Recent Faculty Publications
The Political Science faculty at the University of Minnesota are leading publishers in their field. They are authors of paradigm-shifting books and deliver signal and enduring contributions to their field. They are published by the most respected presses and contribute to the most widely read journals.
Books
This book identifies the factors that have shaped and conditioned the sorting of Americans into different belief patterns and partisan camps as a function of authoritarianism over the past thirty years. It shows, through the use of nationally representative samples, panel data, and experiments, how authoritarianism has increasingly structured a wide range of attitudes, how it has become a growing influence on vote choice, and how the parties have sorted on authoritarianism. However, it makes the point that the impact of authoritarianism on the evolution of partisanship and mass opinion in America has been more complex and contingent than previous treatments have suggested.
This text teaches basic R skills to political science students with no programming background. Intended specifically for the students who need to learn R for a class and who have no interest in R or may even be afraid of or hostile to it, this text builds an awareness of basics, confidence, and a skill set necessary to transition into more advanced texts.
A new perspective on how beliefs about abortion and gay rights reshaped American politics.
Political psychologists have long theorized that authoritarianism structures the positions people take on cultural issues and their parties ties. Authoritarianism is durable; it resists the influence of other political judgments; and it is very impactful—in a word, it is strong. By contrast, researchers characterize the attitudes most people hold on most issues as unstable and ineffectual—in a word, weak. But what is true of most issues is not true of the issues that have driven America's long running culture war—abortion and gay rights. This Element demonstrates that moral attitudes are stronger than authoritarianism.
Nimtz's and Edwards's real-time comparative political analysis offers a unique look at two historically consequential figures with two very different theoretical and political perspectives, both of whom expertly examined the most contentious issue of the nineteenth century. By juxtaposing the political thought and activism of Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass, Nimtz and Edwards are able to make insightful observations and conclusions about race and class in America.
Offers a comprehensive history of U.S. military medicine, examines how the U.S. has assessed the costs of war prior to major conflicts, and explicitly connects changes in military medicine to changes in veterans' benefits and the costs of war.
A sweeping history of Islamism in Central Asia from the Russian Revolution to the present through Soviet-era archival documents, oral histories, and a trove of interviews and focus groups.
This book explores victims' varying experiences in seeking remedy mechanisms for corporate human rights abuse.
SCOTUS and COVID compares the volume and nature of online print and broadcast television coverage from major media outlets from all U.S. Supreme Court oral argument sessions during the October 2019, 2020, and 2021 Terms.
Articles and Book Chapters
Ronald R. Krebs, Stacie E. Goddard, "A Not-So-Closet Constructivist?" The Jervis Effect, Chapter 5, Columbia University Press, January 6, 2026.
Robert Jervis was an intellectual giant who refused to be categorized. His intellectual legacy will partly be defined by his contributions as a theorist of international relations whose writings on signaling, perception, and complexity were pathbreaking. But Jervis was the rare political scientist whom historians spoke about with reverence, and his scholarship was unusually interdisciplinary. He cared deeply about the world beyond the ivory tower, and his analyses of intelligence failures and nuclear strategy had a particular impact on the U.S. policy community. Jervis was a liberal who had cut his teeth protesting the war in Vietnam and whose criticism of the U.S. role in the nuclear arms race was unyielding and trenchant, but he also south to create a space for conservative voices within an academy of whose tendencies toward intellectual monoculture worried him.
Andrew Karch, Andrea Louise Campbell, "Tools of Subnational Democratic Subversion: A Taxonomy and Research Agenda," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, December 18, 2025.
In an era of heightened partisan polarization, subnational officials in the United States have adopted a variety of tools that attenuate the connection between citizen preferences, election results, and policy outcomes. Building on recent scholarship in American and comparative politics, we identity promising avenues for future research on subnational democratic subversion. First, we broaden the list of tools beyond election administration and districting practices, adding undemocratic techniques that operate through the policymaking process. Second, we encourage scholars to shift their focus from the adoption of these tools to their potential durability, which we posit depends partly on the combinations and sequences in which they are adopted. Third, we hypothesize that alternative institutional venues, including direct democracy and judicial elections, can help prevent the entrenchment of undemocratic practices adopted (most commonly) by state legislatures. Such research will illuminate both contemporary trends in the United States and the general connection between federalism and democracy.
Tanisha M. Fazal, Paul F. Diehl, Gary Goertz, Andrew P. Owsiak, Luis Schenoni, Douglas Lemke, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Charles Butcher, & Ryan Griffiths, "Conceptualizing and Operationalizing the 'Interstate System'," International Studies Review, December 17, 2025.
What is the "international system"? Although fundamental to the discipline of international relations, this question lacks a clear answer. Not only has the international system taken different forms throughout history, but scholars also have advanced various conceptualizations of it, even within the same historical era. In the midst of this heterogeneity, however, the state — and in particular, the interstate system — plays a central role. For realists, the number of great powers, as well as how other states align with them, determines the international system's structure. The English School posits an international society, but in its classic form, sovereign states form the society and its underlying norms. Even renowned constructivists give primacy to state actors, for "[a]narchy is what states make of it. In short, even though international systems and interstate systems are not synonymous, scholars see the latter as a key component of the former. One cannot understand fully how the international system operates without knowing which entities comprise the interstate system. Numerous "status clubs" in the international system, for example, are subsets of the interstate system.
Helen M. Kinsella, "Portia's Provocations/Feminist Fury," Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men, by Patricia Owens, Princeton University Press, December 12, 2025.
Patricia Owens wrote a magisterial book on the gendered, racialised founding of British international relations rooted in the 'crisis of empire,' or, more accurately, the concerted avoidance of that possibility and what it portended. As she meticulously documents, the founding of a distinct British international relations was predicated upon narrowing the subjects, methods, expertise, and participants deemed pertinent to its pursuit. This narrowing simultaneously erased a cohort of women active in international thought and politics as capaciously defined and expansively engaged by each. Consequently, a constitutive erasure of the plurality of intellectual thought and of thinkers, in what turns out to be a misguided search for universalities and paradigmatic truths in defence of empire and in service of the naturalisation of hierarchies of power, marks not only the founding of the British international relations but also the origins of its failure. Owens does not mince her words: 'as I researched the ideas and lives of women international thinkers, and how they were erased, I realised that their story revealed the main sources of IR's failure as an intellectual project.' If the founding of British IR as a distinct discipline was so fundamentally flawed as to lead to its contemporary failure, is this not reason to give it up? Or is such forthright recognition and precise documentation a crucial step towards any potential reanimation of British international relations? If so, Owens' recovery project could be a useful fulcrum between what is and what, theoretically, still could be.
Helen M. Kinsella & Giovanni Mantilla, "Historical Approaches and Archival Work in Norms Research," The Oxford Handbook of Norms Research in International Relations, Chapter 17, Oxford University Press, December 11, 2025.
International norms take form historically and contextually. International relations scholars commonly study norms in relation to history, but how scholars understand each - norms and/or history - both individually and in relation to each other, is itself a vibrant field of inquiry. Our orientation foregrounds the study of meanings, actions, events, and structures that constitute norms over time. We study norms' origins, development, and effects not as descriptions or snapshots of causality, but as situated historical processes rooted in multiple collective relations. Such an orientation, consistent with the 'third move' in norms research, prompts 'deeper reflection on the dynamics of knowledge production in histories of international thought' and practice, and combats the outsized 'role of the West in IR's historical imagination.' Historicizing norms in this way offers a more expansive purchase on their essential traits: contingency, contestedness, and ambiguity. Such a focus provincializes universals, denaturalizes origins, and fosters a deeper understanding of the conditions of possibility for norm emergence and recognition.
Ronald R. Krebs, David Blagden, & Robert Ralston, "What do we owe soldiers? Evidence from the UK Armed Forces Covenant," Cambridge University Press, December 2, 2025.
What do people in liberal polities believe they owe soldiers for their service? The UK's Armed Forces Covenant, promulgated in 2000 and enshrined in law in 2021, presents a real-world opportunity to examine the effects of inducing citizens to reflect on soldiering. We develop and test two contending theoretical logics, grounded in the liberal political culture from which the Covenant emerged, using unique observational data and a novel survey experiment. Does prior knowledge of the Covenant or exposure to a Covenant prime highlight the abiding tensions between liberal ideals and military service and underscore the debt that citizens owe soldiers? Or does it prompt liberal citizens to resolve their discomfort with military service in a distinctively liberal way - by emphasizing soldiers' contractual terms and their willing consent to deployment? In line with the latter logic, respondents with prior knowledge of the Covenant or exposure to the Covenant prime were more likely to endorse the use of force and were less sensitive to casualties, and they were no more likely to grant soldiers and veterans additional benefits or preferential treatment. This paper has significant implications for public support for military missions and the relationship between military service and citizenship.
Tanisha M. Fazal & Pedro Accorsi, "Military Medicine and Military Effectiveness," Security Studies, October 23, 2025.
Despite extensive scholarship on military effectiveness, the role of military medicine remains largely untested. We argue that robust medical capabilities improve effectiveness by preserving manpower, sustaining unit cohesion, and bolstering morale. Using complementary empirical strategies, we test this claim. A cross-national analysis of conventional wars since 1900 probes the plausibility of the argument and suggests a positive association between physician-to-population ratios and improved battlefield performance. Exploiting the exogenous mid-war introduction of penicillin, we find that United States and British forces markedly improved loss exchange ratios against Germany, whereas penicillin-deprived Soviet forces showed no such improvement. Time-series evidence from the Italian Campaign corroborates these results, and historical and archival accounts demonstrate how penicillin and whole-blood transfusions reduced mortality and expedited returns to duty. Our findings suggest military medicine represents a cost-effective investment with substantial implications for combat outcomes. Understanding medicine's contribution to military effectiveness is, therefore, crucial for defense planning and resource allocation decisions.
Christopher M. Federico & Caitlyn N. Barrett, "Needs for Security and Certainty Relate Differently to Support for Universal Basic Income Versus Other Social Safety Net Programs Across European Nations," Political Behavior, October 10, 2025.
Needs for security and certainty (NSC) vary in their relationship with economic preferences as a function of political engagement. Among those low in engagement, NSC is directly related to left-leaning economic preferences, since social welfare can be regarded as insurance. Among those high in engagement, NSC predicts right-wing economic preferences, since engaged individuals high in NSC take cues from right-leaning elites suggesting that support for redistribution is inconsistent with conservative ideological and partisan identities. In this study, we argue that this 'reversal' is less applicable to universal basic income (UBI), since the latter is an unconditional benefit that detaches welfare provision from specific situations of risk. This should shift individuals to think of provision in terms of moral hazard in the context of UBI. Using Round 8 of the European Social Survey, we test and find support for several hypotheses based on this argument.
Kathleen Collins, "Uzbek Foreign Fighter Groups in the Syrian Jihad: The Evolution of KIB and KTJ from 2011 through 2025," Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel, September 26, 2025.
The fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime to the forces of Hayat Tahir al-Sham (HTS) revealed the ongoing significance of multiple foreign fighter groups in Syria. These militias were instrumental in supporting HTS during its campaign for Damascus last fall. Two primarily ethnic Uzbek fighter groups that originated in Central Asia were prominent among them: the Imam Bukhari Battalion (Katibat Imam al-Bukhari, KIB) and the Tavhid and Jihad Battalion (Katibat Tavhid va Jihod, KTJ). Each had pledged allegiance to al-Qa 'ida and fought alongside al-Qa 'ida's Syrian branch Jabhat al-Nusra. Each remained closely connected to al-Qa 'ida even after al-Nusra rebranded as HTS. This article traces the origins and development of these Uzbek-led militias and argues that they constitute a resilient force of battle-hardened fighters, demonstrating remarkable staying power in Syria. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that KIB and KTJ still embrace a salafi-jihadi ideology and goals. It also emphasizes KIB's and KTJ's ongoing ties to al-Qa 'ida and the Taliban and recommends that policymakers and counterterrorism experts consider the implications of their continued presence in Syria under the new regime, as well as the potential consequences if they leave Syria.
Christopher M. Federico, Mackenzie Devaney, & Eugene Borgida, "Debunking Misinformation on Critical Race Theory," Political Psychology, August 20, 2025.
There continues to be a pressing need to design and test effective corrections in response to political misinformation, as citizens must have accurate information to be able to meaningfully participate in politics. Critical race theory (CRT) is an issue marked by widespread misinformation and controversy, leading to efforts in multiple states to ban CRT. In a three-wave panel design with a nationally diverse U.S. sample, a correction of misinformation was tested. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a control condition; a misinformation-only treatment; or a misinformation plus correction treatment. Those in the misinformation plus correction condition had significantly higher accuracy scores than those in the control and misinformation-only conditions.
Mark S. Bell, Kai Quek, "How Intractable is Security Dilemma Thinking?" Journal of Conflict Resolution, July 1, 2025.
How intractable is the security dilemma? The extent to which scholars believe the security dilemma's pernicious effects can be ameliorated marks a key dividing line between theoretical approaches to international relations. However, questions about the intractability of the security dilemma have remained largely theoretical and not directly empirically tested. We take advantage of the fact that the security dilemma relies on individual-level mental processes. We use parallel survey experiments in the United States and China across two waves in early 2020 and mid-2023 to assess the extent to which threat perceptions consistent with security dilemma thinking exist among mass publics, change with political context, and can be ameliorated.
Anuja Bose, "The Internationalism of the Black Radical Tradition," The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association, July 2025.
Cedric J. Robinson's Black Marxism is a difficult book. It is spectacular in scope and ground-breaking for the thesis it advances. But it is a book that demands you to question and transform received paradigms and if you first encountered the book during graduate training, as I did, Black Marxism will bewilder, provoke, frustrate, and unsettle its reader. It is not easy to accept the theses that Robinson puts forward because he systematically interrogates concepts of race, ethnicity, nation, and class, that are the building blocks of political science, sociology, and anthropology. However, with each repeated encounter, it's difficult to not be persuaded by the depth and breadth of Robinson's research in Black Marxism and to slowly re-orient oneself to a counter history of modernity; of Western racialism; of the origin and transformation of capitalism and nationalism; and of the traditions of non-Western radicalisms that Robinson opens for investigation through his reconstruction of the movements of Black people in Africa and the diaspora.
Christopher M. Federico & Ariel Malka, "From 'what' and 'when' to 'how' and 'why': Moving the study of psychological dispositions and political preferences forward," Political Psychology, June 22, 2025.
The last two decades have seen a highly generative resurgence of interest in how individual differences in psychological needs, traits, and motives relate to citizen's political preferences. Though interest in this among social and behavioral scientists is quite old, contemporary research relying on newer theoretical models and measurement instruments has led to an explosion in the size and scope of the relevant database.
Christopher M. Federico, Ariel Malka, Thomas Costello, & Adam Panish, "Polarized Attitudes and Anti-Democratic Orientation: Robust Evidence for Paradoxical Relationships Among American Partisans," PsyArXiv, May 30, 2025.
Influential perspectives on polarization in the United States imply that partisans will be more willing to degrade democracy when they are ideologically aligned with their own party and feel negatively about the opposing party. But psychological accounts of political ideology suggest that conservatives will be especially anti-democratic regardless of partisanship. Integrating insights from these areas, we argue that there are reasons to expect paradoxical partisan asymmetries in the ideological correlates of democratic attitudes. Across numerous surveys we find consistent evidence that cultural conservatism and out-party favorability are reliably associated with anti-democratic orientation among Democrats (but not Republicans), while left-leaning economic attitudes are reliably associated with anti-democratic orientation among Republicans (but not Democrats). These findings provide context for understanding how polarization might impact American democracy. They also suggest that increased centrality of sociocultural conflict and Republican cultivation of a right-wing populist reputation might sort anti-democratic Americans into the Republican Party.
Christopher M. Federico, "Political Attitudes and Behavior," The handbook of social psychology (6th ed.), Situational Press, May 19, 2025.
Social psychology, as the classical definition would have it, is the study of how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by other individuals and by the social groups they belong to. If so, then politics provides one of the richest contexts for the examination of social-psychological questions. Indeed, many of the psychological systems that human beings use to navigate their social environments may have evolved to help us cope with fundamentally 'political' problems like the distribution of resources, the regulation of life within social groups, and intergroup relations—even if the form taken by those problems is different now than it was in the ancestral human environment (Petersen, 2015).
Christopher M. Federico & Nicolas Campos, "A New Measure of Affective Polarization," American Political Science Review, May 15, 2025.
Affective polarization has emerged as an important construct in the literature on partisanship. However, most efforts to measure it have relied on simple preexisting indices, potentially missing the complexity of affective polarization. In this article, we address these concerns by reconceptualizing and deriving a new measure of affective polarization. Drawing on the notion of political sectarianism and other lines of research in political behavior and social psychology, we develop and validate a novel multidimensional measure of affective polarization consisting of three parts: othering, aversion, and moralization. Our analyses yield a valid and reliable nine-item measure with three subdimensions. These subdimensions and the full scale broadly correlate with various measures of poltiical identity, and anti-democratic elite action, and political violence. Importantly, we find that the subdimensions have different patterns of correlation with key criterion variables, suggesting that othering, aversion, and moralization are distinct components of affective polarization.
Tanisha M. Fazal, Jane L. Sumner, Jessica Korona-Bailey, & Tracey Perez Koehlmoos, "U.S. Combat Medicine and Military Morale," Armed Forces & Society, May 2, 2025.
While a number of studies have argued for a relationship between military morale and military effectiveness, analyses of the sources of morale have overlooked the possible role of military medicine. We suggest that military medicine may be an important predictor of morale. We assess this claim via an observational survey of U.S. military veterans and a survey experiment of active-duty U.S. military personnel. We find a statistically significant relationship between confidence in military medicine on one hand and morale on the other, especially for respondents who have seen combat.
C. Daniel Myers & Taylor Hvidsten, "Politics Through a National Lens: Evaluating the effect of local vs. national news coverage of Congress using a panel experiment," Open Science Framework, March 28, 2025.
Americans increasingly get their news from national news outlets, whose coverage of politics is qualitatively different than coverage produced by local news outlets. What is the effect of this shift from viewing politics through a local lens to viewing politics through a national lens? We investigate this by comparing the effect of consuming coverage of Congress produced by local newspapers to the effect of consuming coverage of Congress produced by national newspapers. Congress is a useful institution for studying the effect of news nationalization, as it is a national political institution rooted in local, geographically defined districts. As a result, both local and national news outlets cover Congress, but in very different ways.
David J. Samuels & Henry Thomson, "The Green Revolution is Not Always Bloodless: Agricultural Modernization and Rural Conflict in Brazil," World Development, March 26, 2025.
What are the sources of rural unrest? Recent research has focused on wage and employment shocks, which give workers stronger incentives to engage in contentious mobilization. Examining the case of Brazil, we show that adoption of new agricultural technology that substitutes for labor and reduces employment - specifically, mechanical tractors - can contribute to rural conflict. Using counts of tractors, we estimate the effects of agricultural mechanization on rural land invasions at the municipal level. We find that the number of tractors is robustly, positively correlated with conflict. Mechanization's impact is distinct from the effects of other factors associated with rural unrest such as rainfall, landholding inequality, or nearby land reforms. Findings shed light on unanticipated political consequences of the Green Revolution and illuminate a novel mechanism potentially shaping rural conflict elsewhere.
Mark S. Bell, "Stability and Change in Nuclear Thinking: Grand Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, and Policy Change," Journal of Strategic Studies, March 24, 2025.
What explains when states shift how they understand the utility of their nuclear weapons? Existing literature offers mechanisms that should be expected to inhibit change, but does not offer an explanation for when those mechanisms might be overcome. I argue that in periods of grand strategic change - when a state's political-military strategy is in flux - the forces inhibiting shifts of nuclear thinking are more likely to be overcome. Grand strategic change, therefore, may be a necessary condition for changes in nuclear thinking.
Christopher M. Federico, "Social Psychology and Contemporary Innovations in the Study of Political Behavior," Political Science and Public Policy 2025, March 11, 2025.
Social psychology and contemporary innovations in the study of political behavior. The field of political psychology can in many ways be characterized as a longstanding and fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars in social psychology and political science. This history of interdisciplinary collaboration is the starting point for the present chapter. In this chapter, I focus on how selected innovative lines of inquiry at the interface between personality and social psychology and political science are advancing our understanding of the micro-level foundations of political attitudes in behavior in a number of domains. Specifically, I highlight and review collaborative work being done in three core areas of research on political attitudes and behavior in mass publics: the political psychology of mass belief systems, the psychological foundations of political preferences, and social identity and psychology of sorting and polarization.