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...

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 polit...

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 ...

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 stat...

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 caus...

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 in...

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...

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...

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 perce...

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. ...

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 o...

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 emerg...

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-...

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...

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,

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 metake...

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 random...

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 membe...

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...

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 th...

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,

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 tha...

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. I...

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 Universi...

 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...