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A podcast showcasing cutting-edge research in comparative politics.
31 Episodes
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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 incentive...
Today on Scope Conditions, what’s the secret to successful peacekeeping?We often think of civil conflict as being driven by organized, armed groups – like rebel militias and state armies. But as our guest today reminds us, a leading cause of conflict around the world is communal violence – fights that break out between civilians over land, cattle, water, and other scarce resources. When the United Nations sends peacekeepers in to manage a conflict, one of their most important jobs is de...
Today on Scope Conditions: when is racial status a unifying force in politics?Shared experiences of prejudice and discrimination can sometimes help create shared political identities within and across racial minority groups and strong incentives for collective mobilization. But as our guest today points out, neither race nor racial-minority status maps neatly onto patterns of political coalition-building. Consider, for instance, the lack of an enduring political alliance between African-Ameri...
Today on Scope Conditions, can we teach voters how to tell truth from lies?Around the world, governments and political parties wield misinformation as a powerful political weapon – a weapon that is massively amplified by social media. A large and growing literature has investigated how misinformation spreads and ways of combating it – from corrections and warning-labels to educational programs designed to inoculate citizens against untruths. Yet most of what we know about misinformation and i...
Today on Scope Conditions: why the judge’s gavel is sometimes mightier than the sword.Political trials – or show trials – are a well-known mode of repression in authoritarian settings. We often think of a show trial as a sham version of the real thing: the autocrat affords his enemy a semblance of due process to give off the appearance of fairness, even though in reality, the fix is in. On this view, the show trial helps to legitimize arbitrary rule.Our guest today, Dr. Fiona Shen-Bayh, an as...
Today on Scope Conditions: what drives discrimination against immigrants – and what can be done about it?When social scientists have sought to explain anti-immigrant bias, they’ve tended to focus on one of two possible causes: the perceived economic threat that migrants might pose to the native born or the cultural threat driven by differences in race, ethnicity, or religion. In a new book with Mathias Poertner and Nicholas Sambanis, our guest Donghyun Danny Choi, an assistant professor of po...
A little over two years ago, mass protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, focused public attention on the dramatically higher rates at which the police use force against Black and Latinx people. More broadly, the Black Lives Matter movement has put a spotlight on deep-seated systemic racism in the criminal justice system in the U.S. and beyond. Against this backdrop, many reform advocates have called for a fundamental reorientation of prioritie...
Today on Scope Conditions, we’re talking about rising partisan animosity and what can be done about it.When we think about partisan polarization, we’re often thinking about the United States – and about how the policy attitudes or ideological positions of Republicans and Democrats have moved further and further apart in recent decades. But partisan polarization is far from a uniquely American phenomenon. And it isn’t just about policy attitudes.Increasingly, political scientists have been att...
Can autocrats fight online dissent with offline repression?In the world’s most authoritarian regimes, on-the-ground forms of protest or expressions of dissent are quickly quashed. So the online world – especially social media – has emerged as a critical venue for activists and reformers to express opposition and sustain their movements. Given its more diffuse and elusive nature, online activism presents dictators with a new challenge of social control. One possible response is to try to ...
Today on Scope Conditions, we’re talking about the origins of supranational power.The European Union has no army. It levies no taxes. Covering a population of 450 million, its administrative bureaucracy is on par with that of a moderate-sized city. And yet the EU’s treaties, directives, and regulations – 50,000 pages worth – are enforced daily across Europe, covering domains from labor relations to financial markets to immigration, consumer protection, and pharmaceuticals. What’s more, E...
In this episode of Scope Conditions, we ask: what happens when your favorite candidate isn’t even running?We often think about the quality of democratic representation in terms of the outcomes that citizens get. For instance, we compare the policies a government enacts to what citizens say they want in surveys. Alternatively, we might compare the demographic characteristics of the candidates who make it into office with the demographic makeup of their constituents. Our guest today, Dr. S...
Today on Scope Conditions, we’re speaking with Dr. Dana El Kurd, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Richmond, about her recent book, Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine. In this book, Dana seeks to unravel a puzzle of Palestinian political development. With the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, Palestinians gained the prospect of democratic self-government, with the establishment of an elected Palestinian National Authority and...
Today’s episode is Part 2 of our conversation about metaketas with Dr. Tara Slough, an Assistant Professor of Politics at NYU, who co-led with Daniel Rubenson a metaketa on the governance of natural resources that was published this year in PNAS; and Dr. Graeme Blair, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA, who co-led a metaketa with Fotini Christia and Jeremy Weinstein testing the effects of community policing. The main paper from that project was just published last month in Sc...
The last two decades have seen an explosion of field experimentation in political science and economics. Field experiments are often seen as the gold standard for policy evaluation. If you want to know if an intervention will work, run a randomized controlled trial, and do it in a natural setting. Field experiments offer up a powerful mix of credible causal identification and real-world relevance.But there’s a catch: if you’ve seen one field experiment, you’ve seen one field experiment. A fie...
Today on Scope Conditions: how the paper-pushers of Empires reshaped colonialism in Southeast Asia. Our guest is Dr. Diana Kim, an Assistant Professor at Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Hans Kohn member (2021-22) at the Institute for Advanced Studies’ School of Historical Studies. In her award-winning book, Empires of Vice, Diana unpacks the puzzle of opium prohibition in the French and British colonies of Southeast Asia. As she traces out the twists and tu...
Today we are talking about the problem of maintaining social order. In particular, what happens when citizens see the police as ineffective and, in turn, decide to take the law into their own hands? And once mob justice becomes commonplace in a society, what can be done?In places where the state is weak, citizens often have to take it upon themselves to provide basic public services, such as building schools or collecting the garbage. And, as our guest today tells us, it can also include poli...
By their very nature, autocracies are political systems in which power is highly concentrated; dictators can do pretty much as they please. So dictatorships might seem an unusual place to go looking for institutions: the rules and structures that limit discretion and set bounds on who can do what. Yet over the last two decades, political scientists studying autocracies have done exactly that. The field has witnessed what Tom Pepinsky has called “an institutional turn” in the study of authorit...
1Our guest today is Dr. Mai Hassan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mai is the author of a recent book, Regime Threats and State Solutions, about how leaders manipulate the bureaucracy to maintain their hold on power.Imagine a political system in which the president has the power to hire, fire, and shuffle bureaucrats in the most important state agencies. How would the leader strategically choose to wield this authority? Perhaps she would decide to pa...
This is a conversation about the politics of voting from abroad: in particular, about how governments manipulate emigrants’ access to the ballot in order to protect their own hold on power.For the most part, elections are events that happen inside a country, as resident citizens cast ballots at local polling stations. However, around the world, about 281 million people live outside the country in which they were born, and a majority of countries give their emigrant citizens the legal right to...
In this episode of Scope Conditions, we talk about how civilians seek to survive civil war. Our guest is Dr. Justin Schon, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Virginia’s Democratic Statecraft Lab. In his new book, Surviving the War in Syria, Justin examines the repertoires of strategies that civilians choose from as they seek to keep themselves, their families, and their communities safe. In the West, we often think of migration as the key survival strategy for those threatened by civ...
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