E34 Professor Wendy Schiller

We had the absolute privilege of speaking with Professor Wendy Schiller, Alison S. Ressler Professor of Political Science at Brown University and one of the most prominent voices in American politics. You have likely seen her across major outlets including MSNBC, NPR, CNN, and Bloomberg News, among countless others. Our conversation explored her work on the Senate, beginning with Electing the Senate: Indirect Democracy before the Seventeenth Amendment, where we discussed the original system of indirect elections and the new challenges introduced by direct statewide campaigns. We then turned to the modern dual representation system and how it creates both opportunities and tensions in accountability. We next shifted to polarization, drawing on her work Dynamics of American Democracy: Partisan Polarization, Political Competition, and Government Performance, where we examined the line between healthy competition that strengthens democracy and destructive competition that rewards obstruction. We talked about its roots dating back to Jefferson and Hamilton, the role of digital media in accelerating division, and how voters can still meaningfully hold governments to account even in periods of gridlock and policy oscillation. To conclude, we turned to her current scholarship on domestic violence, drawing on Inequality Across State Lines to explore how structural gaps and uneven state enforcement allow key protections to erode, particularly in preventing firearm access and limiting the conditions that allow violence to persist. We also challenged the misconception that the digital age has simply improved help-seeking, since technology often strengthens abusers’ control rather than weakening it. Stay until the end to hear who Professor Schiller would choose to have dinner with in all of history and why. Check it out!