Women's International Thought: Towards a New Canon
Discussant: Jan Eijking
Who Governs? The COVID-19 Pandemic, Trust and Evaluations of National and Local Government
The coronavirus pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges for governments around the world. These challenges have necessitated national policy responses such as lockdowns and government funding to avoid mass unemployment. However, national government responses have varied along with the numbers of cases and numbers of deaths and local lockdowns (e.g., tier systems in the UK and France), the responsibilities given to regional and local governments, and the divisions these circumstances have raised between national and sub-national identities and interests.
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Closing the Gap: The Politics of Property Rights in Kenya
In many cases of state-led land reform, governments allocate land but withhold formal property rights from recipients. When do leaders grant property rights to landholders? We argue that land rights are a strategic distributive good that leaders conservatively and selectively relinquish in response to popular pressures.
Parties as Disciplinarians: Charisma and Commitment Problems in Programmatic Campaigning
We study how parties balance the benefits of disciplined programmatic campaigning with the electoral appeal of charismatic, but potentially less faithful candidates. We incorporate the well known collective action problem arising from candidates’ inability to fully internalize the fruits of programmatic brand-building. While parties may strategically use promotions to overcome this problem, we show that when highly charismatic candidates bring strong electoral rewards, the party may be unable to commit to promoting based on programmatic effort over charisma.
The punishment against black girls and women and its political consequences
Established research in political science has revealed the superlative political participation of Black American women. Yet, Black women and girls also represent a disproportionate percentage of the prison system and the fastest growing juvenile justice population, respectively. Still, there is very little work on the public perceptions shaping Black women and girls and its negative impacts on their experiences with punishment and political participation.
Russia's Use of the Wagner Group 'Private' Military Company
Russia has employed the semi-state Wagner Group security company in Ukraine, Syria, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Libya, and Mozambique (so far). Wagner is tightly connected to Russia's military intelligence organization (the GRU), and its contractor, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is one of President Vladimir Putin's close cronies. Why, then, is Wagner technically illegal (and even unconstitutional) in Russia? And what does Russia hope to gain from using it--including in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa? Using the best available evidence, this presentation explores these mysteries.
Party System Institutionalization and Stability in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes
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In this paper we explore the question of party system institutionalization in competitive authoritarian regimes. We begin with a discussion of party system institutionalization in democracies and in conventional authoritarian regimes and its central role in the regime stability in both types. We then explore the extent to which standard indicators of institutionalization, namely electoral volatility, are useful and meaningful within authoritarian contexts.
Deeper Roots: Historical Causal Inference and the Political Legacy of Slavery
The legacies of slavery have shaped nearly all aspects of American politics. Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen’s Deep Roots: How Slavery Shapes Southern Politics deploys sophisticated methods of causal inference to empirically identify one of these legacies: the enduring impact that slavery has had on white southerners’ racial attitudes. An important part of their causal argument is the role of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which they argue was the critical juncture when the distribution of white racial attitudes in the South began to diverge based on the prior pervasiveness of slavery.
Artificial Intelligence and National Security Decision-making
Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to increase military efficiency, but also poses unique challenges to multinational military operations and decision-making that scholars and policymakers have yet to explore. The data- and resource-intensive nature of AI development creates barriers to burden-sharing and interoperability that can hamper multinational operations. By accelerating the speed of combat and providing adversaries with a tool to heighten mistrust between allies, AI can also strain the complex processes that allies and security partners use to make decisions.