An Interview with Professor Harris on his Recent Publications
By Timothy Dias
Douglas B. Harris, Professor of Political Science, is the co-author of two recent books in American politics. The first, co-authored with Matthew N. Green, Choosing the Leader: Leadership Elections in the U.S. House of Representatives (Yale University Press, 2019), is a study of the dynamics of House leadership races using archives of former leaders and leadership candidates to re-tell the story of the campaigns and to assess patterns of support among members. The second, co-authored with Amy Fried, At War With Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump (Columbia University Press, 2021), studies distrust in government as a deliberate strategy employed by conservatives in the modern era to seize on existing distrust and to stoke public anger for a range of benefits. [Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
Q. What is the overall theme behind your research in general, and is there something that links both of these new books together?
The story of both books starts with the fact that I study congressional party leaders. My overall research has focused on how party leaders use media and rhetoric to lead their legislative parties and impact public opinion. Choosing the Leader began as just a side project that I worked on every time I was doing other research on a congressional party leader. While at the archive, I would look to see if there was information about how the party leader I was studying was selected as leader. Over the course of decades, I had accumulated all this information on multiple congressional leadership races that had just not been studied that way previously. So, I had all that information almost as a side project or a benefit of going to all these leadership archives.
At War with Government was the result of a longtime collaboration going back to when my co-author and I both taught at Colgate University in the late 1990s. She and I started talking about her interest in public opinion and my interest in congressional leaders using media. Through our conversations, we realized that there was this intersection in our research. Part of what I discovered was that congressional leaders sometimes used media to undermine trust in our political institutions. That collaboration led to a book chapter published in 2001 that included a dire warning that if we didn’t get control over this growing strategy of stoking distrust, it could get much worse in American politics. And as things have gotten worse, we've been asked on multiple occasions to revisit our theory, published a few things along the way, and then, of course, there was something about the Trump presidency that made this more interesting to more audiences, and that is what really prompted the writing of the book overall.
Revising the Conventional Wisdom of African Politics with Professor Joan Ricart-Huguet
By Sydney Brooke
A fourth year Assistant Professor, Joan Ricart-Huguet brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to Loyola’s Political Science department in the areas of political leadership and political economy, with a focus on the Global South and on Africa in particular. Dr. Ricart- Huguet credits the origins of his current research to formative experiences as a Ph.D. student in Politics at Princeton University, a Masters student of Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences at Columbia University, and his time as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University.
Dr. Ricart-Huguet’s book project, Unequal Education: The Origins of Elite Power in Contemporary Africa, examines the political sources of unequal development in East and West Africa. “Many African countries are poorer than most other countries, and I wanted to understand the politics behind that,” said Ricart-Huguet.
Ricart-Huguet’s research shows that some regions in East and West African countries are much more represented in politics than others and that these also tend to be more developed. In his quest to understanding why, he “started reading history… and eventually what realized that [this unequal representation between regions] did not have so much to do with ethnic struggles, as is commonly argued, but with unequal colonial legacies.” Ricart-Huguet collected data on both thousands of cabinet ministers since independence and on colonial investments and realized that one or two regions in each colony received the lion’s share of education and that these regions, regardless of ethnicity, where the most present in government since independence in the 1960s.
Unequal Education: The Origins of Elite Power in Contemporary Africa examines 16 countries in East and West Africa but it also intends to take a close look at two case studies: Uganda and Senegal. He finds that many ministers since independence hail from the St. Louis region in Northern Senegal even though Dakar is the political and economic capital He traces this overrepresentation of St. Louis to its historical importance as the center in education in all of French West Africa until the early 1900s. “Regions such as Saint-Louis that were disproportionately educated [during colonial rule] were also disproportionately represented politically, decades later,” he shares.
To better understand the political economies of African countries is important in itself and also to improve policymaking. For example, many organizations, from the World Bank to the government of Uganda, have focused on increasing literacy where it is easiest to do: in or near big cities. However, Ricart-Huguet argues that peripheral regions should be prioritized to increase the human capital and ultimately the development of regions that were ignored during colonial rule. It is easier to educate a few more in areas were many are already educated because the infrastructure already exists. But educating a few where very few are educated provides a higher “social rate of return”, that is, higher social benefits because those few that become educated can make a difference in their region. . To him, a multidisciplinary approach is one way to better design development policy. “Some economists want to fix their own country or other countries without really understanding their politics or history, while some policy-makers do not have a basic understand of economics.” Both of these are problematic, he argues.
Ricart-Huguet hopes that his research will revise some conventional notions of African politics. “The typical African cabinet since independence in countries ranging from Senegal to Tanzania has been composed of highly educated and professional civilians, not military rulers. This does not mean that these civilian presidents, such as President Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal or President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, ruled democratically. They did not. It does mean, however, that we should revise the stereotype that most African presidents were ruthless military dictators. Africa’s underdevelopment is partly the result of weak states, ethnic fragmentation, bad geography, and low levels of education overall, but the leaders in many countries were highly experienced.. Ricart-Huguet hopes that his research will contribute to the development of more nuanced views on the shortcomings and the promises of politics in Africa.
Pi Sigma Alpha Honor Society Induction
Loyola’s Omicron Mu Chapter of Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society, held its annual inductions dinner on April 19th.
Newly inducted members included Emily Alcock, Elizabeth Bielic, Danielle Choma, Isabel Coan, Megan Cutter, Jess Franchock, Elizabeth Gilmore, Ben Grossman, Bridget Harrington, Becca Howlett, Janae James, Ciara Kelly, Ryan Mason, Reagyn Powers, Connor Quigley, Olivia Reed, Caitlin Rydzewski, Gianna Sansonetti, Tim Schluth, Mel Silberger, Carolyn Stoller, Ale Terrero.
The induction dinner’s featured speaker was Anna Beaulieu ’22 who is currently a Legislative Correspondent in the office of U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Anna talked about building a career on Capitol Hill and shared her perspective on contemporary Hill life and congressional politics. Congratulations to all of our new inductees!
Congratulations to Tom Mortimer '22!
During the Spring semester, Loyola’s chapter of Pi Sigma Alpha sponsored an essay contest on “The Challenges and Opportunities of Civic Engagement in Polarized America.” Tom Mortimer ’22 won the contest with his essay entitled, “Youthful Approaches to Defending Democracy.”
