Maxwell School News and Commentary

In his book, "A Culture of Conspiracy," Professor Emeritus of Political Science Michael Barkun writes "such subject-specific areas as crank science, conspiracist politics, and occultism are not isolated from one another," but rather "they are interconnected."

According to Leonard Burman, professor of public administration and international affairs, "enlightened policy should aim to make work pay and help workers adapt. Better education and training will help. But a permanent solution would create a mechanism to automatically translate economic growth into higher wages."

"No matter how strong or dominant a personality the president has, he is going to have trouble taking on an American political institution as powerful as the U.S. Senate," says Grant Reeher, professor of political science.

"The amended Entry Law shouldn’t make it difficult for the vast majority of people who criticize Israel to get tourist visas," writes Miriam Elman, associate professor of political science. "To meet the criteria, you have to hold a senior-level position in certain targeted organizations, be key activists in the boycott movement, be an establishment figure who openly supports the boycott, or operate on behalf of the targeted organizations."

"The Justice Department could certainly apply pressure on Mueller's team to hasten the investigation, make it difficult to obtain the funds beyond certain periods to continue to investigate; more likely that those kinds of informal pressures would be applied rather than removal itself," said William Banks, professor of public administration and international affairs and director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism.

“The Russian ambassador has probably been under surveillance since before you and I were born,” says William C. Banks, professor of public administration and international affairs.

"If the government is serious about exports and jobs, a bolder approach needs to be taken on labor reforms," says Devashish Mitra, professor of economics and the Gerald B. and Daphna Cramer Professor of Global Affairs, about the Indian government.

According to Shana Kushner Gadarian, associate professor of political science, "Images matter. The emotions that you evoke really do have implications for how the public feels about whether or not they are safe, what kinds of beliefs they want to support, and their feelings about fellow citizens and whether or not they want to take liberties away from fellow citizens."

“The two parties are very close in number—it’s a very even split—and they are polarized,” says Grant Reeher, professor of political science and director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute. “Those things tend to reinforce each other, make it harder to work across the aisle, which makes it harder to pass any big bill.”