About
Professor Mickey's undergraduate courses concern American politics, often in cross-national perspective. He won the Department's Tronstein Prize for outstanding undergraduate teaching in 2019, was named an Honored Instructor by the office of Living Learning Programs in 2018, and was nominated for the University's Golden Apple Award for best lecturer in 2017 and 2021. He was the Department's graduation speaker in 2020, 2022, and 2023. He currently serves as the placement director for the department's Ph.D. students.
Formerly the Department's Diversity Ally, Professor Mickey in 2011 co-founded (with Nick Valentino and Elizabeth Wingrove) and frequently organizes the Department's Eldersveld Emerging Scholars Conference. While Director of Graduate Studies, Mickey began research and student-support collaborations with departments of political science at *the* Jackson State University and the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras. Vince Hutchings, D'Andra Orey (Jackson State), and Mickey -- along with students at Jackson State and Michigan -- are developing a research project on perceptions of police and policing in the United States. He serves as a faculty mentor in the Rackham Graduate School's Aspiring Fellows program and its Summer Research Opportunity Program, and since 2016 has taught Summer Bridge Scholars through Michigan's famed Comprehensive Studies Program. Mickey is now the Department's Placement Director.
Recent Courses Taught
- Introduction to Research Design (undergraduate)
- Sundown Towns and Their Legacies (undergraduate)
- Introduction to American Politics (undergraduate)
- Policing & Democracy (undergraduate)
- Reconstruction (undergraduate)
- U.S. Democratic Stability in Comparative Perspective (undergraduate)
- American Nation Building from Reconstruction to Iraq and Afghanistan (undergraduate)
- American Politics Pro-Seminar (graduate)
- American Political Development (graduate)
- Race & American Political Development (graduate) (with Pam Brandwein)
Professor Mickey's research focuses on U.S. politics in comparative and historical perspective. He is interested in the country's belated (as well as incomplete) democratization by the 1970s, its current democratic backsliding, and the place of racial conflict in each. He is the author of Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972 (Princeton University Press), which won the 2016 J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book on politics & history published in the past two years (American Political Science Association), and the 2017 V. O. Key Award for the best book on southern politics (Southern Political Science Association). Recent articles include an analysis of challenges to democracy in America's states and an exploration with Ashley Jardina (University of Virginia) of the relationship of white racial solidarity to support for democracy. The latter grows out of ongoing research on racial conflict and elite appeals with Vince Hutchings and the late, great Hanes Walton, Jr.
Professor Mickey is now at work with David Waldner (University of Virginia) on a book-length study of America's Reconstruction in comparative perspective with other postwar efforts to construct democratic polities and diverse economies in societies dominated by labor-repressive agriculture.
He is also exploring the historical legacies of mid-20th century urban racial conflict for America's contemporary policing with Jake Grumbach (Goldman School of Public Policy, UC-Berkeley) and Dan Ziblatt (Harvard University & WZB-Berlin). This work is generously supported by the Russell Sage Foundation. A working paper from this project is available here. In 2024, Mickey (with Matt Lassiter) drafted a report on the history of Detroit policing for the city's Reparations Task Force, and is currently a member of the Reparative Justice Research Group at the Rackham Graduate School's Institute for Interdisciplinary Study.
Mickey co-edits (with Dan Slater) the newsletter of APSA's Democracy and Autocracy section.
Before attending graduate school, Mickey was based in Prague for five years at a not-for-profit organization involved in policy assistance and research; there, he focused on ethnic minority political parties in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. From 2006-2008, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the School of Public Health at UC-Berkeley, where he studied the political development of America's community health centers program.
Affiliations
- Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research
- Center for Emerging Democracies
Fields of Study
- American Government and Politics
- Comparative Government and Politics
- Political Development
- Race, Ethnicity and Politics
