Rob Mickey

I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and a Faculty Associate at the Center for Political Studies. I spent 2006-2008 at UC-Berkeley, where I was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research. In another life, I worked for five years in Prague at a European-American nonprofit organization involved in policy assistance and research, where I focused on ethnic politics in East Central Europe and the Balkans. Long before it was a gleam in the eye of the DPRK leadership and--worse--Californians, I grew up in Austin, Texas, where I spent a lot of time watching Landis Armstrong practice the guitar (he got really good).

Drop me a line at rmickey@umich.edu.

Work

I teach and study U.S. politics in historical (and occasionally cross-national) perspective. I'm interested in America's political development, its political economy, racial politics, and policy responses to durable inequalities.

At the undergraduate level, I teach or have taught courses on U.S. policymaking, the politics of the new inequality, American political economy, race and American political development, urban politics, southern political development, and slavery, and have helped run the department's honors thesis program. For graduate students, I teach the department's pro-seminar in U.S. politics, American political development, U.S. political economy, and race and American political development. I have also taught seminars on U.S. parties, urban politics, regimes and regime change, and causal inference in small-n research (with Anna Grzymala-Busse). Since 2008, I have served as a core faculty member of the University of Michigan site of the RWJ Scholars in Health Policy Research Program.

My first book is Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972 (Princeton University Press). The study on which it is based received the APSA's 2006 Elmer Eric Schattschneider Award for best dissertation in the field of American government and politics.

I am now working on two book-length research projects:

*The Political Origins of the Financial Crisis and the New Inequality (under contract as part of Oxford University Press' Studies in Postwar American Political Development Series)

*Elite Communications and Racial Group Conflict in the 21st Century (supported by National Science Foundation Award No. 0920838), with collaborators Vince Hutchings, Ashley Jardina, and the late Hanes Walton, whom we miss terribly


Other research interests include:

*U.S. Transitional Justice in Comparative Perspective (with Rick Valelly)
*The American Party Platforms Project, should funding ever arrive (with Eric Schickler)
*Partisan Learning, National Health Insurance, and the Politics of Community Health Centers

Here's my CV.