The Myth of the Democratic Recession
April 2, 2015
On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, the Journal of Democracy recently posed the question to its readers: “Is Democracy in Decline?” Our own Lucan Way and colleague Steven Levitsky, of Harvard, argue that much of the excitement over the rapid democratization of the world in the 1990s was over-hyped. For example, the collapse of […]
Best Book on Law and Courts
March 31, 2015
The Department congratulates Professor Ran Hirschl, whose recent book: Comparative Matters: The Renaissance of Comparative Constitutional Law (OUP, 2014), has won the 2015 American Political Science Association C. Herman Pritchett award for the best book on law & courts. The only other Canadian author to have won this award is our own Peter Russell, in […]
Inequality and Canadian Politics
March 20, 2015
Professor Peter Loewen has published an op-ed in today’s Ottawa Citizen on the topic of inequality. “[post-transfer] inequality has increased principally because government is transferring less to poor citizens. The problem is then not too little government spending or even too little taxing, but the wrong spending,” he says. “Ultimately, addressing inequality will require winning […]
Tory’s First 100 Days
March 11, 2015
New Toronto Mayor John Tory’s first 100 days in office have now elapsed. So far, how successful has the mayor been in uniting a divided city council and navigating a litany of complex public policy issues? Renan Levine, a political science professor at the University of Toronto at Scarborough recently told CTV News that, so […]
Government Funding Essential To Innovation
March 5, 2015
Political Science professors David Wolfe and Dan Breznitz are quoted in a recent story in The Toronto Star about the importance of having the state, not the private sector, be a key funder of innovation. To read the entire story please click here
Following Germany’s Lead
March 4, 2015
**Updated** Please check out Professors Bathelt and Hansen on last night’s episode of The Agenda with Steve Paikin, where they discuss the current prowess of Germany in a segment called “Germany and the World”. For more, please take a look at the video posted on the TVO website, here and here *Media Advisory* Professors […]
Walter Gordon Symposium 2015: Confronting Complexity
March 3, 2015
*Update 03/13* Tickets are now available for the Walter Gordon Symposium 2015 keynote event, which will take place on Thursday March 26th at 8 pm in the Isabel Bader Theatre. To register, please click here and select ticket option #6 to register. __________________ The Department of Political Science hopes that you will attend the 2015 […]
Bathelt Wins Grant
February 27, 2015
Congratulations from the entire Department go out to Professor Harald Bathelt and Banting Postdoctoral Fellow Peng-Fei Li who have been awarded a special Policy Research Grant by the Asia Pacifica Foundation of Canada. The title of their research project is: “Mapping Networks of Innovative Clusters between China and Canada”. For more info on these grants […]
Recapping the ISA Conference
February 23, 2015
At this year’s annual meeting of the International Studies Association, held last week in New Orleans, special awards were given to several U of T faculty members. Department Chair Louis Pauly received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Political Economy Section. The award was created in 1989 to “recognize senior scholars of exceptional merit […]
Stephen Harper’s veiled attack on religious freedom
February 18, 2015
Professor Clifford Orwin has penned a sharply-worded op-ed in today’s Globe and Mail that addresses the issue of whether people should be forced to remove their niqab or face covering upon taking the oath of Canadian citizenship. To read the entire article, please click here. Orwin subsequently appeared on TVO’s The Agenda to defend his […]