Please join us for a conversation with Mullissa Willette, a first-term CalPERS Board of Administration member. Willette will offer an insider's perspective on how the nation's largest public pension fund is governed and the key issues shaping its future.
In Company Towns, Elizabeth Mitchell Elder examines the long-lasting political legacies of mining-company dominance in the Midwest and Appalachia. While the economic consequences of deindustrialization are well-known, Elder shifts the focus to a more insidious problem: the political dysfunction that took root long before the mines shut down. She argues the coal industry cultivated corrupt and low-capacity local governments. These patterns have had enduring consequences for public life. Elder shows how these historical experiences have fueled a broader cynicism toward government, in which citizens expect little from public institutions and doubt the usefulness of elections. Company Towns underscores the consequences..
During the Qing period (1644–1912), late imperial China was in theory governed by approximately two thousand local administrators who were appointed for their mastery of the Confucian classics rather than for their administrative or legal expertise. How did these scholar-officials actually carry out the daily tasks of local governance, including judicial administration? Based on a forthcoming monograph, this talk analyzes the training and roles of the thousands of legal specialists who advised local officials behind the scenes and handled most of the judicial and other substantive administrative work on their behalf. Despite their important functions in local governance, these legal..
This year will mark the 30th anniversary of Taiwan's Electoral Sovereignty. Join us for an insightful discussion with David Chih-Hsiang Wu 伍志翔, Director-General of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in San Francisco.
Federal immigration enforcement in the United States is increasingly shaped by the convergence of surveillance technologies, data systems, and on-the-ground policing practices. From AI-assisted identification tools to information-sharing across agencies, these developments are transforming how enforcement operates, and raising urgent questions about civil liberties and democratic oversight. This panel will bring together scholars to examine the social and political consequences, and the stakes for rights in an era of technological governance. The panel will feature David Hausman, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley Law School, C aitlin Patler, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public..
Join the Citrin Center and the Institute for Governmental Studies at the Social Sciences Matrix on Friday, October 30th at 3:30pm for "California and the 2026 Midterms: A Pre-Election Roundtable on the State of the Electorate". This panel event will feature a presentation by Berkeley IGS Poll Director Mark DiCamillo on the latest round of statewide election-related data, conducted in partnership with the LA Times, followed by a moderated discussion with a panel of experts on the results. The discussion will cover the race for governor between Xavier Becerra and Steve Hilton, prominent statewide ballot measures including Proposition 39 (Voter..
The Rise and Fall of Tunisian Democracy: Populism, Polarization, and the Perils of Power-Sharing (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines the politics of Tunisia after the Arab Spring. Tunisia emerged as the one success story to transition to democracy, winning a Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 for its focus on inclusion and power-sharing. How, then, did its democracy collapse in 2021?
IES Director's Theme Lecture Series for 2026-2027: Democracy in Peril This year's election in Hungary ending 16 years of Viktor Orban's rule raises important questions about the tactics of recovery from backsliding in Europe and around the world. Questions of sequencing, institutional redesign, and the balance between looking backward and forward have come to the fore, echoing the democratic transitions of 35 years ago. Are the answers different? Drawing on the experience of several countries, this lecture argues that today's transitions raise distinct challenges and require different tools those of the prior generation. Shoring up the core institutions and practices..
Professor Elizabeth R. Nugent will present part of a book she is finalizing on activism in exile. Dr. Nugent studies the politics and political psychology of authoritarianism and religion in the Middle East and is the author of After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition, published by Princeton University Press (2020).
How do social norms and professional incentives affect policy discourse within the Washington foreign policy community? We conducted over 50 semi-structured interviews and a survey of nearly five-hundred American foreign policy and national security professionals about their views towards the People's Republic of China. Over one fifth of survey respondents noted instances of professional pressure to voice a more hawkish point of view towards China, and many feared being perceived as naive or compromised by their views on, ties to, and experiences in China. These pressures were particularly acute for foreign policy professionals that are traditionally marginalized from power–those who..
How have European countries coped with the challenge of industrial capitalism and the rise of superpowers? Through an analysis of European integration from 1945 to the present day, Laurent Warlouzet argues that the European response was to create both new institutions, in particular the European Union, and an original framework of governance for capitalism. Beyond the European case, he demonstrates that capitalism is not just a contest between free marketeers and their opponents, those in favour of welfare and environmental policies, because there is a third camp that defends protectionism and assertive defence policies. Hence, the governance of capitalism has..