DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

Last week, President Museveni returned to one of his predictable pet subjects, the courses universities teach. In remarks delivered for him by Vice President Jessica Alupo at Lira University’s graduation, the President yet again called out ‘irrelevant’ courses. He did not elaborate, but anyone who has followed the debate knows what he meant.

The International Relations Speaker Series on Friday featured political science and Pritzker Prof. Karen Alter, who spoke about defining backlash politics and emphasized the necessity of a more explicit framework. The speaker series is open to all Northwestern students, including undergraduates. “I’m extremely fascinated why people today get extremely motivated by grievances that happened a hundred years ago,” Alter said. A small group of students gathered in Scott Hall to talk about the first chapter of Alter’s latest work, an upcoming edited volume on backlash politics. An edited volume is a book that contains scholarly articles about a specific theme or topic from multiple contributors.

There is growing recognition that mass incarceration is unjust and undemocratic, but when the subject of prison abolition is raised, a ready chorus emerges to declare that such a project is naïve, idealistic, and out of touch with reality. Anna Terwiel challenges this view, carefully examining the work of abolitionist thinkers and activists since the 1960s to argue that prison abolition is a realist political project. Abolition, Terwiel shows, is oriented toward practical realities and offers concrete proposals for radical democratic change. Based on insightful readings of renowned abolitionists such as Michel Foucault, Liat Ben-Moshe, and Angela Y. Davis, Prison Abolition for Realists illuminates the realist aspects of their approaches as well as the important differences between them.

"I discuss how political contexts ostensibly hinder the communication of science. I then demonstrate how these 'hindrances' can be addressed. But, should they be addressed? How do we define effective scientific communication? Science can play a critical role in the making of public policy. Yet, it only does so if it can be effectively communicated to citizens and policy-makers. In this presentation, I demonstrate three features of the current political environment – media saturation, partisan polarization, and the politicization of science – generate preference formation processes that are often deemed undesirable. I then discuss ways in which one can counteract these dynamics; however, I conclude by asking a larger question: what are the criteria for assessing whether the processing of scientific information generates 'better' or 'worse' preferences?"

Northwestern University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors condemned the agreement. “Northwestern has abdicated its duty to uphold principles crucial for higher education,” Jacqueline Stevens, the chapter president, said in a statement. Terms have varied widely among the schools that have reached agreements with the Trump administration.

How does winning or losing a referendum affect social media engagement and the demand for political news? This chapter examines Chilean voters’ digital news consumption patterns before, during, and after the 2022 Chilean constitutional referendum on September 4. In response to the referendum results, the analysis shows an increased demand for information among winners (news-seeking behavior), with faster browsing time (celebration mode) and a larger share of overall news consumption (larger digital fingerprint). In contrast, there was a decline in the demand for information among losers (news-avoidance behavior), with more time devoted to reading a smaller subset of articles.

An urgent and shocking examination of how the ultra-rich dominate democracies, hoard political power, and maintain inequality—and how we might chart another path. The wealthy and powerful few have dominated the masses throughout most of human history. This is starkly visible now more than ever—a time when the gulf between oligarchs and the average citizen is larger than any gap that existed during European serfdom or the slave society of Imperial Rome. We have arrived at the most blatant version of oligarchy that the United States has endured, with politicians bought and paid for across the political spectrum. One thing is clear: the world is heading even deeper into a state of inequality that oligarchs and elites of past eras could only have dreamed of.

How does winning or losing a referendum affect social media engagement and the demand for political news? This chapter examines Chilean voters’ digital news consumption patterns before, during, and after the 2022 Chilean constitutional referendum on September 4. In response to the referendum results, the analysis shows an increased demand for information among winners (news-seeking behavior), with faster browsing time (celebration mode) and a larger share of overall news consumption (larger digital fingerprint). In contrast, there was a decline in the demand for information among losers (news-avoidance behavior), with more time devoted to reading a smaller subset of articles.

Identifying Afro-Latino identity in the United States is necessary in understanding the potentially conflicting nature of belonging to two ethnic groups that, up to the present day, have behaved as mutually exclusive in politics. One such example of the consequences of considering Latinos to be one racial group is the shock at the 2016 and 2020 Latino voting trends.

Ideology has been conceptualized within a Marxian framework that challenges exploitation of humans by other humans. Thus, ideology is often understood as a veil that precludes the exploited from knowing, acknowledging, recognizing, and contesting the conditions of such exploitation. In this context, even if the oppression of non-human animals by humans has been acknowledged, ideology has seldom been conceptualized across the human-animal divide. Thus, it could be argued that there is a veil that prevents the recognition of oppression and violence toward non-human animals. We claim that such a veil can be conceived from the perspective of two distinct, but complementary, philosophical approaches: social epistemology and deconstruction.