Political Science Department - Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences

We seek to advance the science of politics through research, publishing, and teaching, while contributing to the general goals of liberal education and addressing the broader needs and civic aspirations of the student as a whole person.

News and Notes

David A. Hopkins has co-authored a new book, Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics.

Over the past several decades, American society has experienced fundamental changes – from shifting relations between social groups and evolving language and behavior norms to the increasing value of a college degree. These transformations have polarized the nation’s political climate and ignited a perpetual culture war.

In Polarized by Degrees, a sequel to their award-winning collaboration Asymmetric Politics, Hopkins and co-author Matt Grossmann draw on an extensive variety of evidence to explore how these changes have affected both major parties. They show that the Democrats have become the home of highly educated citizens with progressive social views who prefer credentialed experts to make policy decisions, while Republicans have become the populist champions of white voters without college degrees who increasingly distrust teachers, scientists, journalists, universities, nonprofit organizations, and even corporations. The result of this new “diploma divide” between the parties is an increasingly complex world in which everything is about politics – and politics is about everything.

Phi Beta Kappa Teacher of the Year: David DiPasquale's research and teaching focus on the relationship between Islam and the West

Associate Professor of the Practice David DiPasquale, a member of the Political Science Department whose research and teaching focus on the relationship between Islam and the West, is the winner of the 2024 Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, presented by Boston College students in the prestigious honor society.

Each year, Phi Beta Kappa students submit nominations for outstanding teachers who have positively influenced their experiences at BC, either inside or outside the classroom. Faculty are selected for the award based on the cumulative nominations from students over multiple years.

DiPasquale, who earned a master’s degree in political science from BC in 1992 and has taught in the department since 2009, is associate director and director of graduate studies for the Islamic Civilization and Societies Program. He also directs the Political Science Department’s John Marshall Project—named for the 19th-century United States Supreme Court chief justice who advocated for civic education of the young—which promotes a focused study of “the citizenship and statesmanship needed by a democratic and constitutional republic” through a variety of activities and resources, including the Undergraduate Marshall Fellows Program.

Being selected for the teaching award is “easily the highest honor I have ever received” since joining the department, said DiPasquale, and filled him with “heartfelt and sincere gratitude” toward the Phi Beta Kappa students who had nominated him.

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Gerald Easter's new book The Last Stand of the Raven Clan: A Story of Imperial Ambition, Native Resistance and How the Tlingit-Russian War Shaped a Continent

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Russia was a rising power in North America, aiming to corner the lucrative North Pacific fur trade and colonize the American coastline all the way to San Francisco Bay. This ambitious project was moving apace until the Russians were finally confronted and stalled on the battlefield. When Russia went to war in America, the fate of a continent was at stake. Yet it was neither the Old-World rivals Spain and Britain nor the upstart United States who stopped Russian expansion, but a coalition of defiant Tlingit bands. The Last Stand of the Raven Clan is a history of how the indigenous Tlingit people of southeast Alaska thwarted Imperial Russia’s plans of conquest in North America.

Professors Dennis Hale and Marc Landy have written a new book, Keeping the Republic: A Defense of American Constitutionalism.

“The Constitution Is Broken And Should Not Be Reclaimed.” This headline from a New York Times editorial written by Harvard and Yale law professors, is a more hyperbolic expression of a view increasingly prominent in the writings of law professors, journalists, political scientists, and politicians who deem the Constitution to be “broken,”“paralyzing,” “undemocratic,” and “obsolete.”

Keeping the Republic: A Defense of American Constitutionalism provides a defense of American Constitutionalism in the face of those criticisms. Such critics often forget what the Constitution attempts to achieve: a republican form of government in a nation as large as an empire. Complicating matters is that America was the first modern state— the first to be shaped by the expectation that government exists to protect natural rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that it had to cope with inherent difficulties modernity poses for republican government – a huge population that is also culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse, as well as incurably commercially minded.The framers recognized that to sustain republican government in such circumstances required both an embrace of modernity and a determination to tame modernity’s most anti-republican excesses.

The book argues that this framework for building and constraining a modern state remains the best one for coping with the problems modernity still poses. To more fully appreciate the persistence and endurance of anti-constitutional thinking, the book traces its lineage, starting with the Anti-Federalists and including certain abolitionists; Henry David Thoreau; 19 th -century utopians such as Edward Bellamy, Herbert Croly, and Woodrow Wilson; prominent New Deal, Great Society, and New Left anti-constitutionalists, as well as modernpolitical scientists such as Robert Dahl.

The penultimate chapter asks the inconvenient question: Why, if the constitutional order is so praise worthy, has confidence in it declined so dramatically? To address this question the book revisits the most critical periods of 20th Century policy transformation—the New Deal and the Great Society as well as the period since the 70s, which has engendered a form of anti-constitutional relations between the courts, the bureaucracy and Congress, which the book labels “stealth government.” It then offers an alternative way of understanding the path to useful political reform: working with the “constitutional grain” rather than against it. The book concludes with a reflection on the art of “thinking constitutionally.”

An introduction to the art of rhetoric or persuasive speaking, Political Rhetoric in Theory and Practice: A Reader, is the newly published book from Professors Robert Bartlett and Nasser Behnegar.

A collection of primary sources, it combines classic statements of the theory of political rhetoric (Aristotle, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Cicero) with a rich array of political speeches, from Socrates to Martin Luther King Jr., Pericles to Richard Nixon, Sojourner Truth to Phyllis Schlafly. These speeches exemplify not only the three principal kinds of rhetoric – judicial, deliberative, and epideictic – but also the principal rhetorical proofs.

Grouped thematically, the speeches boast a diversity of speakers, subject matters, and themes. At a time when the practice of democracy and democratic deliberation are much in question, this book seeks to encourage the serious study of rhetoric by making available important examples of it, in both its noblest and its most scurrilous forms.

Winner of the 2023 UACES Best Book Prize, Mary Murphy's: A Troubled Consititutional Future, Northern Ireland after Brexit

The UK's decision to leave the EU has opened up huge existential questions for Northern Ireland as it marks its centenary. Constitutional conflict in Northern Ireland had been regarded as largely resolved and settled, but Brexit has altered the wider constitutional framework within which the 1998 Good Friday Agreement is situated. With the question of Irish unity gaining renewed and sustained traction, and with trade, relationships and politics across "these islands" in a state of flux, Northern Ireland approaches a constitutional moment.

Murphy and Evershed examine the factors, actors and dynamics that are most likely to be influential, and potentially transformative, in determining Northern Ireland's constitutional future. This book offers an assessment of how Brexit and its fallout may lead to constitutional upheaval, and a cautionary warning about the need to prepare for it.