Michael McQuarrie on writing for blogs: "the most utility comes from allowing me to think through a problem that is bugging me and then publish something about the result"

In the wake of Donald Trump's surprise election victory one year ago, LSE Sociology Associate Professor, Michael McQuarrie wrote on the regional nature of Trump's win. His blog article, "Trump and the Revolt of the Rust Belt", which has been viewed over 35,000 times has now formed the basis of a new article in the British Journal of Sociology. Chris ..

Sociology has a Trump problem

Sociology has a Trump problem. And a Brexit problem. And a Populism problem. And a white people problem, and a class problem, and a man problem. What does this mean? Confusion is expected because, unfortunately, sociology has these problems in numerous ways. For example, sociology has a real Trump and Brexit problem in the straightforward sense that it is institutionally dependent on higher education and research funding which are directly threatened by Trump’s election and Britain’s secession from the EU. It has a populism problem in the sense that populism’s assertion of popular authority against elites, including elite “experts”, sanctioned to speak by their sheepskin credentials, moves sociologists from being observers of society to an interested position in political struggle and even a political adversary for many of the people we might want to study. It has a white, privileged, male problem because too many elite academics are white privileged males and the effect is that their distinct dispositions and views become normalized while others are reduced curiosities. And that is just to name a few of the dimensions to these problems. But worthy as these are for consideration, these are not the problems that I want to address

With unions in decline, Trump’s path to the presidency is unlikely to be through the Rust Belt.

In this election, Donald Trump has been drawing a great deal of his support from disaffected white working-class voters. Michael McQuarrie writes that Trump’s strategy of courting this group is not surprising; white workers have been slipping away from the Democratic Party for nearly 50 years. Much of this is down to the decline of unions, which in the past had been able to keep white voters anchored to the left. This decline – along with the changing demographics of the Rust Belt- also hurts Trump’s electoral chances; without unions to mobilize them, working class whites are less likely to vote

Blacks have more political power than ever. but they still face a racialized criminal justice system.

The victories of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s have paved the way for African-American elected officials, judges, police officers, and presidents. But fifty years on, why has this political representation translated into few positive policy outcomes for African Americans? Michael McQuarrie writes that the reasons for this are many: persistent racist sentiment, general biases in the American polity towards business and rural interests, the declining resources available to municipalities, and most importantly, the geographic concentration of African Americans in areas with smaller electoral footprints –compared to statewide offices – such as House districts and mayoralties

Trump and the Revolt of the Rust Belt

Much has been made of the inaccuracy of exit polls and voting projections amidst Trump’s shocking win this week. Michael McQuarrie argues, however, that to truly appreciate why Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States we must look beyond distortionary exit polling and come to appreciate the thoroughly regional nature of his victory. Only this can explain Trump’s win, which relied on the Rust Belt’s rejection of Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton – and their resounding endorsement of Trump’s anti-globalist rhetoric

Community organizations in the foreclosure crisis: the failure of neoliberal civil society

This paper looks at the prehistory of the foreclosure crisis in Cleveland, Ohio, in order to understand the effectiveness of civil society organizations in mitigating its impact on the city’s neighborhoods. Social theorists and movement activists have often postulated civil society as an authentic and voluntaristic realm in which we constitute and act on shared values. The voluntary nature of civil society organizations also, it is argued, make them more responsive, adaptable, and effective in meeting the needs of the communities they operate in. The question is whether or not this has held true in the contemporary crisis. I find that in the 1970s, Cleveland’s community-based organizations were instrumental in securing resources from government and private philanthropies to deal with the urban crisis. The unintended result of this success was a general rationalization of Cleveland’s civil society around narrow practices and market-based conceptions of value. In the process, civil society was transformed into a political technology that solved various dilemmas of rule, but at the same time it was transformed into a civic monoculture that made the city especially vulnerable to foreclosure. A key implication of this analysis is that civil society has been transformed into an object and stake of urban politics and, as a result, it should not be expected to protect society against neoliberal institutional transformations

New urban governance: a review of current themes and future priorities

This review paper explores some of the key concepts, trends and approaches in contemporary urban governance research. Based on a horizon scan of recent literature and a survey of local government officials it provides a big picture on the topic and identifies areas for future research. Bridging the gap between the scholarly research focus and the perceptions and requirements of city administrators represents a major challenge for the field. Furthermore, because global and comparative research on urban governance is confronted with an absence of systematically collected, comparable data, the paper argues that future efforts will require experimenting with methodologies that can generate new empirical insights

Multicanonical molecular dynamics by variable-temperature thermostats and variable-pressure barostats

Sampling from flat energy or density distributions has proven useful in equilibrating complex systems with large energy barriers. Several thermostats and barostats are presented to sample these flat distributions by molecular dynamics. These methods use a variable temperature or pressure that is updated on the fly in the thermodynamic controller. These methods are illustrated on a Lennard-Jones system and a structure-based model of proteins

Diffusion and spatial correlations in suspensions of swimming particles

Populations of swimming microorganisms produce fluid motions that lead to dramatically enhanced diffusion of tracer particles. Using simulations of suspensions of swimming particles in a periodic domain, we capture this effect and show that it depends qualitatively on the mode of swimming: swimmers ``pushed'' from behind by their flagella show greater enhancement than swimmers that are ``pulled'' from the front. The difference is manifested by an increase, that only occurs for pushers, of the diffusivity of passive tracers and the velocity correlation length with the size of the periodic domain. A physical argument supported by a mean field theory sheds light on the origin of these effects.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev. Let