124 Mt. Auburn Street, 2nd Floor, Suite 200N, Room 226, Cambridge, MA — Registration Required
For many people, everything in Washington seems stuck: Democrats and Republicans disagree on all fronts, few in Washington want to cooperate with the other side, election results are closer than ever, outcomes turn on a coin flip, and each side thinks its candidate won. How did we get here — and can minds be changed?
This talk highlights data from The Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape Project —a 500,000-interview election study — to explore what happened in the 2020 presidential election and what it portends for the future of American politics. The talk will...
Join us for an American Politics Speaker Series seminar with Professor Jennifer Cryer of the University of Southern California as she discusses her research.
This event is open to Harvard-ID holders.
The Ash Center encourages individuals with disabilities to participate in its events. Should you wish to enquire about an accommodation, please contact our events team at info@ash.harvard.edu prior to...
Due to unforeseen circumstances, we are postponing this event.
Racial sympathy, defined as white distress over Black suffering, is an understudied but influential, force in American public opinion. It is associated with white support for a wide range of racialized policies, such as redistribution, affirmative action, and criminal justice. This presentation considers the behavioral consequences of this unique racial attitude. Does racial sympathy manifest into political behavior? To answer this question, ...
The ability of the global community to address some of its most pressing challenges, from climate change to the coronavirus pandemic, has been stymied by public unwillingness to engage in measures (such as vaccines or climate mitigation activities) designed to support the common good. Scholars have speculated that dense civic infrastructure in a community may make people more likely to adopt publicly-oriented behaviors, but empirical research on this point remains unclear. History shows that civic infrastructure can...
The COVID-19 crisis has created more casualties than any war or public health crisis in American history, but the scale and grim human toll of the pandemic were not inevitable. In this talk, Professor Shana Kushner Gadarian of Syracuse University will examine how the politicization of COVID-19 led ordinary citizens to prioritize partisan concerns over the common good—and let political “teams” rather than sound science dictate their behavior.
Drawing on a wealth of new data on public opinion to show how pandemic politics has touched all aspects of our lives—from...
Professor Hakeem Jefferson will discuss his forthcoming paper, "Deconstructing Race," which takes seriously the idea that race is socially constructed by endeavoring to deconstruct it. In particular, this work focuses on deconstructing the category “Black”—a racial category that has been uniquely and stringently defined throughout American history. Using an innovative conjoint experimental design, the authors surveyed a diverse sample of Americans to examine several sociopolitical antecedents of Blackness and ask: how flexible is the category “Black” in American society...
How do perceptions of belonging or lack of belonging to American society influence political interest and political engagement? To date, there have been few inquiries that systematically investigate notions of perceived belonging to U.S. society and the political ramifications of these predispositions. This project addresses this puzzle and investigates how a sense of...
As part of the American Political Speakers Series, Professor Adriane Fresh of Duke University will present her recent scholarship examining how The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) sought to fundamentally change the distribution of electoral power in the U.S. South. She will examine the consequences of this mass enfranchisement of Black people for the use of the carceral state---police, the courts, and the...
Americans have deep-seated skepticism about presidential power. This skepticism is not always made explicit in the public’s day-to-day political expressions, but it is a latent force in American political culture forged at the founding of the nation and ingrained in grade school civics lessons. It is not a legalistic or intellectual understanding of the text of the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence. Rather, this skepticism reflects a belief that the separation of powers, especially in their protection from tyranny, is...
