The NCAA is clearing the way to allow college athletes to profit from their names, images, and likenesses following law enacted in California affording athletes those same rights. Lauren A. McCarthy, associate professor of political science and legal studies, and Tatishe M. Nteta, associate professor of political science, published a data-driven article in the Washington Post exploring white racial attitudes, perceptions of college athletes, and support for college athletes earning a profit.

Professor Raymond J. La Raja, is interviewed on the local public affairs program Connecting Point about the pros and cons of changing the political campaign finance system to allow matching small contributions with public funds. He says some places have such an arrangement, but it isn’t clear that this will work everywhere. (WGBY-TV 57)

 

Paul Musgrave, political science, says President Donald J. Trump’s perceptions of how the temporary ceasefire in Syria is succeeding, based on the word of the Turkish president, is revealing. “This all seems to result from Trump’s somewhat bizarre but persistent belief that you can only trust the word of other strongmen – from China’s Xi Jinping to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to Russia’s Vladimir Putin,” Musgrave says. “I’m not sure I can easily think of other times when this sort of personal trust in authoritarian leaders has so dictated U.S. presidents’ approaches.” (Vox, 10/18/19)

A team of UMass Amherst researchers has received a three-year, $460,000 National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network grant for a project aimed to help better understand the interplay between policy design and human behavior. The grant, awarded to Douglas Rice, assistant professor of political science and legal studies, Charles Schweik, professor of environmental conservation and public policy, and Brenda Bushouse, associate professor of political science and public policy, aims to build an interdisciplinary international network of policy scholars, behavioral researchers and computational scientists to develop mechanisms to allow these kinds of comparisons to move toward a more robust, quantitative science.