Political Science

Talking politics with a side of pizza

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 12:08:46 +0000

Talking politics with a side of pizza Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/10/2024 - 06:08

New Politics & Pizza sessions give students and experts and space for productive and lively discussion of timely political topics

Today’s elections bear little resemblance to elections 50 or even 20 years ago. One key change: Digital and social media have become more central to how voters receive information—or misinformation—about candidates and issues.

For example, a recent Pew Research Center survey found that of those ages 18 to 29 surveyed, 48% use TikTok to keep up with politics or political news and 52% use TikTok to get news. Another recent Pew survey found that 54% of U.S. adults surveyed often or sometimes get local political news from social media.

If you go

What: Politics & Pizza, “The Role of Digital/Social Media in U.S. Elections”

When: 5:30-6:45 p.m., Monday, Oct.14

Where: Bruce Curtis Building (MCOL), W100 – CC

Free Cosmo’s pizza!

Learn more

The role of these new media will be the focus of the inaugural Politics & Pizza session, set for 5:30-6:45 p.m. Oct. 14. The aim of Pizza & Politics—which is being initiated by Glen Krutz, a professor of political science—is to “encourage productive, substantive deliberation of specific topics, rather than rancorous and ideological macro-thoughts.”

“These events are meant to help ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ students sink their minds into key, specific political issues while they are sinking their teeth into delicious pizza!” Krutz says. “The other main goal is to have experts get the discussion started, but then to very much have a discussion between the students and one another and the students and the experts. The interaction piece is central, rather than a one-way information flow that sometimes we see at talks on university campuses.”

Politics & Pizza, which includes free Cosmo’s pizza, is modeled on similar sessions offered in Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Each session will feature expert speakers who give a few introductory thoughts about the session’s topic, and then open the session to a question-and-answer with students.

The theme of the first Pizza & Politics event Oct. 14 is “The Role of Digital/Social Media in U.S. Elections” with speakers Stephen Frost, an assistant professor in the College of Media, Communication and Information Department of Media Studies; Vivek Krishnamurthy, an associate professor in the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Law School and director of the Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law and Policy Clinic; and Alexandra Siegel, an associate professor of political science.

The second Politics & Pizza is scheduled for Oct. 28 and will focus on the Electoral College and institutional reform. A third date is set for Nov. 18 and will offer an analysis of the election outcome and the upcoming transition.

Spring 2025 sessions will focus on the new U.S. Congress, business and politics, and state universities in America.

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New Politics & Pizza sessions give students and experts and space for productive and lively discussion of timely political topics.

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Getting out the vote and hashing out the issues

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 20:14:17 +0000

Getting out the vote and hashing out the issues Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/09/2024 - 14:14

Rachel Sauer

Nonpartisan, campuswide initiative aims to help students get registered and vote, as well as learn about the candidates and issues

A significant and growing body of research shows that whether people vote in their first two elections can significantly alter their voting behavior for the rest of their lives.

“We know that voting and civic participation habits get set in your 20s—so basically, people who are college age and just a little bit older,” explains Janet Donavan, a teaching professor and director of undergraduate studies in the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Political Science. “If we can get people voting in their first or second election, it helps set the habits of a lifetime for them. If they miss those first two elections, they’re unlikely to vote throughout their lives.”

Any challenges associated with voting can be compounded for college students—from learning about eligibility and how to register to figuring out how to request a ballot if they live outside their home counties or states.

If you go

What: Presidential Debate Watch Party

When: 6:30-9:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 10

Where: Center for Teaching and Learning, CASE Building, E390

Who: All ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ students are invited

Learn more

However, a campuswide initiative between now and election day, Nov. 5, aims not only to help eligible students get registered to vote and to the polls, but to offer information and opportunities for discussion as they become lifelong participants in civic and political process.

One of the first events will be a non-partisan presidential debate watch party from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Tuesday with faculty moderators Regina Bateson, Carol Conzelman, Leah Sprain and Donavan, who also is Higher Education and Democracy Fellow with the Office for Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship.

“One of the things that we’re excited about, doing this debate watch—and we also have one planned for Oct. 1 for the vice-presidential debate—is we haven’t had organized debate watches of any large scale since 2012,” Donavan says.

“In 2016, people were afraid, which was a new thing for us to have such a polarized campus, and in 2020 it was COVID. But I and some of the other people who are part of this, we have decided that if we do live in this contentious political world, we do need to find ways to move forward and talk about it, even if it’s hard.”

Fostering civic culture

The voter registration events scheduled for the next two months dovetail with ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s participation in the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, which aims to “foster civic culture and institutionalize democratic engagement activities and programs at colleges and universities, making them a defining feature of campus life.” The initiative also works to close voting gaps based on age and race.

An element of ALL IN is that participating colleges and universities can compete with each other for highest voter turnout “and the idea there is that it will be motivating for students if it’s a little bit of a competition,” Donavan says.

The events and initiatives that Donavan and her colleagues in departments and offices throughout the university are planning focus not only on voting, but on education about candidates and issues.

A significant body of research demonstrates that an individual's lifetime voting habits are established in young adulthood. (Photo: iStock)

“For example, with the debate watch party, a big part is going to be just learning what the different candidates think,” Donavan says. “Because it’s a non-partisan event, it’s going to be a little different environment than if you were watching with your friends, because your friends might all have similar partisan commitments. This is for students who are supportive of Harris, who are supportive of Trump and those who just don’t know yet.

“We’re also emphasizing that it’s not just focused on political science. There are so many people who care about politics who are business majors or engineering majors or any other major and just want to learn more about the candidates and issues. We hope this is an opportunity for people to get more involved in the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ community while learning more about each other.”

A lifetime habit

Donavan and her colleagues, as well as campus and community partners, also are coordinating classroom visits to present information about registering to vote and voting. For example, in partnerships with the Byron White Law Centerand the American Indian Law Clinic, law students trained in voting law will have tables at various events to help students who might be having trouble registering to vote.

“It all goes back to the fact that if people don’t vote in their first or second elections, they might not vote for the rest of their lives,” Donavan says, adding that an aspect of the educational efforts will be the importance of non-presidential elections and down-ballot issues.

“If you’re voting in ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ, the presidential race probably not going to be tightly competitive race, but we have two hot House races and issues on the ballot that are going to matter to students a lot.

“How many people were kicking themselves was over that they could have voted for if only they’d voted? We want help students make voting a lifetime habit.”

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Nonpartisan, campuswide initiative aims to help students get registered and vote, as well as learn about the candidates and issues.

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Scholar learns that ‘language links us all’

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 16:46:45 +0000

Scholar learns that ‘language links us all’ Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/05/2024 - 10:46

Doug McPherson

Political science undergrad Cooper Baldwin wins prestigious U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship to learn ‘one of the most critical languages for future United States policy’

Cooper Baldwin, a junior from San Antonio, Texas, majoring in political science and journalism, has been named a recipient of the 2024 Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) from the U.S. Department of State.

The scholarship allows American college and university students to learn languages that are key to America's engagement with the world.

Baldwin is the only ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder student to receive the CLS in the last two years. Just 500 undergraduate and graduate students in the United States are chosen each year from an application pool of more than 5,000 students, according to the Department of State.

Cooper Baldwin, a junior majoring in political science and journalism, received a 2024 Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. Department of State and studied Russian over the summer.

As a CLS recipient, Baldwin chose to study Russian (over Arabic and Chinese) and spent the summer learning the basics of the language online from what he calls “an awesome instructional team” based in Chișinău, Moldova. Russian was the language he’s most interested in learning, he says, and he wanted to get the basics down before he applied to go to a Russian-speaking country next summer and study the language in more detail.

“In my opinion, Russian is one of the most critical languages for future United States policy facilitators, executors and diplomats to learn,” Baldwin says. “Not only is it primarily spoken in many Eastern European countries, it’s the cornerstone of many languages and dialects worldwide. So, with such a broad reach, the choice seemed obvious to me.”

He says his initial curiosity about Russian stems, in part, from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine: “The invasion … stoked a connection to that part of the world. To be honest, the invasion seemed entirely surreal to me, and the onset of a full, unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country rattled the conceptions I had about the relative peaceful nature of nations worldwide. I’ve never lived in a world without Russian aggression and a tense atmosphere from the Kremlin toward the United States.”

'A patriot above all'

Baldwin—who is interested in international relations, geopolitical relations, history and national security—calls himself “a patriot above all” who wants to give back to the United States.

“I believe the CLS program is the perfect way to do that. To learn a language critical to the U.S.'s national security and economic interests nationwide will allow me to pursue this commitment and philosophy fervently, which I intend to do.”

He calls his career goals “big and numerous” and says that working on political campaigns boosted his interest in politics and government.

“To those who know me, it's no secret that I’m thoroughly committed to entering the field of politics, campaigns or government when I graduate from ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ. I intend on using my studies and experiences to seek a role in the federal government.”

He hopes to work in the Department of State, Homeland Security, intelligence services, civil military service or policy administration.

I want to live a life of service to the country that has given me so much. I know it is my birthright to be an American, but I see it as an incredible and awe-inspiring privilege to say I am.”

“I want to live a life of service to the country that has given me so much. I know it is my birthright to be an American, but I see it as an incredible and awe-inspiring privilege to say I am.”

Baldwin says that for as long as he can remember, he’s had a “deep interest” in language and linguistics.

“They’ve been an intellectual love of mine,” he says. “I taught myself to read at age 4 because I was so deeply invested in language and its capability for beautiful, complex expression. I find it incredibly interesting that people worldwide have such different ways of expressing themselves. Language links us all.”

He credits his middle school Spanish teacher in San Antonio for bolstering his interest in languages, and adds that she encouraged him to excel in class.

“My teacher never told me to slow down, to stay on pace with the class, to stop answering all the questions she asked,” he says. “She always gave me more material to push my studies further and took time … to give me additional practice with the language. The CLS program was the perfect opportunity to pursue language at the rapid pace I’m capable of, and it challenged me every day. I absolutely loved that.”

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Political science undergrad Cooper Baldwin wins prestigious U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship to learn ‘one of the most critical languages for future United States policy.'

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From harmony to civil war: when language turns deadly

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 19:40:40 +0000

From harmony to civil war: when language turns deadly Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/26/2024 - 13:40

Bradley Worrell

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder political scientist Jaroslav Tir argues it’s not just what a government says about its ethnic minorities, but also the language it uses that can be threatening

For years, Jaroslav Tir has been pondering a perplexing mystery: Why do some countries where a multi-ethnic populace once lived together in harmony devolve into civil war, slaughter and ethnic cleansing?

“If we look at the former Yugoslavia, where I was born and raised, it’s a big puzzle: why the country went from one of the most ethnically harmonious countries to ethnic cleansing and genocide in a few short years,” says Tir, a professor in the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Political Science, whose research focus includes armed conflicts and how to stop them.

In Yugoslavia after World War II, “you had multiple ethnic groups that lived in relative harmony. There was evidence that this was real because people intermarried and neighborhoods were ethnically mixed. A lot of people were of mixed ethnic origin,” he says. “And then things took a 180-degree turn that ended up in the 1990s with very brutal conflicts.”

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder political scientist Jaroslav Tir finds in new research that it’s not just what the governing authority says about its ethnic minorities that can be potentially threatening, but also the language in which it communicates about those groups.

While some of the dynamics of ethnic conflicts remain unknown, Tir says, in recent years researchers have come to believe that dehumanizing ethnic “others” can help explain how seemingly ordinary individuals become willing not only to fight but also to commit horrific crimes against their former neighbors. In turn, researchers have suspected that dehumanization stems from perceptions that ethnic others pose a violent threat to one’s own group, he says.

Expanding upon that research, Tir and co-author Shane Singh of the University of Georgia recently authored the paper “Less Human Than Human: Threat, Language and Relative Dehumanization,” published in the British Journal of Political Science, in which they made the case that it’s not just what the governing authority says about its ethnic minorities that can be potentially threatening, but also the language in which it communicates about those groups.

“A government’s choice to communicate [a sense of threat] in a native language, rather than a commonly used and understood non-native tongue, puts the audience on notice that the message is explicitly meant for them to the exclusion of ethnic others,” the authors state, adding that “such messaging can exacerbate us-versus-them perceptions and lead to extreme negative attitudes such as dehumanization.”

Communicated threats

For their study, Tir and Singh specifically looked at India, where a native (Hindi) and non-native (English) language are understood and used by a sizeable portion of the population. In a survey-based experiment, the authors hired an international market research firm to ask Indian respondents about their views toward Muslims and Chinese. Notably, in recent years, both Islamic terrorists and the Chinese military have threatened India’s security.

Bilingual Indian respondents were randomly assigned to take the survey in Hindi or English. They were asked about their perceptions of the humanness of Muslim or Chinese people and the groups to which they belong. Responses to that portion of the survey showed that those receiving the survey in the Hindi language triggered the dehumanization of Muslims, while the dehumanization of Chinese was not affected by survey language assignment.

Tir says those findings are likely due to the fact that the government of Narendra Modi has repeatedly demonized India’s Muslim population in Hindi while remaining comparatively silent about the threat from China.

Survey respondents also were randomly assigned to a control condition (a short article about ship recycling) or one of two recent news briefs about violent events that recently took place: a terrorist attack by an Islamic group or Chinese military aggression. In that case, the threat conveyed in Hindi, rather than English, does the most to prompt dehumanizing attitudes toward Chinese, Tir says.

Conversely, the story about the Islamic terror attack did not have a detectable effect on survey respondents’ attitudes toward Muslims. At first blush, that would seem to be counterintuitive, but Tir says that Modi’s frequent anti-Muslim rhetoric has likely saturated the populace, making respondents insensitive to additional communicated threats.

A man in Jaisalmer, India, reads a Hindi newspaper. (Photo: Ihsan Iqbal/Shutterstock)

Impacts beyond the Indian subcontinent

Tir says the survey findings have implications for political communication beyond India, noting that many countries in Africa and Asia have populations that speak both native and non-native languages, typically French or English, depending on their colonial history.

“Compared to communication in a commonly used and understood non-native tongue, a native language environment exacerbates the effect of threat on dehumanization of a rival ethnicity,” Tir and Singh write, adding that “this suggests that unscrupulous leaders in multilingual countries with identity-based cleavages and a widely understood non-native language can select the language of communication to incite xenophobic attitudes.”

Such was the case with Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian strongman who came to power in the late 1980s. Tir says Milosevic broke with the tradition of using the more neutral Serbo-Croatian language blend written in the Latin alphabet and popularized in Yugoslavia after WWII in favor of “pure” Serbian and the Cyrillic alphabet. Milosevic built his political career on demonizing essentially powerless ethnic minorities—initially ethnic Albanians, who he argued posed an existential threat to Serbs.

Tir is quick to note that India is not the former Yugoslavia. Also, he says that just as leaders can use native language to incite xenophobic attitudes, it is possible for more peaceable leaders to communicate in a non-native language to help promote interethnic harmony. He cites India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who chose English as the language in which to deliver his landmark speech celebrating his country’s newfound freedom, which took place against a backdrop of interethnic strife.

However, the risk remains that when the leaders of a country essentially weaponize native language against its ethnic others, it can be very difficult to pull back from the brink, Tir says.

“The traditional ethnic conflict literature highlights the concept called outbidding. When an attention-seeking leader starts to reference the threat to their group by ethnic others, things tend to get more extreme, as opposed to going toward moderation. So essentially, if someone is already delivering an extremist message, the way for someone else to get attention in the political space is with an even more extremist message. It’s radicalization upon radicalization upon radicalization. It’s then very hard to go the other way; moderate voices tend to get ignored and it’s the more extremist voices that get listened to in response to a sense of threat to the group.

“That is, more or less, how things played out in the former Yugoslavia,” he says. “Things got ever more extreme, destroying the original sense of interethnic harmony.”

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ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder political scientist Jaroslav Tir argues it’s not just what a government says about its ethnic minorities, but also the language it uses that can be threatening.

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Remembering Nixon’s resignation, five decades later

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Remembering Nixon’s resignation, five decades later Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/08/2024 - 00:00

Bradley Worrell

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder political science professor Kenneth Bickers reflects on what made the ex-president’s decision to step down following the Watergate scandal a watershed moment in American history and how it has influenced politics today

In a solemn television address 50 years ago this week, on Aug. 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon announced he would resign from office—becoming the first American president ever to do so.

It was a stunning turn of events for Nixon, who just two years earlier won his reelection bid by a landslide. However, as details of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C., became public, leading to congressional hearings and impeachment proceedings, Nixon finally bowed to pressure from Congress and the public to leave the White House.

“By taking this action,” Nixon said in an address from the Oval Office, “I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.”

Kenneth Bickers, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professor of political science, notes that Richard Nixon's resignation "exposed the kind of deceit and corruption that can reach the highest office in the land."

At the time, Kenneth Bickers was a young teenager spending the summer at his grandparents’ house in Cheyenne. In the days leading up to Nixon’s resignation, Bickers would spend his mornings watching TV broadcasts of the congressional hearings regarding the Watergate break-in, as new damning details became public about the White House’s involvement and its attempts to cover up the affair.

“That was my education in politics. It was what got me interested in what would eventually be a major in political science and later a PhD in political science, and it was the seminal event of my development,” says Bickers, a University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Political Science professor since 2003, whose area of focus is American politics and public policy.

With the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, Bickers recently reflected on what he believes made Nixon’s resignation a watershed moment in U.S. history, its lasting impact upon American politics, and offered his thoughts on how things might have gone very differently if Nixon had pursued a different path. His remarks have been lightly edited and condensed.

Question: Can you set the scene prior to Nixon’s election in 1972 and into 1973, as details of the Watergate break-in started to become public?

Bickers: In 1972, Nixon was the incumbent going into that election, and the economy was actually in really good shape. We were certainly mired in the Vietnam War, and there had been a lot of protests in the street, but those had kind of diminished from the high point of 1968 to 1969.

And then the Democrats had a catastrophic convention in 1972, with the naming of a Democratic vice-presidential choice, (Thomas Eagleton), who was subsequently replaced. It was one of the most poorly managed conventions since the 1920s, and so Nixon benefited from the ineptitude of the Democrats in 1972.

But Nixon also had a lot of assets going into that year, which was part of what made the whole Watergate break-in totally inscrutable. I mean, it should have been clear to anybody that he was going to win in a huge way. Nobody could have foreseen the magnitude at the time, but it certainly looked like he was going to win.

So why the third-rate burglary of the DNC in the Watergate building? And then why cover it up? None of that made any sense.

Question: Today, some may see Nixon’s resignation as inevitable, but a poll taken in 1973 found only 25 percent thought he did anything wrong that would reach the level where he should be removed. So, he still enjoyed widespread support at the time?

Bickers: That’s true. He still enjoyed wide support, and I think there was disbelief at the time that things could be as bad as the allegations suggested.

And I think if he’d been honest about how stupid that burglary was, if he had simply fessed up and taken his lumps at the time, none of that would have happened (the congressional investigations ultimately leading to his resignation).

This is where we learned that the cover-up is often worse than the crime, because it was the cover-up that was at the heart of the allegations against Nixon. He didn’t break into the Watergate; it was this team of former CIA operatives that did that, or it included some former CIA operatives. Whether it was paid for by his campaign or not, obviously a presidential candidate isn’t in charge of the books for a multimillion-dollar campaign operation.

So, it was the cover-up. And then the thing that ultimately sealed the deal was the Oval Office tapes with the famous missing section that had somehow inadvertently been erased.

Remember, at the time trust was still very high of our national leaders. And remember, huge majorities had voted for him just before that in the 1972 election—it was the second-largest victory in American history at that point. So, there were a lot of people who had supported him. And it takes a lot to move people away from their prior commitments, their prior beliefs and their prior expectations.

[video:https://youtu.be/IwQMpSxRPvc?si=Boz10O72_MCVpnCm]

Question: Is it fair to call Nixon’s resignation a watershed moment in American political history? If so, what makes it so?

Bickers: It certainly was watershed, because he was the first president and the only president to resign. We’d never experienced that before.

The other thing is that it’s a watershed event because it exposed the kind of deceit and corruption that can reach the highest office in the land—and it changed the way people view politicians.

Confidence in the national government—trust in the institutions of our national government, the presidency, Congress, and so forth—absolutely craters starting in about 1973 and 1974, and it has never recovered. It has come back some, but never to the levels that existed when Nixon was first elected president, or when he was reelected president.

That loss of confidence in public officials has been a permanent change, and I don’t think it was just Watergate. The shifting (and in many cases untrue) stories about the Vietnam conflict, the protests and riots over civil rights, and the assassinations in 1968 of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.—all of those play into the absolute loss of faith in our leaders.

Here we are five decades later, and that’s still true. People are much less trusting of national leaders than was routinely the case before Nixon’s resignation. We are a much more jaundiced people than we were in the pre-Watergate era.

Question: In the 1970s, Republican and Democratic lawmakers came together in a bipartisan way on challenging issues, including pushing for Nixon’s ouster once details of the Watergate break-in came to light. Do you think it’s possible for Democrats and Republicans to work together that way today?

Bickers: We’re living in one of the most polarized periods in American history. We’ve had periods that were as polarized, but you’d have to go back a long way to find that, as in the decades leading up to the Civil War, and obviously the Civil War itself.

Maybe unusually, in the period coming out of World War II—when America was clearly on the top in the world in terms of its economic and military and political powers—while there were obviously differences between Republicans and Democrats, those differences were smaller, and there were more places where they could agree. It was Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency. It was under Nixon that the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act were passed, with Democratic support.

That’s gone. It’s hard to imagine anything big happening in a bipartisan way today.

Richard Nixon leaving the White House grounds in Marine One on Aug. 9, 1974. (Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Question: In his resignation announcement, Nixon said he hoped his action would hasten the healing process in the country. Do you believe it did that?

Bickers: Probably. We don’t get to replay history with a change where Nixon doesn’t resign and compare what did happen to what might have happened, but probably it did. And I think Vice President Gerald Ford showed quite a lot of courage in pardoning him. That may well have cost Ford the opportunity to be elected in 1976.

There were a lot of people—particularly on the Democratic side—who wanted to see Nixon criminally charged and potentially sent to prison, and that was short-circuited by the pardon.

But the pardon probably did help lower the temperature some, because I think to watch a former president tried in court for crimes and then potentially sent to prison, that inflames the supporters of that party and unites them in a way that might otherwise not happen.

Question: Any thoughts as to how Nixon would be remembered today, had it not been for Watergate?

Bickers: There were a lot of other things happening after Nixon’s reelection in 1972. The economy began to start showing signs of problems that were later going to swamp the Carter administration in the late 1970s. So, wage and price controls were instituted by Nixon after his reelection to try to bring down inflation. The post-World War II legacy of American manufacturing that was in Nixon’s period as president had turned and started going south—and permanently so at that point.

In the war in Vietnam, we were not getting out in a way that looked like it was going to be a success. We were going to have to abandon South Vietnam in some way, which of course did happen, but not until after Ford was president.

All of that was happening, and so that would have been part of his legacy. Had he finished the second term successfully, those would have been marks against him. But a lot of presidents have had recessions. A lot of presidents have had economic issues. Unfortunately, a lot of presidents have had foreign policy failures.

Nixon would have had all of those things on his record, but were it not for Watergate, he would have finished out his term of office and been viewed as a president of two consequential terms. That’s not how we remember him today.

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When economies falter, governors respond similarly, regardless of party

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 21:43:43 +0000

When economies falter, governors respond similarly, regardless of party Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/20/2024 - 15:43

Bradley Worrell

Political scientists find that partisan divide shrinks among governors who are responding to economic downturns

In today’s hyper-partisan environment, do states led by Republican governors have different budgetary priorities than those led by Democrats?

They do indeed, in normal economic times. However, in times of negative economic shocks—either within a state or in neighboring states—Democratic and Republican governors tend to share a similar budgetary response by increasing spending in certain categories while also cutting discretionary spending.

That’s the assessment made in a research paper, “Bad times keep us together: Policy priorities and economic shocks,” co-authored by Andrew Q. Philips, associate professor in the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Political Science. Social Science Quarterly published the work this year.

Andrew Q. Philips, an associate professor in the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Political Science, studies political economy, specifically budgets as a reflection of government priorities.

While much has been made of the political divide between Republicans and Democrats, research on their spending priorities at the state level in several budgetary categories remains somewhat sparse, according to Philips, whose research focus includes political economy, specifically budgets as a reflection of government priorities.

To gauge the budgetary priorities of state governments, Philips and his three co-authors focused on 10 budgetary categories that compose most state expenditures: elementary education, higher education, transportation, social services, housing, natural resources and sanitation, public safety, labor market policy, interest on the debt and “other.” The data came from U.S. Census Annual Survey of Government Finance for the 48 contiguous states between the years 1977 and 2007.

Partisan spending priorities

“Our research finds support for the idea that partisanship drives the allocation of budgetary expenditures. So, to answer the question: Do Democratic and Republican governors have different ideological priorities regarding spending? In good economic times, the answer is ‘yes,’” Philips says.

“That makes sense, and we are certainly not the first ones to show that—although I believe we do it in a different way, because of the compositional approach we take to spending, rather than focusing on certain categories, such as unemployment.”

The research found that Democratic governors tended to spend comparatively more on labor market policy (which includes unemployment, workers’ compensation and jobs training programs) as well as housing, while Republicans tend to spend a bit more on public safety and transportation, according to Philips.

“A lot of these are the usual suspects,” he says of spending priorities relating to a governor’s political affiliation. “I think the cooler part of the paper is: What happens when the economy is not doing well? In those cases, what we find is that it actually matters less what the party of the governor is, because no matter their (party affiliation), they tend to respond in a similar manner to these shocks that we look at within a state.”

For example, if a state’s unemployment rate increases, Philips says both Democratic and Republican governors will allocate a larger portion of the budget to cover unemployment, worker’s compensation and job retraining. At the same time, because most states are required to have balanced budgets, increases in those segments will come at the expense of discretionary expenses in other areas.

“Economic pressures constrain the ability of governors to act,” Philips explains. “And so, I might be a Republican governor who wants to increase spending on public safety as a percentage of the budget, but if—all of a sudden—there’s more unemployment, I likely have to address that more direct need. So, even if public safety is what I want to spend more on, I need to address the more pressing need.”

It’s not surprising that governors—regardless of party affiliation—pursue similar policies when faced with economic shocks, because as politicians, they face pressures to act from other elected officials, the media and—perhaps most importantly—voters, Philips says.

“The worry is that, if you are an incumbent and the (state) economy is not doing well, there’s lot of evidence from political science that they get punished at polls,” he adds.

“If there are negative economic shocks in nearby states—no matter the partisanship—they (governors) tend to respond relatively similarly,” says ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder political scientist Andrew Philips

Still, because budgets are established in advance, Philips says there’s generally not a lot a governor can do in the immediate aftermath of an economic shock.

“I think the overarching statement is that, in the short run, like a one-year period, they tend to do the same thing—and often they often don’t do much,” he says of both Democratic and Republican governors. “These (state) budgets are really sticky. They get allocated the year before … and it’s hard to make changes, even if they (governors) want to.”

Another possible economic shock is a drop in a state’s per capita personal income, which Philips says in the longer term (five years or more) can reduce budgets for social services, labor market policy, public safety and interest on the debt.

In that case, both Republican and Democratic governors will cut spending for labor market policy, he says, adding that Republican governors will cut it slightly more, as a percentage of the budget. And Democratic and Republican governors will both cut funding for elementary education and higher education, although Democrat governors will cut expenses by a larger amount, percentage-wise, he says.

Negative effects from neighboring states

Philips says another interesting aspect of the paper is that it found economic shocks to states had correlating effects on the budgets of neighboring states.

“I think there are various mechanisms as to how that could happen,” he says. “For example, there could be a common factor, such as the national economy going down and everyone is receiving this simultaneous shock. Or, there could be a spillover effect. For example, on the East Coast, where the states are pretty close together, it’s not uncommon for people to live in New Jersey and commute to New York. So, if the economy is suddenly doing poorly in New Jersey, that could be felt in New York, and in how New York responds to setting its budget.”

When a neighboring state experiences negative economic shock in the form of a decrease in personal income, in the short run, both Republican and Democratic governors in their home state respond in nearly identical ways, by sharply decreasing elementary education and increasing social services and labor market policy, the research paper found.

“If there are negative economic shocks in nearby states—no matter the partisanship—they (governors) tend to respond relatively similarly,” Philips says.

Notably, the study illustrates that that for negative economic shocks—specifically, increases in unemployment or decreases in personal income—budgetary reactions are similar when the shock happens within a state versus when a shock occurs in surrounding states, he adds.

As a governor, I might wake up to an economic crisis, and even if at the end of the day I want my budget to look like budgetary menu A, the events at the time might force me to make my budget look like budgetary menu B."

Phillips says he believes there are many aspects of budgetary policy at the state level that could still be explored. For example, Philips says his paper compared states where the Republican or Democratic governor also had a state legislature of the same party, which raises the question of whether a governor serving in a state where the legislature is controlled by the opposition party would be required to make more compromises to get things done.

Another possible area to study: Comparing whether governors who are term-limited with those who are not to determine if it had any impact on whether governors kept their budget priorities after experiencing an economic shock.

Still, Philips says he believes his research has broken new ground on the similarities in budgetary priorities between Republican and Democratic governors during in times of economic shock, particularly when partisanship appears to be on the rise.

“It’s very easy in today’s age to think that the policies of Democrats and Republicans couldn’t be more different, and certainly on the national stage I think that’s true to some extent,” he says.

“For a variety of reasons, during periods of economic shock, I think our research has shown that it’s a bit different at the state level. Because, as a governor, I might wake up to an economic crisis, and even if at the end of the day I want my budget to look like budgetary menu A, the events at the time might force me to make my budget look like budgetary menu B. And there’s a trade-off between: When can I stick with my priorities versus being stuck with menu B.”

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Political scientists find that partisan divide shrinks among governors who are responding to economic downturns.

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In historic first, Mexico is poised to elect female president

Anonymous — Fri, 31 May 2024 14:38:06 +0000

In historic first, Mexico is poised to elect female president Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/31/2024 - 08:38

Pam Moore

However, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder scholar Lorraine Bayard de Volo notes that electing a female president may not guarantee a more feminist mode of governing

Editor's note: On Monday, Claudia Scheinbaum is the presumptive winner in what is being called a landslide victory.

While Americans follow a likely rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election, it’s also an exciting and historic election year in the country’s southern neighbor.

On June 2, Mexico’s election day, and for the first time in the nation’s history, a woman will almost certainly win the presidential election.

The election is significant not only for the more than 127 million people living in Mexico, but for the Mexican diaspora and those of Mexican heritage throughout the world, including in ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s Front Range.

Lorraine Bayard de Volo, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder political scientist and professor of women and gender studies, notes that electing a female president may not guarantee a feminist mode of governing in Mexico.

Lorraine Bayard de Volo, a political scientist and University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professor of women and gender studies, has been a scholar of Latin American politics—focusing on gender as it interacts with and informs war, revolution, political violence and social movements—since her undergraduate studies. She has closely followed Mexico’s presidential election, noting that even though Mexico trails several of its Latin American counterparts in electing a female president, the event still is historic for a country that has traditionally identified with macho culture.

Bayard de Volo recently spoke with ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Arts and Sciences Magazine about what this presidential election could mean for Mexico and for those around the world watching.

Question: How did you become interested in this area of study?

Bayard de Volo: As an undergraduate in the ‘80s, studying political science and economics, I was very interested in the various ways in which the U.S. was funding the wars taking place in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

In graduate school, I became increasingly interested in the growing field of gender studies. As a political science PhD student specializing in gender studies, I was able to combine my interests. While studying Latin American politics, particularly war, revolutions and social movements, I was hearing about how women were getting involved, yet there was very little understanding of how gender informed political violence and social mobilization.

I became very intrigued with trying to fill the gap in the research, and I’ve been fascinated by this field of study ever since.

Question: Can you give a quick overview of the upcoming Mexican presidential election?

Bayard de Volo: The Mexican president is in office for a six-year term and cannot run for reelection. Of the three candidates running to take the place of current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly known as AMLO) when his term ends on Oct. 1, the two leading contenders are Claudia Scheinbaum and Xóchitl Gálvez.

Scheinbaum represents the Morena coalition, which is a newer party, but also the same party as AMLO, who won in a landslide and still has very high approval ratings. She’s leading in the polls right now, at least in part due to AMLO’s popularity. Although she identifies as a feminist, if she were to win, she’d inherit her predecessor’s antagonism toward Mexico’s growing women’s movement. Scheinbaum’s experience includes working in the AMLO administration and having served as the Head of Government of Mexico City.

Xóchitl Gálvez represents the Frente Amplio, the broad front, a coalition party that includes three formerly very powerful parties (and formerly mutually antagonistic parties). She was a senator until her nomination as a presidential candidate and has organized for indigenous rights and also served as mayor in a borough of Mexico City.

Interestingly, it’s not only their gender identities but also their ethnicities that represent a departure from the norm. Scheinbaum is of Jewish descent while Gálvez has indigenous roots.

People at an opposition rally in the Zocalo, Mexico City's main square, May 19 to encourage voting in Sunday's presidential election. The sign reads, “We are all the same Mexico." (Photo: Ginnette Riquelme/AP)

No matter who wins this election, AMLO will continue to have a lot of influence due to his overwhelming popularity. There are concerns that his political capital could be used to pressure his successor.

Question: To what extent has the rise of Mexico’s women’s movement contributed to the likely election of its first female president?

Bayard de Volo: It’s hard to say. The women’s movement is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Many Latin American countries—including Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama and Costa Rica—have already elected female presidents, so Mexico is actually behind the curve in that regard.

Meanwhile, there’s been a vibrant, burgeoning women’s movement in Mexico in recent years, which has focused its efforts on reproductive rights and femicide. While efforts were underway to overturn Roe v. Wade here in the United States through two different Supreme Court decisions, Mexico decriminalized abortion within certain parameters.

Although the government has done little to address the high rates of femicide, and despite being a nation known for its macho culture, Mexico’s government has adopted gender quotas with the goal of achieving gender parity in politics. Right now, 50% of Mexico’s lower house is female, women are governors in about a quarter of Mexico’s states and there are some states where women outnumber men in elected office.

The rising women’s movement might be reflective of increasing acceptance of gender parity, but I’m not sure it’s fair to say it’s had a huge influence on the election. Women in Mexico take many different political positions. There’s no clear agreement on what constitutes ‘women’s interests,’ and the election of a female president wouldn’t necessarily guarantee a more feminist mode of governing.

Question: What can the United States learn from Mexico?

Bayard de Volo: That’s a hard question because we are such different countries with different electoral systems. It would be very difficult to implement a gender quota in the U.S. because we don’t have proportional representation. Trying to do something like that here would be controversial, to say the least. That said, it is interesting that a nation that has been identified as quintessentially macho is prepared to elect a woman.

Top image: left, Claudia Scheinbaum (photo: Gerardo Vieyra/NurPhoto/Getty Images) and right, Xóchitl Gálvez (photo: from Gálvez's Facebook)

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However, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder scholar Lorraine Bayard de Volo notes that electing a female president may not guarantee a more feminist mode of governing.

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Afghanistan did not have to be Vietnam 2.0, says former intelligence advisor

Anonymous — Thu, 30 May 2024 18:52:16 +0000

Afghanistan did not have to be Vietnam 2.0, says former intelligence advisor Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/30/2024 - 12:52

Bradley Worrell

Gail Nelson, a career intelligence officer and ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder alumnus, advised Afghan military intelligence leaders after the United States drove the Taliban from power

It’s been almost three years since the Afghanistan government fell to the Taliban, and with the passage of time some have come to believe that America’s efforts to install and support a government that was democratic and friendly to the West were doomed from the start.

Gail Nelson is not one of them.

“It didn’t have to be that way,” he says. “If there was more respect and authority given to the Afghan leaders to take responsibility for combating the Taliban, things might have been different. I can’t say for sure the outcome would have changed, but at least the responsibility would have been more on the Afghans and less on the U.S. and NATO.”

Nelson speaks from experience. A University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder graduate with master’s and doctorate degrees in political science and a U.S. Civil Service and Air Force intelligence career , Nelson served as a military advisor to top Afghan intelligence officials for two years during the early 2000s and for three years during the early 2010s.

Gail Nelson is pictured in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2013, with the tomb of the late king, Mohammad Nadir Shaw, in the background. Nelson says he was optimistic about the country’s chances during his first deployment to the country as a senior intelligence advisor from 2003 to 2005 but grew increasingly concerned about its prospects during his second deployment, from 2010 to 2013.

Those first years in Afghanistan—after the Taliban had been driven from power by U.S. and coalition forces following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on American soil—were promising, according to Nelson.

Promising early years

In December 2003, Nelson was one of about two dozen U.S. advisors—all military veterans of senior military ranks —who were hired by a U.S. military contractor to work in Afghanistan. Representing different military branches and experienced in different fields, all were hired to advise top Afghan defense and intelligence officials.

“ We and the Afghans had radically different cultural backgrounds” Nelson says, “But we all had the common goal in getting Afghans out from under their experience of Soviet occupation and civil war. They had a clear determination of moving Westward as was mine. It was a positive approach but there was much work to do in institutionalizing the change.”

Afghan intelligence leaders he worked with were Soviet-trained from the 1980s, when the Soviet Union occupied the country, so they already knew intelligence strategies and doctrine, but they wanted to embrace U.S. and NATO methods as quickly as possible, according to Nelson.

“Afghanistan’s top intelligence official personally asked me: Help us develop an organization that is Western-oriented in organization and doctrine,” he says. “They wanted our help learning to run a defense and intelligence organization aligned with the West. They saw it as important for Afghanistan to be part of the West.”

In Afghanistan, the culture grants respect to people based on their age, honoring the experiences of life they must share, according to Nelson, so the fact that he and many of his fellow advisors were older was an asset used for maximum effect.

“They decide how old you are, and then they decide if they should listen to you,” he says. “So, my fellow advisors and I had the advantage of age in our favor when offering advice to younger Afghan leaders.”

Nelson says his daily duties at the time typically involved meeting with top defense and intelligence officials to exchange ideas on military intelligence theory and practice, and to develop papers on intelligence production, collection, and counterintelligence. These matters included doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, and facilities.

Plenty of expertise to share

Nelson had extensive strategic intelligence knowledge based upon his 26 years in Western Europe, where he was responsible for Soviet/Warsaw Pact and Post-Soviet political intelligence estimates. His master’s and doctorate degrees in political science earned at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder specializing in German and Soviet studies were invaluable reinforcements to the challenges that lay ahead.

He took mandatory retirement from the Air Force in 2001, at the age of 57, retiring as a colonel and retired from the U.S. Civil Service as well. However, after 9/11, military contractors were looking for individuals with specialized expertise, and Nelson says he believed he could put his skills to good use in Afghanistan, where national leaders were seeking to create a country free of the Taliban’s harsh rule.

Nelson is pictured recently in his library in his Boulder home. The framed photo on the bookshelf is the late ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ political science professor Edward J. Rozek, who was a mentor. Nelson says what he learned in his German and Soviet area studies courses while obtaining a master’s degree and PhD from ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder were invaluable to him in his job as an Air Force intelligence officer.

Although Nelson worked in Afghanistan as a private contractor, he had plenty of opportunities to observe the interactions of U.S. and NATO active-duty military leaders with their Afghan counterparts. He believes Afghans were willing to give those Western military representatives the benefit of the doubt for the first year or so that he was in the country, but things changed over time.

“U.S./NATO officers found great difficulty in adapting to Afghan culture and were not inclined to do so. They had no background in South Asian area studies, making it difficult for them to understand the political, psychological and leadership styles of Afghan military leaders,” Nelson says. For their part, Afghan officers generally found it difficult to embrace the primacy of computer technologies within their institutions preferring instead the affinity of direct human discourse.

Complicating matters, Nelson says the decision to limit U.S./NATO military personnel deployments in Afghanistan to one year limited how effective those officers could be working with representatives of the Afghan defense ministry and general staff leadership.

“Institution-building is not easy; it takes time,” he says. “And in a culture like Afghanistan, you’re not going to make changes quickly.”

What’s more, it was always clear to both U.S. military officials and their Afghan counterparts that Iraq—which the United States invaded in 2003 to remove Saddam Hussein from power and search for weapons of mass destruction—would take precedence over Afghanistan, Nelson says.

Despite these obstacles—and many others associated with attempting to assist governing a country with eight major tribal groups and more than 15 subcultures—Nelson says he still felt reasonably optimistic about the country’s prospects when he departed in December 2005.

He went on to take consulting assignments as a military advisor in the Philippines and Iraq.

Signs of a downward spiral

In September 2010, Nelson returned to Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, and he says it was immediately clear things had changed for the worse, in part because the security situation had deteriorated.

Threats to Afghanistan leaders including NATO officers were visible throughout Kabul with the construction of barriers on major roads and thoroughfares. One assassin attempted to kill the chief of military Intelligence in 2011 but failed to reach his target. Safehouses for advisors were primary targets as well, in which two guards were killed at Nelson’s residence, followed by at least two advisors killed in car bombs in 2012. Three Afghan children known to Nelson were also killed at the Gate to Camp Eggers by a suicide bomber.

Kabul had become a more dangerous place.

Meanwhile, Nelson says he was disheartened to realize that he and other military contractors were increasingly being sidelined by U.S./NATO active-duty military members, despite their deep connections with their Afghan counterparts. He says Western leaders also increasingly bypassed Afghan leaders as they took the lead on Afghan-NATO missions against the Taliban—a decision that had negative repercussions for the country’s security when Western forces drastically scaled down their presence in the country while Afghans felt disempowered to fill the vacuum

At the same time, years into the operation in Afghanistan, Nelson says U.S./NATO military planners still had not done their homework when it came to teaching U.S. military personnel about Afghan history, culture, and geopolitics.

Outside of the capital, most of Afghanistan’s population live in small, rural villages, many without electricity, that adhere to tribalism and Islamic traditions. Most of the Afghans who live in those communities never leave them, which creates a provincial attitude reinforced by complete indifference to events in Kabul, according to Nelson.

“So, a young U.S. military officer from Kansas telling a village chieftain how to run things is not going to go over well,” he says. “You can’t just march into a country like Afghanistan and think they are going to embrace a modern, computer, business-oriented model when 10 miles outside of Kabul they don’t have lightbulbs.”

For their part, the Taliban were successful in their propaganda efforts to get those villagers to see Western troops not just as foreigners, but as alien outsiders with no respect for the country’s deep cultural and religious traditions, Nelson says.

When he left Afghanistan for the last time in September 2013, he was deeply ambivalent about the country’s prospects. When the country fell to the Taliban in September 2021, it did not surprise him, Nelson says.

Marching into an area we had no real knowledge of, you see the lesson now for what it is once it collapsed in 2021, and we’re back to a Taliban regime.”

“We lost traction on the Afghan defense side,” he says. “They were no longer responsible for what was happening in the field. It was too late; they were not engaged. That had morphed over to NATO and the U.S. taking the lead in combatting the Taliban.”

What’s more, the Trump administration’s decision in February 2020 to negotiate directly with the Taliban—and to exclude the Afghan government—for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country “effectively surrendered Afghan sovereignty,” Nelson says.

Lessons not learned

Today, three years after the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, Nelson says he is worried that America has not learned two vital lessons from its longest war.

The first is not standing by Afghans leaders who stood with the United States after the Taliban was driven from power in 2001. Specifically, Nelson says he is deeply troubled that the U.S. and NATO have made no concerted efforts to evacuate and provide asylum for top Afghan political and military leaders before or after the country fell to the Taliban in August 2021.

Of the Afghan intelligence leaders he worked with, Nelson says one was killed in the aftermath of the Taliban’s retaking of the country, at least one is in hiding in Afghanistan and one is in neighboring Tajikistan but is in limbo there, unable to gain U.S. assistance. Nelson says he is unsure about the fate is to several other top Afghan intelligence officials he knew from his time in the country.

Leaving those Afghan leaders behind was not right and sends a bad signal to U.S. allies and potential allies, Nelson notes. He says he has contacted the U.S. State Department, the White House and other government agencies advocating for asylum for those Afghan leaders but has received no response.

Meanwhile, Nelson says he believes many of the problems the United States faced in Afghanistan arose because military planners were not experts in area studies for the region, and he says part of that blame goes to universities, which he says typically do not offer master’s degrees and PhDs in area studies.

“If universities aren’t graduating MA/PhDs in area studies for various regions of the world, we are going to continue to produce people who know nothing about regional histories, cultures and geopolitics that dictate whether U.S. national security policies are a success or a failure,” he says. “We blew it in Vietnam, and we blew it in Afghanistan. I believe one of the key issues was there was a failure among the Pentagon planners, who were coming out of a background that was functional and not area-studies related.”

Reflecting on America’s war in Afghanistan, Nelson says, “Marching into an area we had no real knowledge of, you see the lesson now for what it is once it collapsed in 2021, and we’re back to a Taliban regime.”

Top image: a view of Kabul, Afghanistan (Photo: iStock)

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Gail Nelson, a career intelligence officer and ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder alumnus, advised Afghan military intelligence leaders after the United States drove the Taliban from power.

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Not just angry, but motivated and voting

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 16:05:35 +0000

Not just angry, but motivated and voting Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/29/2023 - 09:05

Rachel Sauer

In new publication, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder PhD graduate Kimberly Killen highlights how ‘angry feminist claims’ have the power to inform and mobilize

Kimberly Killen was an undergraduate at Wellesley College, which counts Hillary Rodham Clinton as an alumna, during the 2008 presidential election—in which Clinton was an early candidate.

“That election was a complete eye-opener,” Killen recalls. “Here I was 19, 20 years old, and my brain was bopping around with ideas about how, as women, we have equality, things are different now. Then I saw all the ways the media treated her as a woman—any emotion she showed or did not show, how that was covered was so completely gendered that it seemed to me, as a woman, you just can’t win. You’re either too much of this or too little of that.”

And if the emotion being shown is anger and the person expressing it identifies as a feminist? She’s hysterical, she's strident, she’s irrational, she’s a “feminazi”—pick your dismissive stereotype.

In a recent publication, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder PhD graduate Kimberly Killen explores how angry feminist claims have the power to inform and mobilize.

However, in a recently published article exploring “angry feminist claims” and political and social mobilization, Killen, who earned a PhD in political science from the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder in 2022 and completed a research assistantship with ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder researcher Celeste Montoya in May, argues that angry feminist claims have the power to inform and mobilize. She emphasizes that by resonating with empathetic communities, angry feminist claims legitimize feelings and experiences, triggering energetic transfers between feminists and non-feminists.

“I’m interested in this political moment and in what anger can do,” Killen says. “Anger is not a uniformly good emotion, and I’m not saying we should all get really angry and go out and do things.

“In this paper, I’m presenting anger as this really narrow path that can get us out of our seats to then transform that anger into something good or civic—something that organizes us to act. It shouldn’t just begin with, ‘I’m really angry, and I’m just going to stay really angry all the time.’ Part of it was recognizing my own anger and recognizing the ways people are using their anger to reclaim the position of rationality.”

Demanding respect and recognition

Killen uses the term “angry feminist claims” to characterize particular statements and issues—not individuals—as “feminist” based on “their demands for respect, recognition and action on women’s sexual autonomy and political legitimacy,” she writes. “I do not classify angry women writ large as ‘feminists.’ However, as a result of making these claims, regardless of speakers’ self-identification, society often treats these speakers as feminists; their political claims becoming synonymous with their identity.

“Is anger an unproductive political emotion and mode of speech for women activists? Can angry feminist claims only get heard if they are delivered in an emotional register that conforms to liberal democratic conventions?”

She considers whether angry feminist claims can be understood as a mobilizing and productive political practice by focusing on the protests of Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 confirmation hearings for the U.S. Supreme Court. She highlights the confrontation in an elevator between then-U.S. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona and activists Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher.

After learning that Flake planned to vote in favor of confirming Kavanaugh, Archila and Gallagher confronted Flake in an elevator near his office.

“You have children in your family,” Archila told him (some media accounts describe her statements as “shouting”). “Think about them. I have two children. I cannot imagine that for the next 50 years they will have to have someone in the Supreme Court who has been accused of violating a young girl. What are you doing, sir?”

Gallagher then added (also described as “shouting” in some accounts), “I was sexually assaulted, and nobody believed me. I didn’t tell anyone, and you’re telling all women that they don’t matter, that they should just stay quiet because if they tell you what happened to them you are going to ignore them. That’s what happened to me, and that’s what you are telling all women in America, that they don’t matter.”

Protesters on the steps of the U.S. Capitol demonstrating against the confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Oct. 6, 2018. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

“Do you think that Brett is telling the truth?” Archila asked. “Do you think that he’s able to hold the pain of this country and repair it? That is the work of justice.”

The exchange was recorded by a CNN team, and for Killen, that exchange and the rhetoric and analysis that followed embody how angry feminist claims and their reception are shaped by a nexus of socio-historical forces. Whether and how an angry feminist claim is heard and valued can depend not only on a person’s sex, but on their skin color, sexual orientation, gender identity, economic status and a host of other factors, Killen says.

“It’s possible, and it happens frequently, that two people are going to hear the same angry feminist claim, but hear it in two totally different ways,” she says. “One person may have that nodding feeling of acceptance, and another may be thinking, ‘Oh, she’s just being hysterical.’”

Challenging conventions

Studying angry feminist claims as a factor in political motivation also highlights disparities that have long existed within feminism, Killen says. The voices and experiences of liberal white women have long had a place at the front of the line, while those of people from underrepresented communities have struggled for legitimacy and to be heard.

“This is a really difficult problem, and I think it even exceeds the feminist movement,” Killen says. “We have a lot of sensitive conversations today within feminism and you can see people moving into a sort of defensive crouch rather than taking a beat to listen. Often, it feels threatening to hear that within feminism, some voices and experiences have been marginalized or delegitimized.”

She adds that bringing long-marginalized voices and experiences to the fore is a step-by-step process and that anger can play an important role in motivating action. Citing Archila and Gallagher confronting Flake in the elevator, Killen notes that “you can see they’re upset, their voices are raised, but the way in which they’re using anger is reclaiming—either intentionally or not—the position of rationality. Step by step, they’re pointing out the ways that (Flake) is not behaving as a rational actor. Their language is going, ‘Wait up, no, look at this story we’re telling you, this is the rational path.’”

Further, anger doesn’t just fulfill short-term goals for mobilization, but can challenge longstanding conventions about what is politically appropriate and for whom, Killen says. Seeing women’s anger empowers other women to articulate feelings that deviate from the norm—norms that have dictated who gets to be publicly angry and whose voice gets to be heard.

Having just completed an election cycle and heading into the 2024 election year, Killen says she is hopeful that anger will continue galvanizing action: “What I see really motivating a lot of people, and not necessarily just women, is protecting reproductive and sexual health rights, voting to protect these rights. To me, that’s a really hopeful glimmer that I think is going to continue to be on the ballot in ways that I just find exciting.

“I’m excited for civic action and people feeling the inspiration of, ‘We’re going to go out and protect these rights.’ I’m hopeful citizens are going to continue to show up at the ballot.”

Top image: People protesting Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court Oct. 4, 2018. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

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In new publication, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder PhD graduate Kimberly Killen highlights how ‘angry feminist claims’ have the power to inform and mobilize.

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What’s next for Putin’s Russia?

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 21:11:40 +0000

What’s next for Putin’s Russia? Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/29/2023 - 15:11

Bradley Worrell

An agreement between the Wagner mercenary group and the Russian government averts a civil war for now, but the future is less clear, according to ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Russia expert and political science professor

Events in Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine took perhaps their most dramatic turn to date late last week.

On Saturday, members of the 25,000-member Wagner mercenary group—which had been fighting on behalf of Russia in Ukraine—took over a major Russian military base, shot down several Russian aircraft and launched a short-lived coup that threatened to start a civil war.

The two sides quickly approved a deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, the terms of which include Wagner forces agreeing to stand down in exchange for immunity and mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and some of his fighters relocating to nearby Belarus.

Sarah W. Sokhey specializes in comparative politics and political economy with a regional focus on the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia.

Sarah Wilson Sokhey, an associate professor of political science at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder who has spent more than 20 years traveling to and studying the politics of Russia and the former Soviet Union, has been monitoring the situation in Russia closely for signs of what might come next. She recently spoke to Have Ya Herd about what the latest developments could mean for Prigozhin, his mercenary fighters, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power and the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

Question: Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary army, was once a close ally of President Putin. How surprising is it he and Putin had a major falling out?

Wilson Sokhey: It’s surprising and not surprising, in a way.

So, it’s surprising in that most of us had no idea that this was coming with a particular timing of this. The U.S. government is saying that they did have some advance information that this might be about to occur, but I’m not sure how far in advance they had that information.

It’s not surprising that someone like Prigozhin would turn on Putin and would try to take advantage of the situation—to challenge Putin’s political power. … Given that the war has been going badly, and that he (Prigozhin) is not an entirely predictable person, it’s not shocking that someone like him would do something like this.

Question: Do you have any thoughts on what happens to Prigozhin, who supposedly is now receiving amnesty?

Wilson Sokhey: It probably doesn’t stop there. There are a lot of different scenarios that could play out. Prigozhin has been offered the opportunity to “retire,” in an old kind of Soviet sense, in Belarus, as negotiated by Belarus President Lukashenko.

If he’s smart, he’ll try to get out of Belarus and go somewhere else, but he doesn’t have any good options for where else he could go.

Some people think that Prigozhin could still pose a risk to Putin. He could still possibly have support among the soldiers that he led before. Some people are speculating that there’s every incentive for Putin or for the FSB (the Russian state security service) to try to kill him while he's in Belarus, or maybe for the Belarusian security forces to be involved in that, because Belarus is a close ally of Russia.

So, Prigozhin himself is still very much at risk, and the Russian system is still at risk from having someone who has recently engaged in this attempted coup still very close by.

Question: What happens to Wagner’s mercenary troops that are in in Russia and are deployed against the Ukrainians?

Wilson Sokhey: They’ve also been offered amnesty. So, the official line right now is that they’re not going to be prosecuted for their participation in the coup. They have every incentive as well, however, to try to get out of Russia with whatever options that they have. …

I wouldn’t imagine that the Russian government has any incentive to have those particular soldiers go back to Ukraine and fight, but the Russian government also is running out of (soldiers) and is facing a situation which it has to draft more people. It really needs every soldier it can get if it intends to keep waging this war. So, it’s really unclear.

Question: In the past, Putin has been an expert at spinning things—even when they didn’t necessarily go his way. But given this latest development with the attempted coup by Wagner mercenaries, is there a way for Putin to put a good spin on it?

Wilson Sokhey: He can’t turn it into a good thing, but Putin is certainly trying his hardest to spin it as a situation in which he was very much in control, that he knew what was happening and that it (the coup attempt) was put down quickly. But it’s going to be very challenging for him to avoid any consequences from this in the public eye.

On the front page of (the Russian newspaper) Komsomolskaya Pravda is an interview with a political analyst, saying, “Well, it doesn’t appear that Russian elites were involved in this at all … and it’s just a limited attempt at a coup.”

But there’s really not a scenario in which it doesn’t make the Russian government look grossly incompetent and divided that something like this could happen. And although the Russian people, like all people, are very susceptible to propaganda from the Russian state … they can also be remarkably savvy. And if this is what they see of how the Russian government is functioning, they know that what they don’t see has got to be all the worse.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Putin will immediately be removed from power as a result. But one possibility is that it’s the beginning of the end.

Question: In terms of the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, can the Ukrainians potentially use this turmoil to their advantage?

Wilson Sokhey: Absolutely. This is only good for Ukrainians, who are fighting against Russia. It shows that Russia is divided and that the military is falling apart. It provides an opportunity in the short and medium term, and maybe long term as well, for attention to be diverted away from attacks on Ukraine at a time when Ukraine is stepping up its own counteroffensive. …

Ukrainians were watching this very closely—and not only does it boost morale, but the actual ability to fight. So, it’s very clearly good for Ukraine.

Question: In terms of the long-term outlook for the war between Russia and Ukraine, do these recent developments with Wagner potentially change the calculus of the war?

Wilson Sokhey: The calculus changes entirely, really, in that it sends such a powerful signal that the Russian military is doing so badly. But the other critical component of this will be continued, strong support from Western governments and military aid and financial aid to continue fighting the war.

It absolutely changes the calculus of what we think is possible. And it shows that the Russian military is not invincible, which we already knew, but it demonstrates just how bad of a state the Russian military is in.

Question: What are Western governments to make of the current state of affairs in Russia?

Wilson Sokhey: Governments are watching these developments very, very closely. (Secretary of State) Anthony Blinken cancelled travel plans because of the potential coup attempt that was happening to make sure they were monitoring the situation closely.

And I think that what’s key here, is that Western governments will watch closely for opportunities to assist Ukraine most effectively, because what’s happening makes Russia look all the more vulnerable. So, what some Western governments didn’t entirely think was possible before, in defeating Russia in Ukraine … looks more possible now.

Question: Putin has managed to stay in power for about 20 years. Is there anything to suggest he might not be able to survive this politically?

Wilson Sokhey: Yes, but we really don’t know when that political demise would come, exactly. There have been people who have pointed out that this is similar to a failed attempted coup that happened in Russia back in 1917, before the Bolshevik Revolution, which was successful.

In the summer of 1917, there is a general who marches on the Tsar and is trying to bring down the monarchy, but fails. But that was the first step in what’s ultimately going to open up an opportunity for the Bolshevik Revolution to be successful.

Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin (left) is a leader of a mercenary group and previous confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin (right).

So, one possible scenario is that we see something like that—that this attempt was not successful, but it opens the opportunity and creates cracks and weaknesses in the system that lead to regime change, perhaps, or the fall of Putin.

Question: If that happens, is there a sense of who Putin’s replacement might be?

Wilson Sokhey: One possibility is that it’s someone from the security services or from the military. And one possibility is that we see it be someone who, like Putin himself when he first came to power, is a relatively unknown name for the everyday person. So, it’s not someone on our radar right now, but someone who is high up in the ranks.

But the critical thing to remember is that the person who takes over from Putin may not be better than Putin. It’s not a quick fix if Putin dies tomorrow or if he’s deposed from power. With the system that’s being perpetuated in Russia, and the Russian government right now, it may get worse before it gets better.

Question: Is there anything else that people should be mindful of now, particularly regarding the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia?

Wilson Sokhey: I just think it’s so important to continue to keep Ukraine in the news and to remember that the war is happening. And that it actually could get worse this winter, especially because Russia has attacked infrastructure in Ukraine. …

That’s going to be a very challenging situation for Ukraine, and it needs as much support as ever from the West.

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