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Abstract:

We live at a time of the greatest progress amongst the global poor in human history. Never before have so many people in so many developing countries made so much progress in reducing poverty, improving health, increasing incomes, expanding health, reducing conflict, and encouraging democracy. The Great Surge tells the story of this unprecedented progress over the last two decades, why it happened, and what it may portend for the future.

“A brilliant new book” ~ Francis Fukuyama

“A stunning, wise, and deeply hopeful book that anyone concerned about global human development must read.”~ Larry Diamond

“Powerful, lucid, and revelatory” ~ George Soros

“A terrific book” ~ Nicholas Kristof

“With his typical care and detail, Steven Radelet describes humanity’s greatest hits over the last twenty years—never have we lived in a time when so many are doing so well” ~ Bono

 

 

Speaker Bio:

Steven Radelet holds the Donald F. McHenry Chair in Global Human Development and is Director of the Global Human Development Program at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He serves as an economic adviser to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, and is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Professor Radelet joined the Georgetown faculty in 2012 after serving as Chief Economist of USAID and Senior Adviser for Development for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (1999-2002). From 2002-09 he was Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development. He spent twelve years with the Harvard Institute for International Development, while teaching in both the Harvard economics department and Kennedy School of Government. While with HIID, he spent four years as resident adviser to the Ministry of Finance in Jakarta, Indonesia, and two years with the Ministry of Finance and Trade in The Gambia. He and his wife served as Peace Corps Volunteers in Western Samoa. Dr. Radelet is the author or coauthor of several books and dozens of academic articles, including The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World (Simon & Schuster, 2015), Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries are Leading the Way (Center for Global Development, 2010) and the textbook Economics of Development (W.W. Norton, 7th Edition, 2013). He holds Ph.D. and master's degrees in public policy from Harvard University and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Central Michigan University.

Abstract:

The coup of July 3, 2013 brought a decisive end to Egypt’s brief experiment with elected civilian governance that followed the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. Early attempts to understand the downfall of the “Second Egyptian Republic” focused largely around the events that immediately preceded the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi. This presentation adds historical depth to these discussions by analyzing the role of institutional legacies in contributing to that outcome. Specifically, decades-old state interventions have structured Egypt’s political field in ways that encourage defections from pacted transitions in the present moment.

 

Speaker Bio:

Hesham Sallam is a research associate at CDDRL and serves as the associate director of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. He is also a co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine and a former program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His research focuses on Islamist movements and the politics of economic reform in the Arab World. Sallam’s research has previously received the support of the Social Science Research Council and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Past institutional affiliations include Middle East Institute, Asharq Al-Awsat, and the World Security Institute. He is editor of Egypt's Parliamentary Elections 2011-2012: A Critical Guide to a Changing Political Arena (Tadween Publishing, 2013). Sallam received a Ph.D. in government (2015) and an M.A. in Arab studies (2006) from Georgetown University, and a B.A. in political science from the University of Pittsburgh (2003).

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Abstract:

Will Marine Le Pen be the next French President in 2017?

Since she took over the National Front in 2011, Marine Le Pen has carried the far right party to first place, winning an unprecedented 30% of the votes in France’s latest December 2015 elections. What does she say that resonates with French voters so strongly? And how did she manage to turn the once infamous “FN” into an almost mainstream party that claims to be the last champion of French republican values?

Using text mining software and textual analyses, Cécile Alduy has ciphered more than 500 speeches and texts by Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen to pinpoint exactly how, and on what topics, the daughter’s discourse differs from that of her father.

In this talk, literary studies meet digital humanities and political science to crack the new National Front rhetorical code and uncover the deeper ideological and mythological structures beyond the stylistic polishing.

 

Speaker Bio:

Cécile Alduy is Associate Professor of French literature and culture at Stanford University. She is the author of Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste (Seuil, 2015) and Politique des “Amours” (Droz, 2007) and co-editor of the special issue “The Charlie Hebdo Attacks and their Aftermath” for Occasion, a Stanford University online peer-reviewed publication. A specialist of the National Front and French political discourse, she is a contributor to Politico, The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Al Jazeera America, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Rue89 and Le Monde.

Abstract:

Electoral competition, like athletic competition, requires its own norms of fair play. While the rules of the game, and the institutional umpire to enforce those rules, are important components for achieving the goal that the competition be fair, they do not suffice. The participants themselves must have their own standards of fair play apart from the rules and the referee. This need is particularly acute with respect to negative campaign ads, since the First Amendment bars the government from umpiring the fairness of those ads. But the same problem applies to other aspects of electoral competition, including compliance with campaign finance rules. What are these norms of fair electoral competition? Are they only intuitive, or can they be systematized? More specifically, insofar as incumbent candidates are officeholders, does due process constrain the use of their power to attain an unfair advantage in their race for reelection?

 

Speaker Bio:

Edward Foley directs Election Law @ Moritz at Ohio State’s law school, where he also holds the Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law. His book Ballot Ballots: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States, published by Oxford University Press, was available as of December 2015. Ned also serves as the reporter for the American Law Institute’s Election Law Project, which is developing nonpartisan rules for the resolution of disputed elections. (The American Law Institute is the well-respected professional society responsible for the Restatements of Law and the Model Penal Code, among many other projects.) While Ned has special expertise on the topics of recounts, he is conversant in all topics of election law, including redistricting and campaign finance, and recently co-authored a casebook Election Law and Litigation: The Judicial Regulation of Politics (Aspen 2014), which covers all aspects of election law. He and his casebook co-authors also have a contract with Oxford University Press to write a treatise on election law—remarkably the first of its kind in the United States in over a century. He is also a co-author of From Registration to Recounts: The Ecosystems of Five Midwestern States (2007).

Abstract:

Compulsory voting reinforces the distinctive and valuable role that elections play in contemporary democracy. Some scholars have suggested that mandatory voting laws can improve government responsiveness to members of poor and marginalized groups who are less likely to vote. Critics of compulsory voting object that citizens can participate in a wide variety of ways; voting is not important enough to justify forcing people to do it. These critics neglect the importance of voting’s particular role in contemporary democratic practice, though. The case for compulsory voting rests on an implicit, but widely shared, understanding of elections as special moments of mass participation that manifest the equal political authority of all citizens. The most prominent objections to mandatory voting fail to appreciate this distinctive role for voting and the way it is embedded within a broader democratic framework.

 

Speaker Bio:

Emilee is an assistant professor of Political Science at Stanford. Her current research project examines the distinctive value of voting in contemporary democratic practice, and its significance for electoral reform and the ethics of participation.

 

 

 

Abstract:

From El Salvador to Pakistan, high levels of internal violence characterize a growing number of poorly consolidated electoral democracies. Gangs, violent criminals, insurgents, and low-intensity conflict seem to entrench in many of these countries for decades. But some countries have managed to reduce extreme levels of violence. How did they succeed? And why were other, similarly situated countries unable to achieve similar success? Based on current and historical case studies, this upcoming book identifies continuities that suggest why these countries are so violent, and commonalities in the paths countries have taken to reduce violence. The findings are policy-focused and unexpected, even undesired. But they offer ideas to policy-makers based on the reality of what has worked, rather than the hopes of what might be achieved.

 

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she focuses on the rule of law, security, and governance. She previously served for nearly ten years as the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project, a movement to promote U.S. security policies that advance stability, security, and human dignity worldwide, for which Time Magazine named her one of the top 40 under 40 political leaders in the United States. From 2011-2014 she was chosen by Hillary Clinton to serve on the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, which advises the Secretary of State quarterly. Rachel has consulted on governance, security, and the rule of law for the U.S. and other governments, and international, nonprofit, and private organizations. She appears regularly in national and international media, and is the author of multiple books and articles, including Advancing the Rule of Law Abroad: Next Generation Reform, which was named one of the best foreign policy books of 2012 by Foreign Affairs magazine. She received her M. Phil and D. Phil from St. Antony’s College, Oxford, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar, and her B.A. from Yale University. Rachel was born in a log cabin on a dirt road in her beloved Fairbanks, Alaska.

ABSTRACT

A common assumption in political economy is that voters are self-regarding maximizers of material goods, choosing their preferred level of social spending accordingly. In contrast, students of American politics have emphasized the key role of an other-regarding motive that makes support for social transfers conditional on the perceived deservingness of recipients. The two motives often conflict as large portions of the poor (rich) find recipients undeserving (deserving). I argue that material self-interest overruns perceptions of deservingness when the share of income affected by social transfers is high. Using European data, I show that low (high) income individuals are less (more) likely to be driven by considerations of deservingness. Cross-nationally, the more working-age benefits are evenly spread across income groups, the less deservingness considerations  permeate public debates on welfare state reform.  This framework has important implications for understanding attitudinal change in two high inequality countries, the United States and Great Britain.

 

 

SPEAKER BIO

Charlotte Cavaille is a research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Toulouse. She received a PhD in Government and Social Policy from Harvard University in November 2014. Her work examines changes in mass attitudes toward redistributive policies in advanced capitalist countries. Her dissertation focuses on the disconnect between rising income inequality and stable levels of support for income redistribution in Great Britain and the United States. Some of her findings have been published in the Journal of Politics.