrimination in the 20th century titled "At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State.""If you have a house that was built before 1950, there's a pretty good chance that there's a restrictive covenant in the deed, particularly if that was a neighborhood that was historically predominantly white," she explained.

The COVID states project conducted a survey and issued a report in the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Here, we revisit some of the opinions regarding January 6th, a year later.

Shortly after the events transpired, three Emerson professors provided their insight into the insurrection. What led up to it? How do we move forward as a country? Emerson Today checked back with those three professors to reflect one year later. “The insurrection, as I would call it, that took place a year ago, was a critical juncture in which the foundation of U.S. democracy eroded a little further,” said Mneesha Gellman, associate professor of political science in the Marlboro Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative. Gellman said former President Donald Trump’s denial of election results facilitated the events of January 6, and undermined a core aspect of procedural democracy – free and fair elections.

"Political Theorist Ross Carroll takes the reader through Enlightenment conversations about the use of ridicule and laughter in politics and political engagement in his new book, Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain (Princeton UP, 2021) explores, as a framework, two schools of thought on the place of ridicule in political engagement, Thomas Hobbes and those who took their approach to understanding human nature from Hobbes, and the Third Earl of Shaftsbury, and those who followed his arguments. Carroll dives into these two approaches to the use of ridicule, unpacking not only the ideas around how ridicule can be used in politics, but also how it might be managed appropriately, noting the dichotomous approach to ridicule as part of the Age of Enlightenment and Reason.

"In this re-launch episode of 'What Voting Means to Me,' Spenser Mestel and Mara discuss this idea and much more. Spencer is an independent journalist and poll worker based in Brooklyn New York— who shares his appreciation for the wonderful and yes, 'forgettable' voting experiences he has had, his hopes for a less burdensome system of voting in the United States, and how elite partisan rhetoric and a lack of public understanding of how elections are run have combined to become a potent threat to American democracy."

"My research and teaching interests are in the history of political thought, contemporary democratic and feminist theory, and the politics of science, technology and the environment (particularly statistics and statecraft, climate science, and contemporary data politics). My book manuscript (tentatively called Common Knowledge) is occasioned by the crisis of authoritative knowledge in democratic societies. Drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt as well as interdisciplinary literature on democracy and expertise, new communication technologies, and digital publics, it explores how scientific and technical knowledge translates, circulates and becomes contested in the public realm. I also lead an interdisciplinary research project called Arendt on Earth: From the Archimedean Point to the Anthropocene (www.arendtonearth.com), funded by Humanities Without Walls and the Mellon Foundation.

“Perhaps the most disappointing thing that we have learned is that the American people are largely content to watch their democracy burn,” said political scientist Alvin Tillery, director of Northwestern’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy. “Two years after the largest mass protest movement in American history in the name of #BlackLivesMatter and after watching incredibly brave young people strike out for Democracy in places like Hong Kong and Nigeria, the American people are greeting the continuing assault on our democracy with a resounding ‘meh.’ So, on this eve of the one-year anniversary of the Capitol uprising, my warning to Americans, particularly people of color, is that we are not safe.”

"For many purposes—notably, responding to a pandemic—a strong federal government is right handy. But for more than 200 years, some Americans, thinking that they were promoting personal liberty, have tried to persuade the Supreme Court to interpret federal law in a way that would hobble the government. It is happening again with Covid-19. And once again the argument focuses on a technical legal question about the meaning of the word necessary. The court gave the right answer in 1819. If it gets it wrong this time, thousands will die. This Friday, the court will hear oral arguments in legal challenges to two of President Biden’s Covid vaccine mandates. One of those rules governs medium-size and large workplaces; the other focuses on health care workers. In both, the court must decide whether the rules are authorized by the relevant federal statutes.

"The International Court of Justice ('ICJ') is the oldest international court in operation, with the authority to adjudicate cases raised by any United Nations member. It has the broadest jurisdiction of any international court, since states can designate or seize the ICJ to resolve disputes involving a broad range of interstate or international matters. The ICJ also has an advisory function, which can be used to clarify questions of international law. The potential for the ICJ to hear cases involving so many countries, treaties and issues means that the relative paucity of cases adjudicated across the ICJ's nearly 75 years in operation is noteworthy."

Competent elected leaders are often successful in improving the lives of those they serve, but incompetent ones can have an outsized, and even deadly, impact on their citizens, according to IPR political scientist John Bullock. In The Forum, Bullock and Jonathan Bendor of Stanford University argue that researchers should focus more on the competence of elected leaders instead of voter competence, or how well ordinary voters understand politics. The federal government’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic under the Trump administration led the researchers to update their previous essay on the topic. “In 2020, with the Trump administration's handling of the pandemic, we thought that we had a good example that we could use to elaborate the idea,” Bullock explains.

"The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on President Biden's vaccine mandates on Friday, Jan. 7. Officially, the cases are about questions of federal power, administrative law and the capacity of Congress to delegate authority to agencies. But what is fundamentally driving the litigation is the libertarian myth — one that may be embraced by the new conservative Supreme Court majority — that freedom can be promoted by hamstringing the capacities of government."

Ph.D. Javier Burdman joins University of San Martin in Argentina as a Research Fellow (with tenure) where he will continue his research on theories of political action and judgment, moral and political philosophy, and critical theory. Previously Burdman was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Research Center "Normative Orders" of the Goethe University Frankfurt in 2018-2019, and then Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Strasbourg in 2020-2021.

“The U.S. killing of Qassim Suleimani in Baghdad is a major, dangerous, and unexpected escalation in competition between Washington and Tehran. Suleimani had substantial blood on his hands from his activities across the region, including the deaths of hundreds of Americans. Yet, Suleimani was perceived by many to be untouchable due to his prominence in Iran and beyond. No one can be certain what the short- or long-term consequences of Suleimani’s assassination will be, except that Iran will respond on its own terms and timeline. The U.S. should be prepared for a wide range of first- and second-order effects.”

Delmis is 25 years old and is the coordinator of “Mi Espacio,” a program that helps teenage immigrants integrate more easily into American society. Delmis is the daughter of a father and mother who emigrated from El Salvador. As a child, Delmis had to help her mother and father navigate the American system since her parents did not speak English. Writing checks to pay bills, translating conversations at doctor’s appointments and with government agents were some of her tasks as a child.

Julieta Suárez Cao is featured in a video series with Boletín Legislativo Mujer y Género

As James Tully and others have shown, Locke's theory of property in the Second Treatise served as an important argument for the right of British settler colonialists to claim legitimate ownership of "wasted" land in the Americas that settlers claimed was not enclosed or cultivated by indigenous people. Yet interestingly, in a book written during and on behalf of the settler colonial project, Locke never mentions water or the ocean in the Second Treatise. While Locke repeatedly references "America" in the Second Treatise as the prime example of "wasted" land, he does not mention how English colonists got there: via dangerous, risky, and often deadly journeys on ships, ships which themselves often depended on forced labor to (among other things) bear water.