Political Theory Institute's event on Reconstruction

Featured Speaker:

Robert Mickey's research focuses on U.S. politics in comparative and historical perspective. He is interested in the country's democratization by the 1970s, its current democratic backsliding, and the place of racial conflict in each. He is the author of Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972 (Princeton University Press), which won the 2016 J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book on politics & history published in the past two years (American Political Science Association), and the 2017 V. O. Key Award for the best book on southern politics published in 2015-2016 (Southern Political Science Association). Recent articles include an analysis of challenges to democracy in America's states and an exploration with Ashley Jardina (University of Virginia) of the relationship of white racial solidarity to support for democracy. Mickey is writing a book on Americans' relationship of racial attitudes to their support for democracy with Jardina and Vince Hutchings.

Professor Mickey is now at work with David Waldner (University of Virginia) on a book-length study of America's Reconstruction in comparative perspective with other postwar efforts to construct democratic polities and diverse economies in societies featuring labor-repressive agriculture.

He is also exploring the historical legacies of mid-20th century urban racial conflict for America's contemporary policing with Jake Grumbach (Goldman School of Public Policy, UC-Berkeley) and Dan Ziblatt (Harvard University & WZB-Berlin). In 2024, Mickey (with Matt Lassiter) drafted the policing section of the Harms Report for Detroit's Reparations Task Force. He is now working with a team of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty to assist Washtenaw County in understanding its history of racial conflict as part of the Rackham Graduate School's Interdisciplinary Problem-Solving Initiative.

Mickey until recently co-edited (with Dan Slater) the newsletter of APSA's Democracy and Autocracy section, and teaches archival research methods at the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research workshop at Syracuse University.

Before attending graduate school, Mickey worked in Prague for five years at a not-for-profit organization involved in policy assistance and research; there, he focused on ethnic minority political parties in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. From 2006-2008, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the School of Public Health at UC-Berkeley, where he studied the political development of America's community health centers program.