Political Science News

Brad Jones and Caitlin Patler (UC Berkeley) recently co-edited an edition of the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. The volume is a multidisciplinary collection of articles focused broadly on the important and timely issue of deportation in the United States. The Patler and Jones article explains how US immigration policy over the past 40 years has made it "easier" for the federal government to engage in mass detention and deportation policies.

Sophie Green has recently been appointed to be the Graduate Student Advocate for UC Davis. The Student Advocacy program is housed within the UC Graduate and Professional Council and aimed at collecting narratives on unique research, teaching experiences, and graduate student issues that will be used to power UCGPC's federal advocacy campaigns. The advocates will work alongside UCOP Communications and UCOP Federal Government Relations to produce a final report on graduate student activities to present to university and policy stakeholders.

Assistant Professor Tye Rush and coauthors have won APSA REP Section’s Best Paper Award for their paper that examines whether mistrust in American elections extends beyond white conservatives to racial and ethnic minority groups. Using an original national survey and data from the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (2012–2022), Rush and his coauthors find that Black and Native American respondents express significantly lower trust in electoral integrity than white Americans.

Professor Amber Boydstun and recent PhD Jill Laufer (now Assistant Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Sacramento Center) have co-authored a Cambridge Element book, titled Catching Fire in the News, asking the question: Why do some events catch fire in the news, producing a media storm, while many similar events go all but unnoticed? They use a fire triangle analogy to explain the necessary conditions of media storms. The “heat” is the spark: a dramatic event or discovery.

A new article in American Political Science Review by Vincent Heddesheimer, UC Davis political scientist Hanno Hilbig, and Erik Voeten explores how ambitious climate policies can reshape political landscapes by creating new lines of political polarization along occupational divisions.

UC Davis PhD candidate Anya Stewart has published a new article in the journal Conflict Management and Peace Science introducing the EmPower dataset, a novel resource for systematically defining and measuring martial law across countries and time. The article addresses a long-standing challenge in the literature on emergency powers by offering a clear, consistent conceptualization of martial law and accompanying empirical data that researchers can use to study how and when governments deploy military authority over civilian institutions.

UC Davis political scientists Cheryl Boudreau and Scott A. MacKenzie have a new article forthcoming in the Journal of Politics that examines when and why citizens choose to donate money to political campaigns versus charitable causes. Using a donation experiment conducted during California’s 2022 elections, the study shows that people are generally less willing to give to political recipients than to non-political organizations.

How did companies change their campaign contributions in response to the January 6th Capitol Insurrection? In a new article in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, PhD Candidate Alex Cohen studies Fortune 500 companies' contributions to members of Congress, and finds a sharp but declining penalty against election deniers in the 2022 and 2024 election cycles. The findings emphasize the important trade-off between access-seeking behavior and public reputation in the corporate response to political controversies.

Professor Brandon Kinne and PhD candidate Andrew Roskos-Ewoldsen have published an article in the Journal of Conflict Research testing a theory of how reciprocity in international relations affects the beliefs and attitudes of individual citizens. This study uses the theoretical framework of Unbounded Generalized Reciprocity, where reciprocity operates as an informational shortcut about the trustworthiness of others, to understand how people interpret situations where countries return favors, or fail to.

Assistant Professor Tye Rush has published a new article published in Political Research Quarterly that examines whether mistrust in American elections extends beyond white conservatives to racial and ethnic minority groups. Using an original national survey and data from the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (2012–2022), Rush and his coauthors find that Black and Native American respondents express significantly lower trust in electoral integrity than white Americans.