Archive
Essay
How Political Science Can Be Most Useful – with Jack Knight
Agatha Christie’s murder mystery The Mousetrap is the longest running play in history. Its first run began in 1952, and it hasn’t stopped since. Another ...
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Essay
Defending Democratic Mechanisms and Institutions against Disinformation Attacks – with Bruce Schneier
To better understand influence attacks, we proposed an approach that models democracy itself as an information system and explains how democracies are vulnerable to certain ...
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Chapter in an Edited Volume
Privatization as State Transformation
Privatization is an ambiguous term covering many loosely related phenomena. In this essay, I focus on one specific aspect of privatization-the privatization of governance. This ...
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Academic Article
Stability of Democracies: A Complex Systems Perspective – with Karoline Wiesner, Alvin Birdi, Tina Eliassi-Rad, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky, Patricia Palacios, Don Ross, Didier Sornet and Karim Thebault
Karoline Wiesner, Alvin Birdi, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Henry Farrell, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky, Patricia Palacios, Don Ross, Didier Sornet and Karim Thebault (2019), “Stability of Democracies: ...
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Essay
Is a No Deal” Brexit Still Avoidable? Why the Irish Border Remains a Stumbling Block for Negotiations
W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s comic history of England, 1066 and All That, talks about nineteenth-century British Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone’s efforts ...
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Essay
The Most Damaging Election Disinformation Campaign Came From Donald Trump, Not Russia with Bruce Schneier
On November 4, 2016, the hacker “Guccifer 2.0,” a front for Russia’s military intelligence service, claimed in a blogpost that the Democrats were likely to ...
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Essay
Information Attacks on Democracies – with Bruce Schneier
Democracy is an information system. That’s the starting place of our new paper: “Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy.” In it, we look at democracy through the ...
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Essay
Three Moral Economies of Data – with Nils Gilman
In October 24, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, gave an epochal speech to a conference of European data officials. Many outside the technology industry ...
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Essay
Hypocrisy is a Useful Tool in Foreign Affairs. Trump is Too Crude to Play the Game with Martha Finnemore
Hypocrisy has a bad connotation, but it offers a useful middle course in the world of geopolitics; it once lubricated the engine of U.S. power. ...
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Essay
The Wrong Way to Punish Iran with Abraham Newman
During the war on terror, the United States quietly turned the world financial system into a hidden empire. The American government used the power of ...
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Academic Article
Linkage Politics and Complex Governance in Transatlantic Surveillance – with Abraham Newman
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2018), “Linkage Politics and Complex Governance in Transatlantic Surveillance,” World Politics 40, 4:515-554. Globalization blurs the traditional distinction between high ...
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Essay
The New Economy’s Old Business Model is Dead
The titans of the new economy are different from their predecessors in one very important way: They aren’t job creators — at least not on ...
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Chapter in an Edited Volume
“The Shared Challenges of Institutional Theories: Rational Choice,” in Historical Institutionalism, and Sociological Institutionalism, Knowledge and Institutions – eds. Johannes Glückler, Roy Suddaby and Regina Lenz
Scholarship on institutions across the social sciences faces a set of fundamental dilemmas. On the one hand, it needs to explain how institutions change. Yet ...
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Essay
“The “Intellectual Dark Web,” Explained: What Jordan Peterson Has in Common with the Alt-Right”
Bari Weiss, an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times, created a stir this week with a long article on a group that ...
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Essay
Mark Zuckerberg Runs a Nation-State, and He’s The King with Margaret Levi and Tim O’Reilly
“In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said. He elaborated on this ...
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Essay
Northern Ireland’s Brexit Problem
Next month, the Irish and British people should be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The agreement serves as the cornerstone of ...
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Essay
Our Hackable Political Future The New York Times with Rick Perlstein
Imagine it is the spring of 2019. A bottom-feeding website, perhaps tied to Russia, “surfaces” video of a sex scene starring an 18-year-old Kirsten Gillibrand. ...
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Essay
Saving Democratic Institutions from Corrupting Markets
Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles’ essay – and the book that lies behind it – are part of a broader liberaltarian challenge. Liberaltarianism, as I ...
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Essay
American Democracy is an Easy Target
Americans have become paranoid about foreign cyberattacks on their political system, but they have nobody but themselves to blame. Access the full article here.
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Essay
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans
We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning ...
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Essay
How Facebook Stymies Social Science
What exactly was the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 election campaign? How widespread was its infiltration of social media? And how much influence ...
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Essay
This Year’s Economics Nobel winner Invented a Tool That’s Both Brilliant and Undemocratic
Richard Thaler, of the University of Chicago, just won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics for his contribution to behavioral economics — the subfield known ...
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Essay
Revolutionary Possibility (on China Mieville’s October)
October, China Miéville’s new book, describes the October Revolution as a moment of possibility. In its closing pages, Miéville explains why he wrote the book, ...
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Essay
Brexit and the Northern Irish Border
A new fight has been brewing over the consequences of Brexit for the border between Northern Ireland and the neighboring Republic of Ireland. Both British ...
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Essay
When Politics Drives Scholarship – with Steve Teles
The publication of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, a history of the “public choice” economist James Buchanan and his impact on American politics, has led ...
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