In democracies all around the world, criminal organizations are involved in electoral politics. Notable examples include the Sicilian mafia and Pablo Escobar's drug cartel in Colombia. We sometimes think of these criminal groups as having politicians in their pockets or as directing politicians to do their bidding at the barrel of a gun. But our gu…

Today on Scope Conditions: college dorms shed light on where group culture comes from and how it molds us. At Harry Potter’s alma mater, each new student is assigned to a House that aligns with their true character. The mystical Sorting Hat takes the courageous ones and sorts them into House Gryffindor, while the studious know-it-alls go to Ravencl…

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…

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,…

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…

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 correct…

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…

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 …

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 cr…

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 partisa…

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 …

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 acr…

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 …

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 Accor…

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 F…

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 credib…

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…

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 themsel…

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…

Our 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…

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, ab…

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 themse…

We are talking today about the politics of redistribution in an age of rising inequality. Our guest is Dr. Charlotte Cavaillé, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan’s Ford School. We discuss with Charlotte her book project, Fair Enough: Support for Redistribution in the Age of Inequality, which seeks to explain how c…

In this episode, we ask: when a state doesn’t enforce the rules, is it because they don’t have the capacity to do so, or because they’ve chosen not to? Put differently, when is indifference a deliberate policy strategy? We talk with Dr. Kelsey Norman about her new book, Reluctant Reception: Refugees, Migration, and Governance in the Middle East and…

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Tarik Abou-Chadi, an Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Zürich, about how far-right parties have reshaped politics in advanced democracies. Consider the dilemma faced by mainstream political parties of right and the left in much of Europe. Center-right, conservative and social democratic …

In this episode, we talk about how strong legislatures emerge. When we think about what makes a political system a democracy, we usually think of one key ingredient as being an elected legislature that can constrain the executive: an elected assembly that serves as a check on executive whim and has the ultimate say on core matters of public policy.…

In this conversation, we talk with Dr. Agustina Paglayan, an assistant professor of political science at UC San Diego, about her project “The Dark Side of Education,” an examination of the spread of mass primary schooling around the world. Paglayan recently published an article on the topic in the American Political Science Review and has a larger …

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Bryn Rosenfeld, an Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University, about her new book, The Autocratic Middle Class: How State Dependency Reduces the Demand for Democracy (Princeton University Press). This book’s starting point is a puzzling observation that Rosenfeld made during years conducting research i…

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Nikhar Gaikwad, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, about his book project on what happens when identity politics and the economy collide. Many debates in political science revolve around the question of what matters more: identity or economics. For instance, debates about the driver…

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Aram Hur, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri, about her book project Narratives of Duty: How National Stories Shape Civic Duty in Asia. Narratives of Duty is a study about the social good that, under the right conditions, can emerge from nationalism. We often think about natio…

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Elizabeth Nugent, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, about her new book, After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition (Princeton University Press). Nugent is interested in authoritarian regimes that have collapsed in the face of popular uprising -- and specifically w…

In this episode, we talk about improving relations between social groups. For decades, social scientists and policymakers have been examining whether meaningful social interaction between groups can help reduce prejudice and conflict, or what’s been known as the “contact hypothesis.” Whether social interaction breeds tolerance has implications, of …

Introducing Scope Conditions, a podcast about cutting-edge research in comparative politics.