The state of the States - Flinders University

The US political climate in the lead-up to the 2020 elections.

Professor Don DeBats and panellists Professor Andrew Parkin, and Associate Professor Rodrigo Praino, discuss the factors that may influence the outcome of the US elections in November 2020.

Flinders researchers

Professor Don DeBats – Jeff Bleich Centre Director

Professor Don DeBats is Professor, International Relations and Political Science and the Director of the JBC at Flinders; he is a Visiting Research Professor at the University of Virginia and a Resident Fellow at Virginia Humanities. He is joint CI on defence contracts, providing leadership on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies and network methodologies and analysis. His research interests are comparative Australian-Canadian-US politics and political history, US foreign policy, democracy and governance. His historical research is supported by major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Program and explores earlier challenges to democratic norms. His most recent publications demonstrate the operational independence of social and spatial networks.

Associate Professor Rodrigo Praino

Associate Professor in Politics and Public Policy
College of Business, Government and Law

With a PhD in Political Science, A/Prof Professor Praino’s research is focused on decision-making and political behaviour. Using cutting-edge combination of experiments, statistical modelling and real-world data, A/Prof Praino seeks to explain how citizens get to their vote decisions, and what consequences this process has to our society. In particular, A/Prof Praino’s research investigates how voters often make their decisions in a context of low-information. This has recently been in the spotlight worldwide, for example, when a record number of British citizens googled “what is the European Union” after voting for Brexit. How did they arrive to that vote decision, if they didn’t even know what the EU is, and what are the consequences of this behaviour?

Professor Andrew Parkin

Professor in College of Business, Government and Law

Professor Parkin is a political scientist with research expertise encompassing: governmental and public policy processes, intergovernmental relations within the Australian federal system, urban and housing policy, aspects of criminal justice policy, immigration policy, Australian and South Australian politics, and liberal-democratic theory and practice. He has served as Editor of the Australian Journal of Political Science, as President of the Australasian Political Studies Association and as a member of the Australian Research Council's College of Experts. He is a National Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration Australia, and a former Fulbright scholar.

Jeff Bleich Centre for the US Alliance in Digital Technology, Security & Governance

Named in honour of Ambassador and Special Counsel to President Barack Obama, the Jeff Bleich Centre for the US Alliance I Digital Technology, Security and Governance is a research centre focusing on the three key areas of digital technology, security, and governance.

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