CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF DIVERSITY AND DEMOCRACY

To evaluate the public’s attitudes toward Critical Race Theory (CRT), our latest survey (conducted between November 3rd and December 2nd, 2021) asked a series of questions about attitudes towards CRT including concern with how history is currently taught in public schools, familiarity with CRT, support for teaching CRT versus support for teaching the legacy of racism, and how well the public thinks CRT describes American society. In this report, we describe these attitudes to better understand what the public thinks about CRT and whether the legacy of racism should be taught in schools.

Linked fate, the concept introduced by Dawson almost three decades ago, reoriented the study of racism and political behavior in the United States. The scholarship traditionally had focused on the racial psychology of whites and how racism seeps into their political views and actions. Dawson proposed the Black utility heuristic theory and linked fate, its associated measure, to investigate the political behavior of Blacks, the minority group most harmed by racism. Since then, linked fate has become a ubiquitous variable of interest in research on minority group politics. Yet the research program around linked fate is due for some extension. Most studies gloss over the fact that the Black utility heuristic theory is historically and socially conditional.

Over the last two decades, nonprofit “alt-labor” groups—a diverse lot of organizations consisting of community-based worker centers and other social and economic justice groups whose primary missions include fighting for workers’ rights—have emerged in numerous cities around the nation to help nonunionized, low-wage workers combat exploitation. During this time they have become increasingly adept at using public policy, rather than collective bargaining or direct economic interventions, to achieve their goals and to strengthen basic workers’ rights.

Al discusses the inspiration for his innovative CREED model, how his upbringing in New Jersey drove him to study racial justice, and why he believes corporations are not ready for Gen Z.

A study of Boston’s racial wealth gap made headlines in late 2017 when it revealed that the median net worth of the city’s Black households was only $8, compared to $247,000 among white households (Hill 2017; Johnson 2017; Muñoz et al. 2015). The gap in Boston may have been starker than in the nation as a whole, but the latter was also striking. In 2016, the median net worth of Black and Hispanic households nationwide was $17,000 and $20,700, respectively, compared to $171,000 for whites (Dettling et al. 2017). The disparities amongst households with children were even more pronounced. In 2016, Black households with children held 1 percent of the wealth of non-Hispanic white households with children (Percheski and Gibson-Davis 2020: 1).

In calling for articles for this special issue we sought to feature the institution of the US presidency and its implications for racial and ethnic politics in the United States. It was our sense that the race, ethnicity, and politics (REP) literature would benefit from such an emphasis by increasing and complementing the modest amount of extant research on the presidency within the subfield. At the time, bringing in racial dimensions would enrich the presidency research. While presidency scholars have often used case studies about issues racial and ethnic politics to develop theories about the functioning of the institution (see, for example, Graham, Reference Graham1990; Milkis et al., Reference Milkis, Tichenor and Blessing2013; Tichenor, Reference Tichenor2016), presidential studies writ large has been slow to adopt core theoretical perspectives from the REP subfield.

Dr. Alvin Tillery, Dr. Michael Minta and Dr. Jamil Scott discuss the growing power of Black and Latinos in Congress in relation to the BLM protest movement and if Congress and more mainstream Black and Latino civil rights organizations are addressing the priorities of the BLM movement.

Affective polarization—the tendency of ordinary partisans to dislike and distrust those from the other party—is a defining feature of contemporary American politics. High levels of out-party animus stem, in part, from misperceptions of the other party’s voters. Specifically, individuals misestimate the ideological extremity and political engagement of typical out-partisans. When partisans are asked about “Democrats” or “The Republican Party,” they bring to mind stereotypes of engaged ideologues, and hence express contempt for the other party. The reality, however, is that such individuals are the exception rather than the norm.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying recession, millions of low-wage workers have become increasingly vulnerable to exploitation. Limited scholarly attention, however, has been paid to the relationship between rising unemployment, labor standards violations, and government enforcement capacities during periods of economic recession. In this article, the authors begin to draw out these connections. First, they turn to the case of the Great Recession of 2008-2010 in the United States to examine the relationship between rising unemployment and minimum wage violations, using Current Population Survey data to estimate minimum wage violation rates by industry and demographic group. They find that minimum wage violations rose in tandem with rising unemployment, were shouldered by some groups of low-wage workers more than others, and unexpectedly affected certain industries more than

Leaders of Black Lives Matter intended an intersectional movement, but BLM is not always interpreted as intersectional by the public. I theorize how Black Americans think about intersectionality in BLM and report the results of a survey experiment to test the effect of three of these frames—Black Nationalist, Feminist, and LGBTQ+ Rights—on the mobilization of African Americans. Exposure to these frames generates differential effects on respondents’ willingness to support, trust, and write representatives about the Black Lives Matter movement. These findings raise new questions about the deployment of intersectional messaging strategies within movements for racial justice.

This Forward integrates international law, international relations, and global history scholarship to understand two global trends that are in tension with each other: 1) the shift from European colonial dominance to a law-based multilateralism, which enabled a more equal and inclusive international law and 2) global capitalism which across time has been a political and economic force that, left to its own devices, promotes exclusion and inequality. Alter builds an encompassing conception of global economic law to show the interplay of colonial law, private law, domestic law and international law in enabling and constraining global capitalism across time.

“It’s hard for political scientists who are doing this analysis with tons and tons of data to effectively sort out, so it could be really hard to sort out here,” she said. “We may need to do just a little bit more work to sort through what specifically happened, and it may speak to how challenges differ across different women of color.”

“Corporate America has an opportunity to maximize value by making DEI systemic, by recruiting and retaining the best talent, by enhancing the ingenuity and creativity of their employee teams, by strengthening current relationships with customers, clients, and investors, by generating new client and customer opportunities, and by building stronger and more flexible organizations.”

“Corporate America has an opportunity to maximize value by making DEI systemic, by recruiting and retaining the best talent, by enhancing the ingenuity and creativity of their employee teams, by strengthening current relationships with customers, clients, and investors, by generating new client and customer opportunities, and by building stronger and more flexible organizations.”

Inequities in science have long been documented in the United States. Particular groups such as low income, non-White people, and indigenous people fare worse when it comes to healthcare, infectious diseases, climate change, and access to technology. These types of inequities can be partially addressed with targeted interventions aimed at facilitating access to scientific information. Doing so requires knowledge about what different groups think when it comes to relevant scientific topics. Yet, most data collections on science-based issues do not include enough respondents from these populations. The researchers discuss this gap and offer an overview of pertinent sampling and administrative considerations in studying underserved populations. A sustained effort to study diverse populations can help address extant inequities.

Latino and Black workers are far more likely to be paid below minimum wage than their white counterparts and found that from 2009 to 2019, the lowest-paid workers nationwide lost 21 percent of their incomes because they were paid less than their states' minimum wages.

"Because of the misconceptions swirling around CRT, let’s first be very clear about what it is, and isn’t. Simply put, CRT is an intellectual movement focused on how systemic racism has shaped our legal history, says Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., an associate professor of American politics at Northwestern University who researches CRT. Legal scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, and Richard Delgado helped lay down the groundwork beginning in the 1970s. Tillery says they make a set of arguments he thinks most people would agree with: Race is socially constructed — typically through the law and government institutions — not biologically based. As a result, racism is a permanent feature of American society that we need to deal with as it surfaces — it won't "evaporate into thin air" as our attitudes toward communities of color change, Tillery explains. Finally, we can make big gains

Effective immediately, about 55,000 people in North Carolina who had been prohibited, by law, from voting can now do so. It came earlier this week after Judge Lisa Bell extended a preliminary injunction against those on "community supervision" - a group that includes those who have been convicted of a state or federal felony and are still under supervision, but are not in prison. As reporter Jordan Wilkie explains, it's the largest expansion of disproportionately Black enfranchisement since the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In virtually all respects, the Trump presidency has disrupted patterns of presidential governance. However, does Trump signify a disruption, not merely in political style but in regime type in the United States? Assessing Trump's potential impact on democratic institutions requires an analysis of how these institutions—including especially the executive branch—have developed over time as well as an examination of the intersecting evolution of political parties, racial ideologies, and governing mechanisms. To explore how time and temporality have shaped the Trump presidency, editors Zachary Callen and Philip Rocco have brought together scholars in the research tradition of American political development (APD), which explicitly aims to consider how interactions between a range of institutions result in the shifting of power and authority in American politics, with careful attention paid

Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, Spruyt explains the political organization of three non-European international societies from early modernity to the late nineteenth century. The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires; the Sinocentric tributary system; and the Southeast Asian galactic empires, all which differed in key respects from the modern Westphalian state system. In each of these societies, collective beliefs were critical in structuring domestic orders and relations with other polities. These multi-ethnic empires allowed for greater accommodation and heterogeneity in comparison to the homogeneity that is demanded by the modern nation-state.

"From Social Security to Medicare, the Civil Rights Act to the Affordable Care Act, Democrats have long treated policy success as if it were tantamount to political success, assuming that the enactment of significant legislation would create supportive constituencies that would reward the party at the voting booth. President Obama appears to have made the same calculation. Instead of working to strengthen his party organization with an eye toward improving Democrats’ electoral prospects across the board, he focused almost exclusively on achieving significant policy accomplishments, assuming that those policy successes would redound to the party’s electoral benefit (Galvin 2010, 2016)."

IPR social policy expert Tabitha Bonilla’s research project with IPR political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong and IPR sociologist Beth Redbird examines the pandemic’s disproportionate effects on Black and Latinx communities. They are also assessing levels of trust in the government among Black and Latinx communities to determine if there is a connection between the pandemic, institutional action, and public trust. IPR political scientist James Druckman’s project extends his ongoing research with the COVID States Project, a consortium of researchers from Northwestern, Harvard, Northeastern, and Rutgers that conducts large-scale national surveys of American public opinion on various topics.

As with Benjamin Page at Northwestern University in the US, he notes that philanthropists are statistically conservative and lean to the political right, and that higher taxation on the wealthy might be a better way to fight poverty and bring urgently needed social change. It seems Bill Gates agrees: “I’ve paid more taxes than any individual ever, and gladly so. I should pay more.” But among the world’s 2,700 billionaires, I suspect he is in a minority. I don’t think Musk or Bezos are yet thinking about taxes in space.

Northwestern University has announced the recipients of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation Pandemic Response Policy Research Fund, an initiative launched in April to evaluate policies and actions during the current pandemic and to advance effective recommendations for the future. The effort was made possible by a $1 million grant from the Peterson Foundation, a non-partisan organization that promotes fiscal and economic sustainability and increases public awareness of key fiscal challenges.

Children under 12 may be eligible for COVID-19 vaccines by September or October, but will parents vaccinate their children? New survey results from a consortium of universities, including Northwestern, Northeastern, Harvard, and Rutgers, reveal that overall, Americans have grown more supportive of vaccinating children now than when compared to surveys taken earlier this year.

"Religious freedom as a political ideal has enjoyed the support of many Americans and members of Congress. Yet, elevating religion above other factors in foreign policy risks doing damage to the cause of religious diversity and tolerance. The best way to support religious tolerance abroad is to step back from religious freedom as a guiding principle in favor of justice, equality and respect for diversity."

According to a 2014 study by political scientists Laurel Harbridge, Neil Malhotra, and Brian F. Harrison, respondents preferred legislation when their party got more of what it wanted and when it dominated the coalition that passed the bill versus the outcomes that were more bipartisan-oriented. In fact, respondents sometimes viewed bipartisan tradeoffs as the equivalent of a legislative defeat for their party.

The politics of religious asylum is ripe for reassessment. Even as a robust literature on secularism and religion has shown otherwise over the past two decades, much of the discussion in this field presumes that religion stands cleanly apart from law and politics. This article makes the case for a different approach to religion in the context of asylum-seeking and claiming. In the United States, it suggests, the politics of asylum is integral to the maintenance of American exceptionalism. Participants in the asylum-seeking process create a gap between Americans and others, affirming the promise of freedom, salvation, and redemption through conversion not to a particular religion or faith but to the American project itself. This hails a particular kind of subject of freed om and unencumbered choice. It is both a theological and a political process.

Annually helps University departments and faculty with important programs not included in their annual budgets. Past funding has gone to research, speakers, conferences, equipment, and study-related travel for faculty and students.

Concerns about misperceptions among the public are rampant. Yet, little work explores the correlates of misperceptions in varying contexts – that is, how do factors such as group affiliations, media exposure, and lived experiences correlate with the number of misperceptions people hold? We address these questions by investigating misperceptions about COVID-19, focusing on the role of racial/ethnic, religious, and partisan groups. Using a large survey, we find the number of correct beliefs held by individuals far dwarfs the number of misperceptions. When it comes to misperceptions, we find that minorities, those with high levels of religiosity, and those with strong partisan identities – across parties – hold a substantially greater number of misperceptions than those with contrasting group affiliations. Moreover, we show other variables (e.g., social media usage, number of COVID-19 cases

Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, Spruyt explains the political organization of three non-European international societies from early modernity to the late nineteenth century. The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires; the Sinocentric tributary system; and the Southeast Asian galactic empires, all which differed in key respects from the modern Westphalian state system. In each of these societies, collective beliefs were critical in structuring domestic orders and relations with other polities. These multi-ethnic empires allowed for greater accommodation and heterogeneity in comparison to the homogeneity that is demanded by the modern nation-state.

"Thurston points to Los Angeles as one city that has struggled to control the virus because of overcrowding. “One of the reasons that their cases went so high, so quickly was the affordability crisis in the region,” Thurston said. “Many families were living in more crowded settings and in work situations where they couldn't really protect themselves from COVID-19.” She said President Biden’s proposal to tie federal funding to cities who ease restrictions on zoning is an intriguing policy that could help increase affordable housing and address historic exclusions. “Local zoning policies and ordinances are one of the contributors to the lack of affordable housing in many communities,” Thurston said. They limit multifamily housing units, making these communities unaffordable."

Political science Prof. Mary McGrath faced increased at-home caregiving expectations in addition to her academic responsibilities. Instead of focusing on conducting research or publishing articles, she was taking care of her children, then ages 2 and 4, while her husband self-isolated due to health concerns from his kidney transplant. “It was like me and my two boys thrashing in these waves,” she said. “I didn’t know what else was going on in the world, except from seeing what was happening in The New York Times.”

"Inequality is everywhere in American life. Political movements, social discourse, and economic trends have dramatically increased the salience of issues of inequality over recent decades. These developments have, of course, been paralleled by the creation of enormous literatures about inequality in the social sciences."

School voucher programs—loosely defined to encompass a range of policies that indirectly subsidize private school attendance—grew slowly over the second half of the twentieth century, seeing a modest but short-lived rise in the decades following Brown v. Board. It was not until the 2000s that vouchers took off. In 2000 there were a total of eight such programs. Yet by 2019, there were 62, across 28 states, serving more than 500,000 students. As vouchers rose in prominence over the last 20 years, core design features of the new policies also changed, shifting from tuition grants funded through legislative appropriations toward a model more reliant on indirect subsidies through the use of tax expenditures.

The Office of the Provost has announced 11 spring recipients of the Provost Grants for Research in Humanities, Social Sciences and the Arts.

"Scholarship on multimethod case selection in the social sciences has developed rapidly in recent years, but many possibilities remain unexplored. This essay introduces an attractive and advantageous new alternative, involving the selection of extreme cases on the treatment variable, net of the statistical influence of the set of known control variables. Cases that are extreme in this way are those in which the value of the main causal variable is as surprising as possible, and thus, this approach can be referred to as seeking “surprising causes.” There are practical advantages to selecting on surprising causes, and there are also advantages in terms of statistical efficiency in facilitating case-study discovery. We first argue for these advantages in general terms and then demonstrate them in an application regarding the dynamics of U.S. labor legislation."

This Forward integrates international law, international relations, and global history scholarship to understand two global trends that are in tension with each other: 1) the shift from European colonial dominance to a law-based multilateralism, which enabled a more equal and inclusive international law and 2) global capitalism which across time has been a political and economic force that, left to its own devices, promotes exclusion and inequality. Alter builds an encompassing conception of global economic law to show the interplay of colonial law, private law, domestic law and international law in enabling and constraining global capitalism across time.

Laurel Harbridge-Yong, Associate Professor, Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences – “The Polarizing Effects of Primaries” Stephen Nelson, Associate Professor, Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences – “Best Laid Plans: The Political History of Economic Development Plans, 1950-2000”

Several female Northwestern faculty members are planning to protest the promotion of an athletics department employee tied to controversy. Mike Polisky is taking over as Athletic Director. He's a defendant in an ongoing lawsuit filed by a cheerleader who says Polisky ignored her complaints of being harassed and exploited at school-sanctioned events.

Companies are more prone to cheating employees of color and immigrant workers, according to Daniel Galvin, a political science professor and policy researcher at Northwestern University. His research, based on data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, shows that immigrants and Latino workers were twice as likely to earn less than the minimum wage from 2009 to 2019 compared with white Americans. Black workers were nearly 50% more likely to get ripped off in comparison.

Political science assistant professor Chloe Thurston, who studies the role of social movements and organizations in shaping policy, says movements can spotlight individual grievances, increase their visibility and then connect them to a broader context.

"Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy professor Tabitha Bonilla has developed a new undergraduate class that explores how viewing identities as "intersectional" can shift our understanding of policy. The seminar-style course, called “Intersectionality, Policy, and Measurement” was made possible by Bonilla’s 2020 Daniel I. Linzer Grant for Innovation in Diversity and Equity, an award given to help fund innovative faculty projects related to improving diversity and inclusivity at Northwestern."

Join us for the third episode of EDU: Live—a conversation between David and Dr. Alvin Tillery, associate professor and founding director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University. A social scientist, DEI evangelist, and proud alumnus of Morehouse College and Harvard University, Alvin is one of the nation’s leading academics and researchers on issues of diversity and inclusion as well as the architect behind Northwestern University’s new “Leading Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” short course. Dr. Tillery is also the author of Between Homeland and Motherland: Africa, US Foreign Policy and Black Leadership in America (Cornell University Press, 2011), which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

Join us for the third episode of EDU: Live—a conversation between David and Dr. Alvin Tillery, associate professor and founding director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University. A social scientist, DEI evangelist, and proud alumnus of Morehouse College and Harvard University, Alvin is one of the nation’s leading academics and researchers on issues of diversity and inclusion as well as the architect behind Northwestern University’s new “Leading Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” short course. Dr. Tillery is also the author of Between Homeland and Motherland: Africa, US Foreign Policy and Black Leadership in America (Cornell University Press, 2011), which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

Professor Alvin Bernard Tillery, Jr. (Northwestern University) spoke virtually about the Black Lives Matter movement at an event hosted by the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University on April 16th, 2021. This is a recording of his talk and the question and answer session that followed it.

Professor Alvin Bernard Tillery, Jr. (Northwestern University) spoke virtually about the Black Lives Matter movement at an event hosted by the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University on April 16th, 2021. This is a recording of his talk and the question and answer session that followed it.

At a time when some talk of Asian Americans as “honorary whites,” the mass murders at Atlanta-area spas reminded us that those of Asian ancestry can also experience intense marginalization. This micro-syllabus presents a wide range of scholarship exploring these complexities and investigating the place of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in a deeply contested racial terrain.

The Summer of 2020 saw the United States’ biggest protests for racial justice and civil rights in a generation, when deaths of African Americans in police custody brought a national reckoning with systemic racism. As we near the one year anniversary of some of the largest demonstrations in U.S. history, Dr. Alvin Tillery, Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, discusses: what the recent verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial means for racial equity in the United States, how current racial justice movements, like Black Lives Matter, fit within the broader history of the U.S. civil rights movement, and how today’s efforts differ from past American racial justice initiatives.

The Simon Fraser University Department of Political Science is proud to present Professor Alvin Bernard Tillery, Jr. of Northwestern University, who will be giving a virtual talk on "The Performance of Power: Black Lives Matter and American Democracy." This free, online event will take place on April 16th at 10 a.m. PT.

"Weinberg Prof. Karen Alter raised the prospect of bringing in a third party to perform a financial audit to verify the Board of Trustees’ position on retirement contributions and clarify the underpinnings of Northwestern’s financial decisions. “It just gives you that set of information,” she said. “It doesn’t then say that the money has to go into restitution for faculty, it can’t go into this—it tells you how much money you have, how much money existed or was available. Alter said faculty at Johns Hopkins University were able to attain pension restitution due to insight about the university’s finances uncovered by an independent audit."

That means governors must weigh what the public would be willing to do as they consider how to respond to a resurgence of cases fueled by the new variants, said James Druckman, a political science professor at Northwestern University in Illinois who is part of the survey consortium. “It’s unrealistic to engage in complete shutdowns or closing of public spaces at this point,” he said. “I think you’d see a lot of people, including business owners, not following those types of things.”

Serving in the GOP controlled Indiana legislature has been painful for some Black lawmakers, after they were heckled during a debate. It highlights the lack of diversity within state politics.

Serving in the GOP controlled Indiana legislature has been painful for some Black lawmakers, after they were heckled during a debate. It highlights the lack of diversity within state politics.

Focusing on housing, an area where the city can point to a clear history of racial discrimination, will make the programme more likely to survive the inevitable constitutional challenges, says Alvin Tillery, director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, also in Evanston. “Given the conservative jurisprudence around racial equity in America, governments are really constrained in terms of what they can do. Programmes have to be ‘narrowly tailored’ to meet the specific harm and in this case that harm is redlining,” he told the Financial Times in an interview.

Experimental political science has transformed in the last decade. The use of experiments has dramatically increased throughout the discipline, and technological and sociological changes have altered how political scientists use experiments. We chart the transformation of experiments and discuss new challenges that experimentalists face. We then outline how the contributions to this volume will help scholars and practitioners conduct high-quality experiments.

"Since January, more U.S. healthcare workers have said they are ready to get vaccinated, with rates of vaccine hesitancy dropping from 37% to 29%, according to a new survey from a research consortium that includes Northwestern University. The same survey finds a similar drop in the hesitancy rate for workers outside of healthcare, falling from 41% to 31%. "Early on a lot of people expressed outright hesitancy, but they seem to be moving as more and more people get vaccinated without major incidence," said IPR political scientist James Druckman, who co-leads the ongoing, national survey of more than 25,000 Americans. The researchers from Northwestern, Harvard, Northeastern, and Rutgers are investigating changes in attitudes about the vaccine and vaccination rates among healthcare workers from previous data collected in February. The survey also shows the rate of vaccination has double

"I believe that what makes America exceptional is the fact that we're a meritocracy that you can be anything — that you can come from anywhere and go and have success in any capacity. And I think the question Democrats have to reconcile with right now is whether or not, race and gender are more important than qualification," McCain said on Wednesday's show, reacting to Duckworth saying she would not support any more of President Joe Biden's non-diverse nominees until he appoints more Asian Americans to his Cabinet.

"A new survey by IPR and @PoliSciatNU prof. James Druckman shows parents are more hesitant to get vaccines for their kids, with young mothers largely driving the resistance"

While coronavirus vaccines are yet to be approved for children, public health officials worry that the increasing numbers of parents skeptical of vaccinating their children for any disease could affect overall vaccination rates for the coronavirus. A new survey aims to understand how prevalent this attitude is among parents compared to adults without children.

From right to left, notions of religion and religious freedom are fundamental to how many Americans have understood their country and themselves. Ideas of religion, politics, and the interplay between them are no less crucial to how the United States has engaged with the world beyond its borders. Yet scholarship on American religion tends to bracket the domestic and foreign, despite the fact that assumptions about the differences between ourselves and others deeply shape American religious categories and identities.

“Even before the pandemic, female faculty were disadvantaged in nearly all metrics university leaders use to assess faculty quality and impact. Numerous studies show that grants to female faculty are lower, citations and teaching evaluations are lower, and salaries are lower. These studies, which control for so many factors, bolster the lived experience of female faculty. It is hard not to conclude that gender bias is at play."

In the wake of Samuel Paty’s murder, the French government proposed a “draft law to strengthen republican values” aimed at reinforcing the principles of French laïcité. Laïcité, often translated as secularism, refers to the French Law of 1905 on the Separation of Churches and State which legally established state secularism. Today many question the extent to which this historic legal settlement and cultural tradition is equipped to accommodate minority religions and meet the needs of an increasingly diverse society. Yet President Macron has advanced a law against “separatism” to defend laïcité, describing Islam as a religion “that is in crisis.”

In November 2020, Floridians made the historic decision to move an estimated 2.5 million Floridians closer to a living wage with the passage of Amendment 2. The state minimum wage increase goes into effect in September 2021, increasing from $8.65 to $10 per hour, then rising by $1 per hour each year until it reaches $15 in 2026. Failing to pay workers the minimum wage is but one of many forms of wage theft. However, given the timeliness of Amendment 2, wage theft in this report refers solely to minimum wage violations among low-wage workers (those with incomes in the bottom 20 percent) unless otherwise indicated.

We agree that a chief cause of the feeble US response to economic inequality is the weakness of the US working class. And we agree that a crucial cause of that weakness is racial division among workers, sometimes inflamed by opportunistic politicians or self-interested employers who benefit from a low-paid and powerless workforce. We would add two points. Increased capital mobility, the global labor market, and automation have strengthened capital versus labor in all advanced countries. But specific undemocratic features of US political institutions and processes have further increased the relative influence of the affluent and wealthy here, so that in the United States—more than in Western Europe—public policies have failed to offer much help. Our two books do not really disagree much about this: they just emphasize different parts of the story.

In a far-reaching project measuring American attitudes and behavior during the pandemic, researchers from Harvard and three other universities have polled people in all 50 states for nearly a year, reporting each week not just on evolving views toward the virus but on how the tumultuous political events helped shape the public response.

Across the country, communities have needs ripe for innovative solutions -- from rethinking transit and housing affordability to operating safe schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Civic Innovation Challenge, led by the U.S. National Science Foundation in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Department of Homeland Security, seeks to empower communities to address those needs by establishing research partnerships that can achieve not just local impacts but potentially be scaled up regionally, or even nationally. The Civic Innovation Challenge has now taken a major step by naming 52 teams across 30 states as well as tribal regions, Washington DC and Puerto Rico as Stage-1 awardees.

As women Northwestern faculty, we are dispirited and angry to hear of the recent allegations of racist and sexist practices on the cheer team. Many of us teach topics associated with the history of women, gender and patriarchy, and their intersections with racism and imperialism. We are frankly astounded that at the exact same time that we have been teaching our students about the baneful impacts of these phenomena in history and culture, the university where we work has evidently been engaging in them in blatant and illegal ways.

"We’ve found that housing practices, since the 1930s, have discriminated against women and racial and religious minorities who are disproportionately less likely to benefit from policies for new homeowners," says Prof. Chloe Thurston of Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research and Weinberg College.

“We’ve found that housing practices, since the 1930s, have discriminated against women and racial and religious minorities who are disproportionately less likely to benefit from policies for new homeowners,” says Prof. @ChloeThurstonDC of @IPRatNU and @WeinbergCollege .

Political science Prof. James Druckman is working with researchers from Harvard, Northeastern and Rutgers to survey thousands of Americans every month for the COVID States Project — the largest ongoing national survey tracking people’s opinions and behavior during the pandemic.

Political science Prof. James Druckman is working with researchers from Harvard, Northeastern and Rutgers to survey thousands of Americans every month for the COVID States Project — the largest ongoing national survey tracking people’s opinions and behavior during the pandemic.

Two-thirds of respondents (67%), whether students or parents, say they are concerned about the quality of K–12 learning during the pandemic, according to a new national survey of more than 25,000 people by Northwestern, Northeastern, Rutgers, and Harvard universities. The finding holds across respondents from different racial backgrounds, incomes, and political affiliations. “The shift to virtual learning was impressive in many ways, but after nearly a year, it is clear that concerns are growing,” said IPR political scientist James Druckman.

“This kind of schism over the loyalty to Trump, I think, creates the opportunity for potentially more [primary] challengers [in 2022],” Northwestern University political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong told VOA during a recent Skype interview. She added that banishing anti-Trump Republicans could make the party less palatable to the general voting public. “It points to how members are more focused on a small number of people in their constituency — their primary electorate, and even within that, an ardent base — whose interests might not be the same as the rest of their constituents,” Harbridge-Yong said. “It means that legislators are acting in the interests of a small minority rather than the interests of the majority of their constituents, much the less the majority of the country as a whole.”

"This kind of schism over the loyalty to Trump, I think, creates the opportunity for potentially more [primary] challengers [in 2022]," Northwestern University political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong told VOA during a recent Skype interview. She added that banishing anti-Trump Republicans could make the party less palatable to the general voting public. "It points to how members are more focused on a small number of people in their constituency — their primary electorate, and even within that, an ardent base — whose interests might not be the same as the rest of their constituents," Harbridge-Yong said. "It means that legislators are acting in the interests of a small minority rather than the interests of the majority of their constituents, much the less the majority of the country as a whole."

“Professor Shank will be required to begin mandatory diversity, equity and inclusion training with a highly-experienced trainer selected by the President: Dr. Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., Ph.D., Founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University,’’ according to the summary

Racial linked fate, the concept introduced by Dawson (1994) almost three decades ago, reoriented the study of racism and mass political behavior in the U.S. The scholarship traditionally had focused largely on the racial psychology of whites, how racism seeps into their political views and actions. Dawson proposed the black utility heuristic theory and linked fate, its associated measure, as an empirical framework to investigate the political behavior of blacks, the racial minority group most harmed by racism. Since then, linked fate has become an almost ubiquitous variable of interest in the research on minority group dynamics in American politics.

In the newest APSR "Conversations with Authors," Jamil Scott interviews Tabitha Bonilla and Alvin Tillery about their article examining the impact of different identity frames for Black Lives Matter on support for and mobilization among Black Americans.

“Professor Shank will be required to begin mandatory diversity, equity and inclusion training with a highly-experienced trainer selected by the President: Dr. Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., Ph.D., Founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University,’’ according to the summary.

Amid the protests and turbulence of 2020, Americans set a new record for gun purchases, with the FBI tallying a new high of 21 million background checks over the year. That was an increase of 26% over the 2016 record of 15.7 million. In a new national survey that took place between December 16 and January 11, nearly 9,000 of 25,000 Americans said they bought guns in 2020. The researchers then asked about why they bought them. Gun sales were especially high in March when the pandemic and lockdowns became widespread and in June at the peak of the Black Lives Matter protests. "These events generated feelings of uncertainty and threat, and Americans apparently felt some security in buying guns.” said IPR political scientist James Druckman.

Northwestern political science professor Laurel Harbridge-Yong explained that the articles of impeachment are rooted in "long-running conservative speculations." They claim Biden used his power as Vice President to make deals with foreign governments that benefited himself and his son, Hunter Biden. These allegations have been used against Biden since the election cycle, Harbridge-Yong said, despite Senate Republicans investigating these claims and finding "no evidence of wrongdoing."

"These articles of impeachment are more position-taking than an actual threat against Biden," Harbridge-Yong explained. They may not even be brought to a vote, considering the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee decides whether Congress will pursue the articles. “My understanding of these articles of impeachment,” Harbridge-Yong said, is that they are “contributing to the kind of alternative facts and alternate realities that members of the two parties seem to exist in these days, in terms of working off of very different versions of what they see as the truth.”

"Congress begins with a budget reconciliation bill that sets out the spending targets. It's a chance to take one of their spending priorities and say what needs to change in current law to kind of fit within that framework. Over time obviously strategic politicians recognized that this was a great way to avoid the super majored requirement." "But it certainly suggests that the democrats would not have to move legislation as close to the preferences of the legislators in the republican party as they would if they were passing legislation in the world where the filibuster was an option."

Northwestern University researchers conducted a survey experiment focused on how #BlackLivesMatter messages about police reform were landing on Democratic-leaning voters in Georgia during the peak of the runoff election cycle.

NU political science Prof. and Associate Director of the University’s Institute for Policy Research James Druckman said when it comes to the likelihood of being vaccinated, “very large gaps” exist between Black Americans and other racial groups. A member of the COVID States Project, a multi-university consortium aimed at analyzing national data about virus transmission, Druckman began tracking vaccine hesitancy last summer. According to the team’s research, only 52 percent of African Americans are likely to seek vaccination, compared to 67 percent of White people, 71 percent of Hispanic people and 77 percent of Asian Americans. “That (disparity) reflects the history of unethical and deadly medical trials that have been run,” Druckman said.

A Rasmussen poll recently indicated that Americans would rather see term limits on the Supreme Court before they see court-packing. Last year, however, an academic study from political scientist Aaron Belkin of San Francisco State University and James Druckman of Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research openly encouraged Democrats to pack the Supreme Court, asserting the party would face little political fallout, if any.

Many are hopeful that Joe Biden’s presidency will quickly restore federal climate change measures and catalyze substantial new efforts, such as a "green new deal." Many also hope for the United States to play a leadership role in fueling far-reaching international cooperation around climate change. Are those expectations warranted or unrealistic? What can we expect from the new administration? A panel of Northwestern University political science, environment, and economics experts came together for a Northwestern Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs webinar to discuss these questions and more

Jaime Harrison has been elected chair of the Democratic National Committee. Harrison is an institution builder. By choosing him, President Biden suggests he may be willing to become modern history’s first Democratic presidential party-builder — that is, the first Democratic president who prioritizes building up his party as well as enacting policy.

On the eve of the inauguration of a new president, join the Department of Political Science to take stock of the last few weeks and last four years in U.S. democracy and think through implications for the future. Four faculty members will offer brief reflections and then open up for questions and discussion.

“The context of the pandemic and the needs of their constituents may lead Republicans to be willing to work with Biden and the Democrats on vaccine and pandemic recovery legislation — even if they oppose the levels of spending proposed by Biden,” said Laurel Harbridge-Yong, a political science professor at Northwestern University who studies Congress. Also, politics may be changing on the right in a way that pushes some Republicans toward working with Biden on COVID-19 in particular. Republicans used to talk a big game about reining in the federal budget deficit while never really doing anything about it. But in the Trump era, some prominent Republicans, including Trump himself and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, have basically dropped the pretense that they really care about keeping the deficit low. That pretense seems to already be returning.

"It's more like a wartime inauguration than a normal inauguration," said Alvin Tillery Jr., director of Northwestern University's Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy. "It's going to look a lot more like FDR and the economic crisis of the Great Depression or Lyndon Johnson and the crisis of the civil rights movement." As a result, he said, Biden's speech needs to be "a much more stirring defense of the institution of democracy" than the typical inauguration address – or the typical speech by Biden, usually a plain-spoken person.

Seen against that history, the upsurge in White nationalist violence under Trump seems less like a new phenomenon than the resurgence of an old one -- a determination to use force to maintain a clear racial hierarchy. Political scientist Alvin Tillery, director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, says Trump's success at mobilizing an electoral coalition resistant to demographic change underscores the country's imperfect progress toward creating a true multiracial democracy. While America has formally been a democracy since its birth in the 1700s, he notes, for most of our history those democratic rights were limited solely to White men.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest funder of the arts and humanities in the US, announced today that grants totaling more than $72 million have been awarded to winners of its Just Futures Initiative—supporting teams of scholars who are studying past periods of crisis and disruption in order to lead us to cultural and social transformation. The 16 projects will receive grants of up to $5 million to be used over a three-year period to support multidisciplinary and multi-institutional collaborative teams producing solutions-based work that contributes to public understanding of the nation’s racist past and can lead to the creation of socially just futures.

Though historians now tell a much more complex story about religion in early America, the notion that the United States invented and perfected religious freedom remains firmly ensconced in U.S. public discourse. Since the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, U.S. promotion of international religious freedom advocacy is also written into the law. Yet, white supremacy is also deeply woven into religious freedom, and the impacts on U.S. society have been no more pronounced than the present. The foreign policy establishment is abuzz with talk of freedom, toleration, and rights. Proponents defend efforts to export religious freedom globally, with the United States proudly at the helm.

Prof. Sally Nuamah’s (Weinberg Doctorate ’16) scholarship isn’t constrained to the limits of traditionally academic research. A filmmaker, political scientist, author and non-profit founder, Nuamah has used various mediums to examine the education and political participation of Black women. Social policy Prof. Jonathan Guryan, her colleague in the Institute for Policy Research, said the scope of Nuamah’s work goes beyond what is typical for social scientists. “She publishes books, she publishes articles in peer reviewed academic journals,” Guryan said. “And then in addition to that, she also shares her ideas in ways that are more likely to reach non-academic audiences.”

President-elect Joe Biden will ask Congress to immediately cancel $10,000 in student debt for all borrowers and to extend the payment pause that’s scheduled to lapse this month, an aide told reporters Friday afternoon. Not all Democrats may be on board for student debt forgiveness and even if they were, procedural rules in the Senate generally require legislation to garner 60 votes. It will be hard to get nine Republicans in support of a debt jubilee. “With Democratic control of government, the Republicans are likely to re-assert their interest in the federal deficit and government spending,” said Laurel Harbridge-Yong, associate professor at Northwestern University.

That problem of racial and socioeconomic relations can also be seen in how different people don’t — or won’t — encounter each other, whether in our schools, in colleges, or even at the grocery store, said Gellman. U.S. schools must overhaul their curricula to stop perpetuating stereotypes and racism, and marginalizing groups. “Let’s rewrite our history books to tell the truth,” said Gellman. “Let’s make curricula respectful and honest. Tell [young students] that it was founded on a genocide of Native Americans, and not the Mayflower, the pilgrims and Thanksgiving.”

Druckman is a member of the 50-state COVID-19 project, which was launched in March 2020 by a multi-university group of researchers with expertise in computational social science, network science, public opinion polling, epidemiology, public health, communication, and political science. The consortium aims to help practitioners and governments make informed decisions and allocate resources effectively. The research seeks to identify links between social behaviors and virus transmission, as well as and the impact of messaging and regulation on individual and community outcomes during the COVID-19 crisis.

“The reality is we have not seen anything like this in modern American history. We’ve seen this in state houses in the 19th century: 1874 to 1876, the counter reconstruction movement, where the klan and democratic allies threatened violence and entered statehouses in this way. And we’ve seen violence in state houses this summer in Michigan and places like that in response to the COVID-19 restrictions. But we have never seen this in the television age at the US capitol.”

Connecticut already has Election Day registration. There’s pretty compelling evidence that when you have both early voting and Election Day registration, they can do a lot to retain voters and boost new turnout,” Suttmann-Lea said. “From the perspective of increasing access to ballots, the state has shown it has the infrastructure to run something like expanded mail voting quite well, even when they’re doing it on the fly.”

What role does trust play in global climate governance? For decades, claims of mistrust and distrust have dominated climate change policy arenas: doubts about climate change science and disagreements over rights and responsibilities related to mitigation, adaptation, loss, and damages undermine trust, impeding progress towards effective global climate action. And although frequently invoked in explanations of weak or failed climate action, there is limited research exploring the role of trust as a distinct concept in global climate governance. Here we seek to address this gap by developing a relational framework that focuses attention on how trust dynamics shape cooperation in four types of relationships: reliance, reciprocity, responsibility, and recognition.