Read the latest news, commentary, and analysis from the Ash Center.
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Contrary to conventional wisdom, the size and scale of anti-Trump protests this year have dwarfed those in 2017, and they have been extraordinarily peaceful. This article was originally published in Waging Nonviolence.
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Q+A
HKS Professor Maya Sen analyzes the new balance of power on the Supreme Court and how the conservative majority aligns with the beliefs of Americans.
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You are invited to a virtual book talk featuring Stephen Goldsmith, Derek Bok Professor of the Practice of Urban Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Kate Markin Coleman, director of ias advising, LLC. Goldsmith and Markin, co-authors of “Growing Fairly: How to Build Opportunity and Equity in Workforce Development.” They were joined by moderator Earl Buford, President, Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL.)
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At a time when many are rightly concerned about the health of American democracy, scholars and reformers are evaluating proposals to make democracy more functional and representative. One such proposal is to move beyond the winner-take-all electoral system used at the federal and state levels in the United States to enable adoption of proportional voting systems. What would be the impact of proportional voting in the United States, and what will it take to enact it?
Join panelists Rob Richie, President and CEO of FairVote, Rebecca Chavez-Houck, Community Engagement Consultant and Former Utah State Legislator, and Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University in discussion. Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at Harvard Kennedy School, Director of the Ash Center’s Democratic Governance Programs, moderated.
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Following recent victories in San Francisco and New York City, Boston advocates are looking to expand the franchise to all residents with legal status for local elections.
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As efforts get underway to expand the franchise to non-citizens in Boston, the Ash Center and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston hosted a conversation to learn about how non-citizen voting once was the norm and how it’s making a comeback.
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Harvard Ash Center Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy Miles Rapoport advocates that universal voting, a requirement that every citizen cast a ballot, could reduce polarization and pave a pathway to a more equitable American democracy.
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There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to engaging the diverse AAPI voter community says expert panel.
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The 2020 election saw a dramatic increase in Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) voter participation—increasing ten percentage points over 2016. In the runup to the 2022 midterm elections, how will political parties continue to court AAPI voters? What strategies work to reach the growing AAPI community?
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Join us for a book talk with Roselyn Hsueh, Temple University Associate Professor of Political Science and author of the forthcoming “Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism: Sectoral Pathways to Globalization in China, India, and Russia” (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Hsueh discussed how her book’s Strategic Value Framework shows that the perceived strategic value orientation of state elites rooted in significant phases of internal and external pressures shape dominant patterns of market governance, which vary by country and sector within country. Specifically, Hsueh’s research demonstrates techno-security developmentalism in China has shaped bifurcated capitalism, which governs dual-use capital- and knowledge-intensive versus labor-intensive industries. In India, neoliberal self-reliance has determined the bifurcated liberalism, which grounds transnationally networked high-tech versus rural, small-scale sectors. A bifurcated oligarchy governs defense and resource-oriented versus labor-intensive sectors in Russia shaped by resource security nationalism.
Edward Cunningham, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Director of Ash Center China Programs and of the Asia Energy and Sustainability Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School, moderated.
This discussion was co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard Kennedy School China Society, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute.