American Politics

Ways To Make Your Voice Heard After An Election

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⚠️ This post was written in November 2016 and reflects the political situation at that time. Some details may be outdated.

Since the surprising results of the US presidential election, a lot of websites and blogs have asked how ordinary citizens should react. What is the best way to allocate your participation, if you want to have an actual impact? One of my favourite examples was here, but other examples were here, here, and here. So – what does political science say is the best way to get involved?

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Why an Economically Conservative Republican Party is No Longer Tenable

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Donald Trump is not is an economic conservative. He sometimes pays lip service to conservative ideas and has come out in favor of cutting taxes, but these are not the central tenets of his campaign. This is both a stark departure from previous Republican presidential candidates and a large part of why Trump was able to … Read more

How the US military’s overseas troop deployments affect global defense spending

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This post is based on the article “Regions of Hierarchy and Security: US Troop Deployments, Spatial Relations, and Defense Burdens”, by Michael Allen (Boise State University), Michael Flynn (Kansas State University), and Julie VanDusky–Allen (Boise State University), which is forthcoming in International Interactions. Since the end of World War II, the United States has deployed … Read more

Why Don’t We See Party Organizations In Faculty Senates?

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What kinds of features would a legislative or pseudo-legislative situation need to have before would we expect the emergence of parties (or pseudo-parties)? The organization of political parties is usually argued to be a response to the collective action problem inside legislatures (Aldrich 1995) or outside legislatures (Cox and McCubbins 1997). But is the mere presence of one or both of these problems enough to trigger the development of organizations that look like parties? I’m thinking particularly of a setting that many of us are probably familiar with – faculty governance. Different colleges and universities have different institutions, but are there any that have given rise to faculty party organizations? Would such a development be possible, and would it improve efficiency?

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What Can Dollar-Store Candy Teach Us About Voting? A Rational Choice Argument For Casting A Wasted Vote

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You’re probably familiar with the idea that voting is ‘irrational’. Your one vote doesn’t matter. Sure, there’s some tiny probability that after you vote, your preferred candidate will end up winning by one vote – and in that scenario your vote truly did matter. But outside of that Hollywood script, your vote probably won’t decide the outcome. So why bother with the whole rigmarole of voting? Worse still, imagine that your preferred candidate isn’t even one of the frontrunners. If you support the Greens or the Libertarians, then your tiny probability of deciding the election just got a whole lot tinier. What I’d like to do here is outline an alternative perspective: even in an electorate of millions, your vote still has a remarkably high probability of affecting the outcome.

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Looking for two-sided coattail effects: Integrated parties and multilevel elections in the U.S.

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The following is a guest post by Amuitz Garmendia Madariaga & H. Ege Ozen.  Amuitz and Ege are Ph.D. candidates in the Department of Political Science at Binghamton University.  This post is based on an article of the same name, which is forthcoming in Electoral Studies.  Multilevel structures of government are spreading all around the world but … Read more

A Comparative Perspective on Racial Polarization

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Like many of you, I’ve been thinking a lot about the politicization of race and ethnicity lately. Most of this has surrounded the emerging national conversation on systemic racism present in America and its impact on racial minorities in the country. This is an important, necessary conversation, but I’ve been especially interested in the ways … Read more

Divided Government Isn’t All Bad

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The results of the midterm elections on November 4th have generated considerable hand-wringing in some circles over the Democrats’ loss of the Senate and the expected legislative gridlock that will result as in this piece in the Washington Post.  Political polarization and the gridlock that may result can harm countries that would benefit from necessary reforms … Read more

Voting Rights in the Wake of Shelby County v. Holder

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In June 2013, the Supreme Court issued a decision in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, where the Court ruled that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional. The contentious 5-4 decision eliminated the Justice department’s mandatory oversight of the electoral process in the Deep South. As a result, many individuals have … Read more