Actions Panel
NEW DATE- Dem. Backsliding Below the Nat'l Level: South America & the US
SIS professor Agustina Giraudy will speak with experts about democratic backsliding taking place in the US and globally.
Date and time
Location
Online
About this event
Webinar Link: https://american.zoom.us/s/91510819664
** This event was rescheduled from a previous date. If you already registered and can still attend, there is no need to do anything. If you did not previously register and can attend the new date, please register here. Thank you for your interest in this event!
The phrase “democratic backsliding” describes what happens when governments become more authoritarian, and it’s not theoretical. Over the past several years, democratic backsliding has increased in many different parts of the world, including in the United States, and it’s increased at both the federal and state, or subnational, levels. There’s not much consensus on why this is happening, and the reasons differ from place to place, with motivations ranging from citizens acting out their grievances to leaders tending towards authoritarianism.
To shed light on democratic backsliding in the US since the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, SIS professor Agustina Giraudy will lead a panel discussion on subnational democratic backsliding, or what experts in comparative politics refer to as “subnational undemocratic regimes.” Featured experts will focus on the issue in the US and will look at research from Latin and South America. An audience Q&A will follow the discussion.
Registrants will receive reminder emails containing the Zoom webinar link.
Biographies
Kent Eaton is a professor of politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of Territory and Ideology in Latin America: Policy Conflicts between National and Subnational Governments. Over the last twenty-five years he has lived and worked extensively in Latin America. His research examines the interplay between politics and territory, focusing on the territorial (re)organization of states in the world today. His research on politics in the region has been published in Comparative Politics, Latin American Politics and Society, Latin American Research Review, Politics and Society, and Security Studies. He is also the author/editor of three monographs on decentralization, including The Democratic Decentralization Programming Handbook, The Political Economy of Decentralization Reforms: Implications for Aid Effectiveness, and Making Decentralization Work: Democracy, Development and Security . Before joining the faculty at UCSC in 2006, he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School and at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.
Charlotte Hill is a professor of political science at Berkeley. She is a policy analyst trained in political science methods. Her research explores how structural reforms might improve American democracy, especially for the types of people who have historically been shut out of the process. Before beginning her PhD program, she developed and managed policy and communications programs for multiple organizations, including global advocacy platform Change.org. During the 2016 election season, she ran communications for RepresentUs, helping win multiple state and local ballot initiatives; she was also on the RepresentUs board. She previously served on the San Francisco Elections Commission as well.
Carole Gallaher is the senior associate dean at American University's School of International Service. Her research focuses on two distinct areas—organized violence by non-state actors and urban politics. She examine the politics, internal dynamics, and patterns of violence of militias, paramilitaries, private military contractors, and drug cartels among others. She has written two books. The first, On the Fault Line: Race, Class, and the American Patriot Movement, tracks the identity politics of the Kentucky State Militia as it experienced rapid growth, internal upheaval, and decline with the arrest of its commander. The second book, After the Peace: Loyalist Paramilitaries in Post-accord Northern Ireland, examines why Loyalist paramilitaries took nearly a decade after the 1998 peace agreement to decommission their weapons and stand down their armed units.
Agustina Giraudy (moderator) is a professor at American University's School of International Service. Her book, Democrats and Autocrats, explores the multiple pathways towards subnational undemocratic regime continuity within democratized countries. A second, co-edited book with E. Moncada and R. Snyder, Inside Countries: Subnational Research in Comparative Politics, assesses the theoretical and methodological contributions of subnational research to comparative politics. Before joining AU, she held a postdoctoral position at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, taught at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and Universidad de San Andrés (both in Argentina), and worked as a consultant for the Ford Foundation, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, and the Anti-corruption Office (Argentina).