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.

Drop me a line at rmickey@umich.edu.

Work

I teach and study U.S. politics in historical and cross-national perspective. I'm interested in America's political development, racial politics, and policy responses to durable inequalities, especially in the field of health care.

At the undergraduate level, I have taught courses on U.S. policymaking, race and American political development, urban politics, southern political development, and slavery, and help run the department's honors thesis program. For graduate students, I've taught the American politics pro-seminar, American political development, race and APD, U.S. parties, urban politics, regimes and regime change, and causal inference in small-n research (with Anna Grzymala-Busse). With Tony Chen and Matt Lassiter, I organized a colloquium from 2003-2005 on Race and Twentieth-Century American Political Development for graduate students in sociology, history, and political science. 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.

Here's an overview of my forthcoming book, 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 Democrats' Urban Crisis: Racial Politics, Federal Urban Policy, and Party Politics Since 1940 (under contract, Oxford University Press)

*The Politics of National Health Insurance Proposals Since the New Deal: Understanding Mass-Elite Linkages from FDR to Obama (with Eric Schickler)


Other research includes:

*Elite Communications and Racial Group Conflict in the 21st Century (funded by the National Science Foundation) (with Vince Hutchings and Hanes Walton)

*"Dr. Strangerove, Or: How Conservatives Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Community Health Centers"

*The Beginning of the End for Authoritarian Rule in America: Smith v. Allwright and the Abolition of the White Primary in the Deep South, 1944-1948" (Studies in American Political Development, Fall 2008)

*"Explaining the Contemporary Alignment of Race and Party: Evidence From California's 1946 Ballot Initiative on Fair Employment" (with Tony Chen and Rob Van Houweling) (Studies in American Political Development, Fall 2008)

*The Politics of Racial Backlash: Consequences of an American Metaphor (with Dan Kryder)

*Missed Opportunites in "Missed Opportunities" Research on American Political Development (with Paul Frymer)

*Duration and the Explanation of Political Processes (with Paul Pierson)

*"Ring of Truth: Johnny Cash and Populism" (with Mika LaVaque-Manty), in John Huss and David Werther, eds., Johnny Cash and Philosophy: The Ring of Truth (Chicago: Open Court, 2008).

Here's my CV.