Authors

When the elite abandon democracy – A Warning from Belize?

By Harold Young of Austin Peay State University “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As always, my first full day in Belize starts in my barber’s…


MPSA in 2017 - Accomplishments Worth Celebrating (video)

  This year was confusing at times and exhausting at others, but it also had its high points. As we say goodbye to 2017, we welcome you to join us for the MPSA highlight reel. Our thanks to everyone who played a part in making these projects a reality, including our program chairs, council members,…


More Guns, Less Replication: The Case for Robust Research Findings

The meaning of the word “replication” hardly seems like the sort of thing that would land a person in court. Yet, it did. In Lott v. Levitt (2009), the U.S. District Court of Northern Illinois ruled on that very question, in a dispute between two academic authors of bestselling books. In his book…


Intrastate Conflicts: Refocus on the Intractable

By Harold A. Young The burden and devastation of intrastate conflicts are disproportionally borne by people of color in the developing world. While many people of color in the United States may view these conflicts as distant, they are not. Some may have relatives and friends in these conflict…


Politics and Sunburn: Snapshot of the U.S. from Belize

By Harold Young, Ph.D. The sun blazed, cooled only by sporadic showers, during my recent visit to the Central American and Caribbean nation of Belize where I spent my formative years. The size of Massachusetts, Belize is racially and ethnically diverse population of 332,000 that depends heavily on…


Humanitarian Missile Attack? Responsibility to Protect (Redux)

“There’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime…. regime change is something that we think is going to happen because all of the parties are going to see that Assad is not the leader that needs to be taking place for Syria”  - U.S.…


The Loss Lab

“Trump was an alternative to interchangeable robots whose goal is to avoid saying anything interesting.” - Molly Ball, political reporter, The Atlantic “If you wanted to write a playbook for how to lose an election, Trump did that and he won anyway.”  - Steve Peoples, AP reporter What rotten luck…


Four Stormy Days - #MPSA17

This year’s MPSA has been an interesting experience as opposed to other years. That is due to a near perfect storm of political events in the last few months. Add to this already interesting mix the fact that, due to inclement weather and flight cancellations, we end up with a more intimate…


Election 2016: Did New Voting Laws Tip the Balance?

Since the early 2000s, a flurry of new voting laws have passed in the states. There is a marked Democrat-Republican divide.  Democratic-leaning states, such as California, Oregon, and Massachusetts, have passed laws making access to the ballot easier.  Oregon now automatically registers citizens to…