*Indicates a student co-author.
Appel, Hilary. “Populism and the Durability of the Liberal Order in Eastern Europe: EU and NATO Enlargement Reconsidered.” Rethinking the 1990s, edited by John Ikenberry and Peter Trubowitz). Oxford University Press, 2025, pp. 139-168.
Abstract: This chapter explores whether the illiberal trends over the past decade in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic result from major policy choices in the 1990s, most crucially the specific ways that EU and NATO accessions were carried out—employing strong if not coercive membership conditionality—or simply reflect democratic decline as seen across many regions. This chapter argues that the expansion of major multilateral organizations and the extension of full membership to postcommunist states contributed centrally in the liberal reorientation of this region. Despite the demands and the speed of membership accession, and the loss of domestic policymaking authority in the process, these countries’ accession process on balance contributed significantly and positively to their democratic and capitalist transformations and the embrace of liberal political norms. The chapter ends with a consideration of other factors shaping the endurance and future of liberalism and multilateralism in the region, including the war in Ukraine.
Johnson-Saeger*, Samuel, and Hilary Appel. “Ukraine’s Defense in a Trump World: Can Europe Fill the Gap?” Global Policy, May 20, 2025.
Abstract: Given the tremendous uncertainty surrounding U.S. military support for Ukraine under a Trump administration, European leaders are working aggressively to identify which military areas they can assume and which areas are beyond their current capacities in helping Ukraine protect itself against Russian aggression. While America’s contribution to air defense, intelligence, and longer-range missiles are especially important and hard to replace in the short term, other defense areas are less vulnerable to a U.S. withdrawal. In addition to examining the material limitations hampering European effectiveness in supporting Ukraine’s future defense, this article considers key political challenges at both the domestic and the EU level that will constrain Europe’s ability to absorb the role played by U.S. military support.
Appel, Hilary, Principal Investigator. “International Grant for the International Journalism Program at the Keck Center.” Robert H. N. Ho Foundation, 2025, $423,000.
Blitz, Mark. Review of Kantian Dignity and Its Difficulties, by Karl Ameriks. Choice Magazine, vol. 62, number 8, 2025.
Blitz, Mark. Review of A Philosophical History of Police Power, by Melyana Lane. Choice Magazine, vol. 63, number 1, 2025.
Blitz, Mark. Review of Absolute Ethical Life, by Michael Lazurus. Choice Magazine, vol. 63, number 2, 2025.
Bou Nassif, Hicham. “Worse Than Camp David? Revisiting the May 17, 1983, Lebanon-Israel Agreement.” The Middle East Journal, vol. 78, numbers 2-3, Winter-Spring 2025, pp. 259-275.
Abstract: In light of the declassification of archival sources, this article reassesses the negotiations of the Lebanon-Israel agreement of May 17, 1983, which revolved around three major themes: security arrangements in Southern Lebanon, the fate of Israel’s ally Major Sa‘d Haddad and his militia, and normalization. Many have claimed that Lebanese negotiators capitulated to a US-Israeli diktat, yet, on all three issues, Israel conceded more than it had initially intended. Thus, I demonstrate that when negotiations stalled, American mediators consistently sided with Lebanon to offset the power of Israel, and, although the agreement ultimately failed, I challenge the widely held presumption that Israel, with American backing, imposed peace terms on a compliant and powerless Lebanon.
Bou Nassif, Hicham. “Lebanon’s Precarious Future.” Washington Monthly, April 8, 2025.
Abstract: The collapse of Hezbollah’s dominance has left a power vacuum in Lebanon—and a rare opening to reimagine the state. But without reform, aid, disarmament, and a rethinking of the centralized system of governance, the country risks falling back into the abyss.
Bou Nassif, Hicham. “Trump Is Betting on Syria’s New Strongman.” Washington Monthly, May 22, 2025.
Abstract: Ahmad al-Sharaa toppled Assad. But is Syria headed toward democracy, or did it trade one dictator for another?
Bou Nassif, Hicham. “Why I’m Not Optimistic About Democracy in Syria.” Washington Monthly, September 29, 2025.
Abstract: Early next month, the country is scheduled to hold its first parliamentary elections since the fall of Assad. But the conditions that have long stifled democracy in the Arab world remain firmly in place.
Branch, Jordan. Virtual Territories: Technology, Representation, and the State in a Digital Age. Oxford University Press, 2025.
Abstract: Thanks to the digital revolution, new weapons, communication media, surveillance systems, and more are increasingly interwoven into warfare, diplomacy, trade, and every other aspect of international relations. To understand the interaction between the resulting technological and political changes, this book focuses on the essential but underappreciated mechanism of representation: how technologies and their capabilities are represented and how technologies produce or alter representations of the world. These dual representational processes act as essential intervening variables in international politics. Technological systems create and transform the representations that define international politics, from the territorial state to core practices of international cooperation and conflict. Simultaneously, technological systems are represented in ways that fundamentally shape their political impact. These dynamics have implications for the underlying features of international relations, including the future of the territorial state and the international system. This book explores these consequences in four empirical areas: the technologies of nineteenth-century state-building and imperial expansion, digital geospatial technologies and territorial borders, cybersecurity threats and how states address them, and remote and possibly autonomous warfare through drones. The digitization of information technology has created an explosion of visual representation, greater malleability of digital tools when compared to their predecessors, an ever-increasing complexity of systems requiring simplifying representations, and the blurring of the material-ideational distinction. Representational dynamics are thus one of the most important, though neglected, mechanisms in the interaction between technological and political change today.
Branch, Jordan. “Representing Territory Beyond the Map.” Dialogues in Human Geography, vol. 15, issue 3, 2025, pp. 461-464.
Abstract: This commentary engages with Gonin et al. in terms of how their novel concept of terrestrial territory can be read through the importance of representations: visual, linguistic, and otherwise. This supports their effort to reframe and address the challenges of the Anthropocene.
Branch, Jordan. “Reconceptualizing the State and Its Alternatives: Ideas, Infrastructures, Representations.” Territorial Imaginaries: Beyond the Sovereign Map, edited by Kären Wigen. University of Chicago, 2025.
Abstract: This chapter aims to redefine the state by synthesizing conceptual elements from across discussions, identifying how certain threads have constituted the state as today’s dominant organizational form - including, in particular, its territoriality. Specifically, this chapter proposes reconceptualizing states as the combination of particular ideas, infrastructures, and representations: ideas about organization, authority, and action; material infrastructures of control and communication; and representations in visual, linguistic, and other forms. Most concepts define the state in terms of ideas alone, although often implicitly. Studies that have discussed infrastructural or representational elements have incorporated them as causes, effects, or tools of states or state-building. Instead, this chapter proposes that we think of the state itself as a combination of ideas, infrastructures, and representations. This reformulation draws on disciplines that have rarely been in conversation, and provides new means to address the emergence and contemporary trajectory of statehood. This helps explain the persistence of the state in spite of the enormous transformations of the last half-century - including many that have been hypothesized to undermine the purpose, legitimacy, or practical functioning of states.
Buccola, Nicholas. One Man's Freedom: King, Goldwater, and the Struggle Over an American Ideal. Princeton University Press, 2025.
Abstract: In the mid-1950s, Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the leaders of two diametrically opposed freedom movements that changed the course of American history and still divide American politics. King mobilized civil rights activists under the banner of “freedom now” – insisting that true freedom would not be realized until all people—regardless of race—were empowered politically, economically, and socially. Goldwater rallied conservatives to the cause of “extremism in defense of liberty” – advocating radical individualism. In One Man’s Freedom, Nicholas Buccola tells the compelling story of Goldwater and King’s dramatic decade-long debate over the meaning of an all-important American ideal.
Part dual biography, part history, One Man’s Freedom traces the actions and words of Goldwater and King over a crucial and eventful decade, from their dizzying rise through 1964, which ended with Goldwater’s landslide defeat in the presidential election and King’s Nobel Peace Prize. The book chronicles why Goldwater and King, who never met in person, came to view each other as perhaps the greatest threat to freedom in America. It explains how their ideas of freedom could be so vastly different, yet both so deeply rooted in American history and their times. And it shows how their disagreement continues to shape and explain politics today, when the bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats often come down to the question of what kind of freedom Americans want – the one defined by Goldwater or by King?
Buccola, Nicholas. “A Stranger Everywhere.” The American Scholar, October 22, 2025.
Abstract: A review of Nicholas Boggs's James Baldwin: A Love Story.
Evrigenis, Ioannis D., Carl J. Richard, Marco Romani, and Charlotte C. Thomas. “Ancient Legacies: Democracy v. Republic (Greece v. Rome).” Online Library of Liberty, January 14, 2025.
Abstract: American revolutionaries looked to the past for lessons about constraining the individuals who would serve in future governments. While they read about systems as varied as monarchies, aristocracies, and tyrannies, they focused on democracies and republics—with an eye to minimizing the dangers of each. In this Liberty Matters series, Carl Richard, Marco Romani, and Charlotte Thomas respond to Ioannis Evrigenis on how the United States’ founders created a bold, new constitution inspired by ancient ones.
Evrigenis, Ioannis, Principal Investigator. “Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE)-SP Program: Promoting Civil Discourse on College and University Campuses.” Department of Education, in support of the Open Academy, 2025, $2,408,560.
Evrigenis, Ioannis. “Professional development course for K-12 teachers.” Jack Miller Center, 2025, $30k.
McWilliams Barndt, Susan. “Why Study the Humanities When People Are Dying?” Public Humanities, vol. 1, e19, 2025, pp. 1-3.
Abstract: Lately, my students have been asking: “Why should we be here, when there are people suffering out there?” Evidently, they are asking about the public value of higher education. But they are also asking old questions, some of the oldest that human beings have seen fit to ask. Versions of these questions appear in all scriptural traditions, in ancient and modern philosophical works, in stories and novels and songs. They are questions at the core of what we call “the humanities.” Part of why we study the humanities– and why we must– is to get help in asking, articulating, and trying to answer such questions. There aren’t single right answers to any of those questions. Each of us must work answers out for ourselves. But we can work out better answers for ourselves if we spend time in the company of others who take those questions seriously. This is not just an individual task; it’s a collective task of great public import. In this short piece, I defend the idea of the public humanities on these terms.
McWilliams Barndt, Susan. “The Idea of Fraternity in America at Fifty: A Symposium (Introduction).” Political Science Reviewer, vol. 49, number 1, 2025, pp. 245-251.
Abstract: A symposium on Wilson Carey McWilliams' The Idea of Fraternity in America.
McWilliams Barndt, Susan. “Hells Angels in the White House: Trumpism and the Politics of Total Retaliation.” The Journal of Illiberalism Studies, April 8, 2025.
Abstract: This article reflects on the 'politics of total retaliation' in the second Trump administration, based on terms derived from Hunter S. Thompson's Hells Angels. It follows on a piece I wrote in 2016 for The Nation which analyzed Trumpism in those terms.
McWilliams Barndt, Susan. “Campus Swatting on a Thursday Afternoon.” Current, March 26, 2025.
Abstract: This piece reflects on the state of the nation, based on a campus swatting incident in mid-March.
McWilliams Barndt, Susan. Review of Prohibition, the Constitution, and States’ Rights by Sean Beienburg. Federal History Journal, issue 17, 2025, pp. 158-161.
Miller, Kenneth, and Abhi Nemani, Co-Principal Investigators. “Elevating Eastern LA County’s Voice in Measure G Implementation.” John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, 2025-2026, $100,000.
Abstract: The Rose Institute was awarded a one-year planning grant to elevate local perspectives in Eastern Los Angeles County as the County implements major governance reform. In 2024, voters approved Measure G, the most sweeping change to LA County government in more than a century and the nation's most significant local government reform in recent history. Among other changes, Measure G will expand the County Board of Supervisors from five to nine members and create an elected office of County Executive. Cities on the eastern periphery of this massive, complex county often struggle to have their concerns heard at the county level. This project will focus on them; researchers at the Rose Institute will conduct roundtables and individual interviews with city managers in the county's eastern region to understand how, in their view, Measure G can best be implemented to serve residents in their respective cities. The Rose Institute has chosen to work with city managers because, as their cities' chief executive officers, their supportive engagement will be critical for Measure G's successful implementation. Moreover, at this early stage of the transition, city managers can provide keen insights into the most pressing challenges (and opportunities) for cities in adapting to Measure G reforms.
Keil, Manfred, Robert Kleinhenz, and Kenneth P. Miller. "The State of the Region 2025: Economic and Election Report.” Inland Empire Economic Partnership, February 19, 2025.
Miller, Kenneth P., Bipasa Nadon, and Jessica Jin. "Building Back Better: Altadena's Recovery and Lessons from Santa Rosa." Report of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government, April 2025.
Abstract: Altadena's Recovery and Lessons from Santa Rosa. A research study by the Rose Institute, commissioned by The Olson Company. Released April 2025.
Miller, Kenneth P., et al. “2025 California City Managers Survey: A Profile of the Profession." Report of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government, June 2025.
Abstract: What are the characteristics of the men and women who serve as California’s city managers? What are their demographic traits? Their educational backgrounds and prior work experiences? Their average length of service in their positions? What do they consider the most important issues facing their cities? And do these answers vary depending on the city’s size?
As the chief executive officers of hundreds of cities across the state, city managers are collectively California’s most important group of local government officials. Yet, until recently, little was known about the people who fill these critical positions.
In 2023, the California City Management Foundation (CCMF), joined by Tripepi Smith Talent Solutions and the California Joint Powers Insurance Authority, commissioned the Rose Institute of State and Local Government, an academic research institute at Claremont McKenna College, to survey the state’s city managers. The survey results were released in a report, 2023 California City Manager Survey: A Profile of the Profession, which presented the first in-depth, comprehensive look at these officials.
Building on that work, the California City Management Foundation (CCMF) commissioned the Rose Institute to conduct a second survey. Tripepi Smith and California Joint Powers Insurance Authority (California JPIA) provided additional support. The 2025 Survey expands on the 2023 report by including additional questions highlighting changes in our findings between 2023 and 2025.
Nadon, Bipasa, Kenneth P. Miller, and Sophia Helland. "Affordable Housing Funding: How Ontario, Anaheim, Corona, Fontana, Pomona, and Rancho Cucamonga Fund Affordable Housing Projects." Report of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government, July 2025.
Miller, Kenneth P., and Quinten Carney*: "Proposition 50 is a high-stakes redistricting choice coming in November." The San Bernardino Sun, September 18, 2025.
Murray, Jean-Pierre, and Jeffrey D. Pugh. “Refugees, Forced Migration, Conflict, and Security.” The Sage Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies, edited by Maia Carter Hallward, Ji Eun Kim, Cécile Mouly, Timothy Seidel, and Zubairu Wai. Sage Publishing, 2025, pp. 378-388.
Abstract: The study of the intersection of conflict and forced migration has increased significantly over the past ten years, including explanations of the conflict drivers that cause forced migrants to flee and the dynamics of integration, conflict, and coexistence as they negotiate their place in new host countries. In this chapter, we examine several of the major debates and scholarly trends that have emerged from this body of work: traditional examinations such as narratives and securitization of forced migration and critical scholarship on political agency vs. invisibility of forced migrants, structural violence, and the technologies of border controls and migration governance. Drawing specific mini-case examples from the Caribbean and the Andean region of South America, we illustrate patterns and distinctions in the way migrants, their countries of origin, and their host countries navigate conflict and coexistence. Through this chapter, we show that the study of forced migration, once considered marginal to the fields of international relations, and peace and conflict studies, is a central focus of scholarly and policy attention, and that migrants themselves exercise agency in surprising ways to navigate conflict and secure peaceful livelihoods, protection, and coexistence. We provide background and historical context on migration, security, and conflict in the global system, a survey of scholarly debates and trends on this topic, and an examination of critical theories and their contribution to our understanding of forced migration, conflict, peace, and security. We then illustrate the dynamics we surveyed through two vignette examples from the Dominican Republic and Ecuador.
Murray, Jean-Pierre. “The War on ‘Drug Boats’: How Lethal Maritime Strikes Push the Boundaries of International Law.” Global Policy, November 17, 2025.
Murray, Jean-Pierre. “Beating the Backlash: Can Incremental Approaches Strengthen NGO Responses to Security-Based Migration Policies.” New Security Beat, February 4, 2025.
Pears, Emily. Review of Prohibition, the Constitution, and States’ Rights by Sean Beienburg. Federal History Journal, issue 17, 2025, pp. 162-167.
Pei, Minxin. The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism. Princeton University Press, 2025.
Abstract: When China embarked on its transformative journey of modernization in 1979, many believed the country’s turn toward capitalism would put its totalitarian past to rest and mark the birth of a democratic, open society. Instead, China reverted to a neo-totalitarian state, one backed by one of the fastest-growing, most formidable economies on earth. The Broken China Dream pulls back the curtain on the regime of strongman Xi Jinping, revealing why the reforms of the post-Mao era have been reversed on nearly every front—and why the world failed to see it coming.
Exposing the truth behind China’s economic ascendency after the Cultural Revolution, Minxin Pei shows how, following Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping strategically deployed the tools of capitalism to preserve the Chinese Communist Party. Deng kept intact the institutional foundations of totalitarianism even as he unleashed private entrepreneurship and courted foreign investment, giving China’s one-party state control of a vast repressive apparatus and the most critical sectors of the economy. Only a fragile balance of power among dueling factions prevented the rise of a totalitarian leader in the two decades after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989—but this temporary equilibrium collapsed.
Essential to understanding today’s China, this meticulously researched book is a sobering account of why the country’s reformers and institutions could not stop a shrewd and ruthless politician like Xi from resurrecting dormant totalitarian practices that, for the foreseeable future, have spelled the end of the dream of a free and prosperous China.
Pei, Minxin. “Same Strategy, But Different Emphasis: Main Takeaways from the Central Committee’s Proposals for the 15th Five-Year Plan.” China Leadership Monitor, issue 86, December 2025.
Abstract: The proposal for the 15th Five-Year Plan (FYP), approved by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party at its 4th plenum in late October 2025, is substantively similar to the proposal for the 14th FYP. The most important message conveyed in this document is that the party will continue to pursue the security-centered development strategy unveiled in October 2020. Based on the more pessimistic assessments of China’s external environment, the proposal for the next FYP underscores the party’s determination to mitigate China’s strategic vulnerabilities with new investments in a wide range of industrial, technological, and military capabilities. Although many specific measures listed in the proposal are part of existing policy, their prominence in this authoritative party document signals that the Chinese leadership will stay the course in spite of difficulties and risks. Regardless of its upbeat tone, the proposal reveals the significant challenges China will face in implementing its strategy. Contrary to the perception that the West’s technological chokeholds constitute China’s greatest vulnerability, what is holding back China is the party’s lack of success in reinvigorating the broad economy. The proposal contains few credible measures to suggest the party will do any better in this respect during the next five years.
Pei, Minxin. “More Method than Madness: China’s Response to Trump’s New Tariff War.” China Leadership Monitor, issue 85, September 2025.
Abstract: China’s initial response to America’s new trade war was cautious and restrained due to uncertainties about the Trump administration’s objectives. But the high tariffs announced on “liberation day” in early April left Xi Jinping no alternative but to retaliate forcefully. By demonstrating defiance and resolve, Xi likely hoped both to rally domestic public support and to force the U.S. to show all its cards. At the same time, however, Xi also attempted to preserve a working relationship with Trump by avoiding antagonizing him personally and by signaling a willingness to de-escalate. In terms of domestic economic policy, China opted for more rhetorical reassurance than a substantive stimulus because of its limited resources and Beijing’s desire to keep its powder dry for future contingencies. On the external front, Chinese leaders adopted a wait-and-see stance. Instead of aggressively exploiting the fallout from Trump’s tariffs on all its trading partners, China pursued a differentiated policy that prioritized Asia with moderately more intense diplomatic engagement while avoiding any new bets on Europe, where the relationship with China is complicated by both pre-existing trade tensions and Chinese support for Russia. With a 180-day truce that avoided a complete meltdown in Sino–American commercial relations, China has demonstrated a more nuanced and effective – approach to the Trump administration and a strategic mindset that is focused on the long term.
Pei, Minxin. “Broke But Not (Yet) Bankrupt: Local Government Finance in the Age of Economic Stagnation.” China Leadership Monitor, issue 84, June 2025.
Abstract: The combination of the real estate crash that started in 2021 and the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2022 has contributed to a dramatic fall in local revenues during the past three years, in particular income from land sales. In response, local governments have cut spending and raised new sources of revenue through mostly one-off measures (such as selling state-owned assets). Although these short-term solutions have apparently kept local governments barely afloat, long-term reforms are needed to address a well-known flaw in China’s fiscal system. In light of China’s overall large structural deficit and growing level of public debt, the policy of muddling through will most likely produce even worse outcomes, such as a further deterioration in local services and a continuing waste of scarce resources on unnecessary or inefficient local investment projects.
Pei, Minxin. “From Purge to Control: A Recent Pivot in Xi Jinping’s Anti-Corruption Crackdown.” China Leadership Monitor, issue 83, March 2025.
Abstract: A striking anomaly marks Xi Jinping’s never-ending anti-corruption campaign. Twelve years after its launch, the number of party members and officials punished for violating CCP discipline has more than doubled. In addition to raising questions about the effectiveness of Xi’s approach to fighting corruption since a successful campaign should have already reduced the level of corruption and the number of officials disciplined, this anomaly may also be the result of a shift from purge to control in the emphasis of Xi’s anti-corruption drive. As evidenced by three successive revisions of the party’s discipline code within an 8-year period, the party under Xi’s rule has greatly expanded the range of actions it deems to be in violation of political and organizational discipline. An examination of the new rules shows that most of these new rules are vaguely worded, perhaps deliberately so, in order to give the party greater discretion in disciplining its members. Analysis of sample cases involving disciplined senior and mid-level officials in 2023–24 indicates that these revisions have indeed given the party new instruments to control its officials, with about 10–25 percent of the disciplined officials accused of violating the newly established rules.
Busch, Andrew E., and John J. Pitney, Jr. The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Bloomsbury, 2025.
Abstract: Continuing a tradition now in its fourth decade, this book provides the most comprehensive and authoritative account of the national election, as well as congressional and state elections. From the nominating process to the ratification of the electoral college vote, Andrew E. Busch and John J. Pitney Jr. revisit the campaigns and results through the short lens of politics today and the long lens of American political history. With its keen insights into the issues and events that drove the 2024 elections, The Comeback will be an invaluable resource for students and all political observers seeking to understand a historic election that will continue to resonate throughout American politics for many years to come.
Rose, Shanna. “Federalism and the Future of US Minimum Wage Policy.” Publius: The Journal of Federalism, vol. 56, issue 1, Winter 2026, pp. 87-104.
Abstract: This article examines how federalism has shaped the development of minimum wages in the United States, and discusses implications for the future. I argue that federalism operates as both an opportunity structure and a containment structure for US wage standards, as it creates multiple overlapping policy venues as well as multiple veto points. These features of American federalism make it an inherently neutral but highly malleable tool that can be used to advance the opposing interests of business and labor. Countervailing expansionary and contractionary pressures in different parts of the federal system have contributed to interjurisdictional variation in not only basic minimum wages but also indexation, tip credits, and subminimum wages. These disparities will likely continue to widen in the future. The analysis sheds light on a broader debate on the promise and perils of decentralized policymaking.
Shields, Jon A. “A New Path for a Free Palestine.” Washington Monthly, December 16, 2025.
Storey, Benjamin, and Jon A. Shields. “Teach Students Conservative Thought.” Persuasion, December 1, 2025.
Shields, Jon A., Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik. “Professors Need to Diversify What They Teach.” Persuasion, October 16, 2025.
Shields, Jon A. “Campus Climate Rankings Miss the Point.” Washington Monthly, August 24, 2025.
Shields, Jon A., and Yuval Avnur. “Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s Bias.” The Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2025.
Sinclair, J. Andrew, Ian O’Grady, Bryn Miller, and Catherine M. Murphy. “Participation and Competition in Top-Two Elections: Trade-Offs in Election Reform.” State Politics & Policy Quarterly, vol. 26, number 1, pp. 101-115.
Abstract: American states continue to experiment with new forms of electoral institutions, including various nonpartisan election systems. One such rule, the “top-two” procedure, allows all voters to choose any candidate in the primary, advancing whichever two candidates obtain the most votes to the general election. These general elections may feature two candidates of the same party. This paper uses data from California, the largest state to adopt this rule, to examine participation and competition in the last five elections before the top-two procedure (2002 to 2010) and the first five after it (2012 to 2020), investigating the potential trade-off between the roll-off and increased competition. We find that while roll-off occurs with copartisan elections, the compensating increases in competition are substantial. Furthermore, with this system, the meaningful competition shifts toward the higher turnout general elections, which calls into question whether there is much of a participatory cost at all. Additionally, we leverage the unusual cases of write-in candidates to illustrate the electoral dynamics of these elections, highlighting the difficulty of implementing accountability with cross-party elections while demonstrating the behavioral potential of copartisan elections.
Echeverri-Gent, John, and Aseema Sinha, eds. “Special Issue on Analyzing the Diversity of a Large Emerging Market: Sectoral Politics in India’s Multi level Political Economy.” Studies in Comparative International Development, vol 60, issue 2, June 2025.
Echeverri-Gent John, and Aseema Sinha, “Analyzing the Diversity of a Large Emerging Market: Sectoral Politics in India’s Multi-level Political Economy.”Studies in Comparative International Development, vol. 60, issue 2, June 2025, pp. 283-309.
Abstract: Like other large emerging markets, India’s economy cannot be understood without explaining significant sectoral variations within manufacturing and services. Diverse and persistent sectoral patterns reveal the inadequacies of a dirigisme-liberalization frame that relies on a state versus market dichotomy adopted by most analyses of India’s political economy. Rather, each sector combines state and markets in diverse ways. Focusing on sectors, however, is not enough. This paper’s contribution shows how sectors are embedded in international, national, or regional contexts. This paper, and the larger collaborative project of six papers, offers a distinctive, disaggregated perspective on India’s large emerging market by deploying a sector-centered approach that embeds the study of sectors across India’s international, national, regional, and micro-levels. We advance explanations of the politics of “marketcraft” across sectors by incorporating “sectoral political networks” into our analytical framework. We show how they play a crucial role in shaping policy formation and implementation in a manner that connects the different levels of analysis and structures of political contention. The framework also yields important insights for other large and diverse economies and comparative political economy more generally.
Sinha, Aseema. “The ‘Crisis of Success’ and Peaceful Change at the WTO and within the Global Trading System.” International Organizations and Peaceful Change in World Politics, edited by T.V. Paul, Anders Wivel, and Kai He. Cambridge University Press, 2025, pp. 249-272.
Abstract: Despite the promise of a well-ordered trading system and expansion of trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s, why is trade governance deadlocked? This puzzle is addressed by elaborating the meaning of “crisis of success” and what such a crisis looks like at the global trading order. I argue that the global trading system is revealing a “crisis of success” in that its current failure to ensure functional trade liberalization change is a result of the initial accomplishment in successfully undergoing a power shift in global trade governance especially at the WTO, marked by greater inclusion of new emerging powers. The success of the initial first phase of trade governance (1990s–2008/2012), especially in aiding an institutional power shift at the global level, created conditions for new problems, leading to a fragmented turn toward preferential trade agreements as well as trade-mediated conflictual strategies rather than sustainable peaceful change. The chapter’s dynamic historical argument delineates how early successes in global trade policies and governance led to maximalist peaceful change, followed by crisis leading to greater use of tariffs and ensuing US–China economic and trade competition. The mechanisms that underwrote the paradox of crisis despite institutional strength are elaborated.
Thomas, George. “Recovering the Founders’ Constitution.” American Political Thought, vol. 14, number 4, Fall 2025, pp. 596-606.
Thomas, George. “Christianity, Enlightenment, and the American Experiment: A Review Essay.” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 140, number 1, Spring 2025, pp. 175-192.
Abstract: In the Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding, Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer argue that the classical Christian Natural Law tradition is the central tradition shaping the American political order. Rejecting the scholarly consensus that the American founding was shaped by multiple traditions, Cooper and Dyer see continuity from Aristotle to Aquinas to the founding generation. This argument far exceeds the evidence: It is unpersuasive at the level of ideas, but it is even less compelling considering the epic political conflicts that surrounded these ideas—conflicts that were responsible for the genesis of Enlightenment ideas about religious liberty. Both liberalism and civic republicanism, to take the two leading schools of thought, emerged in response to conflicts over theology among the different sects of Christianity. Yet Cooper and Dyer's analysis obscures the political conflicts that were an essential feature of creating the American political order. To argue that Christianity and political theology had an important influence on thinking during the founding era, we must wrestle with what type of Christianity and political theology? How did understandings of Christianity and political theology change in their encounter with Enlightenment thinking? Cooper and Dyer do not attend to these questions. Yet such questions are all the more important given the rise of Christian nationalism and Catholic integralism, which would return us to pre-Enlightenment understandings of religious liberty that are profoundly at odds with the American experiment and the religious pluralism that stems from it.
Thomas, George. “James Madison and the Logic of Republican Government.” James Madison’s Constitution: A Double Security and a Parchment Barrier, edited by Eric T. Kasper and Howard Schweber. University of Georgia Press, 2025.
Thomas, George. “The Supreme Court’s Immunity-to-Impunity Pipeline.” Washington Monthly, May 21, 2025.
Thomas, George. “Surviving Bad Presidents.” The Bulwark, May 16, 2025.
Thomas, George. “The Other Fear of the Founders.” The Atlantic, February 12, 2025
Thomas, George. Review of Prohibition, the Constitution, and States’ Rights by Sean Beienburg. Federal History Journal, issue 17, 2025, pp. 167-170.
Thomas, George. “Ken Kersch and the Politics of Constitutional Erasure.” Blog. Balkinization Symposium in honor of Ken Kersch, June 12, 2025.
Zarkin, Jessica. “Security Is on the Upswing; Who Should Get the Credit?: Insights from Mexico City Residents.” Urban Affairs Review, vol. 61, issue 6, November 2025.
Abstract: How do city residents assign credit to city officials for good policy outcomes? And, do credit claims by city officials influence how citizens perceive their performance in office? To address these questions, this article turns to matters of public safety in Mexico City, where a substantial reduction in crime coincided with constitutional amendments, triggering intense debate over credit allocation for improving crime between the City government and borough mayors despite the former having sole structural authority over policing. I find that partisanship significantly shapes whether city residents credit the city government or boroughs for crime reduction, while knowledge about how the city is governed does not. Moreover, my findings indicate that borough mayors' credit claims do not enhance perceptions of their performance in office but instead diminish the City government's reputation. These findings underscore that delivering public goods does not guarantee political benefit, nor do deceptive credit claims.
Gonzalez, Yanilda and Jessica Zarkin. “Who Governs Policing? Mayors’ Strategic Linkages to Police in Latin American Cities.” Comparative Political Studies, vol. 58, issue 7, June 2025.
Abstract: What explains variation in mayors’ strategic linkages with police forces they do not formally control? This question is of central importance in Latin America, home to 43 of the 50 most violent cities in the world. As mayors with limited to no authority over police came to see their electoral fortunes affected by citizen demands for security, some have expanded the role of municipal governments in policing. Others, however, deliberately constrained their role in this electorally risky area. Drawing on within and cross-case comparisons of São Paulo, Colombia, and Mexico City police forces, we argue and show that variation in mayors’ strategic linkages to policing and security is shaped by electoral incentives for responsiveness, constitutional rules that impose responsibility, and risks of shirking by police. Our findings speak to an emerging research agenda placing policing at the center of our understanding of urban governance and democratic responsiveness more broadly.