Scope Conditions Podcast

Feb 20 2025 34 ep. 66 mins 109
Scope Conditions Podcast artwork

A podcast showcasing cutting-edge research in comparative politics.

  Government  Science
RSS feed Share
Copy RSS


Subscribe on Podcast Addict


Violence as Campaign Strategy, with Niloufer Siddiqui

Feb 20 2025 74 mins  
When we think of weak democracies around the world, we often think of their inability to maintain a monopoly on violence because of challenges outside the state – like militias, rebel groups, criminal gangs, and other external, violent organizations. But sometimes it’s actors deeply intertwined with the state – like political parties – who are engaging in the violence. Some

How Criminal Governance Undermines Elections, with Jessie Trudeau

Sep 20 2024 78 mins  
In democracies all around the world, criminal organizations are involved in electoral politics. Notable examples include the Sicilian mafia and Pablo Escobar's drug cartel in Colombia. We sometimes think of these criminal groups as having politicians in their pockets or as directing politicians to do their bidding at the barrel of a gun. But our guest today, Jessie Trudeau, an Assi

What College Dorms can teach us about Culture, with Joan Ricart-Huguet

Jul 22 2024 78 mins  
Today on Scope Conditions: college dorms shed light on where group culture comes from and how it molds us. At Harry Potter’s alma mater, each new student is assigned to a House that aligns with their true character. The mystical Sorting Hat takes the courageous ones and sorts them into House Gryffindor, while the studious know-it-alls go to Ravenclaw. The Sorting Hat may be ficti

Statecraft as Stagecraft, with Iza (Yue) Ding

Jan 27 2024 76 mins  
Most governments around the world – whether democracies or autocracies – face at least some pressure to respond to citizen concerns on some social problems. But the issues that capture public attention — the ones on which states have incentives to be responsive – aren’t always the issues on which bureaucracies, agents of the state, have the ability to solve problems. What

How the UN Keeps Peace Among Neighbors, with William G. Nomikos

Oct 01 2023 75 mins  
Today on Scope Conditions, what’s the secret to successful peacekeeping? We often think of civil conflict as being driven by organized, armed groups – like rebel militias and state armies. But as our guest today reminds us, a leading cause of conflict around the world is communal violence – fights that break out between civilians over land, cattle, water, and other scarce res

Race-Based Coalitions in Three Chinatowns, with Jae Yeon Kim

Jun 14 2023 59 mins  
Today on Scope Conditions: when is racial status a unifying force in politics? Shared experiences of prejudice and discrimination can sometimes help create shared political identities within and across racial minority groups and strong incentives for collective mobilization. But as our guest today points out, neither race nor racial-minority status maps neatly onto patterns of poli

Can We Immunize Against Misinformation? with Sumitra Badrinathan

Feb 26 2023 77 mins  
Today on Scope Conditions, can we teach voters how to tell truth from lies? Around the world, governments and political parties wield misinformation as a powerful political weapon – a weapon that is massively amplified by social media. A large and growing literature has investigated how misinformation spreads and ways of combating it – from corrections and warning-labels to edu

Trial and Terror, with Fiona Feiang Shen-Bayh

Nov 27 2022 76 mins  
Today on Scope Conditions: why the judge’s gavel is sometimes mightier than the sword. Political trials – or show trials – are a well-known mode of repression in authoritarian settings. We often think of a show trial as a sham version of the real thing: the autocrat affords his enemy a semblance of due process to give off the appearance of fairness, even though in reality, th

Overcoming the Hijab Penalty, with Donghyun Danny Choi

Oct 24 2022 81 mins  
Today on Scope Conditions: what drives discrimination against immigrants – and what can be done about it? When social scientists have sought to explain anti-immigrant bias, they’ve tended to focus on one of two possible causes: the perceived economic threat that migrants might pose to the native born or the cultural threat driven by differences in race, ethnicity, or religion.

“Defunding the Police” as Transitional Justice, with Genevieve Bates

Jul 11 2022 74 mins  
A little over two years ago, mass protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, focused public attention on the dramatically higher rates at which the police use force against Black and Latinx people. More broadly, the Black Lives Matter movement has put a spotlight on deep-seated systemic racism in the criminal justice system in the U.S.