Maxwell School News and Commentary

“It's really interesting that the Catholic Church is probably one of the few places where you find people with different perspectives sitting together at Sunday Mass,” says Margaret Susan Thompson, associate professor of history and political science. She adds that if past election results are any indication, Catholic turnout and the choices they make at the polls will depend on a variety of factors.

“Folks that are in the U.S. military are some of the most highly trained, capable people in the world,” explains Steven Lux, director of Executive Education. “The amount of money that we invest—appropriately, I would argue—in our military, you just don’t want it to go to waste in a way,” Lux says.

“You have two states that [we]re the same, were pretty middle-of-the-road in terms of life expectancy, but they take opposite trajectories,” says University Professor Jennifer Karas Montez. Some states, she says, took action to “invest in [the state] population’s overall economic well-being and health. And you had other states that took a...very different approach.”

Harris is “is performing better in the national polls versus the battleground states, which tells me she is racking up more support in states where she is already likely to win,” says Grant Reeher, professor of political science. “That makes sense given the nature of the campaign's central messages and appeals.”

Using a 40-year panel dataset from Texas, Yilin Hou and co-author identify leader municipalities in changing sales tax rates and examine how municipalities asymmetrically respond to multi-tiered rate changes. Published in Fiscal Studies: The Journal of Applied Public Economics.

Matthew Huber, professor of geography and the environment, says the VP debate was “evidence of the sad state of our climate discourse.“

One element is “the return...of class politics, which takes the form of a series of important legislative measure that includes raising the minimum wage, facilitating the formation of unions, but also more specific things like, for example, recognizing the labor rights of domestic workers for the first time in the country,” says Edwin Ackerman, associate professor of sociology. 

“By growing the use of the RMB in cross-border trade settlement directly between China and Russia, U.S. financial sanctions cut targeted actors off from using the dollar system, which forces targets into alternative currencies that are exchanged outside of the U.S. financial system,” says Daniel McDowell, professor of political science.

The agreement will further cooperation on veterans and military programs, workshops, training and international engagements.

“Since nonpartisan primaries include candidates from all parties, and many voters are entrenched in their partisan loyalties, fewer voters are susceptible to changing their votes based on persuasion efforts funded by wealthy donors” writes Richard Barton, assistant teaching professor of public administration and international affairs.