Maxwell School News and Commentary

Discussing the AR-15's appeal on the right, Grant Reeher, professor of political science, tells Newsweek: "In large part, I think it's because this particular rifle has become such a public target for Democrats and liberals regarding gun regulation and control. ...The rifle has become a symbol of the debate over gun control, and the political right is more associated with gun ownership and rights."

Between 1900 and 1940, roughly five million southern whites left former Confederate states and neighboring Oklahoma. In a peer-reviewed study to be published later this year, Thomas Pearson, assistant professor of economics, and his co-authors found that this group was not just greater in number, but, as they spread their culture and attitudes, perhaps in political influence, too.

The Iraq War veteran is director of national security for The American Legion and is pursing an executive master’s in international relations degree.

“Those processes, they’re hard to pull off. You need to have both sides in agreement. It just doesn’t happen that much,” says Ryan Griffiths, associate professor of political science. “The thresholds for success are just too high to make it work.”

"The Problem with Primaries," written by Richard Barton, assistant teaching professor of public administration and international affairs, was published in American Purpose. "To free political parties from fringe candidates, we need to eliminate primaries that favor extremes," says Barton.

"Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID" (Princeton University Press, 2022), co-authored by Professor and Chair of Political Science Shana Kushner Gadarian, was reviewed in Foreign Affairs. "Their book is a sophisticated study, based on voluminous data, of U.S. politics as revealed by the strains and stresses of the pandemic," writes Jessica T. Mathews. 

This article, written by Professor of Political Science Margarita Estévez-Abe and published in the Japanese Journal of Political Science, examines the biographies of female local politicians in Tokyo's 23 Special Ward assemblies to understand the rise of Mama Giin.

There is a "mismatch between policies about abortion and attitudes about abortion at the state level," Shana Gadarian, professor of political science, tells Axios.  While opinions around abortion are "relatively nuanced," even "Republican voters tend to be more pro-choice than the policies that we're seeing in Republican states," Gadarian adds.

“That seems to be what the outcome was—it was a non-outcome outcome. Maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world because I think we do need a presidential election year in which to try to establish some kind of direction on this,” Grant Reeher, professor of political science, tells CNN.

America's first third party, the Anti-Masonic Party, was founded on the conspiracy theory that an elite group of Freemasons were secretly controlling the U.S. government. Freemasonry continued to grow in the United States during the first two decades of the 19th century, in part because it was a good way for people who wanted to enter politics to network, says Mark Schmeller, associate professor of history.