Political Science
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Williams Magazine

Reckoning and Responsibility

Juliet Hooker, Professor of Political Science, speaks at Williams College as an alumnus. She discusses movements, monuments, and the long struggle to achieve racial justice.
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Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

Rob Blair on Voting and Electoral Minipulation

The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University supports multidisciplinary research, teaching, and public education on international affairs. The Institute promotes the work of students, faculty, visiting scholars, and policy practitioners who analyze and develop initiatives to address contemporary global problems.
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The Indian Express

Ashu Varshney: Trump could win an election he lost

In Trump’s America, dog whistles have become bull horns. Those groups that wish to preempt a dystopia have a huge task ahead of them. How Trump’s illness will affect the emerging lines of the political battle is unpredictable at this stage.
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Brown Alumni Magazine

Filming in the Jungle

Poli Sci Undergraduate alum, Alejandro Landes '03, discusses filming the movie Monos in the Colombian jungle.
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The Washington Post

Rich Arenberg: Wash Post: Don't fall for filibuster abolition

Carl Levin, a Democrat, served as a U.S. senator from Michigan from 1979 to 2015. Richard A. Arenberg, co-author of “Defending the Filibuster,“ is interim director of the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy and a visiting professor at Brown University.
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"Once a country is habituated to liars," Gore Vidal once observed, "it takes generations to bring back the truth." Many of us don't have generations left. After four years during which President Donald Trump has waged thermonuclear war on the truth, we face the depressing reality of living out our days in a country in which, thanks to Trump and the cultlike embrace of him by far too many of our countrymen, corruption has not been merely normalized but legitimized.
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University of California Press

Linda Cook: Can Russia’s Health and Welfare Systems Handle the Pandemic?

The COVID-19 pandemic has tested the preparedness of Russia’s public health system to respond to a nationwide crisis, and the ability of its broader welfare state to cushion the population against the economic impacts. This essay puts these developments in the context of recent reforms of the health care and welfare systems, showing how they affected the population’s vulnerability to the pandemic’s health and economic shocks, and the government’s ability to manage both.
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Knox College

Constitution Day lecture

Professor Melvin Rogers, Associate Professor of Political Science, Director of Graduate Studies, delivered a colloquium at Knox University as part of their Constitution Day lecture series.
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After the 2008 economic collapse, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations launched a series of inquiries aimed at exposing the rot underlying the financial services industry. During one memorable hearing, then-Sen. Carl Levin grilled Goldman Sachs executives on their sale of investment products they knew to be dubious in order to increase their already eye-popping compensation. An exchange in which Levin used internal emails to show how Goldman Sachs officials sold products they knew to be "s—-ty deals" went viral.
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APSR

UN Peacekeeping and the Rule of Law

Robert Blair: The UN is intimately involved in efforts to restore the rule of law in conflict and postconflict settings. Yet despite the importance of the rule of law for peace, good governance, and economic growth, evidence on the impact of these efforts is scant.
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The New York Times

Jim Morone: NYTimes book review: Republic of Wrath

If political scientists’ warnings about the poisonous effects of partisanship may have seemed a bit overwrought before, they certainly don’t at present. Viewing the reality of the coronavirus pandemic through the cockeyed lens of American politics can now be lethal.
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On the morning of Dec. 22, 1944, German soldiers waving white flags approached American troops defending the Belgian city of Bastogne against the Nazi counterattack known as the Battle of the Bulge. The German army had the American defenders completely surrounded and outnumbered, and the Americans were rapidly running out of supplies by five to one.
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Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy

Wendy Schiller & Kaitlin Sidorsky: Litigating Lives and Gender Inequality

In this article, we show that domestic violence public policies are implemented inconsistently across states under federalism. Using original survey data of public defenders across 16 states, with data on domestic violence laws, we demonstrate that there are differing policies and implementation practices regarding domestic violence cases depending on where they are adjudicated. State level domestic violence laws, such as mandatory arrest and firearm access restrictions, combined with structural elements of the judicial system, and public defender personal characteristics, exert significant influence in determining the outcomes of domestic violence cases. Overall, our analysis shows that the lack of uniformity in the implementation of domestic violence policy creates inequality in the criminal justice system’s treatment of domestic violence and makes personal security for women contingent on where they live.
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Politics/Letters Live

Bonnie Honig: Waiting for John Kelly

Waiting for John Kelly? He cannot save the Republic from what ails it.* Bonnie Honig   In the New Yorker, John Cassidy refers to the story that Trump routinely refers to deceased and injured members of the US military “suckers” and “losers” as a “controversy” and calls on John Kelly, the General who served as […]
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Last week the Republican Party held its national convention to nominate Donald Trump as their candidate for the 2020 presidential election. Bonnie Honig writes that the convention gave us another look at what power can look like if unchecked and unbalanced.
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Department News

Jeff Robbins In the News Summer 2020

Jeff Robbins, Visiting Professor of the Practice of Political Science, writes about U.S. politics in Creators Syndicate.
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A top Senate Republican said Wednesday he is “more optimistic today than I have been” about Congress passing another coronavirus stimulus package before the end of the month, and he cautioned both parties could face political consequences in November if a stalemate over relief funding continues.
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The Contemporary Condition

Bonnie Honig: The People Want Their House Back

“Here. Don’t say I never gave you anything,” Trump sneered when he tossed a candy at Angela Merkel early in his presidency. (This was at a 2018 G-7 meeting, though Trump may have mistaken it for a Middle School lunchroom.) Last night he tossed a candy at the American people while he took everything else away. Impeach this! he all but said as he strode down a long staircase (no escalator to be had) and then strutted around a White House turned from a symbol of public government into a stage for his Republican campaign for the Presidency.
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Department News

Manento awarded Dirksen Research Grant

Congratulations to Cory Manento, PhD candidate, on receiving a Dirksen Congressional Research Grant which funds research on congressional leadership and the U.S. Congress.
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No one has ever accused Abe Foxman of being derelict in defending Israel or soft when it comes to protecting the Jewish people. A Holocaust survivor who only narrowly escaped the fate suffered by 6 million Jews, Foxman served the Anti-Defamation League for a half-century, including 28 years as its national director. A force of nature, he became the face of the endless battle against anti-Semitism, melding bluntness and fearlessness with legendary tirelessness.
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Steven Calabresi is not what you'd call a "leftist." The co-founder of conservative legal group the Federalist Society worked for former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and has only voted for Republican presidential candidates, including Donald Trump. Now a law professor, Calabresi adamantly opposed last year's impeachment of President Trump on constitutional grounds.
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Reuters

Mark Blyth: Angrynomics book review

What went wrong? Many books have attempted to tackle that question since 2016, when the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential victory threatened to upend the global economic order. Replies tend to fall into two broad categories. One is hand-wringing by anxious liberals, who lament the unravelling of a system that has brought so much peace and prosperity. The other is hand-waving by more conservative writers, who welcome electoral revolts as an overdue reassertion of national sovereignty.
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The Wall of Moms in Portland, Oregon, are mostly dressed in yellow to stand out and make it easier to find one another in case they get separated in a melée. On their first recorded night out as a unit, July 19, the women linked arms and chanted “Feds steer clear, Moms are here.” One of them was visibly pregnant. All were brave, as they faced anonymized federal police forces wielding tear gas, pepper bombs, and truncheons. Someone on Twitter called the women Momtifa, which is an excellent coinage. Moms against fascism and with antifa helps to undo the associations Trump and Barr have constructed. No longer thugs and anarchists, antifa becomes someone’s beloved sons and daughters. Those watching from afar may feel their sympathies start to shift.
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While comfortable Americans are passing the pandemic studying their favorite restaurants' takeout schedules and strategizing Zoom techniques, tens of millions of our countrymen dramatically less fortunate are desperately trying to keep their families from being tossed into the street.
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The recent murders of innocent Black people have galvanized individuals to fight against the oppression of Blacks in this country. The Race and Capitalism Project, along with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, has organized a panel featuring historians, activists, and political theorists, Juliet Hooker (Brown), Barbara Ransby (University of Illinois), Vesla Weaver (Johns Hopkins), and Megan Ming Francis (University of Washington) to discuss "Anti-Black Violence and the Ongoing Fight for Freedom."
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Polls, betting odds and pundits are all pointing toward a substantial victory for Joe Biden. The New York Times poll showed Biden leading President Trump by a staggering 50 percent – 36 percent, a 14-point margin. The Real Clear Politics polling averages show a 9-point lead for Biden. He leads Trump even more among women voters. The Times poll also indicated strong leads in critical swing states Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina, ranging from 6 to 11 points. These results point to an overwhelming Electoral College victory.
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It isn't easy being Donald Trump these days: so many people to silence and so little time. Muzzling those who have damaging evidence on you can be exhausting in the best of circumstances, and keeping a lid on so much incriminating information springing from so many different sources would make anyone cranky.
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Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs

Jeff Colgan: Asset Revaluation and the climate change

In June 2020 Jeff Colgan co-wrote, "Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change," a piece focused on a dynamic theory of climate politics based on the present and future revaluation of assets that accelerate climate change, such as fossil fuel plants.
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It's been another bad stretch for Donald Trump. The president's terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week began with his labored shuffle down a short, modestly inclined ramp after giving an even more labored speech at West Point, one eliciting an audience response somewhere between tepid and silent. It was an event commandeered by Trump himself.
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Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

Mark Blyth: Angrynomics - a virtual book talk

Join Watson Director Edward Steinfeld for a conversation with Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance Director Mark Blyth about his new book, Angrynomics (co-authored with Eric Longeran).
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Listen now (85 min) | Escaping household chaos, a car-bound Jonah talks prisons with Brown University’s David Skarbek. Bolivian jails and Soviet gulags are just two choices in this long game of Where’d-You-Rather: Incarceration Edition. Skarbek takes us through the highlights of his upcoming book and touches on the delicate subject of policing.
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The inhabitants of Chelsea, Massachusetts, have known tough times for a long time, long before the COVID-19 pandemic hit them hard. Almost half of Chelsea's population consists of recent immigrants, largely from Latin America, and almost 1 in 5 lived below the poverty line even before the virus struck and wiped out the economy.
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