Ever since President Biden referred to “MAGA Republicans” as “semi-fascists”, the previously shunned F-word has become the omnipresent. At the same time, Christian nationalism has also become broadly used. Today, I will talk about fascism in general, and its relationship to Christianity in particular, which Richard Steigmann-Gall. Richard is an Associate Professor of History at Kent State University, former Director of the Jewish S...

My guest today, for this ninth episode in the Special Election Series, and the first covering a non-European election, is Malu Gatto. Malu is an Associate Professor of Latin American Politics at the Institute of the Americas at University College London. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her work explores questions about political behavior, represe...

My guest today is Kim Lane Scheppele. Kim is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her work focuses on the intersection of constitutional and international law, particularly in constitutional systems under stress. After 1989, she studied the emergence of constitutional law in Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. Over the last decade, she has ...

My guest today is Tessel Middag. Tessel is a professional soccer player for Rangers FC in Glasgow, Scotland, as well as an international for the Dutch women national team. She studied history at the University of Amsterdam, where she also researched the history of women soccer in the Netherlands. In 2017 she was the first Dutch player to join the NGO Common Goal. Today we will talk about politics and women soccer. You can follow Te...

My guest today, for this eight episode in the Special Election Series, is Giulia Sandri. Giulia is an Associate Professor of Political Science at ESPOL at the Catholic University of Lille in France. Her main research interests are digital politics, comparative politics, quality of democracy and political behavior. She has also written extensively on Italian electoral and party politics. Notably, she co-edited the special issue “Pol...

My guest today is Elizaveta Gaufman. Lisa is Assistant Professor of Russian Discourse and Politics in the Department of European Languages and Politics of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the exploration of verbal and visual enemy images through big data analysis. Lisa has worked a lot on nationalism and security in the post-Soviet space, including in Russia and Ukraine, and is currently invol...

My guest today, for this seventh episode in the Special Election Series, is Nicholas Aylott. Nick is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Södertörn University in Sweden. His main academic interests are in comparative European politics, in particular political parties. Today, we will discuss the context, results, and consequences of the Swedish parliamentary elections that were held on September 11. You can find more infor...

My guest today is Luisa Turbino Torres. Luisa is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and the Center for Women, Gender & Sexuality at Florida Atlantic University. Earlier this year she defended her PhD thesis, entitled “The Politics of Being a Soccer Fan: An Ethnographic Perspective on Feminist Action Around Soccer in Brazil”, at the University of Delaware. Today, we will talk about gender and soccer fa...

My guest today is Christophe Jaffrelot, a CERI-CNRS Senior Research Fellow who teaches in three different schools at Sciences Po in Paris. He is a world-leading scholar of Indian politics, from its foreign policy to its political sociology. In 2020, he was elected president of the French Association of Political Science (AFSP), and last year, he published the incredibly detailed but still very readable book Modi’s India: Hindu Nati...

My guest today is Dana El Kurd, an Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Richmond in Virginia, who works on authoritarian regimes in the Arab world, state-society relations in these countries, and the impact of international intervention. In 2020, she published the book Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine with Oxford University Press. Today, we will speak about authoritariani...

My guest today is Philip Gorski. Phil is a Professor of Sociology at Yale University, where he is currently also Chair of the Department of Sociology, and Co-Director of Yale’s Center for Comparative Research. He is a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods and in modern and early modern Europe. Much of his work has been on the sociology of religion, including in the US, which includes his new...

My guest today is Ellen van Damme. Ellen has a BA, MA, and PhD in Criminology from the KU Leuven in Belgium, as well as an MA in Conflict and Development from Ghent University in Belgium and has just finished a Fulbright Post-Doc at the Center for the Study of International Migration at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her PhD research concerned the role of women in and around gangs in Honduras, Central America, for which...

My guest today is Aurelien Mondon, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies at Bath University in the United Kingdom. He has been studying the far right in Europe and beyond for over a decade now, focusing in particular on its mainstreaming, and engaging critically with both the scholarship and its terminology, in particular the term populism. Aurelien is a frequent commentator on t...

My guest today is Melanie Schiller, an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Popular Music at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her research combines critical theory, cultural studies, and media studies and focuses particularly on the relationship between popular music and nationalism and populism. In 2018 she published Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity with Rowman & Littlefield. Curren...

My guest today is Lenka Bustikova, currently an Associate Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University who will soon join St. Anthony’s College at the Oxford University, as Associate Professor in European Union and Comparative East European Politics. Her research focuses on party politics, democratic decay, ethnicity, and clientelism, with special reference to Eastern Europe. She is the author of the awards-winning bo...

My guest today is Phillip Ayoub. Phillip is an Associate Professor in the Department of Diplomacy and World Affairs at Occidental College in California. This Summer he will take up a Professorship in the Department of Political Science at University College London. His research bridges insights from international relations and comparative politics, engaging with literature on transnational politics, gender and politics, norm diffus...

My guest today, for this sixth episode in the Special Election Series, which will focus on the 2022 French presidential elections, is Rainbow Murray. Rainbow is a Professor of Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London in the UK. She is an expert on representation, political institutions, gender and diversity, with particular expertise in French and British politics. Rainbow is...

My guest today is Charlotte Lysa. Charlotte is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law and the University of Oslo in Norway. Her academic interests include politics and society in the Middle East and North Africa, and in the Arab Gulf monarchies in particular. She is currently working with the project REF-ARAB: Refugees and the Arab Middle East: Protection in States Not Party to the Refugee Conve...

My guest today is Christopher Ogunmodede. Chris is a foreign policy advisor and associate editor of World Politics Review, who is based in Lagos, Nigeria. He specializes in diplomacy, development and international security, with a particular focus on West Africa and its history, political institutions and foreign relations. His areas of interest include governance, elections, military dictatorships, comparative authoritarianism, tr...