For decades scholars have thought about the climate change problem as one that involves collective action on a global scale. That logic has animated the creation of treaties like the UN Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol that have failed spectacularly in having any real impact on the underlying problem. The Paris Agreement arrived with the great hope it would change everything; so far, its impacts have been modest too. This talk will explain what we know, as international relations scholars, about why the diagnoses of troubles with climate cooperation have not led to real solutions and where more effective strategies, building on the Paris Agreement, could be forged. It will be based partly on work done with the UK government (which hosts the next Conference of the Parties) and a forthcoming book (Princeton University Press) with Charles Sabel on Experimentalist Governance.

What are the downstream political consequences of state activity explicitly targeting an ethnic minority group? This question is well studied in the comparative context, but less is known about the effects of explicitly racist state activity in liberal democracies such as the United States. We investigate this question by looking at an important event in American history—the internment of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. We find that Japanese Americans who were interned or had family who were interned are significantly less politically engaged and that these patterns of disengagement increase with internment length. Using an identification strategy leveraging quasi-random camp assignment, we also find that camp experience matters: those who went to camps that witnessed intragroup violence or strikes experienced sharper declines, suggesting that group fragmentation is an important mechanism of disengagement. Taken together, our findings contribute to a growing literature documenting the demobilizing effects of ethnically targeted detention and expand our understanding of these forces within the U.S.

Credit card debt is increasingly common among poor and inexperienced borrowers – thus de facto a financial inclusion product. However, it remains relatively under-studied. We use detailed card-level data and a product that accounted for 15% of all first-time formal loans in Mexico and show that default rates are high and ex-ante unpredictable for new borrowers – suggesting an important role for ex-post contract terms in limiting risk. However, using a large nation-wide experiment we find that default is unresponsive to minimum payment increases, a commonly proposed policy remedy. We provide evidence that the zero result is driven by the offsetting effects of tightened liquidity constraints and lower debt burdens. Surprisingly, we also find muted default responses to large experimental changes in interest rates – suggesting a limited role for ex-post moral hazard in our context. Finally, we use job displacements to document large effects of unemployment on default, highlighting the centrality of idiosyncratic shocks as a barrier to the expansion of formal credit among poorer populations.

Why, despite high rates of reported political discussion, do so many Americans dislike talking about politics? And how do the mixed considerations people hold about discussion affect the way that they communicate? We argue that we need to consider the psychological experience of political discussion as navigating a social process that is rife with potential challenges to our sense of self and our relationships with others. Variation in the cognitive resources of political conversation, such as interest or knowledge, or in instrumental goals related to learning and persuasion cannot fully explain people’s motivation to seek or avoid discussion, although considerations related to information certainly are part of the story. Discussion is an inherently social behavior, and we argue that without assessing the social factors influencing the decision to talk about politics, we can’t fully understand who talks about politics, with whom, under what conditions, and with what consequence. 

This book is an effort to open the lid on the processes that lead up to a political discussion and the implications of the conversations that do happen. Our approach is to build on what we already know about political discussion, focusing on the gaps in our knowledge resulting from untested assumptions and limited methodologies in previous work. We apply new measurement techniques in order to better understand the decision-making processes that lead to the initiation of discussion, the nuances of the interactions that do occur, and the consequences of those conversations on a wide set of political and social outcomes.

Are leaders more likely to face militarized challenges earlier in their tenures? Existing studies posit contradictory hypotheses, as new leaders can both invite challengers to take advantage of their lack of preparedness, and deter challengers by their strong incentives to build a reputation for resolve that will stave off future problems. This paper reconciles these competing tendencies by developing a conditional explanation that centers on the direction of the new leader’s anticipated foreign policy preference shift in relation to the previous administration. From the challenger’s perspective, if the office in the target state is passed from an incumbent dovish leader to a hawkish successor, then a more pessimistic strategic environment arises where the new hawk can be less satisfied with the status quo and seeks to revise it. Under this scenario, the new hawkish leader’s inexperience and strong reputation concerns tend to amplify the challenger’s fear of suffering an immediate loss. The challenger, therefore, has incentives to initiate an early crisis to educate the more hawkish but also relatively less informed newcomer on the challenger’s position, resolve, and capability. Otherwise, the opportunity costs of an early challenge—disrupting a potentially beneficial and warmer relationship between two countries—tend to constrain the challenger from provoking an inexperienced new dove whose reputation concerns are high. Statistical analyses of leadership turnovers in all major powers during the post-WWII period (1945-2010) largely support this conditional hypothesis.

In a political climate in which immigrants are often told to “go back where you came from,” this paper explores the intersections of race, immigration, and belonging in North America. It juxtaposes my deep, ancestral connections to Black America and with a parallel but at times competing national affinity with the land to which many enslaved Black Americans once fled: Canada. Using the analytical insights of black political thought, I use personal narrative to explore the boundaries of racial belonging; to identify key facets of Canadian ideas about race and racism, including the intersection of racial formations and settler colonialism; to analyze the transnational nuances and contours of the African diaspora in North America; and ultimately, to think through what it means to be in a place, but not be of that place. Tethering territorial and temporal boundaries to our contemporary understandings of race, the paper seeks to both reconsider and recalibrate ideas of home, belonging, diaspora, and the meaning of democracy.

Debra Thompson is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University. Her award-winning book, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a study of the political development of racial classifications on the national censuses of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. She is currently writing two book projects: the first explores the transnational dynamics of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the second, co-authored with Keith Banting (Queen’s University) analyzes the puzzling persistence of racial inequality in Canada.