Political Science
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It is with great pleasure that we announce the winners of the 2020 DIAP Community Awards. The Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, with generous support from the President’s Office, instituted the DIAP Community Awards in 2018. These awards recognize students, staff, and faculty as well as an administrative and academic department within our Brown community who have used the DIAP as a vehicle to actively create positive change within their departments, programs, and beyond. These awards are highly competitive and selections were made from a pool of exceptional candidates who were nominated by other members of the Brown community.
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For some leaders, personal responsibility in disregarding warnings of an impending pandemic that has now killed 80,000 Americans and cratered the economy might stimulate reflection about the national good. Not so for Donald Trump, whose disastrous presidency continues to capsize the democratic institutions on which we have prided ourselves.
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UK in a changing Europe

Rose McDermott: Illness and Leadership

Professor Rose McDermott examines how leaders have dealt with illness during their time in office and how this impacts their leadership.
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Before the pandemic struck, Sara Blazey made the same three-hour commute to work, three days a week, for the better part of 12 years. The 63-year-old family lawyer from the Blue Mountains works for a domestic violence legal advice hotline in Parramatta and it used to be that she would wake at 7am, drive seven minutes to Hazelbrook station and from there catch the 7.17am train to Parramatta before making the same one-and-a-half hour trip home in the evening.
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Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University

Margaret Weir: podcast "Don't Tread on Me" episode

Is a country that’s had a successful revolution doomed to endlessly re-enact it? In this episode, Adam talks to Professor Margaret Weir (Brown University and Oxford) about why anti-lockdown protests take the form they do in America: armed men entering legislatures and the waving of flags with the slogan "Don't Tread on Me".
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As concern over Covid-19 shifts from a global health crisis to a global economic crisis we speak to political scientist Mark Blyth, author of the forthcoming book 'Angrynomics' about what this pandemic really means for the economy. How long can we afford lockdown? Is it time to abandon globalisation? And can our economies ever return to 'normal'? Mark Blyth was interviewed by Anne McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist and head of Economist Radio. You can find more about his forthcoming book here: https://amzn.to/3aP7ePH Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/intelligencesquared.
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We should not only expect that labour flows will now be more strictly regulated than before. But also more than ever before in recent decades, Western investors will also have to factor in political risks in their investment decision-making.
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Rob Grace, a Ph.D. student at Brown, drew from his research on humanitarian negotiation to offer advice on how to convince skeptical friends and family to protect themselves from COVID-19 via social distancing.
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This April, instead of submitting tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as usual, many Americans were waiting for the IRS to send them cash payments as part of a coronavirus relief package. On April 14, The Washington Post broke the news that the U.S. Treasury Department had made an “unprecedented” decision that stimulus checks sent via postal mail would carry the words “President Donald J. Trump” printed on the memo line — the first time in U.S. history a president’s name appeared on an IRS check.
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Every 10 years, the US government has taken a census of the country, then adjusted the number of Congressional seats for each state. After, states redrew the lines of House districts. Now, in the midst of the pandemic, the Census Bureau is asking for more time to complete in-person counting, thus delaying the information given to the states for redistricting.
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Department News

Update in American Politics - April

Rich Arenberg, Visiting Professor of the Practice of Political Science, Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs
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Politics/Letters

Bonnie Honig: Spitballing in a Pandemic

Isn’t it ironic that bleach, an agent of whitening, may bring about Trump’s downfall? After all he has done for whiteness?

And that television, the medium that gave life to his personal and political ambitions, may be the instrument of his demise?
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Rose McDermott, a professor of international relations at Brown University, argued that a lot of threat inflation comes from overrated low probability risks and underrated high probability risks. Things like terrorism or great power wars are low probability risks, but are highly overrated in public perception and public policy. People feared a terrorist incident far more than a global pandemic, even if such a pandemic was much more likely — and ultimately more deadly.
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"Democracy is beautiful in theory," wrote Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. "In practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that one day." The fiery fascist did not have a perfect score in the prognostication department. For example, his decision to ally with Adolf Hitler worked out poorly for him, and he ended up summarily executed by a countryman and hung upside down in a town square.
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My dentist frequently reminds me not to grind my teeth. As I watched heroic Wisconsin voters stand in line for hour after hour during a pandemic, I ground harder. As I read the Supreme Court's decision requiring Wisconsin voters to choose between the risk of disease and their right to vote, I clenched my fists. And as I watch as the president on his nightly reality show in the White House press room fumble the chance to lead the nation, it makes my blood boil.
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The Conversation

We are all humanitarian negotiators now

Rob Grace, PhD candidate in Political Science, writes on planning your 'please take social distancing seriously' conversations in The Conversation.
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Oil prices have fallen dramatically in 2020, with dire consequences for some countries. The twin shocks of the novel coronavirus and a Russian-Saudi price war drove Brent crude to a low of about $25 a barrel in late March. Since then, prices recovered somewhat on rumors of an OPEC-plus production deal, but the outlook for oil prices remains low. Even if producers cut back significantly, oil prices are unlikely to return to $70 a barrel, as they were in January.
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Professor and Chair of Political Science Wendy Schiller weighed in on how COVID-19 is changing the Democratic primaries — and how the fallout could change people’s minds in November’s presidential election.
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Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs

Susan Moffitt and Eric Patashnik: Politics and the Opiod Crisis

In April 2020, Susan Moffitt co-edited the volume, "The Politics of the Opioid Epidemic" with Eric Patashnik (Brown University) as well as co-authoring an article in the volume with Paul Testa (Brown University) and Marie Schenk (Brown University). The piece focuses on American policy and practice in response to the epidemic, as well as exploring the question: "Where do we go from here?"
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Cambridge University Press

Sean Monahan, PhD '21, in Modern Intellectual History

The American Workingmen's Parties in the 1828–32 period occupy a distinctive place within the history of socialism: they were the first to embrace a strategy of organizing a working-class political party and seizing the democratic state for their collective self-liberation. With universal suffrage, a working-class majority could take political power electorally and expropriate the rich. Karl Marx read about these workers’ parties through works by Thomas Hamilton and Thomas Cooper in the period of his early political development.
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When it comes to pithy lines about dishonesty, writer Mary McCarthy's takedown of playwright Lillian Hellman remains a timeless classic. "Everything she writes is a lie," said McCarthy, "including 'and' and 'the.'" McCarthy died before Donald Trump became president, and wherever she is, she is undoubtedly glad she did. But any literary exaggeration by Hellman is mere chicken feed compared with the steady flow of falsehoods to which the nation is subjected daily by the president, who's responsible for bringing the word "pathological," previously used only by medical professionals, into common usage. As Trump likes to say: "No one could have imagined it. We've never seen anything like it."
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Richard Arenberg, Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs of the Watson Institute at Brown University, joined Joe Paolino Jr. to discuss the latest political news, the race to determine a Democratic nominee for president, how bipartisanship has fallen out of favor and the continuing situation surrounding the Coronavirus, on the show that aired March 15, 2020 on ABC6.
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As the new coronavirus has spread around the world, many people have begun to rely on online maps to understand it. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University used a software package called GIS to create an interactive dashboard with a map, numerical data and charts.
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Two years ago, Bernie Sanders journeyed south to trace the history of a past revolution, and to imagine a new one. On April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., thousands of people gathered on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, for a rally and a march. Sanders was one of the speakers.
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Russell Sage Foundation

Eric Patashnik awarded Sage Foundation Fellowship

The Russell Sage Foundation is pleased to announce the selection of 17 Visiting Scholars for the 2020-2021 academic year. While in residence at RSF in New York City, they will pursue research and writing projects that reflect the foundation’s commitment to strengthening the social sciences and conducting research to “improve social and living conditions in the United States."
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The New York Times Magazine

Peter Andreas' book reviewed in NYT: A History of War in Six Drugs

In a newly released book, “Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs,” Peter Andreas, a professor of international studies at Brown University, has drawn from an impressive and eclectic mix of sources to give psychoactive and addictive drugs a fuller place in discussions of war.
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Watching Trump in Michigan this week talking about Debbie and John Dingell, I was struck by how he spoke the words as well as by what he said. Commentators noted the offenses against Dingell, the universally liked, longest serving Congressman from Michigan, who is recently deceased and unable therefore to respond to the suggestion he may be in Hell not Heaven right now.
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At the outset of the Senate impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, all 100 senators met in the historic old Senate chamber where Webster, Clay and Calhoun, the Senate’s “immortal trio,” established the standards of Senate oratory and deliberation.
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The Bartholomewtown Podcast

Wendy Schiller on Podcast: The 2020 Presidential Election as 2019 closes

In this episode of The Bartholomewtown Podcast, Bill Bartholomew is joined by Brown University Political Science Department Chair Dr. Wendy Schiller for the inaugural installment of the recurring BTOWN series "2020pod", in which the pair will offer perspective and analysis at key moments throughout the 2020 election cycle.
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The Indian Express

Ashu Varshney: India's International Image

Right since 1945, up until recently, few democratic polities moved from inclusion to exclusion in their citizenship practices and laws. The big exceptions were mostly authoritarian, the Chinese treatment of Uighurs being the most recent. Some democratic polities might have remained as exclusionary as before, but, by and large, when change came about, democratic polities edged towards larger inclusion.
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It was a powerful congressional weapon deployed in only the most extreme cases, so explosive that lawmakers feared the wider damage it could do if used for the wrong reasons. Today, the filibuster is an everyday part of Senate business, standard operating procedure in a polarized world where the once rare has become commonplace.
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The Brown Daily Herald

Domingo Morel PhD'14: A different path for Providence Schools

In early November, the state of Rhode Island took control of the Providence Public School District. The takeover came after the release of the “Johns Hopkins Report,” which detailed the district’s academic challenges as well as the bureaucratic problems that have hindered the management of the district.
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