Ash Center Foyer, 124 Mount Auburn St., Floor 2, Suite 200N
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 for the second session of the Democracy Reform: Through the Practitioner’s Lens study group with Miles Rapoport. This second session will be a conversation with John Brautigam, Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor to Maine League of Women Voters and Maine Citizens for Clean Elections; and Adam Friedman, Executive Director, Voter Choice Massachusetts, about Maine, ranked choice voting, and the promise of structural reforms. This study group is open to the Harvard and broader Boston-area university community...
JFK Jr. Forum, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 JFK Street
Join us and the Institute of Politics for a conversation with Jeff Flake, United States Senator, Arizona (2013 - 2019). Leah Wright Rigueur, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, HKS, will moderate.
Ash Center Foyer, 124 Mount Auburn St., Floor 2, Suite 200N
Join Ash Center Visting Democracy Fellow Jonathan Collins, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor of Political Science and Education at Brown University, in discussion about the way that people interact with their municipal governments and their local school boards. Collins will explore how policies and outcomes produced by school boards both begin with the extent to which school boards establish a culture of deliberation with the public - a culture that can be measured. He will also illustrate how the racial context of...
Ash Center Foyer, 124 Mount Auburn St., Floor 2, Suite 200N
Join Kurt Weyland, Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin Department of Government, in discussion. Scott Mainwaring, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor for Brazil Studies, HKS, will moderate.
To elucidate the prospects of U.S. democracy under President Trump, this talk will analyze the regime impact of populist chief executives in Europe and Latin America. Professor Weyland's investigation finds that institutional weakness is a crucial permissive cause for democratic backsliding. Yet even in weaker institutional settings, authoritarian regression only advances under special circumstances, namely when acute yet resolvable crises or extraordinary bonanzas allow populist leaders to win overwhelming support – and then override institutional constraints. Because none of these conditions prevails in the U.S., an undemocratic involution is exceedingly unlikely.
Land Lecture Hall, 4th Floor, Belfer Building, HKS
Join us and the Women and Public Policy Program for a conversation with Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Associate Professor of History at the New School; and Kinitra Brooks, Advancing Equity through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Petrezla is currently writing a book about American fitness culture titled, Fit Nation: How America Embraced Exercise as the...
Land Lecture Hall, 4th Floor, Belfer Building, HKS
Join us and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies for a discussion with Shirley Yu, Non-Resident Ash Center Asia Program Fellow, about the Belt and Road Initiative. Anthony Saich, Ash Center Director, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs, will moderate. Lunch will be served.
Rubenstein 414B , David Ellwood Democracy Lab, Harvard Kennedy School
Join us for an HKS Gender and Security Seminar Series event featuring Aaron Belkin, Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University and author of How We Won: Progressive Lessons from the Repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.' Juliette Kayyem, Belfer Lecturer in International Security, HKS, will moderate.Lunch will be served.
