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Frank Baumgartner, Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, spoke recently at Notre Dame about the unusual imbalance of death penalties across localities in the United States. His talk was sponsored by the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy, and co-sponsored by the Klau Center.…

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University of Notre Dame senior Prathm Juneja has been named to the United States Rhodes Scholar Class of 2020. Juneja, of Edison, New Jersey, is Notre Dame’s 20th Rhodes Scholar and the 14th from the College of Arts and Letters — including four in the past six years — and will commence his studies in Oxford in October.

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With a record number of women running for the Democratic nomination, and Elizabeth Warren leading in some polls, some Democrats have wondered whether nominating a woman in 2020 will mean it is 2016 all over again. Clinton’s loss embittered many women — young women in particular. It was not just that Clinton lost, it was who she lost to. And it was not just that they were frustrated with losing an election; many young women began to question American democracy itself. This is especially troubling at a time when liberal democracy is being questioned…

Read More about How women candidates are making girls feel better about politics

On Thursday, November 7, the Klau Center and the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy welcomed Jennifer Thompson to Notre Dame Law School. Thompson, founder and director of the Healing Justice Project, recalled her experience at the center of a wrongful conviction case, and its devastating aftermath.…

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The numbers of student voters at the University of Notre Dame rose nearly 20 percentage points in last year’s midterm elections, according to the new 2014 and 2018 Campus Report from the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE). At Notre Dame, 37.1 percent of students voted in the 2018 midterms, compared to 17.3 percent in the 2014 elections, following a national trend. Undergraduate and graduate students voted at nearly equal rates in 2014, at 15.2 percent and 16.3 percent respectively, and both jumped significantly in 2018 to 32.9 percent and 33.1 percent respectively.

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Notre Dame political scientist Jeff Harden is part of a multidisciplinary research team awarded a $1 million National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator grant to create a hub that will make it easier to access and analyze data from states on public policy and economic and social outcomes.

Read More about NSF-funded team working to make data from states more accessible and easier to analyze

LEO was honored to cohost, with The Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy, an event for University of Notre Dame students featuring Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. The event, “Evidence and Policymaking in the Age of Big Data,” was held on September 13 on the Notre Dame campus. Ryan, who serves on LEO’s advisory board and is a Professor of the Practice at Notre Dame this academic year, spoke about how research and evidence-based policy can have a meaningful impact on poverty.

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The Presidential Team Irish Award program recognizes staff teams that exemplify the University’s Core Values of integrity, accountability, teamwork, leadership in mission and leadership in excellence. A select number of staff teams receive the award each year as a recognition of significant accomplishments, collaborations or initiatives where they demonstrated Core Values. At each home football game, before 80,000 football fans, one of the Team Irish Award winning teams take the field, during a television timeout, to receive the award. Click for information on the Presidential Team Irish Award.…

Read More about The Building Bridges Mentoring Program receives the Presidential Team Irish Award

Check out the Rooney Center 2018-2019 Year in Review…

Read More about Rooney Center 2018-2019 Year in Review

Latinos make up half of American Border Patrol agents. But it's not self-hatred driving them to work for agencies deporting their communities.

Read More about Assistant Professor David Cortez recently wrote an opinion piece for USA Today: "I asked Latinos why they joined immigration law enforcement. Now I'm urging them to leave."

Juneja is among 62 students — mostly juniors but also seniors in five-year degree programs — selected for the honor from a pool of 840 candidates from 346 colleges and universities nationwide.

Read More about Congratulations to ND Votes leader and 2019 Truman Scholar recipient, Prathm Juneja

Two faculty from Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters — Declan Kiberd and Dianne Pinderhughes — have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers. They are among more than 200 members of the 239th AAAS class, which includes former first lady Michelle Obama, author Jonathan Franzen, gender theorist Judith Butler, former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, NPR host Michel Martin, and neuro-oncologist Robert B. Darnell.

Read More about Rooney Center faculty member Dianne Pinderhughes elected to the prestigious Academy of Arts & Sciences

Notre Dame faculty member and alumnus Carlos Lozada, the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post, is the recipient of a 2019 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, journalism’s highest honor. In announcing the award April 15, the Pulitzer jurors cited Lozada “for trenchant and searching reviews and essays that joined warm emotion and careful analysis in examining a broad range of books addressing government and the American experience.”

Read More about Congratulations to Pulitzer Prize winner, Notre Dame alumnus, and Washington Program faculty, Carlos Lozada

Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Paul Ryan will join the University of Notre Dame faculty as a professor of the practice for the 2019-20 academic year as a guest lecturer in political science and economics.

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Former Secretary of State John Kerry and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (M.S. ’75) took the stage Tuesday night (March 19) at the University of Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center for the forum “America’s Role in the World.” 

Read More about Rice and Kerry find common ground at Notre Dame

Rooney Center faculty member Vincent Phillip Muñoz, the Tocqueville Associate Professor of Political Science has been offered a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is one of three Notre Dame scholars who received NEH fellowships in the 2018 award cycle.

Read More about Political scientist Vincent Phillip Muñoz awarded NEH fellowship, continuing record funding for humanities research