By T.M. Sell Washington state voters will whittle down a busload of candidates for statewide and legislative elections beginning this month, and this process will look different from many other states due to Washington’s top-two primary. In this system, the top two candidates by vote move on to the general election, regardless of party. Unpopular…
In 2018, we published Black and Blue: How African Americans Judge the U.S. Legal System (Oxford University Press). Based on a nationally representative survey of African Americans, this book presents one of the most comprehensive analyses ever of the attitudes of Black Americans toward the legal system. The most important finding of our investigation is…
Dewey M. Clayton, professor of political science at the University of Louisville, is an expert on American politics and U.S. social movements. His most recent book is The Presidential Campaign of Barack Obama: a critical analysis of a racially transcendent strategy. He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles including “Black Lives Matter and…
Was the election of 2016 the new normal? Or will Donald Trump’s successful campaign formula of racialized appeals and anti-establishment messaging be forgotten with the GOP reverting to its previous form after his presidency? On the campaign trail, former Vice President Joe Biden has advanced this latter view, saying “history will treat this administration’s time…
By Melissa Michelson My Menlo College students are generally concerned with current events and politics at the federal level—including Supreme Court decisions and actions taken by Congress or the President—and it can be challenging to convince them that their participation matters on that larger stage. I have found that once students learn more about what…
The year is 2020, not 1968. There has been extensive commentary about the protests over the recent murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police suggesting parallels to the black insurgency of the late 1960s, including especially the massive number of riots that occurred in cities across the country in 1968. A number of historians have…
By Alice Malmberg The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) proposes an alternative to how the United States currently elects its president by tying the outcome of the national popular vote to each state’s electoral vote for the presidency.[1] First introduced in 2006 by a bipartisan coalition of political scientists and elected officials, lawmakers have…
This collaboration brings together articles published in the Journal of Political Science Education that discuss classroom approaches related to teaching about race, racism, social justice and civic action. Our reading list offers a range of materials – from syllabi, reading lists to active learning assignments – that discuss classroom practices through the lens of identity, gender and power relations. It includes a…
Andrea Benjamin, an associate professor of African and African American studies at The University of Oklahoma, is the author of “Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections: Elite Cues and Cross-Ethnic Voting.” She is also the co-author of “Set in Stone? Predicting Confederate Monument Removal,” recently published in PS: Political Science and Politics. Andrea Benjamin earned her…
#PoliSci Tweets is Educate’s regular round-up of political science resources and discussions. This week features a variety of publicly available resources around the movement for Black Lives. Julia Azari is Associate Professor and Assistant Chair in the Department of Political Science at Marquette University I don't care if you don't like podcasts or even if…