College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Speaker: Yuriy Matsiyevsky

Title: Why Ukraine has not succeeded in democratization under Yushchenko

Bio: Yuriy Matsiyevsky is a Fulbright Scholar from Ostroh Academy, Ukraine.

*This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science and the Center for European Studies.

Speaker: Joel Migdal

Title: The U.S. and Israel in a Changing Middle East

Abstract: Assessing the U.S. in the Middle East at the end of the twentieth century, William Quandt wrote, “No other country has gained more influence and succeeded better in protecting its interests in the region—certainly not the old colonial powers of Britain and France, and not the Soviet Union (and now Russia).” The next decade, though, saw, in the words of Rashid Khalidi, “the precipitate decline in the influence and standing of the United States in the Middle East…, from a position of unparalleled worldwide power, influence, and popularity at the end of the Cold War, to one of nearly universal opprobrium with public opinion in the Middle East….” The lecture analyzes the rising and falling fortunes of the United States in the region before and after 9/11, Washington’s changing strategies, and its relationship to Israel. It explores, too, the possibilities for America’s future as a Middle East player.

Bio: Joel S. Migdal is the Robert F. Philip Professor of International Studies in the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and Director of the Near and Middle East Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program. He was the founding chair of the University of Washington’s International Studies Program. Dr. Migdal was formerly associate professor of Government at Harvard University and senior lecturer at Tel-Aviv University. Among his books are Peasants, Politics, and Revolution; Palestinian Society and Politics; Strong Societies and Weak States; State in Society; Through the Lens of Israel; The Palestinian People: A History (with Baruch Kimmerling); and Boundaries and Belonging. In 1993, he received the University of Washington’s Distinguished Teaching Award; in 1994, the Washington State Governor’s Writers Award; in 2006, the Marsha L. Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award; and, in 2008, the Provost Distinguished Lectureship.

*This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the Ehrlich Eminent Scholar Chair in Political Science.

Title: Roundtable on "The Arab Spring"

Abstract: This roundtable was organized by Hashem Zanaty, graduate student, Political Science.

Panelists:

• Joel Migdal, University of Washington (International Studies and Political Science)
• Badredine Arfi, University of Florida (Political Science)
• Patricia Woods, University of Florida (Political Science)
• Michelle Campos, University of Florida (History)
• Matthew Jacobs, University of Florida (History)

Speaker: Sidney Tarrow

Title: Revolution in Words

Abstract: What's in a word? Drawing on three major revolutions -- the English, American, and French -- Sidney Tarrow examines how the language of protest and revolution diffused, and influences the development of ordinary language. He closes his talk with some reflections on the language of the Arab Spring and the Occupy protests of 2011.

Bio: Sidney Tarrow is Emeritus Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government at Cornell University. Tarrow has his BA from Syracuse, his MA from Columbia, and his PhD from Berkeley. His work has covered a variety of interests, beginning with Italian communism (his first book was Peasant Communism in Southern Italy, Yale 1967), then shifting to comparative communism in Communism in Italy and France (Princeton 1972, ed., with Donald L.M. Blackmer). In the 1970s he made a long foray into comparative local politics (Between Center and Periphery, Yale 1978), before, in the 1980s, turning to a quantitative and qualitative reconstruction of Italian protest cycle of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in Democracy and Disorder (Oxford 1989), which received the prize for the best book in Collective Behavior and Social Movements from the American Sociological Association. His most recent books are Power in Movement (Cambridge 1994, 1998), Dynamics of Contention (with Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly, Cambridge 2001), Contentious Europeans (with Doug Imig, Rowman and Littlefield 2001), Transnational Protest and Global Activism (with Donatella della Porta, Rowman and Littlefield 2004), The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge 2005) and Contentious Politics (with Charles Tilly, Paradigm 2006).

*This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the Ehrlich Eminent Scholar Chair in Political Science.

Speaker: Jeffrey Kopstein

Title: Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogrom as Prelude to the Holocaust

Bio: Jeffrey Kopstein is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and Acting Director of its Centre for Jewish Studies. He is the author and editor of three books and forty articles on Central and East European politics and history. He is the recipient of multiple awards and has held fellowships at Harvard University's Centre for European Studies, Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, and the University of Munich as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. Professor Kopstein is currently co-authoring a book on pogrom violence at the beginning of World War II.

*This event will take place at Hillel, 2020 W. University Ave. It is co-sponsored by the Raymond and Miriam Ehrlich Eminent Scholar Chair in Political Science and the Center for European Studies.

Speaker: Fred Dallmayr

Title: Comparative Political Theory: What is it, and what is it good for?

Abstract: In the broad arena of the humanities and social sciences, a new field of inquiry has emerged in recent times: that of "comparative" or "cross-cultural" political theory. The lecture will discuss a number of salient questions. What is the point and the basic character of this type of inquiry? What are the impulses or motivating factors promoting the turn to comparative theorizing? Dallmayr points to two main factors, one exogenous and the other more endogenous to theory: the empirical processes of globalization evident in the rise of a global market and global systems of communication; and the transformation of traditional Western philosophy evident in such perspectives as language philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. He suggests three types of benefits of comparative political theory: pragmatic-utilitarian, moral-prescriptive, and experiential and ethically transformative purpose or "good."

Bio: Fred Dallmayr is Packey J. Dee Professor in the departments of philosophy and political science at the University of Notre Dame. He holds a Doctor of Law degree from the University of Munich (1955) and a Ph.D. in political science from Duke University (1960). He is a political theorist specializing in modern and contemporary European political thought (Heidegger, hermeneutics, Frankfurt School, deconstruction, democratic theory, multiculturalism), with an additional interest in comparative or cross-cultural philosophy (non-Western political thought). He has been a visiting professor at Hamburg University in Germany and at the New School for Social Research in New York, and a Fellow at Nuffield College in Oxford. He has been teaching at Notre Dame University since 1978. During 1991-92 he was in India on a Fulbright research grant. He is past president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (SACP). He is also a member of the International Coordinating Committee of “World Public Forum - Dialogue of Civilizations”, and of the Scientific Committee of “RESET - Dialogue on Civilizations”.

*This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science Research Seminar in Politics and the Ehrlich Eminent Scholar Chair in Political Science.

Speaker: Anthony Pereira

Title: Brazilian Foreign Policy Since 2002: The Honduras Crisis and Beyond

Bio: Anthony W. Pereira is Professor of Brazilian Studies and Director of the Brazil Institute at King’s College London. He obtained his B.A. from Sussex University (U.K.) in 1982 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in 1986 and 1991, respectively. He has held teaching positions at Harvard, the New School, The Fletcher School at Tufts, Tulane, and the University of East Anglia. His research interests include: comparative politics, democracy and authoritarianism, political regimes and regime change, military rule, social movements, citizenship and human rights, and new institutions of accountability in Brazilian public security. He is the author of Political (In)justice: Authoritarianism and the Rule of Law in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina (Pittsburgh University Press, 2005); Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation (with Diane Davis, eds, Cambridge University Press, 2003), and The End of the Peasantry: The Emergence of the Rural Labor Movement in Northeast Brazil, 1961-1988 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997). Dr. Pereira’s current research concerns debates about violence and public security in Brazil, and the politics of public security reform over the last few decades. Detailed information about his research and numerous publications can be found here.

Speaker: Krzysztof Jasiewicz

Title: The Curious Case of Poland’s Vanishing Left

Abstract: In the October 9, 2011, Polish general election, the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), which had re-invented itself in the 1990s as a genuine social-democratic party won 8.2% of the popular vote and only 5.9% of seats in the Sejm, the main chamber of Poland’s bi-cameral parliament. In the elections to the Senate (100 districts), the SLD did not win a single seat. Only a decade ago, in September 2001, a coalition led by the SLD won 41.0% of the popular vote, 47% of seats in the Sejm, and 75 seats in the Senate.

Analysts tend to seek the causes of this spectacular demise on the supply side of politics. In particular, they point out the involvement of many top SLD leaders in several highly publicized corruption scandals. However, this analysis does not seem to tell the whole story. The reasons for the continuing weakness of the entire Left may be embedded in the demand side of politics, that is in the attitudes and policy preferences of the electorate. Empirical evidence gathered thus far indicates that voters who support political redistribution of national wealth (welfare state policies historically promoted by the Left), tend to be very conservative or traditionalist in their cultural values. In contrast, those who lean in the liberal direction in cultural matters, tend to support the free market/free enterprise approach to the economy and social policy.

Bio: Krzysztof Jasiewicz, a native of Poland, received his MA in Sociology at Warsaw University (1972) and his Ph.D. at the Polish Academy of Sciences (1976, also in Sociology). He has taught and/or held fellowships at Warsaw U., Harvard, Oxford, UCLA, and the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, among others. He has published extensively on elections, voting behaviour, party systems, and political attitudes in Poland and other Central European states. Recently, his articles appeared in the Journal of Democracy, East European Politics and Societies, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, and European Journal of Political Research.

*This talk is co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies and the Ehrlich Eminent Scholar Chair in Political Science.

Speaker: Mark Peterson

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA

Bio: Mark Peterson is Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UCLA.

Speaker: Henry Brady

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA

Bio: Henry Brady is Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at UC Berkeley.

*Professor Brady has also been invited to be the keynote speaker at the Department's annual Spring Banquet on Tuesday, March 13.

Title: Graduate Student Panel Presentations

Panelists: 

Ann Witulski, "Contextualizing the Arab Spring: The Role of Islamic Education in Ideological Conflicts Between Leftists and Islamists in Morocco"

Oumar Ba, “(Re)Drawing the African Map: A Critique of the Africa's Secessionist Deficit Argument”

Emily Hauser, “The Origins of Ethnic Politics in Nigeria”

Title: Graduate Student Panel Presentations

Panelists: 

Adam Bilinski, “Landlordism and Democratization in the Balkans before the First World War”

Dong-Joon Jung, "Preventing Patronage Politics: How Parties Interact with the Public in Post-Communist State-building Processes"

Kevin Baron and Jon Whooley, “Deal Breaker: The Influence of Military Contracting and Congressional Voting on Foreign Policy”

Amanda Edmiston, “A Quantitative Analysis of the Effect of High-Stakes Standardized Testing on Curriculum Breadth in Non-Tested Subject Areas”

Speaker: Sean Theriault

Title: The Gingrich Senators

Abstract: Donald Matthews' Senate of the 1950s, which operated under strict folkways, and Barbara Sinclair's Senate of the mid-1970s and 1980s, which highlighted each senator's individuality, have both given way to the partisan Senate of the 21st century, where loyalty to the institution matters less than loyalty to party, and where compromise and negotiations are only signs of weakness. Sean Theriault argues that the Gingrich Senators, those Republicans who served with Newt Gingrich in the House prior to their Senate careers, are primarily responsible for the rise of the contemporary partisan Senate. He shows how the Gingrich Senators, which include 40 senators -- and 22 who are currently serving -- are distinct not only in their more conservative voting record, but also in fulfilling their roles as partisan warriors.

Bio: Sean Theriault researches American political institutions, primarily the U.S. Congress. His current research is on the Gingrich Senators and how they have transformed the U.S. Senate. His classes include the U.S. Congress, Congressional Elections, Party Polarization in the United States, and the Politics of the Catholic Church. He has received numerous teaching awards, including UT Professor the Year in 2011 and the Friar Society Teaching Fellowship (the biggest undergraduate teaching award at UT) in 2009.

Professor Theriault has published two books, The Power of the People: Congressional Competition, Public Attention, and Voter Retribution (Ohio State University Press, 2005) and Party Polarization in Congress (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He has also published numerous articles on subjects ranging from presidential rhetoric to congressional careers and the Louisiana Purchase to the Pendleton Act of 1883.

*This talk is sponsored by the Manning J. Dauer Eminent Scholar Chair in Political Science.

Speakers:Ruchan Kaya and Michael Bernhard

Title: Are Elections Mechanisms of Authoritarian Stability or Democratization? Evidence from Postcommunist Eurasia

Abstract:For some theorists elections are the essential element defining democracy (Schumpeter 1947, Huntington 1991). Theorists of the Third Wave of democratization argued that elections in themselves were not sufficient for democracy, but that democratic founding elections were a necessary benchmark (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986, Linz and Stepan 1996). In the last decade, others have radically reexamined elections in authoritarian contexts arguing that they are congruent with authoritarianism and actually help to stabilize non-democratic forms of rule (Schedler 2006, Ghandi and Przeworski 2007, Magaloni 2008, Levitsky and Way 2010). Lindberg (2006), in his work focused on Africa, and Howard and Roessler (2006) using a cross-national sample, have challenged this reasoning by arguing that elections can be a mechanism for democratization. In this paper we test whether elections have functioned as a mechanism of change or of neo-authoritarian stability in the postcommunist world. We generally find that elections neither promote democracy nor strengthen authoritarianism. However, we do find that in energy-rich states elections promote authoritarianism, though of a somewhat more benign sort.