Scope Conditions Podcast

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 themselves, their families, and their communities safe...

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 citizens reason about taxing the rich and spending...

 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 North Africa. Kelsey is a Fellow for the Middle...

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 parties dominated European politics for most of t...

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. But where do strong legislatures come from? As po...

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 book project underway expanding on this research....

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 in the post-Soviet region. She noticed that, in p...

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 drivers of populism often revolve around the questions...

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 nationalism today as an exclusionary and pernicious fo...

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 with what comes next. The demise of a dictatorshi...

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 course, for a huge range of political outcomes: f...

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