DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

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.

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

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.

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.