Shows
Scope Conditions PodcastRules of Law, with Egor LazarevPolitical 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 many parts of the world, the question is not just whether the law will rule – it’s also which of many legal orders will prevail. In his recent book State...2025-06-171h 20
Scope Conditions PodcastViolence as Campaign Strategy, with Niloufer SiddiquiWhen 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 coming from inside the house.Our guest today, Niloufer Siddiqui, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany - State University of New York, shares with us insights from her award-winning book Under the Gun...2025-02-201h 14
Scope Conditions PodcastHow Criminal Governance Undermines Elections, with Jessie TrudeauIn 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 Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, has spent years studying a different kind of relationship that can evolve between politicians and criminal gangs: candidates for office sometimes hire...2024-09-201h 18
Scope Conditions PodcastWhat College Dorms can teach us about Culture, with Joan Ricart-HuguetToday 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 actually a lot like life. Much of the social world works this way: whether by assignment or by self-selection, people often end up in social environments that already fit...2024-07-221h 18
Scope Conditions PodcastStatecraft as Stagecraft, with Iza (Yue) DingMost 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 incentives of the central state?Our guest, Dr. Iza Ding, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern U...2024-01-271h 16
Scope Conditions PodcastHow the UN Keeps Peace Among Neighbors, with William G. NomikosToday 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 defusing tensions among neighbors – preventing local disputes from spiraling into widespread violence and derailing a larger peace process. ...2023-10-021h 15
Scope Conditions PodcastRace-Based Coalitions in Three Chinatowns, with Jae Yeon KimToday 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-American and Afro-Caribbean communities in places like New York City or the absence before the 1970s of a Latino political identity encompassing Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans....2023-06-1459 min
Scope Conditions PodcastCan We Immunize Against Misinformation? with Sumitra BadrinathanToday 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 and its antidotes comes from the US and other Western contexts – places with notably high rates of formal education and internet exposure, where most of the...2023-02-271h 17
Scope Conditions PodcastTrial and Terror, with Fiona Feiang Shen-BayhToday 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, an assistant professor of Government at the College of Willia...2022-11-281h 16
Scope Conditions PodcastOvercoming the Hijab Penalty, with Donghyun Danny ChoiToday 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 of political science at Brown, uses an innovative set of field experiments to test an alternative possibility: that...2022-10-241h 21
Scope Conditions Podcast“Defunding the Police” as Transitional Justice, with Genevieve BatesA 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 priorities and resources with calls to “defund the police”: to shift money away from armed law enforcement and towa...2022-07-111h 14
Scope Conditions PodcastPartisan Polarization in Israel, with Chagai WeissToday 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 been attending to the sociological and emotional features of partisan differentiation – to the ways partisanship can become...2022-05-231h 12
Scope Conditions PodcastOnline Dissent, Offline Repression, with Alexandra SiegelCan 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 censor online dissent, though it takes a high level of technological sophistication and state capacity to shut down social media opposit...2022-05-021h 06
Scope Conditions PodcastEurope's Hidden Legal Architects, with Tommaso PavoneToday 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, EU law trumps national law. Judges – national judges – strike down actions by their own governments when those actions contravene EU rules. So how did Eur...2022-04-101h 26
Scope Conditions PodcastDiagnosing Democracy's Representation Gap, with Sergio MonteroIn 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. Sergio Montero, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester, argues that, if we wan...2022-03-211h 05
Scope Conditions PodcastHow Palestine Polarized, with Dana El KurdToday 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 and a process intended to culminate in the creation of a Palestinian state. The Palestinian people entered Oslo with a highly mobilized and well-organized civil society — conditions that...2022-02-051h 14
Ufahamu AfricaEp. 131: A conversation with Yang-Yang Zhou of the Scope Conditions PodcastAs fans of the Scope Conditions podcast, we're excited to share this interview with Yang-Yang Zhou, one of the hosts of the show. Scope Conditions features cutting-edge research in comparative politics from across the world, so we took this opportunity to talk to Zhou about her own cutting-edge work studying the effects of migrants on host communities. Take a listen to this great conversation between Kim, Rachel, and Yang-Yang Zhou! Books, Links, & ArticlesScope Conditions Podcast with Yang-Yang Zhou & Alan JacobsDOEK! by Rémy Ngamije "Ignorance, Denial, and Insurgency in Mozambique" by Cor...2022-01-2244 min
Scope Conditions PodcastRandomizing Together (Part 2), with Tara Slough and Graeme BlairToday’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 Science.In Part 1, we learned what a metaketa is, how it’s typically organized, and what the...2021-12-1950 min
Scope Conditions PodcastRandomizing Together (Part 1), with Tara Slough and Graeme BlairThe 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 field experiment is essentially a case study with strong causal evidence. So you now know s...2021-12-091h 05
Scope Conditions PodcastWhy Empires Declared a War on Drugs, with Diana KimToday 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 turns of colonial drug policies, Diana asks how states define the problems they need to solve, and how polic...2021-11-111h 13
Scope Conditions PodcastCan Boosting State Capacity Curb Social Disorder? with Anna WilkeToday 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 policing. In parts of the world where the police are seen...2021-10-121h 19
Scope Conditions PodcastThe Autocrat's Gambit, with Anne MengBy 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 authoritarianism, with scholars such as Barbara Geddes, Jason Brownlee, and Jennifer Gandhi analyzing how institutions like dominant parties and...2021-05-291h 14
Scope Conditions PodcastManipulating Personnel for Power, with Mai HassanOur 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 pack the state with her own supporters -- for example, with members of her ethnic group...2021-05-031h 13
Scope Conditions PodcastVoter Suppression Goes Global, with Elizabeth Iams WellmanThis 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 right to vote.The numbers here are not trivial. While exact figures are hard to co...2021-04-041h 09
Scope Conditions PodcastSurviving the Syrian Civil War, with Justin SchonIn 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 civil violence, probably because migration as the strategy we in the West most readily observe. Ho...2021-03-1555 min
Scope Conditions PodcastRedistribution as Fairness, with Charlotte CavailléWe 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 of political economy: why do governments in advanced democracies do so little to count...2021-02-221h 21
Scope Conditions PodcastStrategic Indifference as Refugee Policy in the Global South, with Kelsey Norman 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 East at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, where she directs the Women’s Rights, Human Rights & Refugees program.In Reluctant Reception...2021-02-0855 min
Scope Conditions PodcastThe Gravitational Pull of Europe's Far Right, with Tarik Abou-ChadiIn 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 last two decades, however, far-right parties running on nationalist, anti-immigration platforms have expanded their appeal to become formidable electoral competitors, steadily taking v...2021-01-181h 11
Scope Conditions PodcastHow Strong Legislatures Emerge, with Ken OpaloIn 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 North and Barry Weingast -- about the emergence of parliamentary strength in 17th century...2021-01-0457 min
Scope Conditions PodcastPublic Education as an Autocratic Project, with Agustina PaglayanIn 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 spread of primary education around the world. Common understandings of the expansion of public education take...2020-12-141h 03
Scope Conditions PodcastMiddle-Class Guardians of Autocracy, with Bryn RosenfeldIn 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 growing cohort of private-sector white-collar professionals. Rather, in much of the post-Soviet world, the middle class was composed largely of public se...2020-11-2351 min
Scope Conditions PodcastThe Economics of Playing the “Identity Card,” with Nikhar GaikwadIn 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 anxieties generated by globalization.A distinctive feature of Gaikwad’s project is that it examines how identities and material interests interact and sha...2020-11-0959 min
Scope Conditions PodcastThe Upside of Nationalism, with Aram HurIn 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 between groups or states. Hur’s project examines a potential “upside” to nationalism: the role that nationalism can pl...2020-10-1857 min
Scope Conditions PodcastForging Democracy out of the Trauma of Repression, with Elizabeth NugentIn 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 replaced by another dictatorship. It is in fact relatively rare that autocratic collapse results in the establishment of a stable democracy. 2020-10-0450 min
Scope Conditions PodcastThe Promise and Limits of Intergroup Contact, with Salma MousaIn 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; and how societies respond to increased flows of immigration. It’s only recently, however, that social scientists have been experimentally testing the contact hypothesis in real-world, high-stak...2020-09-211h 02
Scope Conditions PodcastIntroducing Scope ConditionsIntroducing Scope Conditions, a podcast about cutting-edge research in comparative politics.2020-09-1706 min