Scope Conditions Podcast

Today on Scope Conditions: when the bombs don’t go off, the war isn't over. We tend to think of peace as beginning when the bombs stop falling. But as our guest today shows us, this is only half the story. Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States engaged in massive bombing in Cambodia. Between 1965 and 1973, the U.S. dropped 500,000 tons of explosives there — more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country. Dr. Erin Lin, an Associate Professor of...

Political 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...

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 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, h...

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 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 incentive...

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 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-Amer...

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 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, a...

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. 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 prioritie...

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 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 t...

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 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....

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 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 Sc...

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 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 t...

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 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 author...

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 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...