Scope Conditions Podcast
41 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 29 ratingsA podcast showcasing cutting-edge research in comparative politics.
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Episodes
Statecraft as Stagecraft, with Iza (Yue) Ding
January 27, 2024 18:00 - 1 hour - 52.3 MBMost 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 incentiv...
How the UN Keeps Peace Among Neighbors, with William G. Nomikos
October 01, 2023 23:00 - 1 hour - 51.7 MBToday 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 defu...
Race-Based Coalitions in Three Chinatowns, with Jae Yeon Kim
June 14, 2023 13:00 - 59 minutes - 40.5 MBToday 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-Am...
Can We Immunize Against Misinformation? with Sumitra Badrinathan
February 27, 2023 03:00 - 1 hour - 53.3 MBToday 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 an...
Trial and Terror, with Fiona Feiang Shen-Bayh
November 28, 2022 03:00 - 1 hour - 52.5 MBToday 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, ...
Overcoming the Hijab Penalty, with Donghyun Danny Choi
October 24, 2022 14:00 - 1 hour - 56.2 MBToday 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 ...
“Defunding the Police” as Transitional Justice, with Genevieve Bates
July 11, 2022 20:00 - 1 hour - 51.2 MBA 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 prioriti...
Partisan Polarization in Israel, with Chagai Weiss
May 23, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour - 49.7 MBToday 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 bee...
Online Dissent, Offline Repression, with Alexandra Siegel
May 01, 2022 22:00 - 1 hour - 45.6 MBCan 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 ...
Europe's Hidden Legal Architects, with Tommaso Pavone
April 10, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 59.7 MBToday 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...
Diagnosing Democracy's Representation Gap, with Sergio Montero
March 21, 2022 15:00 - 1 hour - 45.4 MBIn 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...
How Palestine Polarized, with Dana El Kurd
February 05, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 50.9 MBToday 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 an...
Randomizing Together (Part 2), with Tara Slough and Graeme Blair
December 19, 2021 04:00 - 50 minutes - 34.8 MBToday’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 S...
Randomizing Together (Part 1), with Tara Slough and Graeme Blair
December 09, 2021 20:00 - 1 hour - 45.2 MBThe 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 ...
Why Empires Declared a War on Drugs, with Diana Kim
November 11, 2021 19:00 - 1 hour - 50.5 MBToday 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 turn...
Can Boosting State Capacity Curb Social Disorder? with Anna Wilke
October 12, 2021 18:00 - 1 hour - 54.8 MBToday 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 p...
The Autocrat's Gambit, with Anne Meng
May 29, 2021 21:00 - 1 hour - 51.1 MBBy 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 autho...
Manipulating Personnel for Power, with Mai Hassan
May 03, 2021 02:00 - 1 hour - 50.2 MBOur 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...
Voter Suppression Goes Global, with Elizabeth Iams Wellman
April 04, 2021 14:00 - 1 hour - 48 MBThis 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 righ...
Surviving the Syrian Civil War, with Justin Schon
March 15, 2021 13:00 - 55 minutes - 38.3 MBIn 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 ...
Redistribution as Fairness, with Charlotte Cavaillé
February 22, 2021 14:00 - 1 hour - 56.2 MBWe 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 citizens reason about taxing the rich and spending on social benefits for the middle-class and poor. The book’s starting point is a thorny puzzle...
Strategic Indifference as Refugee Policy in the Global South, with Kelsey Norman
February 08, 2021 14:00 - 55 minutes - 37.8 MBIn 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 North Africa. Kelsey is a Fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, where she directs the Women’s...
The Gravitational Pull of Europe's Far Right, with Tarik Abou-Chadi
January 18, 2021 14:00 - 1 hour - 48.8 MBIn 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 parties dominated European politics for most of the postwar era, consistently winning large proportions of the vote at election time. Over the la...
How Strong Legislatures Emerge, with Ken Opalo
January 04, 2021 16:00 - 57 minutes - 39.3 MBIn 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. But where do strong legislatures come from? As political scientists, we commonly tell ourselves an origin story -- first set out by Douglass No...
Public Education as an Autocratic Project, with Agustina Paglayan
December 14, 2020 13:00 - 1 hour - 43.7 MBIn 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 book project underway expanding on this research. In this project, Paglayan seeks to challenge a great deal of what we think we know about the s...
Middle-Class Guardians of Autocracy, with Bryn Rosenfeld
November 23, 2020 13:00 - 51 minutes - 35.6 MBIn 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 in the post-Soviet region. She noticed that, in places like Russia and Kazakstan, the rising middle class was not a commercial bourgeosie or a gro...
The Economics of Playing the “Identity Card,” with Nikhar Gaikwad
November 09, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutes - 40.8 MBIn 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 drivers of populism often revolve around the questions of whether populism emerges from nativist, ethnocentric attitudes or from the economic anxieti...
Episode 3: The Upside of Nationalism, with Aram Hur
October 18, 2020 19:00 - 57 minutes - 39.4 MBIn today’s 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 nationalism today as an exclusionary and pernicious force in politics -- as, for instance, a driver of anti-immigrant sentiment and of conflict be...
The Upside of Nationalism, with Aram Hur
October 18, 2020 19:00 - 57 minutes - 39.4 MBIn 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 nationalism today as an exclusionary and pernicious force in politics -- as, for instance, a driver of anti-immigrant sentiment and of conflict betwe...
Episode 2: Forging Democracy out of the Trauma of Repression, with Elizabeth Nugent
October 04, 2020 19:00 - 50 minutes - 34.6 MBIn 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 with what comes next. The demise of a dictatorship does not necessarily lmean the start of a democracy: one autocratic regime can fall only to re...
Episode 2 — Forging Democracy out of the Trauma of Repression, with Elizabeth Nugent
October 04, 2020 19:00 - 50 minutes - 34.6 MBIn 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 with what comes next. The demise of a dictatorship does not necessarily lmean the start of a democracy: one autocratic regime can fall only to re...
Forging Democracy out of the Trauma of Repression, with Elizabeth Nugent
October 04, 2020 19:00 - 50 minutes - 34.6 MBIn 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 with what comes next. The demise of a dictatorship does not necessarily lmean the start of a democracy: one autocratic regime can fall only to re...
Episode 01: The promise and limits of intergroup contact with Salma Mousa
September 21, 2020 16:00 - 1 hour - 42.9 MBIn 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 course, for a huge range of political outcomes: for instance, for the risks of violence, civil war, and genocide; patterns of discrimination; a...
Episode 1: The Promise and Limits of Intergroup Contact, with Salma Mousa
September 21, 2020 16:00 - 1 hour - 42.9 MBIn 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 course, for a huge range of political outcomes: for instance, for the risks of violence, civil war, and genocide; patterns of discrimination; a...
Episode 1: The promise and limits of intergroup contact with Salma Mousa
September 21, 2020 16:00 - 1 hour - 42.9 MBIn 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 course, for a huge range of political outcomes: for instance, for the risks of violence, civil war, and genocide; patterns of discrimination; a...
The Promise and Limits of Intergroup Contact, with Salma Mousa
September 21, 2020 16:00 - 1 hour - 42.9 MBIn 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 course, for a huge range of political outcomes: for instance, for the risks of violence, civil war, and genocide; patterns of discrimination; an...
Episode 00 —Introducing Scope Conditions
September 17, 2020 19:00 - 6 minutes - 4.33 MBIntroducing Scope Conditions, a podcast about cutting-edge research in comparative politics.
Introducing Scope Conditions
September 17, 2020 19:00 - 6 minutes - 4.4 MBIntroducing Scope Conditions, a podcast about cutting-edge research in comparative politics.
Episode 0: Introducing Scope Conditions
September 17, 2020 19:00 - 6 minutes - 4.4 MBIntroducing Scope Conditions, a podcast about cutting-edge research in comparative politics.
Episode 00: Introducing Scope Conditions
September 17, 2020 19:00 - 6 minutes - 4.4 MBIntroducing Scope Conditions, a podcast about cutting-edge research in comparative politics.
Episode 01 — The promise and limits of intergroup contact with Salma Mousa
August 31, 2020 16:00 - 1 hour - 42.9 MBIn 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 course, for a huge range of political outcomes: for instance, for the risks of violence, civil war, and genocide; patterns of discrimination; a...