DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson spoke about the city’s latest policies at a Northwestern forum in the Guild Lounge at Scott Hall Wednesday evening, attracting students, faculty and members of the public.

"We are all familiar with Charles Tilly (Reference Tilly and Tilly1975) famous dictum: “War makes the state, and the state makes war.” Faced with technological changes that made war more challenging and costly, early modern European elites were compelled to build institutions, organizations, and infrastructure that enabled the recruitment, financing, and deployment of armies, setting in motion the developments that would give rise to the modern state. States that adapted to become the most efficient war machine prevailed; those that did not disappeared. When the dust settled, the modern state emerged as the victor of this Darwinian competition. For many years, this war-centric theory has been central to academic understandings of state-building in Europe.

"Two decades ago, Jeffrey Winters, a political-science professor at Northwestern University, started teaching a course called Oligarchs and Elites. His students at the time considered this exotic terrain. One protested, “Russia has oligarchs. America has rich people.” But over the years Winters noticed a shift in his students, accelerated by the Supreme Court’s decision, in 2010, to remove limits on political contributions. “The challenge really became convincing any of them that the United States was still a democracy,” Winters said. “They argued that oligarchs dominated everything that matters.”"

Is it possible for dissenting citizens in modern-day autocracies to challenge the non-democratic status quo through regular elections? Scrutinizing the smart vote, a voting coordination strategy proposed by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, this article examines the efficiency and limitations of collective anti-regime voting in a regime on the edge of transition from competitive to hegemonic authoritarianism. The analysis is based on the official electoral data covering the period 2019–2021, a list experiment conducted after the 2021 parliamentary elections in Russia, and an original survey of Russian wartime migrants. We find that the smart vote strategy significantly boosted the electoral results of targeted candidates regardless of their party affiliations.

It has been five years since a Minneapolis Police Officer murdered George Floyd and the massive protest movement that followed. This hour, we’re reflecting on what has and has not changed in those five years. We'll look at the protests in historical context to try to understand the ways they succeeded and failed. We’ll also talk about whether have been changes in the rate of police violence since 2020.

Legal experts say the smuggling charge against Kseniia Petrova is unlikely to be upheld, though it could bolster deportation efforts.

"Political science and religious studies Prof. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd spoke at a Wednesday book talk hosted by the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs about her latest book, “Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States.” Hurd studies religion, political theory, political theology and international relations. These fields have shaped her new book, which she defined as an “urgent exploration of borders” and their importance in American society. “U.S. borders are both present and absent,” she said. “The United States has a desire to have and also transcend borders — a desire to make the rules, but to also suspend the laws.” In her talk, Hurd focused on the Mariposa Land Port of Entry located between Nogales, Arizona, and Sonora, Mexico, and the societal significance of this borderland.

Wawancara dengan responden dilakukan lewat telepon oleh pewawancara yang dilatih. Peneliti LSI Yoes C Kenawas mengatakan, survei tersebut tidak jauh berbeda hasil penilaiannya jika dibandingkan dengan data Januari 2025.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize social science research. However, researchers face the difficult challenge of choosing a specific AI model, often without social science-specific guidance. To demonstrate the importance of this choice, we present an evaluation of the effect of alignment, or human-driven modification, on the ability of large language models (LLMs) to simulate the attitudes of human populations (sometimes called silicon sampling). We benchmark aligned and unaligned versions of six open-source LLMs against each other and compare them to similar responses by humans. Our results suggest that model alignment impacts output in predictable ways, with implications for prompting, task completion, and the substantive content of LLM-based results.