In the United States presidential elections are big business. More than fifteen months before the general election, candidates and their affiliated super-PACs have already raised almost $130 million. They will raise and spend many hundreds of millions more before the last ballot is counted. The vast majority of those dollars ...

Do concepts of space and geography play a big role in the questions you’re interested in? These concepts are prominent across the social sciences, in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, criminology, demography, political science, public health, and sociology, and on subjects as different as tribal customs, residential segregation, disease clusters, ...

In a referendum on September 6th 2015, Poles answered three questions. The first one, causing the most controversy, concerned the introduction of single member districts (SMD) in elections to the Polish Sejm (lower house of parliament), while the other two addressed changes to campaign finance regulations and the tax code. ...

Observers of contemporary politics with broadly liberal, democratic moral convictions have often felt ambivalent about the term ‘terrorist,’ particularly when used to characterize armed, non-state political groups that describe their goals in terms of ‘liberation’ or ‘resistance to oppression’. Terrorism and the Right to Resist addresses some of the deeper ...

The most recent Gallup (July 2015) polls report that immigration is one of the nation’s most important problems yet Democrats and Republicans remain sharply divided on how to address the issue. While Republicans generally support securing the borders in order to stop unauthorized immigration and enforcing against illegal aliens that ...

Political pundits (including professors!) sometimes assert that national election outcomes turn on which political party or candidate espouses the most attractive policies on issues such as taxation, immigration, health care, and (in Europe) the role of the European Union, that preoccupy the mass public. However, political parties do not stake ...

Fifteen years ago, the United Nations Security Council took a massive first step towards recognition of the lack of attention to gender equality and gender issues in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and security processes around the world. UNSC Resolution 1325 provided a framework for the integration of women into peace processes, attention ...

Recent high-profile challenges to the veracity of published social science research (see here and here), highlight the importance of methodological transparency in academic research. Methodological transparency is the key to scientific integrity and the accumulation of scientific knowledge. As outlined in a recent NSF report, transparency about data collection, management, ...

In the run-up to the 2014 European and Council elections the UK Labour Party was contemplating different strategies of how to deal with difficult issues, particularly immigration. In the short term, would it be more effective to ‘move the conversation on’ to issues more favorable? Should it confront the difficult ...

On June 8, 2015, U.S. President Barack Obama held a press conference after the G7 Summit in Schloss Elmau, Germany. Although the president spoke chiefly about the Summit, his answer to a reporter’s question about the Supreme Court’s pending decision concerning his signature health care reform policy set off a ...