Interdisciplinary Workshops on Politics and Policy

Protest has been a key method of political claim-making in Jordan from the late Ottoman period to the present day. More than moments of rupture within normal-time politics, protests have been central to challenging state power, as well as reproducing it—and the spatial dynamics of protests play a central role in the construction of both state and society. In this talk based on her new book, Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent (Stanford University Press, 2022), Jillian Schwedler considers how space and geography influence protests and repression, and, in challenging conventional narratives of Hashemite state-making, offers the first in-depth study of rebellion in Jordan.

Based on twenty-five years of field research, Protesting Jordan examines protests as they are situated in the built environment, bringing together considerations of networks, spatial imaginaries, space and place-making, and political geographies at local, national, regional, and global scales. Schwedler considers the impact of time and temporality in the lifecycles of individual movements. Through a mixed interpretive methodology, this book illuminates the geographies of power and dissent and the spatial practices of protest and repression, highlighting the political stakes of competing narratives about Jordan’s past, present, and future.

While the impact of presidential primary endorsements on recipients has been explored, the reasons underlying them remain poorly understood. This paper considers three motivations that capture the motivations of most congressional endorsers: aiding their own reelection, advancing their career, and influencing who wins the nomination. In describing these motivations, I derive testable claims from competing candidate-centric and activist centric theories of party behavior and show that each theory explains endorsement behavior at different points in the primary process and among different groups of endorsers. 

In keeping with activist-centric behavioral theories, the earliest endorsements are targeted at intense policy demanders and favor ideologically proximate candidates. However, as the primary progresses, endorsements become less ideological and more geared towards helping the endorser win reelection, in keeping with candidate-centric theories. Progressive career ambition increases the likelihood of some home state endorsements. However, its absence among those whose career ambition has been realized makes them less likely to endorse. 

In 2020, the slow and uneven federal response to the coronavirus surprised many  observers because multiple sources, including the Global Health Security Index, ranked the  United States as the most prepared nation in the world to deal with public health emergencies.  Congressional Democrats blamed the Trump administration for not properly preparing and  responding to COVID-19 while the Trump administration and congressional Republicans blamed  Democrats and the previous Obama administration for not adequately preparing the US for a  public health crisis. Would the partisan disagreement affect the ability of the federal government  to properly respond to major disease outbreaks? The political science literature offers conflicting  expectations with some scholars arguing that party polarization limits the ability of government  to pass legislation while other scholars find that government’s ability to pass legislation does not  diminish because of party polarization. To resolve this dilemma in the literature, we examine to  what extent, if any, does polarization affect the likelihood of public health bills becoming law.  Using public health bills introduced from the 80th to 114th Congress, we find that polarization  hinders the ability of Congress to pass public health legislation. Even though the bill passage rate  for public health bills is not any different than it was when Congress was less polarized,  polarization impacts the ability of public health legislation to pass the House or the Senate, thus,  impacting the quality of legislation that is introduced. 

Unlike conventional journalism that achieves objectivity by giving “equal weights” to both sides of the debate, fact-checking takes a more interpretive and “weights of evidence” approach. One challenge is that the way fact-checking pursues objectivity allows for asymmetric coverage that covers one political party more heavily than the other. These imbalances may reflect genuine asymmetries in the prevalence of misinformation, but can also undermine trust among partisans. Findings from a preregistered experiment indicate that, compared to symmetric coverage, uncongenial asymmetry (most articles challenge in-group) leads partisans to find a source less credible. Contrary to conventional belief, Democrats react more negatively to uncongenial asymmetry than Republicans. Congenial asymmetry (most articles challenge out-group) also causes partisans to perceive the source as less credible, especially when a portion of coverage challenges their own party on polarized topics. These findings suggest more symmetric coverage of political parties can foster more bipartisan trust in fact checking. ​

What effect does demand for policing presence, as proxied by 911 call locations, have on the location of officer initiated surveillance and enforcement strategies? Using publicly available data from Durham, North Carolina between 2006 and 2020, I investigate how two neighborhood centric emergency crisis – suspicious complaints (citizenry deterrence) and weapon-related calls (citizenry cooperation) – change the intensity of directed patrols across the city, which I use as a proxy for police surveillance. First, I propose a coproduction model of policing where responding officers learn from 911 calls and inform other patrol officers on where to conduct directed patrols. I compare this novel model to two existing frameworks of policing: reactive model of policing and proactive model of policing. Second, I introduce an inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) approach that can estimate the effects of these neighborhood centric calls on directed patrols using their longitude(X)/latitude(Y) coordinates. With this setup, I find that suspicious complaints are responsible for 10.7 percent of directed patrols across the city while weapon- related calls are responsible for 12.2 percent. This proportion is greater in majority-minority communities, however, who tend to be clustered in and around Durham’s gentrifying downtown neighborhoods. In addition, in these downtown neighborhoods, suspicious complaints explain a greater share of directed patrols than do weapon-related calls. This police responsiveness illustrates how 911 callers can indirectly affect levels of police surveillance when engaging in citizenry deterrence, such as suspicious complaints. Residents can have a bottom-up influence on officer-initiated policing strategies.