Abstract:

Duncan Green, Oxfam Strategic Adviser and LSE Professor of Practice in International Development, introduces the arguments of his new book, How Change Happens (OUP, October 2016). How Change Happens explores how political and social change takes place, and the role of individuals and organizations in influencing that change. He discusses the challenges that 'systems thinking' creates for traditional aid practices, and how a 'power and systems approach' requires activists, whether in campaigns, companies or governments, to fundamentally rethink the way they understand the world and try to influence it.

 

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Duncan Green is Senior Strategic Adviser at Oxfam GB, Professor in Practice in International Development at the London School of Economics, honorary Professor of International Development at Cardiff University and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Development Studies. He is author of How Change Happens (OUP, October 2016) and From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States can Change the World (Oxfam International, 2008, second edition 2012). His daily development blog can be found on http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/.

He was previously Oxfam’s Head of Research, a Visiting Fellow at Notre Dame University, a Senior Policy Adviser on Trade and Development at the Department for International Development (DFID), a Policy Analyst on trade and globalization at CAFOD, the Catholic aid agency for England and Wales and Head of Research and Engagement at the Just Pensions project on socially responsible investment.

 

Abstract:

Nika Gilauri, has recently published a book Practical Economics: Economic Transformation and Government Reform in Georgia 2004-2012. Former Prime Minister discusses why the Georgian case is exemplary and relevant for countries in transition. He describes how Georgia managed a breakthrough in the fight against corruption, rightsizing of government, creation of business-friendly environment, tax and customs reform, privatization of state-owned companies, etc. During the seminar, Mr. Gilauri will try to answer a question: how do you manage a transformation to bring about fast and sustainable growth? And he will approach this question from two angles: What is the right size for a government, both in terms of its regulatory footprint and in terms of its budget in relation to the size of the economy? How do you ensure a government’s efficiency in terms of its decision making, its interaction with the private sector, financial flows, and the services it provides?

 

Speaker Bio:

Mr. Gilauri has been a managing partner of Reformatics since 2012 and a senior advisor to McKinsey & Company since 2014. Earlier, he spent 8 years in the Georgian government, where he served as Minister of Energy (2004-2007), Minister of Finance (2007-2009) and Prime Minister (2009-2012). Mr. Gilauri’s term as Prime Minister was notably marked by rapid economic recovery and growth in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 global economic crisis: Georgia’s GDP rose from - 9.0% when Mr. Gilauri was appointed (Q2 2009) to +8.1% when his term came to an end (Q2 2012). Georgia’s budgetary deficit also decreased during his term as prime minister, dropping from 9% in 2009 to 3% in 2012.

During his time in government, Mr. Gilauri also guided reforms in the energy sector, fiscal policy, healthcare, customs, education and other spheres of economic development, and contributed to efforts to improve Georgia’s overall business environment. His greatest achievement as Minister of Energy was to transform Georgia from being a country of semi- permanent blackouts into a net exporter of electricity to all its neighbors.

In his more recent capacity as managing partner of Reformatics, Mr. Gilauri has been involved in over 20 advisory assignments on three continents for various high-ranking government officials and politicians including presidents and prime ministers. Mr Gilauri holds a BA in Economics and Finance from the University of Limerick (Ireland) and an MA in International Business Management from Temple University (USA).

Abstract:

As the number of migrants in Europe has risen in recent years, far right parties have fuelled voters’ fears concerning what the influx will mean for their nations. This project utilizes paired pre-election polls and actual vote shares across state and regional elections pre- and postmigrant crisis to provide evidence that far right sympathists often practiced preference falsification prior to this legitimizing shock, but that the crisis reshaped the political conversation such that far right identification is no longer deemed politically shameful. Although the theoretical framework surrounding preference falsification is well developed in the social movement literature as well as in American politics, Laura Jakli argues that it has untapped parallels in the study of Europe's far right. She also embeds priming and list experiments in a Facebook survey to determine whether there is a significant difference between subjects' willingness to identify with the far right using explicit versus implicit measurement approaches.

 

Speaker Bio:

Laura Jakli is a PhD student and FLAS fellow at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of modern European politics and political behavior. She has designed and implemented field experiments, internet-based survey experiments, and interview-based research in the US, Greece, and Hungary. Her dissertation examines the relationship between digital media polarization and individual-level attitude strength as well as aggregate-level electoral mobilization. The overall goal of her dissertation is to explain why recent far right voter turnout has been remarkably high relative to the underlying distribution of ideological adherents across the West. She holds a BA from Cornell University and an MA from UC Berkeley.

Abstract:

How do autocracies collect information on popular discontent? The existing literature has not provided a systematic answer to this question despite its fundamental importance for understanding the logic of authoritarian rule. This talk offers a theory of information gathering in single-party communist autocracies, which are the most durable subtype of authoritarian regime to emerge since World War I. It argues that the unusual longevity of communist regimes allows us to develop and test a theory of the emergence, evolution, and eventual demise of non-electoral institutions for information gathering in autocracies. The talk uses the East European communist regimes that existed prior to 1989 to generate a theory of information and the case of post-1949 China (where institutional evolution is still ongoing) as a provisional test of the theory. The talk is based on archival sources and regime-generated materials collected in China and several East European countries.

 

Speaker Bio:

Martin K. Dimitrov is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. His books include Piracy and the State: The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights in China (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Why Communism Did Not Collapse: Understanding Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Asia and Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and The Politics of Socialist Consumption (Sofia: Ciela Publishers, 2017). He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Dictatorship and Information: Autocratic Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China and two edited volumes: China-Cuba: Trajectories of Post-Revolutionary Governance and Popular Authoritarianism: The Quest for Regime Durability. After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2004, he taught at Dartmouth and held residential fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, Notre Dame, the University of Helsinki, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has conducted fieldwork in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Russia, Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Cuba.