Based on past and current ethnographic research in the Parisian metropolitan region, I discuss how racial and ethnic minorities understand and respond to their racialization in a context in which race and ethnicity are not legitimate or acknowledged, and how a suspect citizenship is created. I will discuss how racial and ethnic minorities are “citizen outsiders” as evident of France’s “racial project” (Omi and Winant 1994), which marks distinctions outside of explicit categorization. I explore not only how race marks individuals outside of formal categories, but also how people respond to these distinctions in terms of a racism-related issue, here, police violence and brutality against racial and ethnic minorities. I will also discuss how activists frame their growing social problem given the constraints of French Republican ideology.

Jean Beaman is Associate Professor of Sociology, with affiliations with Political Science, Feminist Studies, Global Studies, and the Center for Black Studies Research, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously, she was faculty at Purdue University and held visiting fellowships at Duke University and the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). Her research is ethnographic in nature and focuses on race/ethnicity, racism, international migration, and state-sponsored violence in both France and the United States. She is author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Her current book project is on suspect citizenship and belonging, anti-racist mobilization, and activism against police violence in France. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. She is also an Editor of H-Net Black Europe, an Associate Editor of the journal, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and Corresponding Editor for the journal Metropolitics/Metropolitiques.

 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly gained dominance of liberal democracy as a political regime was accompanied by a new dominance of liberal democracy as a descriptive language. Concepts of political science, sociology, and economics which had been developed for the analysis of Western-type polities were applied to the various phenomena in the newly liberated countries. Bálint Magyar and Bálint Madlovics from Central European University (CEU DI) argue that the language of liberal democracies blurs the understanding of the current state of post-communism as it leads to conceptual stretching and brings in a host of hidden presumptions.

Magyar and Madlovics present at Stanford their most recent book, The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2020). It is a comprehensive attempt to break with the traditional analysis, proposing a systematic renewal of our descriptive vocabulary. The authors have created categories as well as a whole new grammar for the region’s political, economic, and social phenomena. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries, and China, their study provides concepts and theories to analyze the actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships.

Bálint Magyar is a Research Fellow at CEU Democracy Institute (since 2020), holding University Doctoral degree in Political Economy (1980) from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He has published and edited numerous books on post-communist mafia states since 2013. He was an Open Society Fellow for carrying out comparative studies in this field (2015-2016), Hans Speier Visiting Professor at New School (2017), Senior Fellow at CEU Institute for Advanced Study (2018-2019), and Research Fellow at Financial Research Institute (2010-2020). Formerly, he was an activist of the Hungarian anti-communist dissident movement, founder of the liberal party of Hungary (SZDSZ, 1988), Member of Hungarian Parliament (1990-2010), and Minister of Education (1996-1998, 2002-2006).

Bálint Madlovics is a political scientist, economist, and sociologist, currently working as a Research Assistant at CEU Democracy Institute (since 2020). He holds an MA in Political Science (2018) from Central European University in Budapest, a BA in Applied Economics (2016) from Corvinus University of Budapest, and a BA in Sociology (2021) from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He contributed a chapter to one of Bálint Magyar’s volumes on the post-communist mafia state of Hungary, and has co-authored past and upcoming publications since 2015. He was a Research fellow of Financial Research Institute in Budapest (2018-2019).

 

During the past decade, many parliamentary democracies have experienced bargaining delays when forming governments. For example, after the Swedish parliamentary election in 2018, it took 134 days to install a new government, which is especially surprising since all previous Swedish governments since the 1930s have formed within four weeks. The previous literature has attributed protracted government formation processes to a high degree of preference uncertainty among the political parties and a high level of bargaining complexity (resulting, for example, from a high degree of party-system fragmentation). We draw on such theories, but we also highlight a feature that hasn’t received much attention in the previous literature on bargaining duration: “pre-electoral commitments.” We consider such commitments both in terms of positive statements made by parties about alliances with other parties and in terms of negative statements about parties that are considered “pariahs.” Pre-electoral commitments can reduce complexity in a bargaining situation by ruling out certain potential governments as viable alternatives, but they can also increase complexity in cases where the outcome of the election is different from what the parties expected: parties then have to worry about the electoral and intra-party costs that are associated with breaking commitments made before the election. We evaluate our hypotheses using a nested research design, combining a large-n study of approximately 400 government-formation processes in 17 West European parliamentary democracies (1945-2018) with an in-depth case study that is based on 37 interviews with leading Swedish politicians concerning the government-formation process in 2018–2019. This allows us to analyze the effects of pre-electoral commitments on bargaining duration and the causal mechanisms that explain these effects.

 

Jan Teorell, Professor of Political Science and holder of the Lars Johan Hierta professorial chair, received his PhD in 1998 from the Department of Government, Uppsala University, on a dissertation on intra-party democracy. In 2004-2006, he served as Project Coordinator at the Quality of Government Institute, Göteborg University, responsible for creating the Quality of Government Dataset (www.qog.pol.gu.se), which won the Lijphart, Przeworski, Verba Award for Best Dataset by the APSA Comparative Politics Section at the 2009 Annual Meetings (together with Bo Rothstein and Sören Holmberg), and the Varieties of Democracy dataset (www.v-dem.net), which won the same award in 2016 (together with a large international research team). His research interests include political methodology, history, Swedish and comparative politics, comparative democratization, corruption, and state making.

In many countries around the world, women's enfranchisement marked the single largest expansion in the eligible electorate. In Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany, the electorate more than doubled once women could vote, while in countries that rolled out women's suffrage gradually, such as the UK and Norway, even the second smaller reforms saw the electorate grow by more than a third. The sheer size of the expansion had the potential to transform electoral politics, a prospect that provoked optimism and fear alike: for those who fought for women’s suffrage, the victory brought legitimacy and new beginnings; yet for those who fought against, the reform heralded instability. Did women's suffrage transform electoral politics for good or for bad? Did it increase electoral instability? Did women favor particular parties?

Prominent theories of post-suffrage politics suggest either that women would vote conservatively, or that women's voting power would be vitiated by their reluctance to turn out. Leveraging fine grained municipal level data from Sweden, which includes turnout figures separated by sex, to examine the impact of women's suffrage on electoral politics, we argue that the geography of the gender gap, both in terms of turnout and vote choice, jointly determine the impact of women's votes. Using three methods to estimate the gender vote gap, we find that in cities, women were slightly more likely to vote for the left than men. Although women turned out at lower rates than men overall, their concentration in cities produced a national gender vote gap for the left. These findings, which highlight how diversity among women and electoral geography produce electoral outcomes, complicate longstanding theories about the "traditional" gender voting gap.

Dr. Dawn Teele holds a B.A. in Economics from Reed College, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn she was a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics. Dr. Teele's research has been published in a variety of outlets in political science, including the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, and Politics & Society. She is editor of a volume on social science methodology, Field Experiments and Their Critics  (Yale University Press 2014), and co-editor of Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy (Temple University Press 2020). In 2018, Princeton University Press published her book Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote which won the Luebbert Prize for the best book in Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association.

 

Which has more of a “single market,” the United States or the European Union, and why? Most scholars and policy-makers will expect easy answers. Surely interstate exchange faces fewer regulatory barriers in the fluid American arena than between European countries. We argue that this common wisdom profoundly mischaracterizes both polities. The US never attempted to complete a project remotely like Europe’s SMP. Europeans have now removed or mitigated a lengthening list of barriers that Americans retain. Across the “four freedoms” of goods, services, persons and capital, today’s EU unambiguously claims and actively exercises more authority to require interstate openness than the US has ever considered. Existing explanations that privilege economic flows, institutional path dependence, or cultural attitudes struggle with these actual outcomes. Our explanation highlights contingent connections that political movements in each arena forged between ideas about markets and governance, channeling the 20th-century “return to markets” into contrasting varieties of neoliberalism.

 

Matthias Matthijs is Associate Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and Senior Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC. Since May 2019, he also serves as the chair of the Executive Committee of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA). He is the author of Ideas and Economic Crises in Britain (2012) and co-editor (with Mark Blyth) of The Future of the Euro (2015). He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in the fields of comparative and international political economy, on the politics of economic ideas, and on European integration. He is currently working on a book-length project that delves into the fall and rise of national elite consensus around European integration.

A prominent contemporary phenomenon is "backsliding'' of democratic countries into (semi-)authoritarian practices. Importantly, such episodes unfold over time, and often involve uncertainty about the ultimate intentions of governments. Building on recent, we present a model in which a government engages in a reform that may allow for subsequent actions that are inconsistent with the rule of law. Citizens must decide whether to replace the incumbent following the reform. Consistent with existing work, the model suggests that polarization is an important factor in democratic backsliding. More importantly, the model demonstrates that in a dynamic setting, citizens may support incumbent governments even if citizens are fundamentally opposed to authoritarianism. One consequence is that citizens may genuinely regret their electoral choices. We illustrate the model's implications using a survey experiment in contemporary Poland.

 

Monika Nalepa (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. With a focus on post-communist Europe, her research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her first book, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series and received the Best Book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the APSA and the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. She has just completed her second book, Ritual Sacrifices: Transitional Justice and the Fate of Post-authoritarian Elites. She has also published articles in the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Parliamentary Affairs, and Constitutional Political Economy. Monika Nalepa is the Director of the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab, which produces the Global Transitional Justice Dataset.

Why do some parties live fast and die young, but other endure? And why are some party systems more stable than others? Based on a blend of data derived from both qualitative and quantitative sources, in their recently released book Haughton and Deegan-Krause provide new tools for mapping and measuring party systems, and develop conceptual frameworks to analyse the dynamics of party politics, particularly the birth and death of parties. In addition to highlighting the importance of agency and choice in explaining the fate of parties, The New Party Challenge  underlines the salience of the clean versus corrupt dimension of politics, charts the flow of voters in the new party subsystem, and emphasizes the dimension of time and its role in shaping developments. Not only do the authors examine party politics in Central Europe in the three decades since the 1989 revolutions, charting and explaining the patterns of politics in that region, they also highlight that similar processes are at play on a far wider geographical canvas. Their talk will conclude by reflecting on what the dynamics of party politics, especially the emergence of so many new parties, means for the health and quality of democracy, and what could and should be done.

 

Tim Haughton is a Senior Associate Professor of European Politics at the University of Birmingham, where he served as Head of the Department of Political Science and International Studies (2016-18) and the Director of the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies (2012-14). Dr Haughton was educated at the London School of Economics and University College London. He has held Visiting Fellowships at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Institute of International Relations in Prague, Colorado College and was an Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. Dr Haughton has good links with the policymaking community, having briefed inter alia five British Ambassadors to Slovakia before they took up their posts, and given several presentations on Central European politics at the Foreign Office in London and at the State Department in Washington DC.

Tim’s research interests encompass electoral and party politics, electoral campaigning, the role of the past in the politics of the present, the domestic politics of Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic and Brexit. He is the co-author with Kevin Deegan-Krause of The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2020), the author of Constraints and Opportunities of Leadership in Post-Communist Europe (Ashgate 2005), the editor of Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe: Does EU Membership Matter? (Routledge, 2011) and served as the co-editor with Nathaniel Copsey of the Journal of Common Market Studies’ Annual Review of the European Union for nine years (2008-16).

Kevin Deegan-Krause is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Wayne State University. He received his undergraduate degree in Economics from Georgetown University in 1990 and his doctorate in Government from the University of Notre Dame in 2000. He has spent more than two decades studying how political parties compete against one another, and how that competition shapes what happens in a democracy.  He has published what he learned from research on European political parties in several books book (Elected Affinities: Democracy and Party Competition in Slovakia and the Czech Republic published by Stanford University Press in 2006 and The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond, published by Oxford University Press in 2020) and many articles in political science journals and he has been the editor of several other books and the European Journal of Political Research Political Data Yearbook (politicaldatayearbook.com) which provides an annual summary of political developments in European, North American and Asian democracies. His ongoing research focuses on the emergence of new political parties and the transformation of existing ones.

Together with his wife Bridget and his children Elena and Peter, Kevin is also engaged in his local community of Ferndale, Michigan, and in broader public concerns.  He received a Truman Scholarship for public service in 1988, and his commitment to public service has included work with the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Commission, election observation with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, as well as service on Ferndale's elected Library Board and School Board.  He has also worked with many other local voluntary organizations and nonpartisan advocacy groups including promoting fair district boundaries with Voters Not Politicians and encouraging ranked-choice voting with RankMIVote.  His commitment to voter turnout and other forms of civic engagement is also part of his classroom teaching, including his introductory courses on the city of Detroit and engaged citizenship for students in Wayne State University's Honors College.

 

Co-sponsored by the Global Populisms Project