New Books in Political Science

Why do international donors brand foreign aid? And what impact does it have on popular attitudes towards them? Join Matthew Winters and Petra Alderman as they talk about soft power, foreign aid branding, and popular attitudes towards USAID and Japan in India, Bangladesh, and Uganda. They discuss whether foreign aid branding works and address several tensions linked to this practice, including bran...

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey spoke with Francesco Ronchi and Udo Zolleis, two European Parliament officials and analysts. With the European Parliament elections taking place shortly after we spoke, they share their insights on the direction that politics in Europe may take in the coming months and years, especially with regard to right-wing nationalist groups...

What are political beliefs and how do we form them? Oliver Traldi, a current John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the James Madison Program, discusses this and more in his recently-published his first book, Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 2024), a textbook which aims to explain the reasons behind political beliefs and disagreements from a philosophical p...

Until 1900, most political parties in the United States chose their leaders – either in back rooms with a few party elites making decisions or in conventions. The direct primary, in which voters select party nominees for state and federal offices, was one of the most widely adopted political reforms of the early twentieth century Progressive movement. Intuitively, the direct primary sounds democra...

Over the past several decades, predominantly White, postindustrial cities in America’s agriculture and manufacturing centre have flipped from blue to red. Cities that were once part of the traditional Democratic New Deal coalition began to vote Republican, providing crucial support for the electoral victories of Republican presidents from Reagan to Trump.  In How the Heartland Went Red Why Local F...

Harmony and Normalization: US-Cuban Musical Diplomacy (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) explores the channels of musical exchange between Cuba and the United States during the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, who eased the musical embargo of the island and restored relations with Cuba. Musical exchanges during this period act as a lens through which to view not only US-Cuban musical re...

Ibrahim Fraihat’s latest book, Iran and Saudi Arabia: Taming a Chaotic Conflict (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) is much more than an exploration of the history of animosity between Saudi Arabia and Iran and its debilitating impact on an already volatile Middle East. It is a detailed roadmap for management and resolution of what increasingly looks like an intractable conflict. Based on years of...

Since coming to power in 2002, Turkey’s governing party, the AKP, has made poverty relief a central part of their political program. In addition to neoliberal reforms, AKP’s program has involved an emphasis on Islamic charity that is unprecedented in the history of the Turkish Republic. To understand the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, Zencirci introduces the concept of the Muslim Soci...

John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916) transformed how people around the world view the purposes of schooling. This new edition makes Dewey's ideas come alive for a new generation of readers. Nicholas Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University. He is the author of Teaching Political Theory: A Pluralistic Approach (2022) and Common Core: National Education Standards and t...

European colonialism was often driven by the pursuit of natural resources, and the resulting colonisation and decolonization processes have had a profound impact on the formation of the majority of sovereign states that exist today. But how exactly have natural resources influenced the creation of formerly colonised states? And would the world map of sovereign states look significantly different i...

In times where conflicts around the globe are an everyday topic, the place of the United Nations in resolving these conflicts is constantly being questioned. In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey discusses this issue with Professor Abiodun Williams, Professor of the Practice of International Politics at Tufts University and former Director of Strategic Planning to UN...

It is widely acknowledged that the United States is in the grip of an enduring housing crisis. It is less frequently recognized that this crisis amounts to more than there being an insufficient supply of adequate shelter. It rather is tied to a range of other forms of social and economic vulnerability – and many of these forms of vulnerability impede a citizen’s capacity to function as a full memb...

Election campaigns are becoming ever more expensive, with many parties and candidates spending large sums of money on advertising, campaign materials, and staff. But how does money affect campaign environment and electoral outcomes? Does more money mean better chances of winning? And what role do large businesses play in this? Listen to William Horncastle as he talks to Petra Alderman about his re...

On May 29, South Africans voted in the seventh election since the end of political apartheid in the early 1990s. This is the first election in which the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), is polling below 50 percent, which could force them into a coalition with one or more other parties to govern the country after the election. To learn more, we speak with Carolyn Holmes, an assist...

Nisrin Elamin is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto whose work investigates the connections between land, race, belonging, and empire-making in Sudan and the broader Sahel region. Elamin joins the Ufahamu Africa podcast for this episode focused on the conflict in Sudan. Books, Links and Articles “Recent protests in Sudan are much more than bread riots.” Analysis by...

Seeking a second term as US president in November, Donald Trump joins a roster of politicians whose declared aim is to use legal means to bend democracy to their will and in their interests. The system withstood his first term. In Venezuela, Ecuador, Turkey, and Hungary, the systems didn’t, and they are undergoing stress tests in Israel, Slovakia, and Georgia. In Venezuela, Turkey and Hungary, ele...

Senegalese President Macky Sall has postponed the country’s presidential elections originally scheduled for February 25. It's part of a series of concerning moves by Sall to extend his stay in power. The Ufahamu Africa podcast talks with experts on the topic: Bamba Ndiaye and Michelle D. Gavin. Bamba Ndiaye is an assistant professor of African studies at Emory University's Oxford College. He is al...

The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is the concluding text in political theorist Eileen M. Hunt’s trilogy of books focusing on the work of Mary Shelley. All three books have been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and they weave together Shelley’s novels (Frankenstein, The Last Man) and her short stories, as well as her...

A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, in Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy (U Chicago Press, 2024), Carola Binder reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have br...

Vanessa Walker's Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U. S. Human Rights Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 2020) explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the United States government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. Walker shows...

The U.S. Senate is so sharply polarized along partisan and ideological lines today that it's easy to believe it was always this way. But in the turbulent 1960s, even as battles over civil rights and the war in Vietnam dominated American politics, bipartisanship often prevailed. One key reason: two remarkable leaders who remain giants of the Senate--Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois and...

The scientific method that aspiring social scientists are taught in graduate school seems pretty straightforward: you start with a hypothesis, figure our how you’re going to operationalize and measure your variables, pick cases that provide a tough test of your hypothesis, then collect your data, analyze it, and report your findings. However, for comparative-historical social scientists, things ar...

Peter Ireland (Boston College Economics Professor) joins the podcast to discuss his career as a monetary economist, his views on the history of monetarism, New Keynesian models, and the Shadow Open Market Committee which Peter sits on and celebrates its 50th anniversary. Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with interests in international macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics and is curre...

How do Asian nations exercise soft power in the Baltics? Soft power is a political strategy to influence other international relations actors by using a variety of political, economic, and cultural instruments. The rise of Asia aligns with its growing economic, political, and cultural influences worldwide, including in geographically distant Central Eastern and Nordic Europe. In this episode, Agni...

In November, it will be 25 years since the Battle of Seattle – the summit and street fight that marked the end of a half-century of ever-broadening global trade negotiations. Between 2013 and 2016, the same “anti-globalisation” movement sank a US-EU bid to build a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership but it wasn’t until 2016 – with the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election as pre...