Maya L. Kornberg, "Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress" (JHU Press, 2026)
Why fifty years of changemaking and reform haven't fixed Congress—and what that reveals about American democracy. Congress, the central democratic institution in the United States, is hanging on by a ...
26 Maalis 49min
Tom Wells, "The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations" (Oxford UP, 2026)
A richly detailed collection of transcripts of Henry Kissinger's secretly recorded phone conversations from his time in the Nixon administration that touch on every important issue of Kissinger's day ...
26 Maalis 34min
On Trump as a “World Historical Individual” with author John B. Judis
The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel “viewed history as consisting of stages punctuated by times of upheaval,” the author John B. Judis wrote in a recent essay for NOTUS, and “assigned to what he called ‘worl...
25 Maalis 34min
How Authoritarians Exploit Gender
Gender is becoming a central battleground in contemporary authoritarian politics, but how do autocrats manipulate these debates to their own advantage? Some regimes now pursue a double strategy of sim...
25 Maalis 22min
Lucia Motolinia, "Unity through Particularism: How Electoral Reforms Influence Parties and Legislative Behavior" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Why do supposedly accountability-enhancing electoral reforms often fail in young democracies? How can legislators serve their constituents when parties control the necessary resources? Unity through P...
24 Maalis 28min
Stephen G. Brooks, "The Political Economy of Security" (Princeton UP, 2026)
In his new book, The Political Economy of Security (Princeton University Press, 2026), Stephen Brooks provides a systematic empirical and theoretical examination of how economic factors influence secu...
22 Maalis 49min
A Year of Autocratization: Steep Declines in Democracy Registered in 2025 V-Dem Report
This week on Democracy Dialogues, host Rachel Beatty Riedl speaks with Kenneth Roberts and Paul Friesen, democracy experts at Cornell University, to unpack the takeaways of the newly released V-Dem 20...
22 Maalis 43min
Sidra Hamidi, "After Fission: Recognition and Contestation in the Atomic Age" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Nuclear status is typically treated as a stable feature of a state's capacity to possess, use, or build nuclear weapons. Challenging this view, After Fission: Recognition and Contestation in the Atomi...
21 Maalis 56min
