Join Nahomi Ichino, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, in disucssion. Tarek Masoud, Professor of Public Policy and Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations, will moderate. 

Ghana's major parties recently reformed primary election rules which offers a rare opportunity to assess the effects franchise expansion in contemporary new democracies, where universal suffrage was already established at independence. In this talk, Ichino will propose that democratizing candidate selection by expanding the primary electorate has two consequences in patronage-oriented political systems: the electorate will have more diverse preferences and vote buying will become a less effective strategy. These changes, in turn, affect the types of politicians who seek and win legislative nominations.  Using an original dataset on candidate entry and nominations, she will show that expanding the primary electorate opened paths to office for politicians from social groups that were previously excluded, including women and members of ethnic groups outside a party's core national coalition.... Read more about Democracy in Hard Places -- Democratizing the Party: The Effects of Primary Election Reforms in Ghana

Join us and the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center for a discussion on the political roots of conspiracy theories in the Middle East with Tarek Masoud, Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations, Harvard Kennedy School; and Faculty Chair, Middle East Initiative.... Read more about Ash Community Speaker Series: Political Roots of Conspiracy Theories in the Middle East

Democracy appears to be in retreat, not just in fragile states, but also in the West, where we have long taken such concepts as the rule of law and a free and independent press for granted. Join M. Steven Fish, University of California, Berkeley, for a discussion on how can we not only understand this anti-democratic surge, but learn how democracy advocates can surmount this growing threat. Tarek Masoud, Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations at HKS will moderate.... Read more about Democracy in a Suddenly Hard Place: Confronting the Authoritarian Challenge in America

The conventional wisdom is that democracy emerges from the ashes of a collapsed authoritarian regime. In other words, democratic prospects look most enticing when dictatorships become weak, unstable or fall. Counterintuitively, democracy in Asia has tended to emerge when authoritarian regimes have been relatively strong. We call this democracy-through-strength, and illuminate this model through historical examples in Taiwan, Korea and Indonesia, and assess the prospects of democracy in authoritarian stalwarts like China.

Join Joseph Wong, Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School of Global Affairs, a Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto, in discussion. Scott Mainwaring, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor of Brazil Studies, will moderate.... Read more about Democracy in Hard Places Seminar -- Democracy When You Least Expect It: Strong State Democratization in Authoritarian Asia