Maxwell School News and Commentary

“States are supposed to be a laboratory for experimentation. What’s interesting about this moment is that [some] states are now a laboratory for what they perceive to be a hostile federal government,” says Shana Gadarian, Merle Goldberg Fabian Professor of Excellence in Citizenship and Critical Thinking.

“They have their own constituencies that they are there to represent, but also they have the ability to capture media attention and be very clear and forceful, because they don’t have to deal with Trump in the Washington policymaking arena,” says Shana Gadarian, Merle Goldberg Fabian Professor of Excellence in Citizenship and Critical Thinking.

The “idea that irreconcilable differences justify secession ignores the violent history of such efforts, including the Civil War, and overlooks the reality that Americans are deeply intermixed—politically, geographically and ideologically,” says Ryan Griffiths, professor of political science. 

The article, co-authored by Professor of Political Science Daniel McDowell, was published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science.

“Redrawing districts in between the decennial censuses will just lead to a redistricting arms race,” says Grant Reeher, professor of political science. “What both parties are doing is bad for the political system generally, the state legislatures and the Congress, and the citizens.” 

“As I traveled to military installations around the world, I saw in action the powerful symbolism of the American flag. It means something when people see it on the shoulders of U.S. troops in conflict zones and to allies who fight alongside them. It means something when it arrives with humanitarian aid,” says Alex Wagner, adjunct professor in Maxwell's Washington programs.

“His intense ground game—you can’t underestimate the power of that,” says Grant Reeher, professor of political science. “Even from political science research, we know that the most effective way to get people to turn out is face-to-face contact. He’s doing a lot of that. …He’s got tons of volunteers.”

“In theory, what we want is the election that really decides who is going to serve in government to be one that was a higher-turnout election where campaigns, candidates, platforms, policies made some sort of difference in the outcome,” says Assistant Teaching Professor Richard Barton. “But most of those general elections are just not competitive, and they’re not consequential.”

Ryan Griffiths, professor of political science, has co-written a new book, Before Colonization: Non-Western States and Systems in the Nineteenth Century (Columbia University Press, 2025). The book, written with Charles R. Butcher, challenges the Eurocentric view of the world by offering a comparative analysis of non-Western state systems in the 19th century, supported by an original dataset.