From engineering to political science
Ben Wolf: If you had to describe your career as a single problem that you’ve been trying to solve, what is it—and what originally pulled you toward it?
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Craig Volden: Thanks for asking, and thanks for having me here today. I’ve been—early on—on a bit of a winding path.
I grew up in North Dakota and went to college pretty far from there, up at Caltech, to study aeronautical engineering. From there, I decided I wasn’t that excited about that topic. But I also learned at Caltech that political science could be treated as a science.
In other words, the way they approached it there—political scientists were asking questions that led them to form a hypothesis, gather data, test those hypotheses, and so on. I found that tremendous because I’ve always had this science-y background, but I was drawn to political science and public policy questions.
From there, I transferred up to Stanford and stayed there for grad school, and then I had a winding path as a new professor—University of Chicago, Claremont Graduate University, Ohio State, University of Michigan, and finally here at the University of Virginia.
The questions I’m drawn to are: why do we have the public policies that we have? Those policies affect a lot of people’s lives, and I’m interested in the politics behind them.
That led me to big questions like: if one state or locality adopts a policy and it’s working really well, does it spread elsewhere—what we call policy diffusion?
And more recently: if somebody has a good idea in a legislature, what can they do to advance it? What does it take to be an effective lawmaker? That latter question led me to co-found the Center for Effective Lawmaking, which studies and promotes effective lawmaking in Congress and the state legislatures.
I enjoy the academic career and being a professor, but simultaneously, the ability to interact with members of Congress, their staff, state legislators, and the good-governance community—that’s really exciting. It feeds back into new hypotheses to test with new data.

Where the research goes next
BW: When you think about your work right now—the questions you’ve answered in the past and the questions you’re answering now—where do you see that leading you in the future? Do you imagine you’ll continue investigating these questions, or is there a broader goal you’re working toward?

CV: When we set up the Center for Effective Lawmaking, that was in 2017, and we were almost exclusively focused on Congress. We found a way to score every member of Congress—who are the effective lawmakers—and use those scores as a research design to ask: what could someone do to become more effective?
Over the past few years, we’ve been in a position to pivot to the states, too. So now we’re studying state legislators, scoring them for effectiveness, and using the variance across institutions to ask: why are folks in Louisiana different than folks in Virginia, and what are their patterns for how they come up with solutions to public policy problems?
It’s tremendously exciting. Is it the same questions? Sort of, because it’s still about effective lawmaking. But now we’re studying 50 states and 99 chambers instead of the two in Congress.

BW: I interviewed Congressman Suhas Subramanyam once before—he’s in Virginia’s 10th District, funny enough. Do you recall off the top of your head how his score was?

CV: Especially now that we have thousands and thousands of lawmakers at the state level, I don’t recall any particular one particularly well.
But what we do on our website, thelawmakers.org, is put all the data up there. For Congress, the scores go back 50 years, so you can see big trends—what’s been going on in your district. Did you have a really effective lawmaker, and is the current one living up to that standard? A lot of people enjoy poking around there.

How the scoring works
BW: Could you tell me a little bit more about how the scoring works—what goes into the equation? In high school, I remember creating a statistical metric to measure an NBA team's effectiveness in drafting players, which proved to be much more complex then I originally thought. I can't imagine what goes into yours.

CV: We care about lawmaking, so we set aside other important activities: oversight, constituency service, how much funding you bring back to your district. Those matter, but we’re focused on lawmaking.
We start with the bills that can become law. For a member of Congress, we look at how many bills they introduce—and then how far those bills move through the lawmaking process. Do they get action in committee—like a hearing, a markup, a subcommittee vote? Do they get to the floor of the House or Senate? Do they pass their home chamber? Do they become law?
Each of those is a rarer activity, and rarer activities we rate more highly. You get a tiny boost for introducing a bill, but a big boost for a law.
Then we know not all laws are the same. If it’s naming a post office—commemorative stuff—we downgrade those. But if you’re tackling immigration reform or other major issues of the day, you get upgraded for taking on major issues.
And one thing we found in Congress—and it’s starting to take place in the states as well—is that individual bills matter, but now they’re often putting together these giant packages, whether it’s a “one big, beautiful bill” or a major omnibus budget bill that includes a lot of provisions.
So we want to give people credit if they have ideas that are incorporated into those bigger laws. We’re at universities, so we use plagiarism-style software: we take the text of any bill and the text of every law and compare them. If there’s a lot of overlap, we want to give members credit for their ideas finding their way into law.
It has a little of everything going on there, but it captures what we’re interested in.

Limits, improvements, and staying in your lane
BW: When I built that metric I mentionned, we admitted there were things it couldn’t capture—like draft-day trades. Kobe Bryant was drafted by the Hornets but spent his career with the Lakers. Are there “trade”-type issues with your statistic—things you’re looking at now and saying, “We need to account for that”?

CV: Our major one was exactly what I just mentioned—so much language is embedded in other bills. That was an innovation we adopted just a few years ago, even though we released our first scores in 2014.
It’s helpful to have that mindset: I like what we’re doing, but if there are opportunities to do it better, let’s improve.
We use these scores for research on what it takes to become an effective lawmaker, and then we try to convey that to members of Congress, state legislators, their staff, and the good-governance community. We get feedback, which is wonderful.
Some feedback is: capture these bigger bills. Other feedback is: it would be great to have scorecards for oversight, or for how well they communicate with constituents.
I agree—those are important parts of what a legislator does. But since we’re focused on lawmaking, we try to stay in our lane.

Recruitment, parties, and what “winning” means
BW: Another part of what you’re doing seems organizational: parties want to put together a team—committee chairs, party leaders, and so on. How much does effective lawmaking factor into that?

CV: One research project we’re taking on right now is to try to figure out: who recruited these members of Congress to run?
If we can identify the ones getting a lot of support from political parties—through campaign contributions and so on—we might be able to say: that’s who the party was recruiting. And are they recruiting people likely to be highly effective lawmakers, or are they recruiting people who will vote with the party no matter what?
We don’t know the answer yet, but it seems valuable. It’s like putting together a team you want to succeed—what does “succeed” mean? What’s your strategy?

Trends over time: bipartisanship and specialization
BW: Looking back at the past 40 years of lawmakers, what interesting trends have you noticed? Are they more effective now than they were in the past—or vice versa?

CV: We’ve found patterns that are really consistent over time.
One is: you can look at who you attract as co-sponsors. Some members of Congress are really about partisan issues—they advance everything on behalf of Democrats or Republicans—while others are more bipartisan.
People talk about the loss of bipartisanship today, but there are very few members of Congress who don’t have at least some degree of bipartisanship in their co-sponsors.
The most effective lawmakers attract about 40% of their co-sponsors from the other party. That’s a strong signal that the idea has been worked on, refined, and supported across parties—and if you’re including things in a bigger package, or if you’re a committee chair deciding what to spend time on, these are bills where the homework has been done.
That was true 40 years ago; it’s true today. But co-sponsorship across parties has declined: it used to be about 30–40%, and now it’s more like 20–30%. Not as extreme as the public might think, but it is on the decline, which is unfortunate.
Another consistent pattern: the most effective members of Congress specialize. They might put forward half of their bills in one issue area—environment, health care, and so on—and become known as the person who knows that topic inside and out.
That specialization mattered 40 years ago, and it matters today. But members of Congress are becoming more generalists over time, scattering legislation across many issues.
In part, that’s based on committee structure and congressional capacity—party leaders are taking the lead on legislation instead of committee chairs. Without strong specialization incentives—“this is your committee; build expertise; move it forward”—members become more generalist, which, in many ways, doesn’t help the lawmaking process.

What the public misses about policy
BW: More broadly, what do you think people most misunderstand about how policy actually gets made in the U.S.?

CV: A lot of people think nothing gets done. That’s definitely not true.
It’s easier to tell a story about what’s contentious—partisan politics and people yelling at each other—than the story about the work that’s being done, often behind the scenes. People miss a lot of what Congress is doing.
Likewise for state legislatures: many people misunderstand their rules and how they work. If a policy isn’t being accomplished by Congress, there are ways states can step in, and they have on a variety of issues. A lot of that flies under the radar.
So yes: there are major public policy problems not yet being addressed—that’s fair. But there are also many areas where we’ve made substantial progress, and not many people notice it.

Turning “messy” politics into measurable research
BW: What’s your personal method for translating a big, messy political question into something measurable without losing the main point?

CV: It depends on the question. But our starting question was: are there some members of Congress—some state legislators—who are better at their lawmaking jobs than others?
That felt big, so we said: let’s define what lawmaking is, and define what “being good at it” is.
That led us to: laws come from bills, and bills progress through a process. We can capture that.
We didn’t want to go with just what’s easy to measure. But we did want to be objective and not put our thumbs on the scale.
The numbers themselves show patterns—like: it helps to be in the majority party, it helps to be a committee chair, it helps to be senior. But we didn’t want to give someone a higher score simply because they’re in the majority party. We wanted the objective measures to reveal those patterns.
So it’s about being objective, breaking the question into small parts, and bringing it all together.

The fork in the road
BW: I want to turn back to your career path and conclude with advice for students. When you look back, what was the pivotal fork-in-the-road moment—something that looked small at the time but changed your trajectory?

CV: One was the realization that political science could be a science. That was crucial for me because I loved science, and I loved public policy questions.

BW: When you say “realization,” what did that actually look like?

CV: If I look back at my high school government class, it was memorization—facts, dates, storytelling. It wasn’t something I was drawn to in terms of data and hypotheses.
Then in college, around your age, I ran across classes where it really was government as political science—as: there’s a bunch we don’t know; how can we figure it out?
For lawmaking: how can we measure who an effective lawmaker is? Is it better to be a generalist or a specialist? How important are congressional staff in getting things done? What issues are more gridlocked than others?
Those questions sound like: develop hypotheses, gather data, detect concepts like bipartisanship, issue specialization, gridlock—and test.

Generalist vs. specialist: advice for students
BW: You mentioned weighing generalist versus specialist in the context of lawmakers earlier. Students weigh that too—especially those interested in government, think tanks, research, writing. Should they build breadth across fields, or specialize? And if they specialize, how do they decide?

CV: Absolutely—a tough question. It’s something I struggled with early on.
I think the answer is: sample a lot until you’re sure.
If you only know one thing, you won’t build that many connections. But if you’re only an inch deep, that won’t work either.
In the early days, when you’re deciding between history, political science, public policy, engineering—don’t run far down one path until you’ve had experience with a bunch of them.
Universities force some of that through general education requirements. But I’d say the same for clubs: don’t make them all the same. If you can do an internship or a summer job, don’t repeat last year’s—try something else.
Eventually you’ll say: I loved that—and I know why I loved that. You notice patterns: “In all my papers and classes, I keep getting pulled toward environmental policy.” When you know it, you see it.
And there’s no failure here. There’s learning: “I didn’t like that work environment.” Great—why? How do you avoid it? “I didn’t care for domestic topics; I’m drawn to international ones.” Wonderful—because it helps you set a path.
Once you know your path, you’ll naturally build expertise and knowledge around it.

What successful students have in common
BW: As we conclude: you’ve been a professor for many years, and you’ve seen students go on to lead successful, meaningful careers. When you think about those students, what traits, skills, or habits do you think led them there?

CV: Traits and habits can be established over time. It’s not like you’re born “successful” or not.
Students face things that are tricky and difficult for them—and the more difficult it is, probably the more you should go down that road.
If you’re not comfortable as a public speaker, force yourself to get in front of groups and make speeches. If you’re not comfortable with math and data, take classes that make you comfortable.
So: get out of your comfort zone, have a growth mindset, and keep trying things.
The most successful students become lifelong learners. The question is: how do you set yourself up so that after college, you can still learn?
The world is full of opportunities—online and in person—to learn skills. The challenge is identifying what will be hard to learn on your own, and learning that while you have structure and support.
For many students, that’s methods: working with data, econ classes, that kind of infrastructure. Learn it in a group, in an institutional setting, while you’re here—even if it’s tough.
Some substantive knowledge—something you’d love to take a class on—if it doesn’t fit your schedule, there will be opportunities to learn it later. You’re not done learning when you leave.

A book recommendation
BW: Finally, Professor Volden, If you had to recommend a single book for a student interested in your work, what would it be—and why?

CV: Rudely and supportingly, we do have a book that came out early on called Legislative Effectiveness in the U.S. Congress: The Lawmakers—so, buy the book.
But if you’re interested in effective lawmaking, I’d also say: start on our website, thelawmakers.org. Click around. Look at the working papers, what we’re doing now, and the projects we have going on.
We have a lot of interviews with effective lawmakers. They might not be as compelling as what Ben’s putting together, but it’s our attempt to highlight some of the good work being done in the states and in Congress.
And of course: look up the scores for your lawmakers.

BW: I’ll be sure to check out those scores. Professor Volden, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a real honor.
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CV: Great to talk to you.

Career as a single problem
Ben Wolf (BW): If you had to describe your career as a single problem you’ve been trying to solve, what is it—and what originally pulled you toward it?
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Ambassador Lisa J. Kubiske (LK): To make the world a more prosperous and peaceful place—that’s the problem to solve.
What drew me to the career was, actually, a degree of happenstance. I had a lot of international background traveling with my family growing up. And I spoke Spanish because I’d done a year abroad—I studied in Mexico, and then a year abroad in Peru.
I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I did know that when I had gone back to Peru for a year after my year abroad, people couldn’t pigeonhole me. Was I government? Was I a spy? Was I an academic? I wasn’t any of those things.
So my year in Peru had already made me more aware of what my own political and moral values were, because I had been there when they had been nationalizing all these industries. I didn’t like that. They didn’t nationalize the press.
And I figured I should belong to some kind of institution—have some kind of connection where people would understand. So I looked for jobs, and I definitely had a positive-negative reaction to working in the U.S. government, but not to representing the United States.
So I took the Foreign Service exam because it was free, and it was there, and I was in a master’s program in international affairs at Georgetown. And I thought, well, I’ll just try it.
I actually thought I wanted to do policy, and when they send you overseas, they tell you: you’re not making policy; you’re implementing policy. That’s not quite 100% true, because the way you send suggestions back through the State Department, you can be quite influential at times. But I thought originally I wanted to do policy.
Then I got overseas, and I thought: well, I’ll try it for a tour. I’ll try it for another tour. I kept doing well, so I stayed in, and I did eventually become an ambassador.

What diplomacy is in practice
BW: When you first entered the work, what did you think diplomacy was? And what did you learn it actually is once you were inside the State Department?

LK: I thought it was trying to bring everybody onto the same page through dialogue. That’s what I thought, and that is what it is. But you have a lot of tools at your disposal.
Particularly during most of my career, the U.S. was an admired place. That definitely helped. The fact that we were also interested in development, and that we represented—or tried to represent—moral values and human rights values: those were positives. And the fact that our economy, for a lot of the period, was doing well—it also was interesting to people.
People could partner with us, or sometimes emigrate to the U.S.—all of that. So there were definitely tools. It wasn’t just dialogue, but it was definitely trying to find common ground and showing how what we were interested in for ourselves and for the world had a lot in common with what they might like to do as well—or why they would like to have a relationship with us.

Why economics became central
BW: A lot of your work sits at the intersection of economic policy and on-the-ground diplomacy. When did you realize economics would become central to your toolkit?

LK: That’s another thing I kind of fell into.
The first job I got out of graduate school was not the Foreign Service. I had taken the Foreign Service exam, but they didn’t contact me for a long time. So I ended up with a job in the Economic Research Service at the Agriculture Department—USDA.
They taught me a lot of practical agricultural economics—sort of practical, focused economics. My interest had been more in development, but that’s okay. I had taken some economics courses before, but it became real when I was doing it with the Agriculture Department.
Then when I did get into the State Department, they said, “Oh, well, obviously you have all this economic experience—we’re putting you in the economic specialty.” And I thought, “Well, I’m actually interested in democracy,” but that’s okay—development, that’s okay. I can do this.
And the good thing about the State Department is that when you do economics, there are so many different types of economics—everything from trade and investment to sanctions, development, and work with international organizations—that every tour can be a little bit different. So I found a home there, basically.

Judgment: what it is and how you learn it
BW: People talk about “good judgment” as essential in foreign policy. What does good judgment look like in a role like being an ambassador—and how do you train it rather than just hoping you have it?

LK: I’d never thought about that question.
I guess it gets trained by the mistakes that you make. But good judgment is: you can read the other—whoever you’re working with, either a country or an individual—so that you truly understand where they’re coming from, and where you can find common ground.
And you understand your own government and your own country. So you understand what we’re trying to put out there. And you also understand the limits of what you can do.
Through that sort of informational filter, you can decide how to move forward. There’s room in that for creativity—that’s definitely what you want—and curiosity is also part of what gets you some of the information you need to make a good decision. But you’re also guided by your own moral values.
American moral values—it doesn’t really matter what religion you come from—pretty much Americans all kind of have a similar interest in freedom, however you want to define that, and prosperity, and some basic security for your family, some ability to aspire for better for the future, for your kids. That’s common to everybody. So you build on that.

Honduras: principles vs. pragmatism
BW: When you were Ambassador to Honduras, what was the hardest recurring trade-off you faced between principles and pragmatism?

LK: A realization that you have to deal with people that may have checkered backgrounds.

BW: And once you confront that reality, how do you operate without letting it corrode the mission?

LK: Well, you don’t have much choice. You can’t avoid all the people in the world that you would disagree with—or where the U.S. would have a different view of the person—because you keep in mind the goals you’re trying to achieve.
So in the case of Honduras, for example, their justice system didn’t work. There was a lot of impunity, and a lot of that impunity existed because people with power allowed it to happen—made worse by the flow of drugs through the country.
But if you wanted to have stability in the country, which is something the U.S. also wanted, part of getting there was economic futures for poor people in the country.
And so you talk to the people who were in power, and you try to figure out economic development projects—or election projects, that was another one—that would lead to that goal you were interested in, which was more opportunity for people who were more or less outside the system.

Brazil: working with a global-aspiring power
BW: You also served in senior roles in Brazil. What did that experience teach you about working with a major regional power—something you couldn’t learn in Washington?

LK: Well, you always learn things when you’re overseas. Washington is very Washington-focused. I suppose if I had interviewed 20 people—or even the right three people—I would have gotten it, but countries have very different characteristics.
In Brazil, the people that I dealt with—whether government or not government—didn’t want to be told what to do. Compared to a country like Honduras, where they definitely did want to be told what to do. And I didn’t know that ahead of time. But I learned that.
But the other thing was: Brazil actually aspired to be a global power, not just a regional power. And so there were a whole set of issues—basically all the global issues that we used to deal with the Europeans on—whether it was nonproliferation in Iran, or climate change, or energy production, particularly biofuels in those days.
And so what I learned was: the way to deal with Brazil was to talk about those issues and see where in the world we could work together. And we did that very successfully, actually, in the energy area. And we were starting to do it in a number of other areas too—space and agriculture, and that kind of thing.
You learn a lot from every country you’re in, and every country brings something positive to the table. Brazil brings a lot of positives to the table. And as long as you’re working with them in a constructive way, as opposed to an “I’m going to criticize you” kind of way, you can get very far.
So those were all things I learned being in Brazil.

The hardest parts you don’t anticipate
BW: Looking back across your career in the Foreign Service, what’s been the most challenging part—something you wish you had known earlier, before entering the work?

LK: The world doesn’t stand still. Governments change, including ours.
So you think—you know that line about the arc of justice bending toward the positive. That may be true, but it’s back and forth, right?
And in this Trump era, the policies have changed so dramatically that I never expected there would be an effort to undo as much of what had been U.S. policy for my entire career, basically. And that’s a tough thing.
The other tough thing was: the guy who became president of Honduras, when I was there, ended up being extradited to the U.S. on drug charges. And that’s a tough thing to discover, when you realize this is more than the usual situation.
A third is in the human rights area. The U.S. torture at Abu Ghraib happened when I was in the Dominican Republic. I was the number two in the embassy—the deputy chief of mission—and I basically told my ambassador: it’s going to be a little hard for us to say that we’re promoting human rights when this is what we’re doing.
So those were all challenges.

What makes it worth it
BW: On the flip side, what’s been the most rewarding part of the career? Is there a moment that stands out?

LK: Well, for a long time, the one thing I did in my very first tour was coordinate all the search teams after a major earthquake in Mexico. It was 1985, so at the very beginning of my career. There had been this huge, huge, huge earthquake, and Washington sent down three different types of search teams, and I coordinated all of them as a first-tour officer. And we saved lives.
So that was definitely the single most rewarding thing. But there were many, many rewarding moments—dealing with people, seeing where you could bring the U.S. and people together, making their lives and ours better.
There was a port in one country that wanted to build a very secure port, and helping them do that was another big positive thing. So many areas.

Advice for students: test fit, don’t romanticize
BW: As we close, I want to turn this directly to students. For a smart college student who’s drawn to this life, what should they do in the next six months to test fit—before they start romanticizing a career in the Foreign Service?

LK: First of all, don’t romanticize it. It has its ups and downs.
Certainly the State Department has some internships, but other organizations have internships too—try to apply for some of those. Possibly an international organization, or regional ones.
In my area, which is mostly Latin America, with some China, the Inter-American Development Bank is probably worth pursuing to see what you can do with them. It could be a Washington-based job, but possibly they have other things. Maybe they have something remote where you could get a feel for it.
But definitely going overseas is a good thing to do. So even just studying overseas, and then making contact with different kinds of organizations—I think that would be a way to go.

What to read and where to learn more
BW: For a student who wants to learn the work the way practitioners understand it, what’s a book you recommend—and why?

LK: There’s an author named Nick Kralev. He’s written a couple of books, one of which I’m in, which I don’t have here. I think it’s called Diplomatic Tradecraft.
In that book, he has different chapters on lots of aspects of diplomacy, and they’re written mostly by former U.S. ambassadors, so you can get a really good sense of the advice that all of these former ambassadors give. I wrote the economic chapter.
He has other books that he did beforehand too—one of which I don’t remember the name—but it interviewed a number of ambassadors, and they just talked about their careers.
And the third thing: there’s an organization called ADST—the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. They collect oral histories from ambassadors, mostly ambassadors. You can go on their website, ADST.org, and click around until you find how to get access to their oral histories.

Donald Green’s career, by his own telling, did not follow a straight line. It emerged through what he calls a series of “bumbling steps”: an undergraduate fascination with political philosophy that gave way to empirical research, collaborations that opened new questions, and an eventual realization—years into his career—that randomized field experimentation would become his intellectual home. Looking back, what appears coherent on paper was anything but in real time.
In this conversation, Green reflects on how academic paths actually form: through chance decisions, intellectual curiosity, and the influence of collaborators with sharply different perspectives. He explains what graduate school really demands beyond credentialing, why writing—not teaching—is the core labor of academia, and how randomized experiments transformed political science by testing assumptions that observational data had long treated as fact. Along the way, he discusses moments when his own research overturned his expectations, from voter turnout and education to the limits of persuasion.
The discussion also turns to early-career habits that matter more than raw intelligence—deep reading, intellectual breadth, and a willingness to have one’s ideas challenged—and to the risks of pursuing a collaborative, curiosity-driven research agenda without a fixed plan. Green’s advice is simple but demanding: surround yourself with people who argue forcefully, love the work enough to endure rejection, and remember that careers often make sense only in retrospect.
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—Donald P. Green is the J.W. Burgess Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a pioneer of randomized field experimentation in political science, with research spanning voter mobilization, persuasion, discrimination, and experimental methodology.

“Bumbling steps,” collaboration, and the real through line
Ben Wolf: Thank you so much for joining me. To begin, if you had to describe your career path as a single problem you’ve been trying to solve, what is it—and what drew you to that problem?

Donald Green: I don’t think there really is a single substantive question. My career path is more like a series of bumbling steps with no particular direction that eventually reached a moment of epiphany—but it wasn’t part of an ex ante plan.
I went to Berkeley for graduate school for no really sensible reason—they didn’t have a foreign language requirement, and my brother was already going to Berkeley. I thought I was going to study political philosophy, and I did study political philosophy, but I ended up making an abrupt turn toward empirical work.
Now I look back and say: I never actually wrote anything in political philosophy. I only wrote—in the guise of being a running dog of empiricism. There have been lots of twists and turns. One constant is that I’ve really enjoyed the social aspects of my profession. It’s fun to learn from other people and collaborate.
The most exciting moments in my career have been learning lessons from scholars with very different backgrounds. To the extent I’d give advice: surround yourself with interesting people who can argue forcefully for a new point of view. Even if you don’t embrace it, you’ll come to grips with it in a way that enriches your intellectual experience.

Graduate school: worth it, and what you’re really signing up for
BW: You mentioned you went to Berkeley for what felt like fairly arbitrary reasons. How do you value graduate school today? It’s incredibly expensive, and it’s time out of the workforce. If someone wants a path similar to yours, what trade-offs should they be considering?

DG: The fact that I went to Berkeley was arbitrary, but the idea that I would go to graduate school hit me as an undergraduate. I was taking canonical pre-law classes and not enjoying the law part very much. But when I interned with the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 1981, I discovered legislative politics—and that was an eye-opener.
The political director said, “Okay, Green, you can do scut work and answer constituency mail, or you can shut up and follow me around all summer and be a fly on the wall.” Of course I chose the latter. When I came back, I realized: this is what I want to do. I love the idea of exploration.
From that point on, I watched professors differently: how do they do what they do? How do they talk?
I went to graduate school straight out of undergrad. I didn’t know anything about anything. I was 21 when I applied—the youngest in my class. Many people I was in graduate school with had worked, done research, or had real jobs outside academia.
In some sense, the fact that I never left academia gives me an odd perspective. But I learned a lot from them. When I studied for tests, I thought the objective was to get an A. It became apparent that was a juvenile undergraduate viewpoint. The real objective is to make an intellectual contribution to a field. When you set your sights on that, you put a different kind of effort into your work—you broaden yourself and deepen yourself. That was important.
When I talk to my own students, I ask them to think hard about whether they really love doing this. It’s one thing to want to do it—you need to love it to get over the parts that are really hard, if not painful.
It’s no fun to have your work rejected and criticized. It happened to me today, and I thought: even after forty-plus years, it still stings when your work is roundly criticized.
And the thing we’re actually doing in academia—though it looks like we’re instructors—is writing. Writing is incredibly difficult to do well. So two things: do you love it, and are you a good writer? Do you love writing? Because it’s hard work.

What experiments can reveal that observation can’t
BW: You helped normalize randomized field experiments in politics. What do experiments reveal that observational data can’t?

DG: The range of things that can be studied experimentally is narrower than what can be studied observationally—partly for practical reasons, partly for ethical reasons.
But if we use observational research designs to study cause and effect, there will always be a residuum of uncertainty. There might be unobserved variables that confound the apparent causal relationship between an intervention and an outcome.
For that reason, political science—and other fields—shifted dramatically toward experiments, or designs that resemble experiments. It’s very hard to build theory on a foundation of “facts” that may not be facts.
Looking back on decades of field experimentation, things that were taken as facts didn’t stand up to scrutiny when subjected to experiments. That applies to mobilization, persuasion, and other policy principles involving costs, frictions, and resources.
It’s not that the theories were stupid. They were smart theories. The question is: did they point people in a productive direction? Often the answer was: not really.
One thing we learned is that theorizing appropriately is much more difficult than it looks—especially given how context-dependent a lot of what we study is.

Early-career habits: what matters beyond raw talent
BW: You mentioned earlier the requirements for entering academia: loving the work, loving writing. If a young scholar has those, what habits matter early on beyond raw intelligence?

DG: Read deeply enough to understand the intellectual pedigree of your field, especially the area you’re studying.
When I think back on my very best students, one thing that distinguished them is they could have a conversation not only with their peers but with people across multiple academic generations. Their reading was wide enough to give them deep perspective.
You could see it in their writing. In the introductions to their papers, they could summon ideas that would be unknown or foreign to many counterparts. So: being a deep and perceptive reader can separate two otherwise equally intelligent people.

A paper that changed his mind
BW: What’s a paper you wrote that changed your thinking—where you went in with an assumption that didn’t survive the research?

DG: It’s a little embarrassing to talk about your own work as changing your mind, but one thing that’s happened is: I’ve gone into an experiment thinking it would come out one way, and it came out the opposite.
A good example is a paper with Rachel Milstein Sondheimer on the effects of education on voter turnout.
There’s a massive cross-sectional correlation in every observational study in the U.S. between educational attainment and voter participation. I thought: that’s got to be spurious. There are lots of reasons to think factors other than education per se might explain the correlation.
So we looked for opportunities to study randomized experiments—or very close to randomized experiments—where there was an exogenous, in some cases truly random intervention that raised educational attainment in the treatment group versus the control group. The question: when they became adults, did the treatment group vote at higher rates?
I thought: no way. But actually, three for three—all showed a turnout effect, which I did not expect. That’s a good example where intuitions go one way, but the facts go another, and it changes your mind.

Career paths that only cohere in retrospect
BW: A lot of people’s careers look linear on paper, but they’ll admit they were lost in real time. When you were trying to figure out your path, what did you look for to stay on track? Did you know, or did it only make sense in retrospect?

DG: In my case, I did not have a clear intellectual agenda at first. One manifestation is that I worked on all sorts of projects on unrelated topics—which I wouldn’t recommend to people on the hunt for tenure. It’s risky. It worked for me, but I wouldn’t generalize from it.
I arrived at Yale in 1989 without a clear set of things I would study—maybe campaigns and elections, maybe public opinion, maybe methods. I worked with a political theorist on a book about rational choice theory, which sent me down a different direction. I wrote a dissertation on self-interest and political and economic behavior.
Then I became increasingly interested in discrimination, prejudice, and hate crime—another direction.
My problem is that I can get interested in almost anything, and I enjoy the social aspects of collaborative work. If the right people come along and invite me into a collaboration, I’ll go in that direction. That’s a risky strategy.
But years later—before I got to New York—I started working on randomized field experimentation. That was in 1998. And once I did that, I realized: that is my calling. That’s what I want to do for the duration of my career. But it wasn’t according to a plan.

What’s interesting now: persuasion and durability
BW: What questions interest you right now?

DG: I’m increasingly interested in whether interventions designed to be persuasive actually work—and when they do, whether they endure.
Beyond that: to what extent is it possible to change people’s minds not only about a specific proposition, but a broader suite of opinions? Is it possible to have a transformative persuasive intervention, as opposed to an aerosol-like effect that wears off quickly?

BW: And what have you found so far?

DG: I’ve done a lot of experiments—in the West and in the Global South. I’ve seen many instances where dramatization—narrative dramas—can change views in a persistent way. But those effects are fairly limited to the specific things modeled in the dramas.
So one question is: is this because my experiments have had insufficient dosage? If I studied how people absorb messages over a longer period of time, with more and more episodes, would I find stronger effects?
And another question: to what extent are pedagogical shows influential in ways that go beyond what we ordinarily appreciate—because our studies aren’t capturing everything people take in? Or is it the case that they’re entertaining and people follow the characters, but at the end of the day they’re not transformed?

Closing book recommendation
BW: Professor Green, I’ve really appreciated your time. I want to close the way I typically close Pathway Blog interviews: for a student interested in following a path similar to yours, what book would you recommend, and why?

DG: That’s a good question. There are so many great books, and it’s hard to pick one. Having just taught a great books course, the problem with reading one is you want to read them in conversation with one another.
In some ways, you want to pick one that will get you fired up—with objections—so you have to reflect on why you disagree. For example, if you want to get riled up, you could read Achen and Bartels’ Democracy for Realists. Not because you’ll be nodding along the entire time, but because you’ll have to reflect on why, and to what extent, you disagree.

Michael O’Hanlon has spent his career asking a deceptively simple question: how should the United States design its military—its budgets, posture, and strategy—for the world it’s actually in, not the one it wishes existed. In our conversation, he traces that “through line” back to a winding start: a physics degree, a Peace Corps stint, a near washout in graduate school, and then a catalytic insight in 1987—when he began imagining what U.S. defense policy might look like after the Cold War.
We also talk about the research habits behind long-form work: how he chooses questions, how a “working hypothesis” evolves as the evidence piles up, and how he decides when a project is done. Along the way, he shares a core argument from his newest book—that “isolationism” is a poor descriptor of American history—and closes with practical advice for students trying to build the concentration and discipline that serious thinking requires.
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-Michael O’Hanlon is the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy and director of research in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, and author of To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution (released January 13, 2026).

Career through-line: from physics to strategy
Benjamin Wolf: Dr. O'Hanlon, thank you for joining me. For readers who may be unfamiliar with your career path—your through line—if you had to describe your work in a few sentences, or the main question you’ve been trying to solve throughout your career, what would it be?

Michael E. O’Hanlon: Thanks, Ben. Nice to be with you. I got into the field in the 1980s. I was born in ’61. I went to college; I studied physics. I graduated from Princeton with a physics degree in 1982, but I’d always had an interest in history as well. That was my favorite high school course—AP American History.
I also really enjoyed the January term at Hamilton College, where you had a 3.5-week compressed focus on one subject—one course—and I always did history in that. I’m telling you this because I figured out I really needed to get intense about physics. I transferred from Hamilton to Princeton—Hamilton was good, but small—and I sort of ran out of physics courses.
I still have mixed feelings about leaving Hamilton. I have fond memories, and I still teach once a semester at Colgate, which is really next door in central New York.

Leaving physics—but not science
​MO: At any event: I went off and did the Peace Corps. I needed a break from college. I always knew I wanted to do grad school—there wasn’t really any doubt—but I was a little burned out and a little unsure what to do next. I had this great interest in physics, but I almost mimicked the graduate school experience already in my last two years of undergrad, because the Princeton Physics Department was so good.
We had a lot of interaction with graduate students and fantastic professors, and I was way into it—taking two or three physics and math courses every semester. So I maybe overdid it a little bit.
And I was also unsure. At Princeton, I saw that while I was good at physics, I wasn’t the best. It didn’t cause a crisis of confidence overall, but it made me think: it’s not like I’m God’s gift to physics. It’s not like I have to go out and figure out what’s happening in some nebula someplace because I’ve been empowered with these physics neurons. In a way, I felt liberated not to be the best.
So I went off to the Peace Corps, taught physics, did some additional projects while there. And then I went to graduate school, still unsure what I wanted to do, but I applied to programs in science and public policy. That’s sort of all I knew: I wanted to combine those. I didn’t know how. I didn’t really know what that meant. I didn’t even know what courses that would entail.

Graduate school struggles and a turning point
I did those applications while sitting in my little house in the middle of Congo—way before the internet, when phone service was terrible. My only way of learning about different colleges in the U.S. was through the diplomatic pouch of the State Department and the mail. So I sent for brochures, and at that point—being far away from home—I had a proclivity to want to go back to something familiar. I was a little homesick.
So I went back to Princeton, knowing I was going to change department anyway. I wasn’t going to be in physics. Still not sure what it really meant to do science and policy together. I’m still pretty young at this point—only 23. I come back from the Peace Corps, launch into this program.
I found a group doing arms-control-related research that I really liked—and I liked the people—but the coursework was primarily within the engineering school. That’s where they directed me with this program in science and policy. I was doing just fine with the engineering, but I wasn’t really clear on how to combine that with my interests in policy. And frankly, I struggled.
To only slightly exaggerate—and not bore you with too much of the story—I basically almost failed out of grad school twice. I would have failed out with a master’s degree, so it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. It would have essentially been concluded between me and the faculty that there wasn’t a good Ph.D. path for me, and that I should take the master’s degree and run with it.
That would not have been so bad. But luckily, I kept at it. I had some professors who really helped—took a personal interest in me—and helped me get through these setbacks. By 1987—now I’m three-plus years into grad school—I finally got through the general exam process. By this point I had switched over: not in the engineering school anymore, but to the public policy school—what was then called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

Imagining the post–Cold War world
MO: Anyway: by 1987, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were starting to get along better. The U.S.-Soviet relationship was improving, and it looked like we might actually see an end to the Cold War. Just to remind folks: the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989—November 9, 1989. So here I am in the summer/fall of 1987.
I see the improvement, and I think I see where it’s headed. But most of Washington and the policymaking elite could not yet conclude there would be any near-term end to the Cold War. There was no way to foresee when it would happen.
So people at places like RAND—and even Brookings—were not yet doing studies on how you might envision a post–Cold War foreign policy, or specifically, in my case, a post–Cold War U.S. defense policy.
So I decided to make that my dissertation. And it was the benefit of being in an academic setting at a policy school, where you were trying to do policy-relevant research—but you had a little more freedom to think long-term than people inside the Beltway.

From dissertation to lifelong research agenda
MO: That was the key insight—the key decision—when I decided to do my dissertation on how to imagine rebuilding a U.S. military and global force posture for a post–Cold War world.
I was off to the races. Ever since then—whatever people think of my work—I’ve been on a consistent path. I haven’t had big doubts about what I was doing or whether I was properly trained for it.
I spent five years on Capitol Hill at the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1994—that’s when the Berlin Wall fell, when the Soviet Union dissolved, and when Operation Desert Storm was conducted to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. A lot was going on. That was a fun time to be on Capitol Hill, but I’ve been at Brookings—on payroll—ever since 1994.
In that period I’ve had the opportunity to learn about a lot more things, to continue my education through research—sort of think of my job as both at the same time. More recently, I’ve done these books on military and defense history, which in many ways are the books I wanted to read when I was back in graduate school.
So the key turning point was 1987—the decision to pursue that dissertation—after struggling through the academic precursors and hurdles. But from roughly ’82 to ’87—ages 21 to 26—I was searching and unsure.

How he researches: choosing questions and testing ideas
BW: You conduct research for Brookings, but with writing your own book, that is, of course, too, a glacial amount of research. What’s your process? Where do you look first? How do you test that it’s going to be a good question to write about—and how do you know when the work is finished?

MO: It’s an excellent question—maybe the most important of all when you’re in this kind of field.
Generally speaking, I’m always kicking around a few ideas in the back of my head—when I’m driving somewhere, or on a long jog—things I might be interested in working on. They’re often topics in the policy debate today, or things I think I should know better than I do.
For example, the book I just published--To Dare Mighty Things—came out this week: a history of U.S. defense strategy ever since the American Revolution. That’s a book where I had curiosity about the subject for a long time. I broached it wanting to learn better—figuring that if I, at this point in my career, still didn’t feel like I had a good understanding of that topic, a lot of other people probably didn’t either, and maybe the book would be useful to them.
My hope was also that I might identify some patterns—some tendencies—in American decision-making, military policy, strategic culture—call it what you will—that we’d be well-advised to understand about ourselves. Because you don’t want to operate on the world stage naïve about who you are as a country and a people, and about how other countries see you. But I think we often are a bit naïve.
That was the motivation. I wanted to do these last two books—about military history and military strategy—for decades. What I really wanted was to read them more than to write them. But writing became almost a double pleasure: it meant I could immerse myself longer and get paid to do it, since that’s what my job allows—as long as the books are relevant and I stay engaged in the near-term policy debate while doing longer-term projects.
So curiosity has to be the number one answer—but curiosity not in some abstract intellectual sense, because I’m not a pure academic, and I’m not a plasma physics researcher studying the Big Bang. I’m doing think tank work a mile from the White House, a mile and a half from Foggy Bottom, four miles from the Pentagon, two miles from Capitol Hill. There’s a reason Brookings is where it is and why I live where I do.
So the curiosity is always in pursuit of a better understanding of American foreign policymaking—with a goal of contributing to future policymaking.
A couple more thoughts. I usually begin not just with an interest in a subject, but with a little bit of a working hypothesis about what I might want to argue. It’s a fine line: you want to stay open-minded about changing your argument as you learn more, and as you do analysis that improves your understanding.
A lot of times, you have to modify the argument as you go. Hopefully I don’t wind up completely turning it upside down—although it’s okay if that happens, because that’s the whole point of research: to understand things people didn’t previously understand. And you might conclude you were wrong—that the answer is 180 degrees from what you expected. That’s okay.
But usually I modify more like 30 or 45 degrees—not 180. I don’t completely change direction. I often come up with a more focused, specific, sometimes more nuanced thesis.
And I like working on subjects where I have some knowledge going in—pretty good knowledge—but also where I’m curious to understand better. If I didn’t know anything about the topic, it probably would not be a good thing to ask Brookings to pay me a couple hundred thousand bucks a year to work on—it would be like going to school, freshman year, and getting paid for it.
So I should work on things where I’m already reasonably conversant with the material. But if I already thought I had the whole thing figured out, I’d probably just write newspaper op-eds and journal articles and push out my message—and wouldn’t need the time and effort of a book research project.
So I’m usually looking for something in the middle: where I’m already knowledgeable, and where I want to learn a lot more.

What history shows: the “restless” United States, then and now
BW: Let me ask more about your new book. You look at U.S. defense strategy since the American Revolution. Were there any trends you found especially fascinating—and does it tell you anything about defense policy today, whether in Latin America, the Middle East, or the Arctic?

MO: Yeah, for sure. The overall argument that I make is that the United States has always been energetic, entrepreneurial, restless, and assertive in foreign policy and military policy.
You’re a lot younger than I am, so you’re closer to high school. I don’t know how American history was taught to you, but my memory is that a large fraction of the literature was people saying: we came to America to get away from all the silly wars in Europe and all the kings and monarchs. We wanted to build a democracy here. We wanted to be left alone. We fought off British oppression, and then we really just wanted to build our own country—and we only got involved in foreign policy when we had to, because in the early twentieth century Europe kept getting involved in big world wars, and Asian powers too, and they needed our help.
And I’ve come to believe that’s not true. That narrative is bunk.
We were never content to be a peaceful, isolationist country. It’s obvious when you think about it: a country that began as a swath of land along the eastern seaboard and then grew to be a continental power from the Atlantic to the Pacific did not do that by just being peaceful. We took land from other people.
Now, yes—we bought the Louisiana Purchase from France, and we bought Alaska from Russia—but even Louisiana Purchase territory needed to be, in our estimation and our ancestors’ estimation, conquered, because there were other people living there at the time. We didn’t develop some Machiavellian master strategy, but we did it incrementally. We pushed Native Americans west, eventually pushed them onto reservations. We always thought we were making a deal where we’d share the land—and then we got hungry for more land.
I don’t write a revisionist history in the sense of an anti-American tirade. If we hadn’t done these things—if we hadn’t taken the Southwest from Mexico in the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846 to 1848—we wouldn’t be this great continental world power that could have helped save the world in World War I and World War II and keep the peace in the Cold War.
So I have mixed views from an ethical perspective on the nineteenth century, but there’s no doubt we were super assertive. The last thing you’d call us, by any fair measure, is isolationist—or peaceful.
I think Americans are a very good people. I think we’ve done a lot of good in the world. But I don’t think we’re peaceful. I think we’re restless—verging on hyperactive—and sometimes looking for a fight. Sometimes not using military force as a last resort.
And in this sense—sort of obvious where I’m going—in this sense, while I’m not a supporter of Donald Trump, and I think he’s a different kind of president than everybody since 1945 (or since 1932 when Roosevelt was elected), I think his restlessness is not uncommon. It’s not unique.
Now: to see it apply to Greenland and ideas like that—that’s bonkers. I think it would be terrible for the world and for our long-term interests if President Trump were really to use military force to take Greenland. In fact, I think he’s already going way too far even to threaten military operations to do so.
But the energy associated with him is, in many ways, typical of our history.
The presidents whose policies, in some cases, foreshadowed what Trump would do—or where you hear echoes—my short list: President Madison with the War of 1812 (a war we probably shouldn’t have fought); President Monroe and the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, claiming more or less U.S. jurisdiction over the entire Western Hemisphere at a time we had basically no navy—so it was a bit of chutzpah, and therefore typically American; President Polk asking Congress for a declaration of war against Mexico and turning a border dispute into a huge military operation, taking Mexico City and holding it hostage in order to make Mexico sell us the land that’s now New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada; then probably McKinley and Roosevelt, building a big navy and beginning to act like a world power.
Those are the five presidents and that time period where you can look back and see precedents for some of what Trump’s doing today. But I don’t want to sound like I’m blessing or condoning what Trump’s up to now, because what might have “worked” back then is not necessarily appropriate for today’s world—and even what we did back then was sometimes ethically very questionable.

Foreign Policy Trends Across Presidencies
BW: You mentioned an expansionist impulse in U.S. foreign policy. Do you see that as something driven mainly by American ideals and institutions—like the Constitution and the structure of the presidency—or by something deeper, like incentives of power and security? And relatedly: if presidents come in with very different instincts—Trump campaigning on avoiding new wars, for example—why does U.S. policy often seem to revert back toward activism anyway?

MO: Expansionism is the word that captures the first half of our history, roughly through the 1890s. The Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890—where Sitting Bull was killed—and that was sort of the end of the wars against Native Americans. It completed the consolidation of the continental United States as we know it today. We had already acquired Alaska from Russia in 1867.
Then we had the Spanish-American War of 1898 where we got Puerto Rico and Guam, and also temporarily involvement in Cuba, and also sort of accidentally and temporarily the Philippines. Then we realized we didn’t really want the Philippines. We didn’t really want to be colonialists. We had reached the natural borders of the country. And everybody after McKinley basically accepted that.
There may have been people who talked about buying Greenland—as Trump would surely say if he were here—but nobody made it a centerpiece of their foreign policy.
So expansionism characterized the first half of our history, and now Trump’s trying to bring it back—and that is a complete break with more than a century of American presidents.

Advice to students: concentration, reading, and protecting the “core hours”
BW: To close, I want to bring this directly back to students. Are there certain habits or skills you developed in undergrad—or other educational pathways—that were particularly formative in your later career, and that you’d recommend students follow?

MO: I’ve never been content with my skill set or my research strategies. I’ve always felt I could be better—always felt I could improve.
Perseverance and putting in the hours is a big part of my strategy, if you will—my recipe.
I think also having some background in science and math, and history, has been good. I don’t call myself a political scientist. I have a lot of qualms about some aspects of American political science—how it’s taught, how it’s conceptualized. I like cleaner, simpler analysis, as you do in physics and math, and as you do in history. Political science is more about inventing concepts that try to explain things. There’s utility to that, but I find it secondary to my research bent and my identity as a scholar.
I try to read a moderate amount, and I try to protect hours in my life. This is not so much a concern for students—students are good at this. Students are often better at this than older adults into our careers, because we wind up getting pulled in a million directions: immediate debates, meetings. Even at think tanks, there are scholars who don’t protect two to four hours a day for research, reading, and writing. But I try to do that.
Sometimes I have to be ruthlessly protective of my time. I don’t do breakfast meetings unless I absolutely have to. I do a little bit of work on the weekend to maintain momentum—not so much that I want to devote the whole weekend to work, but if I’m in the middle of a project, I’ll often devote both weekend mornings to work.
I try to go into the office later in the morning if I can, and do two or three hours of research and writing at home first—especially if I’m in the chunky part of a book project.
So: willingness to be a little tunnel-visioned—stubborn about protecting time for those core skills.
I try to remember when I was a student—when I learned how to concentrate and apply myself—probably starting senior year of high school and all the way through grad school. Again, students are often better at this than older adults.
The ability to work through a lot of literature, read a lot of pages—develop some skimming skills, but also, for some material, read it thoroughly—sit down with it, think about it, let it imprint on the brain. Those skills are important. Finding good books, good authors that become your lodestars—how to think about certain subjects—that’s important. Keep coming back to big ideas and concepts that help you understand a field.
To simplify: science and math have been good; history has been good. They’re matter-of-fact fields that have been good for my brain—teaching me how to think and giving me substantive knowledge and methodology to fall back on. And protecting several hours a day for core research, reading, and writing—that would be my guideline.

Books that shaped him
BW: Finally, Dr. O’Hanlon: what’s a book that influenced your life and your work the most—and why?

MO: It’s a good question. I could give several answers, but you wanted one, so I’ll fall back on something specific.
If you ask me on a different day, I might not give this answer. But I love a history book about the Civil War era by James McPherson called Battle Cry of Freedom. It helped me understand the military parts of the Civil War pretty well—although I did more research on that after reading McPherson, because it’s really more of a societal and cultural and economic and political history leading up to that period.
That period—like a lot of people—I find it fascinating, and obviously excruciating for what it did to the country, but there’s an intrigue about it that’s alluring. McPherson did that—and he was a professor at Princeton when I was there. I’m still kicking myself, but I never took his course. I never even met him. Anyway, it’s a beautiful book. I really, really like it.
And a similar book—I’ll cheat a little bit—is William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, about Nazi Germany. Shirer started as a journalist living in Germany after World War I and saw a lot happen. Again, a complex history weaving together politics, people, culture, society, and military matters—and of course a terrible story in the end.
Those were big-idea books that took on crucial periods and wrestled with what was happening and what might have happened differently if people had made better choices.
So I guess those are a couple that you probably wouldn’t get from most political scientists, because these are pure history books. But that tends to be what I like. History has been on my mind a lot the last five or six years.

Where party ideas come from
Ben Wolf: Let's start with where your work begins. Where do party ideas come from in the first place? And in your framework, who matters most when deciding on an issue—what specific group?
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Hans Noel: I don’t think there’s one specific group, because the whole point of a party is that it’s a coalition of people who want different things. Where it comes from is really: somebody wants something, and they’re not enough people by themselves to form a majority.
So they pressure others—try to persuade them, whatever else—but ultimately they end up allied with others. Either the people who want something initiate that, or people who want to get elected say, “Okay, I need to build a coalition, so I’m going to appeal to these people and these people and these people.” A lot of what a party’s platform is, is about trying to craft that coalition.
Similarly, ideology can be understood in the same way. It’s a slightly different process—it’s not someone consciously trying to win an election—but people trying to think through issues, finding common ground with others. They build that coalition; the more support behind a movement, the more energy it gets.
So in both cases, it’s about: people want whatever they want—personal experience, instincts, gut feelings, whatever. And then as we try to organize that into a large enough group to make a difference, you start accepting some things, rejecting others, compromising, and the rest.

Polarization: what’s underrated, what’s overrated
BW: Polarization gets explained through a lot of buzzwords—social media, tribalism, incentives to be outrageous. From your perspective, what explanation is most true or underrated? And what’s overrated?

HN: Part of the problem is that there are a lot of different things we call polarization. Sometimes we mean people flying out into two extremes—and some of that is happening. But more common, the bigger factors today are:
One is the degree to which partisan alignments are lining up with so many individual identities and ideological differences. It used to be the Republican Party was more ideologically diverse, and the Democratic Party was more ideologically diverse.
So it’s not necessarily that people are more extreme. In fact, on some issues they’re even less extreme than they were in the 1950s or ’60s. But they’re properly sorted into the right parties—and that also is polarization.
And then another thing is the degree to which we hate the other side—this intense feeling that the other side is wrong. Those things are related, but they probably have slightly different causes.
I think one big cause of sorting is the degree to which political parties, as institutions, have been weakened—less able to manage their coalitions—and that role is taken over by more ideologically oriented folks. A political party might like to say, “Let’s bring the temperature down on this issue,” even if it alienates some people. But ideological money and ideological energy often want a more extreme candidate.
So our primaries—which are not fully controlled by the party—allow outside forces to drive that sorting. There’s more to it, but that’s a big factor, especially of late.
And that can feed the tendency to dislike the other side. It’s hard to manage a coalition of your own—you might take a position some people on your team don’t like—but if you can say, “Fine, get over it, because the other side is so much worse,” that helps keep your coalition together. There’s political value in amplifying that dislike.
One thing I don’t think is driving most polarization is simply social media or media polarization. It matters some, but most polarization in the U.S. took off in the early 1990s—way too early for social media to be the driving factor. Social media and silos don’t help, but they’re not the root cause.

Identity politics: not just one side
BW: One idea you hear a lot is “identity politics”—that party ideology now encapsulates more of who someone is, so attacks feel personal. How do you look at identity politics?

HN: First thing to remember is: “identity politics” is often used to describe a certain set of identities, but really a lot of stuff is identity politics.
In a lot of ways, the MAGA movement is identity politics for rural, white, disaffected Americans—who would be the first to say, “We don’t do identity politics”—but it’s about identity. It’s about crafting who they are.
The process by which identity matters for what team you choose is ubiquitous. And it’s not necessarily bad in and of itself. Of course you have identities, and they shape political preferences. It makes sense that you attach to a team in a particular way.
But there is a tendency where identities become so well-sorted into a conservative identity—connected to race, religion, and other aspects of culture—or a liberal identity connected to those aspects, that it becomes harder to understand what people are like on the other side.
There’s a political scientist, Lilliana Mason, whose book is really about how personal identities are becoming aligned in this way. Polarization is richer than just that, but it’s definitely happening and it’s part of what drives identity’s role in polarization.

What “moderate” actually means
BW: How should we think about moderates in modern American politics? Are moderates a coherent ideological group—or just people whose coalitions haven’t demanded hard alignment yet?

HN: “Moderate” is a lot of things. And frankly, so is conservative or liberal—but “moderate” can mean many things.
There’s evidence that people who think of themselves as moderate are very different from one another. I wouldn’t say there’s no such thing as moderate—there’s a “there” there.
Some moderates are genuinely interested in compromise between political positions. If you think of an ideological spectrum from liberal to conservative, some people are in the middle.
But not all moderates are like that. Other people are moderate because they don’t line up very well. They might be conservative on some things and liberal on others, or some weird mix. There’s no reason the liberal–conservative dimension has to be the only dimension that matters. Historically there have been other dimensions, and even today there are potentially cross-cutting dimensions.
And then there’s a degree to which “moderate” is an identity: “I’m a sensible, reasonable person. I’m not an extremist.” You press them on policy positions, and they might look quite liberal or quite conservative compared to everyone else—but they see themselves as reasonable, careful, willing to talk to the other side.
That can be performative; some of it may be self-delusional. But it’s also real for some people.

Studying messy politics without drowning in jargon
BW: How do you study something as messy as ideas and coalitions and polarization without turning it into jargon—especially when those words and many others like them have become common buzzwords?

HN: It is difficult. And to a certain degree, a little bit of jargon is necessary. If we want to talk about what a moderate is, or what a conservative is, we might have to talk about whether there’s an ideological dimension, or dimensional reduction.
Part of the goal is to find ways to talk about those concepts in plain English. But doing the research sometimes means stepping back into a more abstract world—thinking, “Okay, I’m going to think in terms of dimensional reduction.”
People have different opinions on every issue. In principle, you could have any combination of preferences. They’d be all over the place—that’s possible. And yet that’s not what we see. If you tell me your opinion on some issues, it will often predict your opinion on others. So what does that say about the organization of beliefs?
You might study that abstractly—statistically or otherwise—and then come back and translate it into plain English. All scholarship is like that: the more specific you get, the more esoteric language can get. If it’s something important that we want everyone to be able to talk about, you have to translate it into how we all talk.

A view he had to revise
BW: What’s a view you held earlier in your career that you’ve had to revise—and what forced the update?

HN: I hope there are a lot of them.
Early in my career, I had a view like the one I was describing: people have strange positions—why would you organize everything into a clean dimension? Why would you choose a party at all? Why are there only two options? You should be able to do your own thing.
You could look at that and say, “Then this is bad, so I’m going to reject it and study something else.” But social science tries to understand the things that puzzle us. Why would people join parties? Why would parties serve this purpose?
Once you spend time understanding them, you realize: they serve a really important purpose. My thinking about how politics should be done was wrong. It’s wrong to reduce everything to everyone’s position in a high-dimensional space and say that’s all that matters. What matters is that individuals have opinions, and then they form alliances and connect with other people—that’s what a party is. And it’s okay that you disagree with your party on some things.
A more modest change is that for a long time I thought: therefore a two-party system is fine; we’ll have to live with it. We do have to accept the system we have—but I’m increasingly concerned about the ability of a two-party system to properly reflect American opinions.
I think it would be important to find ways to develop a true multiparty democracy—or, short of that, better ways to understand intra-party factions. Slicing things more finely is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

The future of parties, coalitions, and ideologies
BW: Where do you see the future of parties, coalitions and ideologies in America?

HN: The need to form alliances and build coalitions is never going to go away. People who embrace it and do it will succeed; people who try to outrun it or be purist and refuse internal compromise will eventually not succeed.
We’re in a place where a lot of people are uncomfortable organizing with others or compromising with their own team. They want to prove they’re not polarized—so they want to show they disagree with Democrats and Republicans: “Look, I’m sensible.”
That impulse isn’t going away. So we’ll see push and pull around it. And the consequence is: there will be actors who can exploit those frictions.
In a lot of ways, Donald Trump has done exactly that—differing with the Republican Party in useful ways, while still saying, “The other side is worse,” so people stay with him. Parties have to think: what kind of umbrella do we want, and do we want to let it be controlled by someone exploiting things this way? That’s a tension.
But whatever happens, politics will still be different people finding alliances—maybe changing alliances—trying to find ways for their team to succeed.

Teaching at Georgetown and seeing politics up close
BW: Alongside your research and writing, you’re also a professor at Georgetown. How has teaching students—and being around that student culture—affected your work?

HN: Being here is exciting and interesting. We’re in the capital—people come give talks, we have access to so many folks. And as a consequence, we also have so many students and faculty who are interested in these things.
The classroom is full of people who, if not understanding politics better than I do, certainly have experiences I don’t have. They disagree with each other.
So it shapes how I see things. And what I’m heartened by is that while there’s real ideological disagreement—more students on the left than the right, but still a lot of disagreement—there’s also appreciation that disagreement exists, and that we want to talk across it.
I taught a class a few years ago with the president of the College Republicans in the room, and also very progressive students involved in College Democrats. There was disagreement, but people could talk, have a conversation, and work beyond it—partly because of the university environment.
You can’t port that environment everywhere. Once people go into the real world, there’s different conflict. But it’s heartening to know that given the opportunity, people can talk to people they disagree with.

Advice: staying engaged without becoming cynical
BW: For students who want to understand American politics without becoming cynical—what should they train themselves to notice?

HN: There’s probably some value in a little bit of cynicism, or at least realism. Nothing works perfectly. There is no ideal world where everyone is doing what you want and no one is corrupted in any way. That’s humans—that’s life.
You can still be enthusiastic and sincere, and really believe in what you believe, while recognizing that most people—including yourself—have limits. You’ll have bias; you’ll be tempted to win quickly rather than build long-term relationships. And that’s okay—because that’s part of how politics works.
So I’d embrace the need to build coalitions, and the need to be practical, but not let that get in the way of also trying to be idealistic—having high-end goals that aren’t just cynical directions.
Being realistic and accepting that you’re never going to live in a world where everything is perfect and pretty is actually liberating.

What the most successful students tend to have
BW: Over your years teaching, what’s the most common skill you see among the most successful students—and why that skill?

HN: I’ll mention two—one specific and one general.
The specific skill is quantitative and statistical methods—research methods. Having concrete statistical analysis skills can be really useful for getting your foot in the door. It’s not something everybody seeks out, but it’s valuable. And it changes the way you think—not just a job skill.
More broadly, the successful people tend to have a passion for what they want to do, and a willingness to try things—go places, take risks. And some patience: maybe you go to law school first; maybe you volunteer and then get additional training. Keep the goal in mind.
The people who seem happiest now are people who continue trying to do good in the world—whether it’s good for an abstract cause, or for themselves or their families—but they’re still motivated. That comes back again and again.

Book recommendation
BW: Finally, as is customary with The Pathway Blog: if someone wants to follow your work, what book would you recommend—and why? Or what’s a book that has most impacted your life?

HN: There are so many books that have been impactful.
If you want my work: my most recent book is a thin book on presidential coalitions. I also have a textbook with Seth Masket on political parties—nice and comprehensive. And then there are bits and pieces in various places.
But instead, I’ll recommend one influential book I return to. I just finished reading again, for an undergraduate seminar, John Aldrich’s Why Parties? It continues to be a really useful framework for why politics takes the shape it does. My students had a great discussion of it, so I’d recommend it to others as well.

The through line
Ben Wolf: Could you start us off with the through line of your career? Has there been a consistent question you’ve tried to answer—and what led you to it?
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Mara Karlin: It’s a real treat to be here, Ben. Thanks for having me. I guess the through line has always been curiosity—figuring out why things are as they are.
I showed up at Tulane as a political science major, and political science majors are kind of told we should go to law school. So that was the plan, obviously. And then I studied abroad—I did two incredible programs. I was on Semester at Sea and then in Jerusalem. And while I was there in ’99–2000, there was this vision a lot of folks had building of what the Middle East was going to look like—prosperous, peaceful.
Then I came back to school for senior year, and that all melted. And I wanted to understand why, and what had occurred. Trying to understand those questions is what took me into a career focused more on security issues—because it seemed to me that a lack of security, by a variety of parties, is what propelled the region into further and further violence.
So: trying to understand why things are the way they are, and then how to reshape them.

Washington, defense, and the Pentagon
BW: What was the first step after college—what took you from that question into a career?

MK: After convincing my parents I wasn’t going right to law school—and spoiler alert, never made it—it was trying to understand the different visions folks across the Middle East had of what the region could be, and the role of U.S. policy.
The United States is a really big actor—politically, economically, and above all on security issues—in shaping that region, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in less good ways. So I came to Washington, D.C., the hub of U.S. policymaking, to try to understand that.
Not long after getting here, I realized defense issues were where I wanted to focus. While I was in grad school at Johns Hopkins, I started interning in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. People picture a handful of folks outside the Secretary’s office—that’s not accurate. It’s thousands and thousands of people.
I was responsible for shaping policy ideas the United States would take toward the Levant—Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel—issues involving the Palestinians. And I just thought it was the neatest thing. The U.S. comes with a lot of resources and energy, and I was intrigued to figure out how to more positively influence all that.
So when I finished grad school, I went to the Pentagon full-time. I’ve since been in and out of there, working for six Secretaries of Defense across Republican and Democratic administrations. And I also learned there’s a world beyond the Middle East and ended up covering a wide variety of topics.

Working across administrations
BW: You’ve worked across different administrations and political parties. How did that affect your work?

MK: There are two ways civilians serve in the Pentagon. One is as a career civil servant—you’re there no matter who is in office. The other is as a political appointee—you’re appointed by the president and you’re there until the president is done with you or finishes the term.
I’ve served in both roles. I was a career civil servant in the Bush administration, and then a political appointee in the Obama and Biden administrations.
Frankly, the execution of the roles is more similar than not. It’s helping formulate a vision of the U.S. approach to the world and to defense and security issues—and trying to realize that vision in line with what leadership is trying to achieve: the Secretary of Defense, the Commander in Chief, the President.

What two decades of war left behind
BW: You’ve written about what America’s military inherits after two decades of war. What do civilians most consistently misunderstand about how Iraq and Afghanistan changed U.S. institutions—what habits stuck, and what capabilities quietly went away?

MK: My second book looks at what the military inherited from being at war for the longest time in American history—twenty years. That’s astonishingly long. It’s probably around the age of many of your listeners.
What I find so interesting talking to your generation is: for you, this is ambient noise. You’re used to an America always at war, which is not the case at all for folks like me who grew up in the ’90s, or the generation before me.
One thing that has come out of these wars is a real gap between the American public and the military. The military slogged through these conflicts for twenty years, and most of the public didn’t pay much attention. It didn’t need to—nothing was really asked of the public, and only one-half of one percent of the public serves in the military anyway.
It’s easy to grow up not thinking much about these issues, even though they profoundly affect those who serve and America’s role in the world.
I also talk about how the character of these conflicts was fundamentally inconclusive at best. That’s often how it works when you’re fighting insurgents or terrorists—especially absent an existential threat, which characterized most of this period. That was hard for a lot of the military: “What am I achieving? What am I doing?”
What was unique about the post–9/11 wars is you saw people deployed to the same places over and over, across the twenty-year stretch. They could see the effects they were having—and often the effects they were not having.
Operationally, the U.S. military is hands down the best military in the history of humanity. Period. Most capable. And yet at the strategic level, it hasn’t been successful at some major things it tried to accomplish. Wrestling with that is something the military needs to do—and the American public should as well.

The “secret sauce” behind U.S. military capability
BW: People often can agree that the U.S. military is among the most capable in the world. This may seem naïve to ask, but what exactly has allowed it to be that way? Is it merely spending and strategy, or is there something more to it?

MK: Superb question. The U.S. defense budget is around a trillion or so dollars. But I don’t think it’s the exact number that’s determinative of operational success. How you spend it matters a lot.
And who serves in your military—sometimes a less glamorous topic than the cool tech—is the secret sauce. The U.S. military brings together extraordinary Americans from across the entire country, and operates in a system where people are empowered to figure out the best way to solve a problem, and then do so.
This is worth watching because there’s a lot of attention on what the military buys, and less attention on who serves and who chooses to serve. It’s worth focusing now because we’re seeing notable changes—particularly with the Trump administration pushing out senior women, senior people of color, and senior military lawyers, who help ensure the military is professional and follows the law—which is one of the most important things you can ask of your military.

BW: How do you think that affects capabilities?

MK: It affects unit cohesion. If you can’t totally trust and feel comfortable with the folks next to you in conflict, and if you can’t pull from all demographics across the country, you’re going to be less effective.
There’s a great book by a friend of mine, Kori Schake, on civil-military relations. She has a section about efforts to integrate African American men into the U.S. military. Senior military leadership pushed hard against it, even when mandated by civilian leadership. It wasn’t until the Korean War heated up that they realized: we need more capable people—and there are a whole lot of capable Americans who want to serve, who weren’t given equal opportunity.
So we know there’s a relationship between who serves and the efficacy of the military. And right now that’s up in the air in a not-great way.

Deterrence: what it really requires
BW: My generation is very used to the U.S. being at war, but lately another word has been repeated constantly: deterrence. People use it almost like a mantra. In practice, what does deterrence require during peacetime? And what does it cost beyond money?

MK: Deterrence is saying to someone: don’t do this thing. Don’t do it because if you try, you won’t be successful—or if you try, we’ll respond so harshly you’ll feel a lot of pain.
What’s interesting is that for a lot of the post–9/11 wars, deterrence wasn’t the dominant concept. Trying to deter violent non-state actors like al-Qaeda or ISIS doesn’t really work. Deterrence is more about state actors. So the concept went into a bin, and it has resurged as Russia and China and Iran and North Korea have gotten sportier.
For effective deterrence, first, you have to tailor it to who you’re trying to deter. The things that convince you not to act are different from what convinces me. You’ve got to understand: who am I trying to shape, and how?
Second, you need a feedback loop. Have they picked up on the fact that I’m trying to deter them? Is it working?
A simple analogy: if a teacher is trying to deter cheating, they might use major punishments so you don’t want to fail the class. Or they try to make it impossible—blocking internet access on the exam. You tailor it to the person and context.
A real-world example: after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, there was a massive effort across Europe involving the U.S. to deter Putin from attacking NATO territory. That included surging U.S. troops, joint exercises, harsh language, and around fifty countries sending military aid to Ukraine.
The message was: don’t cross this line. If you do, we’ll respond—and we’ll also counter you aggressively in the place you invaded.

Credibility: capability and will
BW: A word that goes with deterrence is credibility. How do you think about credibility—what makes adversaries believe we’ll act, and what erodes that belief?

MK: To deter effectively, you need capabilities and you need will. You can have the most extraordinary military in the world, but if you never show willingness to use it under problematic circumstances, people won’t fear it.
There were long stretches where the U.S. would park carrier strike groups in the Middle East and not really do anything. Some would say they were there to deter—but they were just sitting there. Over time they became almost like a sunk cost.
Credibility means being clear about what you are willing to do and not willing to do—and then being willing to actually do those things. Not just make threats, but make them real. Sometimes it’s in your interest to be fuzzy for this reason.
This is particularly interesting right now as we examine the Trump administration. Over the last few weeks there were massive protests in Iran, and President Trump tweeted about “help” being on the way. The regime massacred a huge number of people—we don’t know the exact number, but rumors go as high as 20,000. And despite signaling he might use force, he hasn’t yet.
I’m not necessarily advocating that he should, but he put American credibility on the line by signaling and then not acting. That affects whether people go back into the streets, and what they believe will happen.
And what happens in one place is watched elsewhere. If you’re sitting in the Indo-Pacific, you’re watching how the U.S. responds in the Middle East and wondering what it would look like if China starts to bully others—what the U.S. might threaten and what it might actually do.
I’d add one more piece: President Trump did use the military to strike Iran over the summer, so his threats had a different level of credibility than previous presidents’ threats. That’s part of what has shaken people—there was an assumption there was real credibility, and now it’s unclear. The U.S. has sent at least one carrier strike group to the Middle East, arriving later this week. So it’s not impossible this issue isn’t over. If it is, it will hit U.S. credibility in a problematic way.

Analysts vs. deciders
BW: As we wrap up: what distinguishes people who move into real decision-making roles from those who remain permanent analysts? What do the deciders do differently day to day?

MK: Both groups ingest massive amounts of information, synthesize it, and pick out what’s significant.
The difference is: deciders have to accept they’re choosing among bad, awful, and catastrophic options. They have to pro-con those and make a call.
In international security and foreign policy, it’s rare you get butterflies and unicorns as options. You get a rumble in your belly, and you still have to choose. You accept there will be problems with whatever you recommend, and yet you believe—with the information you have at that moment—it’s the best among those options.

Depth vs. breadth in college
BW: Students hear “learn as much as possible” and equate that with breadth. Others worry committing to a region or issue too early will lock them in. How do you weigh studying something specific versus broad?

MK: Isaiah Berlin has this great piece about the fox and the hedgehog, and it argues both sides. There’s no right answer.
The best response is “yes, and.” Get smart on something—and build breadth.
Even if you never end up working on the topic you went deep on, learning a subject inside and out equips you to learn other topics. You know what questions to ask. You know what you don’t know. Find the thing you’re interested in, get really smart on it, and be comfortable looking around.
Also focus on skills: taking in a lot of information, synthesizing it, deciding what matters--not for large language models, but for you. Learn to communicate orally and in writing. You’re conveying complex topics to busy people. Taking something complicated and conveying it in three pages or three minutes is tremendously important.

The least-discussed cost—and the best part
BW: What’s the least-discussed cost of working in national security, personally or professionally? What do you wish more young people understood before jumping in?

MK: It is an all-consuming field. People ask about work-life balance, and I have no good answer—particularly in public service—because foreign affairs are unpredictable. Something is always happening somewhere, often things you didn’t predict or prepare for.
In the Pentagon, it can become all-consuming. You make plans and something pops up and becomes your sole focus. Figuring out how to operate in that space in a healthy way is really important.

BW: And what’s been your favorite part?

MK: Security issues are fundamental to every human being—whether you’re in New Orleans thinking about personal security, whether you’re a refugee returning to Syria after a decade and a half of civil war, whether you’re a foreign leader fighting an insurgency, or a state worried another state is trying to eat up your country. So much comes down to security.
What I’ve always found fascinating is how one can relate to it no matter where you’re sitting. And serving in government is an extraordinary honor. You’re responsible for protecting the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans, and hopefully putting the world on a safer, more prosperous path.

A book to follow the path
BW: If there’s one piece of literature you’d recommend to someone interested in a pathway similar to yours, what would it be?

MK: The title is clunky, but it’s totally worthwhile: Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It’s about paradigm shifts—when we’re in one, what to do, and how to picture the future.
That’s relevant because your generation is graduating into a very different world than five or ten years ago. Post–World War II there was a relatively stable political, security, and economic order for about eighty years. It wasn’t pristine and it wasn’t for everyone, but it was remarkably prosperous and secure. That’s not where we are now. Things are shifting, and it’ll be incumbent on you to help figure out what the new paradigm looks like—and to shape it.

BW: Dr. Karlin, thank you so much for joining me. It’s been a real honor.

MK: My pleasure. Best of luck.

A lot of political arguments aren’t really arguments—they’re translations. The same word can land as a warning to one audience and a promise to another. In this conversation, Professor Desh Girod of Georgetown helps explain why: how people come to hear authority, hierarchy, and “democracy” through different historical and emotional logics—and why that gap has become one of the defining problems of American politics.
We start with the experiences that shaped his career: an early fascination with cities and policy, a formative master’s program at Trinity College Dublin during the 2000–2001 political moment, and the realization that research and writing were a way to think honestly about power. From there, Girod traces a through-line from growing up in Puerto Rico and asking “who gets to decide?” to his work on foreign aid and post-conflict reconstruction, and finally to White Democracy, his project on why authoritarian language can register as democratic renewal.
Along the way, he offers unusually grounded advice for students: worry less about “the perfect plan,” read deeply instead of skimming, protect “quiet mind” time, and treat writing as a craft that carries across careers—even in a world increasingly built for distraction.

—Desh Girod is an Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Social Justice

Origins: The Problem That Pulled Him In
Ben Wolf: To start at the beginning: what problem were you trying to solve—be it intellectually or morally—when you first got into political science? And what early experiences made you interested in that problem?

Desh Girod: My interest in political science as a field really emerged when I was doing a master’s degree at Trinity College Dublin. I had long been interested in policy, and as an undergrad I interned at the mayor’s office in Philadelphia—that was formative. I got curious about how you make cities work: how diverse dynamics can translate into creativity and quality of life across the board.
I was fascinated by cities—how different places handle different challenges. I went to Trinity in part because I was interested in their coverage of conflict resolution and mediation, thinking it would be useful for city-level policy work. But while I was there, world politics was everywhere.
This was 2000–2001—during the Bush v. Gore election. In Ireland, there were questions being asked about the United States and its international role that weren’t being asked in the U.S., and that was striking. I was in Ireland just before 9/11; I came back to the United States after my master’s, and suddenly the U.S. was thrust into world politics in a way I hadn’t experienced in my lifetime.
Having been in Ireland, I had been thinking deeply about world politics. I knew I wanted to go into political science as a career. On one hand, I thought it would make me a better policymaker—knowing what scholars know, going in with that background. But I also got really interested in writing and research through the master’s program.
I remember hearing someone say: if you’re spending your Friday nights in the library and you find yourself excited—reading, writing—then you have the makings of a scholar. I paid attention to how much I loved putting thoughts on paper.
One of my advisors told me: if you don’t do a PhD now, you might not do it later—once you’re in your 30s with a mortgage and other obligations, it’s hard to return. She encouraged me to apply sooner rather than later, and I got into Stanford. I was very excited to be there, and my interests unfolded from that.
But really, it was those experiences—being an undergrad in the mayor’s office, then Ireland and Europe—real life experiences linked to what I was learning in the classroom. That combination of life experience and theory set me on this path.

Advice: Skills, Anxiety, and “Trusting the Present”
BW: I do want to ask more about the work you did then and are doing now. But I’m also curious—looking at your career and educational trajectory, was there something you would change? Or something you wish someone had told you earlier?

DG: If I could go back to past me, one thing I’m glad I did was stick with political science as a major. A lot of people told me: unless you want to be a lawyer, political science won’t translate into a job.
But one of my early advisors told me to pick a major based on substance and where I would have the best professors—people who would challenge me to write well, speak well, and think critically and analytically. So I didn’t worry too much about whether it translated directly into a job.
Over my lifetime I’ve seen stress increase among undergraduates—this pressure to choose majors with an obvious practical emphasis. But I still think it’s true: if you develop the skills to think, write, speak, and present, they carry you across many different jobs—especially as the world changes.
In terms of what I’d do differently: nothing jumps to mind. But generally, I wish I worried less about what the future would look like. I wish I had more confidence that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing in that moment—that there wasn’t some predefined path, and I wasn’t behind.
I say that because I didn’t have a master plan. I stumbled into the idea of a PhD. I can’t think of anyone in my family with a PhD—certainly no professors—so I didn’t grow up with that as an option. Being open to possibilities made it an option.
So I’d tell myself: trust your instincts in the present, and carry less anxiety about the future. Of course, everyone’s situation is different. I was privileged at every step—full scholarships as an undergrad, funded PhD programs—so there were structural factors that made it easier to be at peace. But I still wish I’d worried less.

Puerto Rico, Agency, and the Aid System
BW: That’s very insightful, thank you. You’ve described growing up in Puerto Rico as formative. How did that vantage point shape your instincts about power, legitimacy, and the question of who gets to decide?

DG: That’s a sharp—and perceptive—question. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Over a lifetime, you peel back layers and keep relearning what you thought you knew about yourself.
Growing up in Puerto Rico, I was always interested in the relationship with the United States and the inequality between states. Puerto Ricans are born into American citizenship, but you don’t have all the same rights of citizenship as someone born in Pennsylvania. Becoming aware of that at a young age got me interested in agency—who gets to decide.
I had questions about the decision-making power the United States has over policies that affect everyday life in Puerto Rico. Those questions stayed with me.
I got interested in foreign aid in part because I was curious why outcomes differ—why the U.S. invests more aid in some contexts than others. During my PhD, the U.S. had intervened in Iraq and Afghanistan, and massive state-building operations were unfolding. I would hear policymakers and think tanks talk about “looking for the local will to reform,” and it always sounded patronizing—and odd—like some people want reform and some don’t.
It struck me that we needed to understand incentives: the structures and pressures people are under. In other words, if it were me in that situation—if it were any of us—we might choose the same things under the same pressures. That intuition informed my book: trying to understand the structures that incentivize the use of aid in one way versus another.
I did fieldwork and talked to people about reconstruction processes in places like Uganda and Mozambique. But after working on aid for so long, I became frustrated—with the system and with the narrow question of “how do we make aid work better?”
I started asking: why this aid system at all? Where does it come from? Why do we invest so much thinking in aid when results are often weak—and when aid is a small proportion of overall financial flows?
That pushed me toward bigger-picture questions—looking at countries not only in terms of where they sit in an international structure, but how they arrived where they are historically. You can see imperial dynamics repeating: imperial powers justified their projects with discourses similar to those used for foreign aid and development today. Different nouns, same logic.
So I’ve become interested in how much of the present is a repetition of that history, even if it looks slightly different. And it’s all rooted in that early experience: seeing the United States through the prism of Puerto Rico.

White Democracy: When “Dictator” Sounds Like “Restoration”
BW: You touched on it just now, but in White Democracy you’re asking why authoritarian language can land as “democratic restoration.” What’s the simplest way to explain that paradox to a reader who hasn’t spent years inside the literature?

DG: You probably remember during the presidential campaign, when Donald Trump used the language of being a “dictator for a day”—or “dictator on day one.”
For a lot of people—on the left, in progressive circles, on the coasts—it sounded like he was saying the quiet part out loud, and that it would be bad for him politically. “Dictatorship” has a negative resonance for much of U.S. history.
But if you look at reporting that day—people interviewed at rallies—you heard responses like: “Maybe this is exactly what the country needs.” “We need it to restore democracy.” One person described it like a parent cleaning up a mess.
There’s a sense among many supporters that the system is unfair, that it’s a mess—that the deep state and corruption are real—and that something hierarchical might be required to restore democracy. So you hear the same words, and they mean completely different things. For one audience, it’s a threat to democracy; for the other, it’s a savior of democracy.
That’s fascinating to me. How do we hear the same words so differently? That’s what I’m writing about in the book.

Teaching: Fresh Questions and Global Classrooms
BW: Alongside that research and writing, you’re also a professor. How has being around younger students—who ask you questions about your work—shaped your process? What have you learned from your students?

DG: I learn from students all the time—especially as I’ve gotten older and seen multiple generations of students. Students ask good questions. As professors, we can lose track of the big picture; students coming fresh to the material often ask the most important questions.
It’s invigorating. And at Georgetown, we have students from all over the world, so I’m constantly learning about different politics through their experiences.
It’s a mix of seeing students encounter ideas for the first time and hearing how their life experiences shape their relationship to those ideas. And Georgetown students tend to be deeply engaged—they read, they come prepared, they want to engage. It’s been a privilege to spend my career here with such students.
Sometimes I also build courses around literature I’ve been wanting to read, so I’m reading it with the students. That’s a great process of continued learning and staying on top of the material—you want to deliver the best every time.

Student Success: Reading, “Deep Time,” and Distraction
BW: To close—since you’ve seen many students go on to work or further study—what skills and habits do the most successful students tend to have? And what downfalls do you see most often?

DG: I can’t say enough about the value of reading—books, essays, periodicals like The Atlantic and The New Yorker. It’s accessing incredible minds. In a way, it’s like what you’re doing with The Pathway Blog: talking with one amazing mind after another as you move through texts.
Developing the habit of reading—whatever ideas you’re interested in—keeps your mind rich and makes the world more interesting.
A lot of students move through material quickly now. AI can summarize things; historically, Cliff Notes were always a thing. But you miss so much. Making time to read is powerful.
And it’s also about focus. It’s almost cliché, but distractibility is a huge challenge—being so connected to phones, constant stimulation. I worry we lose track of the big picture and make less well-informed decisions because we know ourselves less. Time that could be spent thinking, reading, reflecting becomes time scrolling and absorbing everyone else’s life.
I can’t emphasize enough what I’ve derived from walking, thinking, reading—deep time of the mind, with a quiet mind. That sets you up to do many things with more self-understanding and confidence.

Reading Recommendations: Du Bois, Historians, and Getting Outside the Journals
BW: Professor, I’m really grateful for your time. I like to close Pathway conversations by asking: for someone interested in following your work—or a book that influenced you—what would you recommend?

DG: Hard to name a single one.
In a way, I stumbled too late in my career onto the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois. I learn something new every time I read him—his work, his life, the context of his writing. There are similarities to challenges we’re facing now. Everything I’ve read by Du Bois has been extraordinary for me—personally and intellectually.
I’ve also been reading a lot of historians, which has helped my work tremendously. Stepping away from constantly keeping up with mainstream political science journals and engaging other disciplines has been valuable.
That’s how I ended up reading Du Bois, but also historians like Quinn Slobodian--Globalists is a powerful book for understanding neoliberal ideas: where they came from, who held them, how they were contested, and how they became so resonant that we now hold them without thinking.
And of course Heather Cox Richardson—her books are revealing, not just intellectually but culturally, for understanding what it is to be an American. When I read her, I find myself asking questions I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
I also love Daniel Immerwahr’s work--Thinking Small, on community development programs and how they relate to modernization ideas in foreign aid, and How to Hide an Empire, which goes from Puerto Rico to the early expansion of the United States. There’s a lot of creative work that’s been inspiring and helpful.

The Problem: A Parliament That Can Govern
Benjamin Wolf: Daniel, I want to start off by asking: for readers meeting you for the first time, what’s the core problem you’ve spent your career trying to solve—and what made it feel worth committing to?

Daniel Schuman: For the last 20 years, I’ve been focused on: how do you build a strong and effective parliament in our political system? What put me down this path is that I’m interested in how systems work. And one of the most interesting and pivotal institutions in the world is the United States Congress—so that’s why I focus there.

BW: When you say you’re interested in how systems work, what do you mean? Like how they get things done?

DS: Congress is the place that—at least in theory—people can come together and solve their problems in a nonviolent way. And of course, the United States has been the pivotal nation of the world. Decisions we make here don’t just affect people inside the United States; they affect people around the world.
There are lots of different ways that power gets concentrated. You can have corporate power, political power, economic power, oligarchical power. But Congress is the institution we created that is a counterweight—or at least can be a counterweight—to these things.
And the rules it creates change the incentives for all the other actors, right? It gets to change the landscape. That’s very interesting.
But it doesn’t work all that well—or it doesn’t seem to be working all that well. And it’s gotten markedly worse in the last 10 or 15 years. So I’ve been very interested in that problem. That’s where I’ve been spending my time.

BW: Where do you see the future of governmental—maybe not efficiency, but efficacy—actually working, in your terms?

DS: Yeah, and it’s not necessarily efficiency. That is a useful value. It’s really sort of the legitimizing of the exercise of power, right?
Congress and politics is about power—how it works and who it benefits. And I’m having a really hard time these days seeing a positive outcome from all this work.
I see a pathway to make things better. The pathway is becoming narrower and narrower. But that is where I focus my life’s work—just to try to get us to go down the right path to fix things.

BW: And what is that path?

DS: At this point, it’s allowing multiple factions to be able to operate inside the legislative branch—so you don’t have two different teams fighting with one another—and it’s having the vast majority of the players committed to democracy and rule of law, to countering the power grabs we see in the executive branch, the courts, and elsewhere.

A Technical Fix That Became a Cultural Change
BW: Was there a specific experience—inside an institution or watching from the outside—when you realized your earlier assumptions about how change happens in Washington were incomplete?

DS: Oh, yeah.
I came to Washington in 2001. My first day on Capitol Hill was 9/11. And I’ve been on and around Congress for maybe—by that point—about 10 years.
Around 2010, I was working at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit focused on government transparency. We had been fighting to get the Library of Congress to publish data about legislation online.
Since the mid-’90s, there was a tool called THOMAS—a website where you could see bills being considered—but it didn’t work very well. Links would break after five minutes. It didn’t publish information in a way that other people could reuse. So if you wanted to analyze legislation, if you wanted to track what was going on, you were using this really bad information source.
And THOMAS at the time was essential for journalists, for civil society—it helped collapse the difference in power between those who are very wealthy and well connected, who could find out what was going on, and the vast majority of people who could not.
We had been pushing and pushing and pushing for the Library of Congress to publish this information online as structured data, and they just would not do it. We’d been fighting that fight for 15 years and they were not going to give in.
We found legislative allies, and we had a memo that was being offered—an appropriations bill—by Darrell Issa, who was (and still is) a congressman from California. He was chair of the House Oversight Committee.
Republican leadership said to him: don’t do this. If you do this, it’s going to create all sorts of problems for us. They really twisted his arm on behalf of the Library, which did not want this information to be available in a useful way.
They came up with a compromise: they would create a committee to study the issue—the Bulk Data Task Force. The idea was the issue would go there and quietly be killed. At least that was the idea on the part of Republican leadership.
They pulled together people from the House, the Senate, support offices, support agencies—to figure out whether this information should be made publicly available as structured data.
What they did inadvertently was bring together all the technologists from these different places—people who care about making things work right—people who didn’t know each other. They got to know each other through this task force: leadership, committees, personal offices, support offices and agencies.
I brought a group of folks and we testified before them. They agreed with us. And they ultimately directed the Library to publish the information.
But that wasn’t the thing that was interesting.
What was interesting is: they kept meeting. They have been having quarterly meetings with the public for the last 16 years now. They have become a driver of modernization in the legislative branch.
We aimed for a technical fix—publish this data in this format. And what we got was a cultural change: bringing together people created a different attitude, a different way of relating, and a different focus.
This is not to say we’ve solved all of our problems—because we haven’t. But what I was aiming for was not the right thing. We stumbled into it, and that thing continues to transform the way Congress works.

September 11 and the Anthrax Letters
BW: You mentioned your first day in Washington was on 9/11. Can you tell me a little bit about what that experience was like?

DS: Yeah—so 2001 was a really tough year for me. My grandfather passed. My father had open-heart surgery. So I came to D.C. in September of 2001 instead of earlier when I had intended.
It’s difficult to explain how different things were then. There was a job announcement bulletin that was published on paper once a week. And one of the ways you could look for jobs was—you’d go and knock on doors.
So I did that. I went and knocked on doors. I met with my two senatorial offices, my member of the House, and other people as well—committees—asking: are you looking for anyone? Do you need anybody right now?
One of the places I looked was with one of my two senators, Joe Lieberman, who was a Democrat at the time. I had gone to interview for an internship, and that interview was on 9/11.
So I came into the— I think it was the Hart Building, or the Dirksen Building. I don’t remember anymore.
I’m staying in an unfurnished apartment in Georgetown. The only furniture I have is a blow-up air mattress and my clothes. I take the D6 bus from Georgetown to Union Station. I get off at Union Station, and I’m walking to the Senate.
I’m getting close to the building, and I start seeing everybody running the other way. It’s 9:30 in the morning. My interview’s at 10. And the World Trade Center was hit at 8-something. The Pentagon was hit a little bit later than that—so it had been hit as well.
People were running out of the buildings. And I’m getting closer—and I can pick up on a hint—this is clearly not right.
I ask a police officer what’s happening. He says the World Trade Center was hit, the State Department was blown up—which of course was not true, but it’s the fog of war, so you don’t know. And everything’s locked down.
And I said: it looks like I should get the hell out of here. He’s like, yeah. And that’s what I did.
I first tried going to Union Station, which was closed. I ended up walking back to Georgetown.
I came back the next week, had my interview, got the internship. I was there for five weeks or four weeks—and then it was the anthrax attack.
I was an intern, so I was working in the mail room. Lieberman’s mail room is right next to Daschle’s mail room—and Daschle was one of the people who received the anthrax. That was the end of my time in the Senate.
I was on Cipro for 10 weeks. I switched to the House. It was really tough. It was really tough for a lot of people.
There’s a photograph in The Washington Post from that day. It’s a picture of a guy holding a giant vial with a Q-tip in it. That’s my friend Greg, who was interning with me in Lieberman’s office. The expression on his face is basically saying, “WTF”—he’s looking at me and showing me what we’re in for.
Nowadays, with COVID, everyone’s used to having giant Q-tips shoved up your nose. But that was a novel thing in 2001, and I hadn’t had that done before.
Afterward, I worked in Rosa DeLauro’s office as an intern, and I got a job later on as a staff assistant for a congressman from Florida.
Four months into that job, they start delivering the mail again—and it’s all irradiated. It’s crinkly, crackly stuff that you open and it just spurts out—like it’s from the movie Alien, like the spores of irradiated crap just flow into the air.
That’s what I remember of that time—and getting trained on how to put on a quick hood in case of a chemical attack. You ever see the Austin Powers movies?

BW: No.

DS: Well, there’s a scene where Dr. Evil has this giant clear mask over his head—like he’s in a bubble. That’s what it was. You got trained in putting those things on.
So that was my introduction to working on Capitol Hill.

BW: Wow. Quite an introduction.

Inside vs. Outside: Where Reform Happens
BW: You’ve navigated spaces that reward different instincts—policy, advocacy, institution-building, public-facing work. How do you decide when to be a builder inside the system versus a pressure source outside of it?

DS: I don’t think there is a distinction.
I think you look for where you have the greatest ability to do the greatest good. And that’s where--
Part of this conversation is: how did I get to do what I’m doing now? And the answer is: my job did not exist when I started my career.
My job at the Sunlight Foundation didn’t exist—they made the position for me. My job at Demand Progress didn’t exist—the executive director recruited me to go work there. The jobs were built around my strengths and weaknesses.
A lot of the people I know who are really good at what they do—they build the things around them. They find a way to make the space their own.
Whether you’re on the inside or the outside, you go back and forth between the two. For me, when I had a choice about what I did next, I would always angle toward the thing that was more interesting and a better fit.
So if someone asks: how do I get to be the executive director doing a focus on rules reform, appropriations, and all the other stuff that I do? It wasn’t a thing. It’s a thing now, but it was never a thing before.

Media, Incentives, and Recency Bias
BW: From your perspective, how has the modern media environment changed incentives for members and staff in ways that make serious governance harder—also for the people on the journalism side of things? And are there any counter-trends you find encouraging?

DS: I’m not sure that’s true.

BW: What is?

DS: In the 19th century, members of Congress would give speeches on the floor, and there were no transcripts. Journalists would write what was said, and then the members would go hang out with the journalists at Swampoodle near what’s now Union Station. They’d clean it up, and then send it out to be published in newspapers. That would create a tremendous political reaction around the country that would influence what members did.
So the media—major media—has always been closely related to the work Congress does.
I’m not sure the current media environment makes it harder for them to do their jobs. I think the way they’ve designed their institutions is making it harder for them to do their jobs: most members of Congress don’t have anything meaningful to do with their time. They’re not being valued. They haven’t created institutions that support their work.
The nature of Congress has changed in ways that are more radical than is easy to understand. And the nature of the press has changed.
In the 19th century, you had journalists who would sit in the House, who would be clerks for committees, and who would gamble on the stock market with insider information about what they were covering.
You had the press at the turn of the 20th century stampeding Congress into war with Spain—yellow journalism.
There was a series of articles in Century Magazine that exposed corruption of senators and led to direct election of the Senate.
So I think we suffer from recency bias when we evaluate the press.
Now, there is definitely a lot more crud—bad faith political stuff. It seems like there’s a lot of it right now. It was also really bad at other times in our history, where it was nasty. And it was harder to ascertain the facts.
I do think algorithm bias in social media has changed the way we access information around us, for good and for ill. But I wouldn’t necessarily say things are worse in terms of the relationship between the press and those they cover.
If anything, there are not enough journalists covering what’s going on, so a lot of things remain uncovered in ways that would be helpful if they were exposed.

BW: Just to play devil’s advocate: even when reporters aren’t lying, the incentive structure can still reward selection and framing—highlighting the most provocative lines because outrage travels farther online, and attention converts into revenue. How do you think that dynamic affects coverage of Congress today? And are there norms or counterweights that still keep serious reporting anchored to what’s actually true?

DS: I think it’s almost always been true.
We had a period of time where it was a little bit less so. But even then—who are you?
So, like, in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, television news might be a little bit more neutral—or the Associated Press might be.
But do you know why the Associated Press takes a neutral perspective in its reporting?

BW: I couldn’t say.

DS: It’s really interesting.
They realized that the papers they were trying to sell reporting to in the 19th century—they were all Democrats, or Republicans, or whatever. And if you put a perspective in your writing, you couldn’t sell to all of them. So they made it as clean as possible, so whoever took their reporting could put their own spin on it.
So the reason they did it wasn’t some noble calling or higher truth. It was because they could make more money.
And the idea that “if it bleeds, it leads” has certainly been true throughout my lifetime.
And think about all the stories newspapers didn’t cover: civil rights, employers mistreating workers—historically, there’s no women’s perspective, no Black perspective, depending on what paper you’re reading and when.
We look at it through rose-colored glasses as if having Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather was a pure good—and they were, to some extent. My parents talk about Walter Cronkite. But there’s a whole lot of stuff that never got coverage—ever.
And the elite consensus around what you can and can’t talk about: it’s fine if you’re part of the elite, if you benefit from it. Not so great otherwise.
Journalists have always been in business to make money. There have been changes—billionaires now own journalistic publications. “Freedom of the press” only counts if you own a press.
Of course, now more people can publish themselves. I do think there’s less filtering now. But in the past, if you go back 100 years, you would read a paper relevant to your political party, and that’s how you got your news.

Advice to Students
BW: As we close, I want to turn it directly to students. If you were advising a sharp undergrad—or if you could go back to your time as an undergrad—wanting to work in government, governance reform, and journalism: what concrete steps would you take—internships, experiences, habits—and why?

DS: The first thing that’s valuable: if you want to be a journalist, if you want to engage in the policymaking process, if you want to be a press person—I would intern for Congress, if there’s a way to do so.
I would aim at committees or leadership more than personal offices, if you can. Understanding the tempo and the incentives and the nature of the people that work there is incredibly valuable for the rest of your life.
Doing what you’re doing—being curious, talking to people, asking them questions, figuring out what they do and why—is incredibly valuable as well.
Be willing to try new things, different jobs. Experiment and see what fits you and what doesn’t.
There’s a lot of received wisdom about how to do stuff. Everyone has an opinion about the right way and the wrong way.
It’s worth finding out: just because it’s been done one way in the past doesn’t mean it has to be done that way in the future.
You hear a lot of people talk about Chesterton’s fence—the idea that if there’s a fence out in the woods, it’s there for a reason.
I can tell you: oftentimes, things are done a certain way for no good reason whatsoever—or the reason no longer exists. So there’s nothing wrong with being bold and trying to think things through for yourself. That’s how progress is made.

A Reading List: Start With CRS
BW: Finally, Daniel, I like to close Pathway Blog conversations by asking: for someone interested in your career path—or at least entering the same general field—what’s a piece of literature, a book, an essay, an article, that you’d recommend, and why? 

DS: It’s such a tough question.
I won’t recommend a book—although I have several that I can think of that would be really interesting—but I would recommend a website.
I run EveryCRSReport.com, which has 20,000-ish Congressional Research Service reports—more than is available from any other source.
Go to that website and type in a topic you care about. I used to write those reports. You can see what an expert on a topic says—it helps give you grounding for what the subject matter is.
Then go look at the footnotes. Find the footnotes that are interesting and use that as a jumping-off point to learn more about what you care about.