Podcast · Tech & Science

Scope Conditions Podcast

by Alan Jacobs and Yang-Yang Zhou · English · Tech & Science

A podcast showcasing cutting-edge research in comparative politics.

New episodes: Now and then
Typical length: 1 hr 14 min
Latest: 6 May 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

6 May 2026 · 1 hr 7 min

The Bombs America Left Behind, with Erin Lin

Today on Scope Conditions: when the bombs don’t go off, the war isn't over. We tend to think of peace as beginning when the bombs stop falling. But as our guest today shows us, this is only half the story. Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States engaged in massive bombing in Cambodia. Between 1965 and 1973, the U.S. dropped 500,000 tons of explosives there — more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country. Dr. Erin Lin, an Associate Professor of...

Play episodeWhatsApp Download

Earlier episodes 29 most recent

S4 · E1 · 23 Feb 2026 · 1 hr 26 min
When Unequal Places Invest, with Alice Xu
Today on the podcast, why are more unequal neighborhoods sometimes better at promoting the collective good? A world of high inequality is, in many ways, a world in which the fortunes of the rich are detached from the welfare of the poor. It’s a world in which the affluent are less reliant on public goods for securing their own safety and wellbeing. Those with money can purchase essential services – even things like security, sewage systems, or street lights – on private markets – rather than ...
S3 · E10 · 17 Jun 2025 · 1 hr 21 min
Rules of Law, with Egor Lazarev
Political analysts are thinking a lot these days about the rule of law: where it comes from, what sustains it, how it can break down. Those are hard enough questions in themselves. And, yet — they simplify away an important complexity. They assume that there is only one law that rules. As our guest today, Dr. Egor Lazarev – assistant professor of political science at Yale – points out to us, in many parts of the world, the question is not just whether the law will rule – it’s also which...
S3 · E9 · 20 Feb 2025 · 1 hr 14 min
Violence as Campaign Strategy, with Niloufer Siddiqui
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. Sometimes, the call is coming from inside the house. Our guest today, Niloufer Siddiqui, an Associate Professor of Political ...
S3 · E8 · 20 Sep 2024 · 1 hr 18 min
How Criminal Governance Undermines Elections, with Jessie Trudeau
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 Assistant Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, h...
S3 · E7 · 22 Jul 2024 · 1 hr 19 min
What College Dorms can teach us about Culture, with Joan Ricart-Huguet
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 fiction, but it’s actually a lot like life. Much of the social world works this way: whether by assignment or by self-se...
S3 · E6 · 27 Jan 2024 · 1 hr 16 min
Statecraft as Stagecraft, with Iza (Yue) Ding
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 do these public agencies do when citizens’ demands don’t line up with either the supply of state capacity or the incentive...
S3 · E5 · 1 Oct 2023 · 1 hr 15 min
How the UN Keeps Peace Among Neighbors, with William G. Nomikos
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 resources. When the United Nations sends peacekeepers in to manage a conflict, one of their most important jobs is d...
S3 · E4 · 14 Jun 2023 · 59 min
Race-Based Coalitions in Three Chinatowns, with Jae Yeon Kim
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 political coalition-building. Consider, for instance, the lack of an enduring political alliance between African-Amer...
S3 · E3 · 27 Feb 2023 · 1 hr 17 min
Can We Immunize Against Misinformation? with Sumitra Badrinathan
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 educational programs designed to inoculate citizens against untruths. Yet most of what we know about misinformation and...
S3 · E2 · 28 Nov 2022 · 1 hr 16 min
Trial and Terror, with Fiona Feiang Shen-Bayh
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, the fix is in. On this view, the show trial helps to legitimize arbitrary rule. Our guest today, Dr. Fiona Shen-Bayh, a...
S3 · E1 · 24 Oct 2022 · 1 hr 22 min
Overcoming the Hijab Penalty, with Donghyun Danny Choi
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. In a new book with Mathias Poertner and Nicholas Sambanis, our guest Donghyun Danny Choi, an assistant professor o...
S2 · E10 · 11 Jul 2022 · 1 hr 14 min
“Defunding the Police” as Transitional Justice, with Genevieve Bates
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. and beyond. Against this backdrop, many reform advocates have called for a fundamental reorientation of prioritie...
S2 · E9 · 23 May 2022 · 1 hr 12 min
Partisan Polarization in Israel, with Chagai Weiss
Today on Scope Conditions, we’re talking about rising partisan animosity and what can be done about it. When we think about partisan polarization, we’re often thinking about the United States – and about how the policy attitudes or ideological positions of Republicans and Democrats have moved further and further apart in recent decades. But partisan polarization is far from a uniquely American phenomenon. And it isn’t just about policy attitudes. Increasingly, political scientists have be...
S2 · E8 · 1 May 2022 · 1 hr 6 min
Online Dissent, Offline Repression, with Alexandra Siegel
Can autocrats fight online dissent with offline repression? In the world’s most authoritarian regimes, on-the-ground forms of protest or expressions of dissent are quickly quashed. So the online world – especially social media – has emerged as a critical venue for activists and reformers to express opposition and sustain their movements. Given its more diffuse and elusive nature, online activism presents dictators with a new challenge of social control. One possible response is to try t...
S2 · E7 · 10 Apr 2022 · 1 hr 27 min
Europe's Hidden Legal Architects, with Tommaso Pavone
Today on Scope Conditions, we’re talking about the origins of supranational power. The European Union has no army. It levies no taxes. Covering a population of 450 million, its administrative bureaucracy is on par with that of a moderate-sized city. And yet the EU’s treaties, directives, and regulations – 50,000 pages worth – are enforced daily across Europe, covering domains from labor relations to financial markets to immigration, consumer protection, and pharmaceuticals. What’s more,...
S2 · E6 · 21 Mar 2022 · 1 hr 6 min
Diagnosing Democracy's Representation Gap, with Sergio Montero
In this episode of Scope Conditions, we ask: what happens when your favorite candidate isn’t even running? We often think about the quality of democratic representation in terms of the outcomes that citizens get. For instance, we compare the policies a government enacts to what citizens say they want in surveys. Alternatively, we might compare the demographic characteristics of the candidates who make it into office with the demographic makeup of their constituents. Our guest today, Dr....
S2 · E5 · 5 Feb 2022 · 1 hr 14 min
How Palestine Polarized, with Dana El Kurd
Today on Scope Conditions, we’re speaking with Dr. Dana El Kurd, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Richmond, about her recent book, Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine. In this book, Dana seeks to unravel a puzzle of Palestinian political development. With the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, Palestinians gained the prospect of democratic self-government, with the establishment of an elected Palestinian National Authority and...
S2 · E4 · 19 Dec 2021 · 51 min
Randomizing Together (Part 2), with Tara Slough and Graeme Blair
Today’s episode is Part 2 of our conversation about metaketas with Dr. Tara Slough, an Assistant Professor of Politics at NYU, who co-led with Daniel Rubenson a metaketa on the governance of natural resources that was published this year in PNAS; and Dr. Graeme Blair, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA, who co-led a metaketa with Fotini Christia and Jeremy Weinstein testing the effects of community policing. The main paper from that project was just published last month in Sc...
S2 · E3 · 9 Dec 2021 · 1 hr 6 min
Randomizing Together (Part 1), with Tara Slough and Graeme Blair
The last two decades have seen an explosion of field experimentation in political science and economics. Field experiments are often seen as the gold standard for policy evaluation. If you want to know if an intervention will work, run a randomized controlled trial, and do it in a natural setting. Field experiments offer up a powerful mix of credible causal identification and real-world relevance. But there’s a catch: if you’ve seen one field experiment, you’ve seen one field experiment. A fi...
S2 · E2 · 11 Nov 2021 · 1 hr 14 min
Why Empires Declared a War on Drugs, with Diana Kim
Today on Scope Conditions: how the paper-pushers of Empires reshaped colonialism in Southeast Asia. Our guest is Dr. Diana Kim, an Assistant Professor at Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Hans Kohn member (2021-22) at the Institute for Advanced Studies’ School of Historical Studies. In her award-winning book, Empires of Vice, Diana unpacks the puzzle of opium prohibition in the French and British colonies of Southeast Asia. As she traces out the twists and t...
S2 · E1 · 12 Oct 2021 · 1 hr 20 min
Can Boosting State Capacity Curb Social Disorder? with Anna Wilke
Today we are talking about the problem of maintaining social order. In particular, what happens when citizens see the police as ineffective and, in turn, decide to take the law into their own hands? And once mob justice becomes commonplace in a society, what can be done? In places where the state is weak, citizens often have to take it upon themselves to provide basic public services, such as building schools or collecting the garbage. And, as our guest today tells us, it can also include pol...
S1 · E14 · 29 May 2021 · 1 hr 14 min
The Autocrat's Gambit, with Anne Meng
By their very nature, autocracies are political systems in which power is highly concentrated; dictators can do pretty much as they please. So dictatorships might seem an unusual place to go looking for institutions: the rules and structures that limit discretion and set bounds on who can do what. Yet over the last two decades, political scientists studying autocracies have done exactly that. The field has witnessed what Tom Pepinsky has called “an institutional turn” in the study of author...
S1 · E13 · 3 May 2021 · 1 hr 13 min
Manipulating Personnel for Power, with Mai Hassan
Our guest today is Dr. Mai Hassan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mai is the author of a recent book, Regime Threats and State Solutions, about how leaders manipulate the bureaucracy to maintain their hold on power. Imagine a political system in which the president has the power to hire, fire, and shuffle bureaucrats in the most important state agencies. How would the leader strategically choose to wield this authority? Perhaps she would decide to ...
S1 · E12 · 4 Apr 2021 · 1 hr 10 min
Voter Suppression Goes Global, with Elizabeth Iams Wellman
This is a conversation about the politics of voting from abroad: in particular, about how governments manipulate emigrants’ access to the ballot in order to protect their own hold on power. For the most part, elections are events that happen inside a country, as resident citizens cast ballots at local polling stations. However, around the world, about 281 million people live outside the country in which they were born, and a majority of countries give their emigrant citizens the legal right...
S1 · E11 · 15 Mar 2021 · 56 min
Surviving the Syrian Civil War, with Justin Schon
In this episode of Scope Conditions, we talk about how civilians seek to survive civil war. Our guest is Dr. Justin Schon, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Virginia’s Democratic Statecraft Lab. In his new book, Surviving the War in Syria, Justin examines the repertoires of strategies that civilians choose from as they seek to keep themselves, their families, and their communities safe. In the West, we often think of migration as the key survival strategy for those threatened by c...
S1 · E10 · 22 Feb 2021 · 1 hr 22 min
Redistribution as Fairness, with Charlotte Cavaillé
We are talking today about the politics of redistribution in an age of rising inequality. Our guest is Dr. Charlotte Cavaillé, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan’s Ford School. We discuss with Charlotte her book project, Fair Enough: Support for Redistribution in the Age of Inequality, which seeks to explain how citizens reason about taxing the rich and spending on social benefits for the middle-class and poor. The book’s starting point is a thorny puzzle ...
S1 · E9 · 8 Feb 2021 · 55 min
Strategic Indifference as Refugee Policy in the Global South, with Kelsey Norman
In this episode, we ask: when a state doesn’t enforce the rules, is it because they don’t have the capacity to do so, or because they’ve chosen not to? Put differently, when is indifference a deliberate policy strategy? We talk with Dr. Kelsey Norman about her new book, Reluctant Reception: Refugees, Migration, and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa. Kelsey is a Fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, where she directs the Wom...
S1 · E8 · 18 Jan 2021 · 1 hr 11 min
The Gravitational Pull of Europe's Far Right, with Tarik Abou-Chadi
In this episode, we talk with Dr. Tarik Abou-Chadi, an Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Zürich, about how far-right parties have reshaped politics in advanced democracies. Consider the dilemma faced by mainstream political parties of right and the left in much of Europe. Center-right, conservative and social democratic parties dominated European politics for most of the postwar era, consistently winning large proportions of the vote at election time. Over the las...
S1 · E7 · 4 Jan 2021 · 57 min
How Strong Legislatures Emerge, with Ken Opalo
In this episode, we talk about how strong legislatures emerge. When we think about what makes a political system a democracy, we usually think of one key ingredient as being an elected legislature that can constrain the executive: an elected assembly that serves as a check on executive whim and has the ultimate say on core matters of public policy. But where do strong legislatures come from? As political scientists, we commonly tell ourselves an origin story -- first set out by Douglass Nor...

About Scope Conditions Podcast

A podcast showcasing cutting-edge research in comparative politics.

Scope Conditions Podcast is a English tech & science podcast from Alan Jacobs and Yang-Yang Zhou. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Alan Jacobs and Yang-Yang Zhou
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Now and then
Typical length: 1 hr 14 min
Latest episode: 6 May 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1532300331

RSS feed Apple Podcasts

More English tech & science

Take it with you

The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.