Department Highlights
Fall 2021
Prof. Eitan Hersh and Lily Geismer of Claremont McKenna College took to the New York Times' Opinion Page to highlight the importance of local politics, especially school board meetings.
Congratulations to Prof. Kelly Greenhill, who was named director of the prestigious Seminar XXI Program, a post-graduate program in national security at MIT's Center for International Studies!
Prof. Michael Beckley and Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies argued that "China Is a Declining Power-and That's the Problem" in Foreign Policy.
Prof. Brian Schaffner and two recent Political Science alums, Zachary Hertz and Lucas Pyle, took to the Washington Post to help explain why there's such a divide between urban and rural voters. Check out their article to better understand how faith, gun ownership, and race divide the American electorate.
Fall/Winter 2020
Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies Brian Schaffner, along with Professors Jesse Rhodes and Raymond La Raja of UMass Amherst, published a new book titled Hometown Inequality: Race, Class, and Representation in American Local Politics.
Chair of the Political Science Department Deborah Schildkraut, John Richard Skuse Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Berry, and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences James Glaser authored a chapter titled “Charge and Retreat: Asymmetric Patterns of Political Engagement among Liberals and Conservatives” in the new volume Dynamics of American Democracy: Partisan Polarization, Political Competition, and Government Performance.
Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies Brian Schaffner’s Polling and the 2020 Election seminar released their poll of the 2020 electorate. You can read their findings and analysis on the Tisch College website.
Professor David Art published a new article, “The Myth of Global Populism” in the journal Perspectives on Politics.
Professor Jeffrey Taliaferro wrote a chapter titled "Peaceful Change: The Post–Cold War Evolution" for the Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations.
Associate Professor Eitan Hersh—along with Donald and Kathie Kaplan, the grandparents of one of the students in his U.S. Elections course—was featured on GBH News discussing his invitation to students’ grandparents to join his lectures via Zoom.
Political Science Majors Brendan Hartnett and Alexandra Haver’s polling results, which came out of Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies Brian Schaffner’s Polling the 2020 Election seminar, were cited in this New York Times article seeking to understand whether most Republicans really believe that the election results were fraudulent.
Professor Jeffrey Taliaferro’s new book, Defending Frenemies: Alliances, Politics, and Nuclear Nonproliferation in US Foreign Policy, was featured as part of Oxford University Press’ International Relations collection.
Associate Professor Eitan Hersh took to The Atlantic to explain why “rage donating” is not a very effective political strategy.
Associate Professor Pearl Robinson authored a chapter on Randall Robinson in the new volume The Pan-African Pantheon: Prophets, Poets, and Philosophers.
The 15th edition of Chair of the Political Science Department Deborah Schildkraut and John Richard Skuse Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Berry’s textbook, The Challenge of Democracy: American Government in Global Politics, was made available through Cengage.
Summer 2020
Join us in congratulating Professor Ioannis Evrigenis, who has been named the International Relations (IR) Program Director for the 2020-2021 year!
Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies Brian Schaffner's new book, Hometown Inequality: Race, Class, and Representation in American Local Politics, written with Professor Jesse Rhodes and Raymond La Raja of UMass Amherst, was recently published and is now available.
Associate Professor Eitan Hersh teamed up with Prof. Aaron Kaufman of NYU Abu Dhabi to author an article on “The Political Consequences of Opioid Overdoses.”
John Richard Skuse Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Berry recently published a new article titled "Interest Groups in a Hyper-Partisan World."
Spring 2020
Chair of the Political Science Department Deborah J. Schildkraut and Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies Brian Schaffner are quoted in a discussion on white racial attitudes moving into the 2020 election.
Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences James Glaser, Chair of the Political Science Department Deborah J. Schildkraut and Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies Brian Schaffner discuss public opinion on Federalism in the midst of a pandemic.
Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences James Glaser, Political Science Chair Deborah Schildkraut, and John Richard Skuse Professor of Political Science Jeffrey M. Berry have published a post on Data for Progress regarding Fox News' influence on attitudes towards Coronavirus.
Associate Professor Pearl T. Robinson won the African Studies Association’s 2019 Distinguished Africanist Award.
Spring 2019
Kelly Greenhill, Associate Professor of International Relations, was on BBC Radio talking about conspiracy theories and why they spread so easily.
Jeff Berry, Skuse Professor of American Politics, was on WBUR discussing Elizabeth Warren's run for President.
Professors Jeff Berry and Deb Schildkraut were quoted in a TuftsNow article giving their thoughts on the State of the Union.
Fall 2018
Michael Beckley, Assistant Professor of International Relations, was quoted in the Axios article "A new era of hostility in the U.S.-China fight." "It is a clear escalation of the economic competition between China and the United States and its allies. Tariffs are one thing, putting each other's citizens in jail is another."
Jeff Berry, Skuse Professor of American Politics, spoke to WBUR about Deval Patrick's decision to not run for President. "This is a field of candidates who believe that what they need to show to Democratic primary voters is how angry they are and how outraged they are about Donald Trump, and that's not really Deval Patrick."
Malik Mufti, Professor of International Relations, was quoted in a Tufts Daily article in how professors are reexamining the study of Saudi Arabia after the death of Jamal Khashoggi. "Next semester, when I teach US Foreign Policy in the Middle East, naturally the US-Saudi relationship will play a prominent role in our readings and discussions, so I'm sure this debacle will come up once again, Mufti said."
Brian Schaffner, Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies, was asked several questions in an interview by Podium about the midterm elections about recounts, the effects of Florida's reenfranchisement ballot measure and more.
Michael Beckley, Assistant Professor of International Relations, has a new book "Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World's Sole Superpower" from Cornell University Press.
Jeffrey Taliaferro, Associate Professor of International Relations, co-authored an article in MIT Press Journals "Correspondence: Neoclassical Realism and Its Critics."
Eitan Hersh, Associate Professor of American Politics, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times, "In a Deep Blue or Red State? You Can Still Influence Politics." "Organize Your own precinct. Your own neighborhood. Your own block. Your own building. Even if you live in the bluest or reddest block around. Even in the bluest or reddest state. Whether you are conservative, moderate or liberal."
Ioannis Evrigenis, Professor of Political Theory, reviewed Deborah Baumgold's book "Three-Text Edition of Thomas Hobbes's Political Theory."
Oxana Shevel, Associate Professor in Comparative Politics, co-authored "Believing Facts in the Fog of War: Identity, Media and Hot Cognition in Ukraine's 2014 Odesa Tragedy" in the journal Geopolitics.
Michael Beckley, Assistant Professor International Relations, wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs Magazine on how misguided U.S. fears are about China imperiling U.S. Hegemony in "Stop Obsessing about China." Professor Beckley states that "the greatest risk for U.S. strategy, accordingly, lies not in doing too little but in overreacting to fears of Chinese ascent and American decline."
Deborah Schildkraut, Professor of American Politics, was interviewed on Living Lab Radio by WCAI NPR on immigration in America and how "A Strong American Identity Doesn't Make One Civic-Minded." Professor Schildkraut shares that "Democracies don't just survive on their own. People have to be committed to the enterprise and do the hard work of being informed and involved citizens and they need to be other-regarding."
Spring 2018
Deborah Schildkraut, Professor of American Politics, co-authored a new piece on "Assessing the Political Distinctiveness of White Millennials: How Race and Generation Shape Racial and Political Attitudes in a Changing America" for the Russell Sage Foundation Journal (PDF). Professor Schildkraut’s study found "race affects attitudes more than generation, and in no case are white millennials as racially liberal as nonwhites. Exposure to information about changing demography makes white millennials more conservative on some questions, but what matters more is whether respondents are Republicans and identify as white. White millennials are hardly immune to the power of race to shape their attitudes."
Kelly Greenhill, Associate Professor and Director of the International Relations Program, wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs on how President Trump has manipulated the migration debate through the use of "extra-factual information," distraction, threat conflation, and repetition. Professor Greenhill states that "Trump has systematically used distraction and the repetition of misleading information to conflate the real challenges of migration policy with false (albeit psychologically satisfying) ones, allowing him to normalize previously fringe solutions, including his well-known proposals to build a border wall with Mexico and bar Muslims' entry to the United States."
Deborah Schildkraut, Professor of American Politics, wrote an essay for The Conversation on how her research on American public opinion about immigration shows that "the American public is supportive of more welcoming immigration policies" and therefore "lawmakers in Washington, from the president down to first-term members of Congress, may be misjudging how the public feels about immigration."
Eitan Hersh, Associate Professor of American Politics, told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for Cambridge Analytica and the Future of Data Privacy that "the idea that Cambridge Analytica could use Facebook likes to predict personalities and use those predictions to effectively target ads strikes me as implausible, given what we know about the significant challenges in persuasion in campaigns," as recorded in an article by TuftsNow. "Political campaigns use data to mobilize people to get out and vote, and, separately, to persuade voters to adopt a point of view, Hersh noted” however, "'Probably nobody in this room,' he told the committee, 'or nobody that anyone in this room knows, changed their mind as the result of any campaign ad in the election of 2016. . . . In a presidential election in particular, when there is so much going on, the effect of one ad, one kind of ad, one robocall, is usually zero.'"
Donald Klein, Professor Emeritus of Asian Studies (1973-1996), passed away at the age of 88 March 2, 2018. For more than two decades, Professor Klein was an "influential voice for understanding contemporary China and who artfully interpreted power shifts in Communist leadership for students, scholars, and the general public" and he will be greatly missed according to TuftsNow in his obituary describing his career and achievements.
Jeff Berry, Skuse Professor of American Politics, and Jim Glaser, Professor and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, wrote an article for the Political Science Quarterly on "Compromising Positions: Why Republican Partisans Are More Rigid than Democrats." Our Professors found "our research does show, by applying prospect theory for the first time to an understanding of political compromise, is that the best strategy for reaching compromise may be to avoid negotiated outcomes that generate a sense of loss by one or more parties. Perhaps it is possible to frame issues so that inveterate opponents to compromise see a tableau that is not centered on trading with the enemy but instead leads them to believe that they are protecting what is good and right."
Kelly Greenhill, Associate Professor and Director of the International Relations Program, co-authored a piece in Science Magazine describing how "the rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against misinformation in the internet age". In "The Science of Fake News," Greenhill and co-authors state: "We must redesign our information ecosystem in the 21st century. This effort must be global in scope, as many countries, some of which have never developed a robust news ecosystem, face challenges around fake and real news that are more acute than in the United States."
David Art, Professor of Comparative Politics, wrote a perspective for the March issue of Current History on "The Radical Right's Gains in the Heart of Europe." Addressing the rise of "the radical right in the German-speaking world," Professor Art asks, "is the radical right more powerful now than it ever has been in the post-World War II era? And perhaps most importantly, has one of the most significant features of postwar German democracy, the political irrelevance of the radical right, now come to an end?"
Nimah Mazaheri, Associate Professor of Comparative Political Economics, was featured in a TuftsNow article endorsing his free webinar on "The Perils and Promise of Oil Wealth," through the Tufts Alumni Association: "The solution is for oil-producing countries to develop economic diversification and entrepreneurship plans, said Mazaheri. Countries that are successfully beginning to overcome the paradox of oil wealth have begun investing in manufacturing, agriculture, and services."
Deborah Schildkraut, Professor of American Politics and Department Chair, co-wrote a report in the most recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences investigating "how different immigration policies influence the social attitudes of immigrant and native-born individuals in the United States." By using “a 2016 telephone survey of nearly 2,000 individuals in Arizona and New Mexico,” Professor Schildkraut and her colleagues found that "hearing and thinking about welcoming immigration policies led to greater feelings of unity not only for Latino immigrants themselves, but also for most whites surveyed."
Eitan Hersh, Associate Professor of American Politics, was featured in TuftsNow for his work on uncovering the discriminatory intent of Texas's 2011 voter ID legislation: "Using an algorithm, and delving into millions of publicly available records, [Professor Hersh] determined that while fewer registered voters lacked the necessary ID than had been thought, the effect of the law was clearly discriminatory, disproportionately affecting minorities."
Vickie Sullivan, Professor of Political Theory, wrote an article on Montesquieu's cautioning of the "the fragility of enlightened government" against despotism that was republished on TuftsNow to address the present concern "that there is no final victory over despotism, and that the West too remains susceptible. It is, in fact, an ever-present threat in the human condition."
Fall 2017
A new representative survey of 1,000 Americans, conducted in early September, 2017, explores how the public views the role of women's rights in US foreign policy. Substantial majorities think the pursuit of global gender equality is an important goal of foreign policy, and large majorities endorse a variety of policy tools for pursuing that objective. In addition, the survey explores support for increased spending on global gender initiatives, and a small but important percentage says that their votes in the 2018 midterm election will be influenced by candidates' positions on global gender issues. The survey team was led by Richard Eichenberg, Professor of Political Science, and Dr. Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) in the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. Read the full report: The Pursuit of Gender Equality in American Foreign Policy: A Survey of American Public Opinion.
Dennis Rasmussen, Associate Professor of Political Theory, has a new book, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought (Princeton University Press) and it was just named Book of the Week by Times Higher Education.
Richard Eichenberg, Associate Professor of Foreign Policy, wrote for the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs about the demographics in the US that support a feminist foreign policy for the country: "his seems all the more relevant given news reports that President Trump's budget proposes to eliminate the office that administers global women's issues. As Congress deliberates on that budget, it is important to know both the overall level of popular support for advancing global gender rights and who is more skeptical."