Perspectives on Politics

The Politics of Rating Freedom: Ideological Affinity, Private Authority, and the Freedom in the World Ratings by Sarah Sunn Bush, Temple University The Freedom in the World (FITW) ratings of countries’ freedom, created by Freedom House in 1972, are […]

Investigating American Democracy: Is Political Science Superior to Journalism? by J. S. Maloy, University of Louisiana, Lafayette Members of the academic profession of political science may notice some eerily familiar feelings of anxiety as they read James […]

Gandhi’s Failure: Anticolonial Movements and Postcolonial Futures by Sandipto Dasgupta, Ashoka University, New Delhi  M.K. Gandhi was the undisputed leader of India’s struggle for independence. Yet his vision for postcolonial India was completely marginalized at the moment […]

Democratic Peace: Progress and Crisis by Christopher Hobson, Waseda University, Japan When work on the democratic peace first emerged it contributed to the revitalization of liberal thought and represented an important contribution to International Relations (IR). […]

The Fact of Experience: Rethinking Political Knowledge and Civic Competence by Katherine J. Cramer, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Benjamin Toff, University of Minnesota In the study of political knowledge, the emphasis on facts is misplaced. Evidence has grown […]

Has the Top Two Primary Elected More Moderates? by Eric McGhee, Public Policy Institute of California and Boris Shor, University of Houston Party polarization is perhaps the most significant political trend of the past several decades of […]

When Is It Rational to Learn the Wrong Lessons? Technocratic Authority, Social Learning, and Euro Fragility by Matthias Matthijs, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and Mark Blyth, Brown University Why do bad policy ideas […]