Scope Conditions Podcast

Today on Scope Conditions: when the bombs don’t go off, the war isn't over. We tend to think of peace as beginning when the bombs stop falling. But as our guest today shows us, this is only half the story. Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States engaged in massive bombing in Cambodia. Between 1965 and 1973, the U.S. dropped 500,000 tons of explosives there — more than the combin...

Today on the podcast, why are more unequal neighborhoods sometimes better at promoting the collective good? A world of high inequality is, in many ways, a world in which the fortunes of the rich are detached from the welfare of the poor. It’s a world in which the affluent are less reliant on public goods for securing their own safety and wellbeing. Those with money can purchase essential services...

Political analysts are thinking a lot these days about the rule of law: where it comes from, what sustains it, how it can break down. Those are hard enough questions in themselves. And, yet — they simplify away an important complexity. They assume that there is only one law that rules.  As our guest today, Dr. Egor Lazarev – assistant professor of political science at Yale – points out to us, in m...

When we think of weak democracies around the world, we often think of their inability to maintain a monopoly on violence because of challenges outside the state – like militias, rebel groups, criminal gangs, and other external , violent organizations. But sometimes it’s actors deeply intertwined with the state – like political parties – who are engaging in the violence. Sometimes, the call is comi...

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 guest today, Jessie Trudeau , an Assistant Prof...

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 Ravenclaw. The Sorting Hat may be fiction, but it’s actu...

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 to solve problems. What do these public agencies...

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, water, and other scarce resources.  When the Unit...

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 maps neatly onto patterns of political coalition-...

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 corrections and warning-labels to educational programs de...

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, even though in reality, the fix is in. On this v...

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 race, ethnicity, or religion. In a new book with M...

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 criminal justice system in the U.S. and beyond. Agai...

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 partisan polarization is far from a uniquely American phe...

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 more diffuse and elusive nature, online activism...

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 across Europe, covering domains from labor relations...

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 demographic characteristics of the candidates who...

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 Accords in 1994, Palestinians gained the prospect of...

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 Fotini Christia and Jeremy Weinstein testing the...

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 credible causal identification and real-world relevance....

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 Vice , Diana unpacks the puzzle of opium prohibi...

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 themselves to provide basic public services, such as buil...

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 studying autocracies have done exactly that. The...

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 bureaucrats in the most important state agencie...

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, about 281 million people live outside the country in...