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. I grew up in Austin, Texas, where I spent a lot of time watching my friend 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 the contemporary politics of American economic inequality, racial politics, and American political development.

At the undergraduate level, I teach the department's introductory course to U.S. politics, as well as courses on the politics of economic inequality, America's political economy, U.S. policymaking, race and American political development, urban politics, southern political development, and slavery. I have also 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, organized interests, and race and American political development. I have also taught seminars on U.S. parties, urban politics, and regimes and regime change, as well as causal inference in small-n research (with Anna Grzymala-Busse).

My first book is Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972 (Princeton University Press). It won the J. David Greenstone prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association for the best book in history and politics published in 2014 or 2015. The book's bibliography is available in PDF format here.

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

*Other People's Money? Public Sector Workers, Their Pensions, and the Political Construction of an American Crisis

*Labor-Repressive Agriculture and the Perils of Nation-Building in Iraq, the U.S. South, and Beyond (with David Waldner)

*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:

*Anglo-American Regulation of Mortgage-Backed Securities (with Tony Chen)

*U.S. Transitional Justice in Comparative Perspective (with Rick Valelly)

Here's my CV.