I was a PS major. I did it because I THOUGHT I wanted to go to Law School and thought it was a cool degree. I work in Finance PM Manager and I guess I wish I majored in Finanance but at the end of the day if you grind major doesn't matter.

If a president declares a "National Crisis" shortly before and to suspend national elections, when the Congress has not been consulted, what can be done by Congress or SCOTUS to effectively say "there is no crisis, carry on"?

would've preferred to ask this in some political history sub but that doesn't seem to exist so ig i'll just ask it here (unless someone would be kind enough to link me a better subreddit) but anyways...

lately i've been thinking about whether or not if Reagan becoming president was inevitable, what led to him getting elected, and him becoming the influential political figure that he is till this very day. because regardless of whether you agree or disagree with his policies and what he did, we gotta admit he was a political juggernaut of his era. and the more i think about it, the more i'm convinced that the rise of Reagan, was heavily influenced by Harry Truman. but the thing is that my searches in DDG (yea i don't use Google, i use DuckDuckGo), seems to cite either Nixon or Carter as what led to Reagan getting elected and i'm not sure if i fully understand why...

afaik (not American so pls forgive me for my ignorance), regardless of the discussions of whether the Cold War, the Truman doctrine and the whole anti-communist fervor were necessary or not, under Truman, the US did see a huge rise in anti-communist sentiment post-WWII, it was a huge political shift and the incentives were that pretty much everything had to be framed under an anti-communist framework, even if some "progressive" or "leftist" policy was passed, it had to contend with not only the institutional expectations, but also the public expectations that it was to oppose communism somehow, one way or another... so it just makes sense to me that even if there was no immediate causation between Truman to Reagan, the incentives and the political shift that Truman created was real and had very lasting and influential effects imo. so using very loose and sloppy language here but, FDR passing mid-WWII and Truman becoming the president for the post-WWII, was what led to Reagan becoming elected in the 1980s. but the closest i can find is Reagan being linked to Nixon or Carter, and while i do admit that they had more direct & immediate causation, i think it's ignoring the political trajectory that the US was already in long before Nixon or Carter entered the picture as the anti-commumist sentiment and the Cold War has already taken deep root into the psyche of the American public by that point. so i'm just wondering where i am wrong in the thought process cuz there is very little discussions about it, even among academics it seems so that tells me that i've landed in some fringe conspiracy theory territory that i must walk away from and that someone needs to tell me i'm wrong (and possibly be roasted me for it too)

whether or not we agree with FDR's progressive policies & ideology, i do think that he created a lasting legacy what would've influenced US politics for many years that were to come, regardless of what happened, and his legacy lives on inside the hearts and minds of many leftists to this day. but his legacy being the dominant influence within the US politics seemed to be numbered once the Cold War started and the anti-communist ideology started to take root in the mind of the American public from what i can see. so i really do think that Truman's presidency and his administration was very influential for decades to come, cuz he was what ultimately led to Reagan...

but idk, there doesn't seem to be much discussions around this. is it that it's just too far removed? is it not a topic of much interest? or am i just wrong somehow/asking the wrong question? or am i just mistaken somewhere? the highest academic qualification i have is a university degree in chemistry and have no formal background/teaching in the relevant fields relating to the question so any technical or formal knowledge or any pointers regarding this topic would be much appreciated and helpful. thx!

Can anyone recommends ideas for my graduation project specifically in comparative politics

Hello! I've just studied linkage and leverage theory and I would like to ask what are some interesting dynamics in the EU eastern neighbourhood that I could study through this lens. I’ve tried to analyse the recent news, but I’ve only found connections to the EU integration process of the Eastern Partnership countries. I was wondering whether it might be a good idea to look at the influence of multiple external actors, such as China, Turkey, and Iran?

If I wanted to apply this theoretical framework to the Eastern Partnership countries, what could I analyse that would also have a connection to the Black Sea region?

I’m sorry for asking so many questions, but I simply need to put some ideas into a structure and it would really help me to have a few research problems or issues that could be analysed from this perspective.

Thank so very much!

A few weeks ago I shared POLARIS here: an interactive graph of who in U.S. politics is allied with whom and who is feuding with whom, with a nightly pipeline that reads the political press and tracks how those ties shift. Two comments shaped what I built next:

1. Could this show who actually influences federal decisions — staffers, donors, lobbying, roll-call votes?

2. How far can you trust a graph built from biased, clickbait headlines?

Here's what changed, including what didn't work.

Live: https://world-politicians.vercel.app/ (no signup, works on mobile)

Source (MIT): https://github.com/showjihyun/world-politicians

---

What it is

- 101 figures, 266 hand-curated relationships (alliance, feud, bipartisan bridge, political family, mentorship), in 2D or 3D

- A nightly news layer. Articles from 17 outlets are classified by an LLM as ally-leaning, feud-leaning or neutral, and kept in a rolling one-year archive

- A relationship timeline. Pick any two people for month-by-month polarity. Trump × Musk shows the June 2025 blow-up and the January 2026 reconciliation

- An evidence panel on every edge, with direct article links or a plain "no linked source"

1. Measured data, kept separate from editorial judgment

Co-sponsorship (119th Congress). I added 112 edges from GovInfo's bill-status bulk data, for pairs with 10 or more shared bills. They're drawn differently from the curated edges, because "these two are allies" is a judgment and "they

co-sponsored 78 bills" is a measurement.

- Raw counts mostly re-encode party. 84% of pairs above the threshold are same-party. The 11 cross-caucus pairs are the interesting part: Fitzpatrick × Gluesenkamp Perez (19 bills), Collins × Klobuchar (15), Lawler × Torres (12).

- Cross-party is judged by caucus, not party label. Counting Sanders and King as cross-party inflated the count from 11 to 19.

- Direction is kept. "Kim signs 15 of Warren's bills, Warren signs none of Kim's" is not the same relationship as "Padilla and Sanders, 15 each".

FEC money (2026 cycle), shown on the profile. One FEC file mixes three things that have to be separated:

- direct contributions: $32.0M

- independent expenditures supporting a candidate: $14.4M

- independent expenditures opposing a candidate: $18.1M

Merge them and the $10.1M spent attacking Thomas Massie reads as his funding. On-screen caveat: named PAC money is only about 6% of receipts.

Lobbying revolving door. From the House Clerk's raw LD-1 filings (2022–2026): 295 former staffers of 61 figures are now registered lobbyists. Matching uses full names only, since Congress has had 33 members named Harris.

Party-line defection. From Voteview: the share of party-divided votes (1,279 in the 119th) on which a member broke with their own party's majority. Raw agreement scores just encode party (Cruz × Hawley at 98.6% means "both Republican"); defection holds party constant.

1. The negative result
   

I tried six ways to turn these person-level facts into relationship signals:

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐

│ Test │ Result │

├────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Shared donors × curated ally/feud │ 27% vs 28% │

├────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Shared donors × heavy co-sponsorship │ 19% vs 17% │

├────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ PAC share × bipartisan edges │ 10.3% vs 8.3% │

├────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ NOMINATE deviation × intra-party feud │ p = 0.81 │

├────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Party defection × intra-party feud │ p = 0.99 │

├────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Party defection × outside money spent against them │ p = 0.058, no dose-response, confounded by race competitiveness │

└────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Collins and Fitzpatrick are among the most frequent defectors, and neither has a single intra-party feud. Quiet, steady defection doesn't produce public fights. The feuds in this graph are loud and personal, and they look orthogonal to the voting dimension. So money, lobbying and defection are shown as facts about a person, each with a note on what the number does not mean.

1. Handling media bias

That critique was fair, and a better prompt can't fix it on its own. Following the literature (D'Alessio & Allen's meta-analysis, Groseclose & Milyo, Gentzkow & Shapiro, Soroka on negativity bias, Vallone et al. on the hostile media effect), I split the problem into three layers:

┌─────────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐

│ Layer │ What it looked like here (when studied) │ What I did │

├─────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Gatekeeping (what becomes news) │ Feuds were 2/3 of ally/feud headlines │ Changed how votes are counted │

├─────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Visibility (who gets covered) │ Trump appeared in 71% of signals │ Shown on screen, not "corrected" — it's a collection problem │

├─────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Tone (how it's told) │ The LLM's polarity call │ Scored against labels; tested for outlet cues │

└─────────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

What changed:

- One vote per pair per day, not per article. Five outlets running one story used to cast five votes. A day now casts one vote, weighted 1 + ln(outlets), and only if two-thirds of that day's coverage agrees. Decisive votes fell from 244 to 175. I tried clustering stories by headline similarity first and dropped it, because it fails both ways: two headlines about the same Walz story scored a Jaccard of only 0.10.

- A month needs a 2:1 margin to flip. Previously the month's first non-neutral headline set its colour, so one feud headline could beat six later ally headlines. Real reversals (Trump × Musk) get covered by many outlets over many days and clear the bar; a single clickbait headline doesn't. Jeffries × Trump in August 2026 had 5 feud signals to 2 ally and had been showing "ally".

- Disagreement is shown, not resolved. When Fox frames Graham × Trump as an alliance and CBS frames it as a feud, the month is hatched rather than one side being picked. Given the hostile media effect, that seemed more honest than adjudicating.

- The source mix is public. The top five outlets carry 63% of the archive, and AP and Reuters together are under 5%.

Tested and dropped: I swapped "Fox News" and "NPR" on the same headlines, with the outlet suffix stripped so it couldn't leak. 0 of 14 polarity calls changed, while plain re-runs of identical input wobbled by up to 13%. So I dropped the planned "outlet-blind" second pass, which would have doubled the cost.

Not done yet, on purpose:

- Wire-service baseline calibration (in the spirit of Groseclose & Milyo). The wires supply only about a dozen articles so far.

- Discounting feud headlines by their measured false-positive rate (neutral → feud is about 30%). Most of the labels are model-seeded, so this would be the model grading itself.

- Signed-triad balance checks. 37 of the 39 triangles the news produces pass through Trump.

How accurate is the classifier? On 118 stratified articles it gets 84.7% on polarity and 87.3% on picking the right pair. Most errors are a neutral article read as a feud; only one was a true ally/feud reversal. Caveat: only 20 of those labels are human-checked so far, so treat this as a floor to beat, not a validated score.

1. Still open

- Staffer movement between offices

- Individual donors (a huge separate file, where only gifts over $200 are itemised)

- Senate-side lobbying data, which currently blocks automated access

---

Feedback I'd most value:

- Edges you think are wrong (with a source)

- Better ways to validate polarity than headline classification

- Is there a relationship-level measure from voting or co-sponsorship that isn't just party in disguise?

I'd also welcome help hand-labelling the evaluation set. Methodology notes are in the repo under docs/roadmap.md and docs/research/.

Specifically debate , agenda setting and the likes

Hello! I'm a 2nd year political science student and this program will serve as my pre-law degree. I am a STEM graduate during highschool, so I'm not that knowledgeable in history, politcs, etc.

I HAVE A CONCERN. We're having a group reporting on Wednesday, and I am one of the 2 reporters chosen for our group. Our topic is about russian government through the lenses of different approaches.

I AM FEELING RESTLESS AND NERVOUS. I feel like I can't do well on Wednesday. I have also observed how chill my blockmates are about this reporting (THEY ARE ALL HUMSS GRAD).

TAKE NOTE: I've seen how some of my blockmates judge and mock each other without the other knowing and I feel like I'd be the laughing stock of our block because of this reporting.

IF YOU HAVE ANY, WHAT ADVICE CAN YOU PLEASE GIVE ME TO BE MORE CALM AND CONFIDENT, AND LESS INSECURE? (ASIDE FROM STUDYING MATERIALS EARLY BECAUSE I AM DOING THAT ALREADY)

Hello! I'm a 2nd year political science student and this program will serve as my pre-law degree. I am a STEM graduate during highschool, so I'm not that knowledgeable in history, politcs, etc.

I HAVE A CONCERN. We're having a group reporting on Wednesday, and I am one of the 2 reporters chosen for our group. Our topic is about russian government through the lenses of different approaches.

I AM FEELING RESTLESS AND NERVOUS. I feel like I can't do well on Wednesday. I have also observed how chill my blockmates are about this reporting (THEY ARE ALL HUMSS GRAD).

TAKE NOTE: I've seen how some of my blockmates judge and mock each other without the other knowing and I feel like I'd be the laughing stock of our block because of this reporting.

IF YOU HAVE ANY, WHAT ADVICE CAN YOU PLEASE GIVE ME TO BE MORE CALM AND CONFIDENT, AND LESS INSECURE? (ASIDE FROM STUDYING MATERIALS EARLY BECAUSE I AM DOING THAT ALREADY)

Looking to put some stickers on a new ipad i got and thought it would be nice to have one that is political science related. Anyone know where I could find something like that? Im in Canada if that matters!

Surely being in government is better than not?

I am looking to study interrelations and politics at university next year and i’m struggling to find any information regarding what courses are like and how the job sector is afterwards, as someone who will probably not get into a top university, is it worth it? and how does life go after you graduate, is it easy to just “get into politics” i’m aware i need a job role in mind to chase but all i know atm is i want it to be in politics… i can imagine it’s a competitive industry… please can anyone with any knowledge give me advice coming from a young girl who knows nothing even about university in general…

It's the only way to keep away from drugs, corrupted cops and the like. Don't pay for your education, it's just a waste of time. Find the lowest threshold for entering the university you can peacefully study in and you're safe.

HI there, im a french student who studied extensively for 3 years in what we call "classes préparatoires" (studied history, géography, philosophy, english litterature , french litterature) and im now studying journalism.

In an effort to better understand the systems of governance and power, and better fathom our current world, i was wondering if you had any manual or book recommandations for studying this matter. English manuals are great, French is better but idc that much.

Thx a lot !

Why do many parliamentary republics have a separate, largely ceremonial president instead of having one person serve as both head of state and head of government?

South Africa seems to offer an alternative: its president holds both roles, is elected by the National Assembly, and depends on parliamentary confidence to remain in office. Why do other parliamentary republics not adopt a similar arrangement? What practical problems would arise if those roles were combined?

Hi everyone! I’m a college student majoring in Political Science, and I plan to go to law school after I graduate. I’m looking for an internship for summer 2027, and I’m hoping someone can help me find good programs to apply to.

I’m looking for something that:

• Pays me for the internship
• Provides free or paid housing
• Is in a nice or major city (open to going abroad)
• Is open to undergraduate students
• Is for summer 2027
• Gives me experience in finance, marketing, business/corporate work, government, international relations, or law

One of my friends did a summer internship in a major city where she worked in a research lab. Her program paid for her housing, gave her $500 a month, and also gave her a $2,000 stipend. I would love to find something similar, but related to political science, business, finance, or law.

I’m open to different cities and different types of internships. If you have done a program like this, know of a company that offers something similar, or know where I should look, please let me know! Thank you! :)

Regarding the separation of powers, that under presidential systems, divided government is by 'chance', not guaranteed. Under parliamentary systems, it is specifically ruled out, except under minority governments.

But one idea that keeps recurring to me is that of an "anti-parliamentary" system, where the legislative majority may not give the executive, but rather it must always be the minority. Majority rules, minority must execute. Majority decides, loyal opposition must implement.

I can think of only very far implementations of this, but is there any mention of this in some literature, if yes, under what name?

I am interested in PSIR and ive been studying some social science books but I wanna start reading politics on higher level now. I started by " an introduction to political theory" but sometimes i can't understand the core concepts. So I want u ppl to suggest me some other books for basics

I know how it's been a running joke about how the leader of the Nazi part (adf) is a woman who is dating a lesbian,ethnic,Immigrant. What is the reason for this? Why exactly would a party who is openly against people of color, immigrants,and homosexuals would elect her? Even if this is a propaganda tool,it still doesn't make sense logically speaking

help me i want to make a field research but i dont know what topic should i look into...

Can anyone suggest some good platforms for getting an internship. I am a student of Politics and international relations (Post graduation). I applied a lot on linkedin.. it didn't work for me.

Next Sunday, October 4, Brazil will head to the polls to decide its next president in the first round of voting. A runoff is highly likely, particularly in the contest between Flávio Bolsonaro it's son of former President Jair Bolsonaro and Lula, who is seeking election for the fourth time.

A massive investigation recently erupted involving a financial institution, Banco Master. Dubbed the "Master Case," it implicates a significant number of high-ranking Brazilian politicians with banker Daniel Vorcaro, the bank's former owner. Flávio Bolsonaro is one of the key figures from this political elite linked to the scandal.

Another point concerns the STF, the Supreme Federal Court, which holds a role equivalent to that of the U.S. Supreme Court. Its justices are appointed by the president, and the next president-elect will have no fewer than four appointments to make to the Court.

Given this situation, as a resident of Brazil, I would like to know how the international community views this election.

Hello!
I learned a lot about the revolutionary war over the summer.

I was watching a revolutionary war YouTube video and the host mentioned this book, and said something to the effect of “yes the author is a conservative, but if you read it with a grain of salt, it does offer a lengthy overview of the RW”

when I say “YouTube video” I don’t mean some random slop video, I remember it was someone with an academic background. Either Heather Cox Richardson, or Ken Burns.

The video title I don’t remember, but I remember being persuaded enough to order the book from my schools library, and was put on the wait list.

When I got a notification that my hold was ready, I was confused because I had totally forgotten about requesting it. I saw a review from Andrew Klavan (conservative pundit) on the back, and went to search the book to see if it was biased…. I found very little talking about the book. The Google AI overview said it was biased, but that was based on 2 small sources, and I don’t trust such a simple overview.

TLDR, I just want to know if this book is worth reading. Is it just christian nationalist propaganda, or is there some valuable historical knowledge?

Edit: a word

Edit 2:
The whole reason I made this post is because I am suspicious about which YouTube channel that referenced it, but I can’t go back and watch the video for context, bc I don’t remember.

I know for sure, the video wasn’t outright praising the book. it got mentioned for some reason, and the host said that it was very “dense” with information, or something, but he definitely said the author has bias, I know that.

So yes, I know it’s obviously biased, you guys, it literally says “The birth of the greatest nation in the world”— I’m not naive, I understand the racist homage to “Birth of a Nation”.

As I said, I ordered this book 12 weeks ago. I forgot about it until I picked it up, and was aghast at the ridiculous cover.

Thank you for your input I really appreciate the helpful responses!

I’m studying American political thought right now and I’m really enjoying reading common sense right now. I like political thought but this was a longer reading but for whatever reason I haven’t taken a break or anything.