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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

SPEAKERS BIOS

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Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University.  From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo.  In 2002 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Beinin’s research and writing focus on the social and cultural history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel and on US policy in the Middle East. He has written or edited twelve books, most recently A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa (Stanford University Press, 2020), co-edited with Bassam Haddad and Sherene Seikaly; Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2015); and Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, 2nd edition (Stanford University Press, 2013) co-edited with Frédéric Vairel.

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Amr Hamzawy is currently a senior research scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He studied political science and developmental studies in Cairo, The Hague, and Berlin. He was previously an associate professor of political science at Cairo University and a professor of public policy at the American University in Cairo. Between 2016 and 2017, he served as a senior fellow in the Middle East program and the Democracy and Rule of Law program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC. His research and teaching interests as well as his academic publications focus on democratization processes in Egypt, tensions between freedom and repression in the Egyptian public space, political movements and civil society in Egypt, contemporary debates in Arab political thought, and human rights and governance in the Arab world. His new book On The Habits of Neoauthoritarianism – Politics in Egypt Between 2013 and 2019 appeared in Arabic in September 2019. Hamzawy is a former member of the People’s Assembly after being elected in the first Parliamentary elections in Egypt after the January 25, 2011 revolution. He is also a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights. Hamzawy contributes a weekly op-ed to the All Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi.

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Nancy Okail is a visiting scholar at CDDRL. She has 20 years of experience working on issues of democracy, rule of law, human rights, governance and security in the Middle East and North Africa region. She analyzes these issues and advocates in favor of human rights through testimony to legislative bodies, providing policy recommendations to senior government officials in the U.S. and Europe. She is currently the president of the board of advisors of The Tahrir Institue for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), previously she was the Institute’s executive director since its foundation. Dr. Okail was the director of Freedom House’s Egypt program. She has also worked with the Egyptian government as a senior evaluation officer of foreign aid and managed programs for several international organizations. Dr. Okail was one of the 43 nongovernmental organization workers convicted and sentenced to prison in a widely publicized 2012 case for allegedly using foreign funds to foment unrest in Egypt. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in the UK; her doctoral research focused on the power relations of foreign aid.