Aug 13, 2020

Postscript

Kamala Harris as Vice President

Lilly Goren

Hosted by Lilly Goren

Summary

This is our second podcast in a new series from New Books in Political Science called POSTSCRIPT in which Susan and I invite authors back to the podcast to react to contemporary political developments that engage their scholarship.

Today’s podcast – recorded on Wednesday, August 12th (less than 24 hours after Democratic candidate Joe Biden announced Senator Kamala Harris as his Vice Presidential pick) – cuts through the hype of “veep stakes” by providing a deep dive. Scholars put the selection of Kamala Harris in the context based on what political scientists know about the vice presidency, parties, gender, and race.

The podcast begins with a conversation between William Adler (Associate Professor of Political Science at Northeastern Illinois University who studies the presidency, bureaucracy, and American political development and a contributor to the blog, A House Divided) and Julia Azari (Associate Professor and Assistant Chair in the Department of Political Science at Marquette University who studies the presidency, American political parties, and the politics of the American state and is a regular contributor at the political science blog The Mischiefs of Faction. Her work has also appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and in Politico). Adler and Azari recently coauthored an article on Harris as VP and party politics.

In the second half of the podcast, Linda Beail (Professor of Political Science and Director, Margaret Stevenson Center for Women's Studies at Point Loma Nazarene University who studies American politics, political theory, and gender and race politics) and Rhonda Longworth Kinney (Professor of Political Science at Eastern Michigan University who studies women and politics and the presidency) further analyze this historic pick. Beail and Kinney are the coauthors of Framing Sarah Palin: Pit Bulls, Puritans, and Politics.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).