News, Media & Publications

In a real-time update of last week’s interview on gerrymandering, MU Political Science Professor and Kinder Institute faculty member Jay Dow sat down with Newsy’s Cliff Judy to weigh in on the Supreme Court’s June 18 decision against intervening in two high-profile partisan gerrymanders—a Democratic gerrymander in Maryland and a Republican gerrymander in Wisconsin.

It’s the practice of drawing voting districts that gives one person’s vote more weight than another’s. And while that sounds blatantly unfair, gerrymandering is as old as the republic itself—it was used in the very first congressional elections for a seat in Virginia. The Supreme Court heard two cases in the past year—Gill v. Whitford […]

Many legal experts believe the Supreme Court will inevitably hear a case about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. But historically, justices of the nation’s highest court have largely deferred to the executive branch on issues such as immigration and national security. And SCOTUS is especially hesitant to get involved in any […]

A news item so exciting it gets its own post, Kinder Institute Director Justin Dyer and Kinder Institute Associate Professor of Constitutional Democracy Adam Seagrave took to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently to address the sometimes contested distinction between calling the United States a democracy vs. calling the nation a republic. Read the full text of […]

Thanks to the hard work of our longtime collaborator Dr. Steve Belko, Executive Director of the Missouri Humanities Council, the Kinder Institute has officially entered a statewide alliance of six nonprofit organizations and government agencies mutually committed to developing educational, community outreach, and scholarly research projects and events related to the Missouri Bicentennial. Representatives of […]

A pair of Kinder Institute faculty members sat down during the Fall 2017 semester with our friends at Columbia-based NPR affiliate KBIA (91.3) to talk about projects they have in the works.