“Uncovering Discrimination in the Policing of Anti-Immigrant Hate Crime” With an increase in ethnically motivated hate crime, we explore the issue of the rigor in which law enforcement agencies police potential hate crime activity. We conducted a large-scale field experiment on roughly 6,800 police departments throughout the United States to Read more…
Welcome to our first Lunch with a Leader event of the new semester! This year's theme focuses on leading academic initiatives on inclusion, diversity, and the public good. Our series opens with Jack H. Knott, Dean and the C. Erwin and Ione L. Piper Chair and Professor of the USC Sol Read more…
LaGina Gause will discuss her research paper, The Advantage of Disadvantage: Protests, Resources, and Legislative Behavior. It is well documented that low-resource groups are disadvantaged in the political process. But, when low-resource groups can overcome barriers to engage in collective action – participation involving multiple participants publicly expressing a grievance – it Read more…
Ben Graham is an assistant professor at USC's School of International Relations. Ben will discuss his paper, Network Ties and the Political Strategies of Firms, co-written with Cesi Cruz. Social ties are critical to firms’ ability to achieve influence over government policy, and it is widely accepted that better-connected firms achieve more influence. However, Read more…
Nicolas Duquette is an assistant professor at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. He completed his PhD in economics from the University of Michigan in 2014. Duquette's research is in public finance and economic history, with particular interest in the historical development of taxation and spending policy and the Read more…
Violent encounters involving police and racial minorities are taking place in greater numbers in the United States. Some of the high-profile incidents (New York City (Eric Garner), Sanford, FL (Trayvon Martin), and Ferguson, MO (Michael Brown)) have generated strong public reaction. Protest movements, such as like “Black Lives Matter,” have Read more…
Public School Finance in California: the Golden Age On several occasions, significant changes were made in the way the public schools in California were financed. Major reforms were also made in the state's tax structure. What did not change was the nature of the state's commitment to public education. From the time of Read more…
Policing for Profit: The Political Economy of Law Enforcement In recent years numerous observers have raised concerns about "policing for profit'' or the deployment of law enforcement resources to raise funds for cash-strapped jurisdictions. However, identifying the causal effect of fiscal incentives on law enforcement behavior has remained elusive. We model Read more…
The Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump symposium will bring together leading political scientists from across the country to explore his radical revision to US foreign policy. In doing so, we hope to better understand the key components of foreign policy in the Age of Trump and their likely Read more…
Citizen Competence and Democratic Governance Competing traditions in public opinion scholarship offer strikingly divergent understandings of the role citizens can and do play in democratic governance. Some scholars argue that most citizens are poor decision makers who are woefully uninformed and easily manipulated. Others believe that public opinion is “rational” Read more…
Political Violence in China: Terrorism, Official Media, and Political Priorities Most scholars agree that autocracies enjoy a key counterterrorism advantage, namely the ability to control information. In reality, the information strategies of autocracies are much more sophisticated. To better understand these strategic considerations, we explore why the Chinese Communist Party Read more…
White Identity and the Emergence of the Republican Party in the Early-20th Century South (Co-authored with Boris Heersink, Fordham University) We explore the relationship between white identity, the GOP, and the South, by examining the role that white identity played in the Republican Party’s emergence in the former Confederacy prior to Read more…
"When Citizens Peek Behind the Bureaucratic Veil: An Experiment in Shaping Public Opinion" In this paper, we plan to conduct a novel experiment to test whether Americans form their opinions on executive agency decisions based on whether those decisions are framed as emerging from either technocratic or democratic deliberative processes. Read more…
Unbundling Polarization Chad Kendall will discuss his co-authored research on investigating the determinants of political polarization, a phenomenon of increasing relevance in Western democracies. How much of polarization is driven by divergence in the ideologies of politicians? How much is instead the result of changes in the capacity of parties to Read more…
"Implementing Particularism: Bureaucracy and the Distribution of Federal Grants" Under what conditions do bureaucrats implement policy on behalf of the President? Do ideology and politicization condition agency implementation of presidential particularism with respect to the distribution of federal grants? I develop a novel theory of the implementation of presidential policy Read more…