Estallido social, COVID19 y democracia

Date: 

Friday, May 22, 2020, 4:00pm to 5:30pm

The recording of this event can be found here

Speakers: Steven Levitsky, David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, Harvard University; David Altman, Professor of Political Science, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; Rossana Castiglioni, Professor of Political Science, Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile

A conversation among three scholars about what kind of democracies might emerge after the pandemic is over? Elections in times of COVID-19. Chile is discussing delaying the plebiscite for the Constitution. What is the situation of other Latin American countries?

Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, mostly in Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), which was a New York Times Best-Seller and has been published in 22 different languages. He is also author of Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), co –author (with Lucan Way) of Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2010), co-author (with Daniel Brinks and María Victoria Murillo of Understanding Institutional Weakness: Power and Design in Latin American Institutions (Cambridge Element, 2019), and co-editor of Argentine Democracy: The Politics of Institutional Weakness (2005), Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America (2006), The Resurgence of the Left in Latin America (2011), Challenges of Party-Building in Latin America (2016); and The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America (2020), and The Inclusionary Turn: Democracy and Citizenship in Latin America (2020). He is currently writing a book (with Lucan Way) on the durability of revolutionary regimes. Levitsky has also written for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Vox, The New Republic, and The Monkey Cage, and he has written regular columns in La República (Peru) and Folha Do Sao Paulo (Brazil).

David Altman is a Professor of Political Science and Chair of Comparative Politics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Born in Uruguay, his research and teaching interests lie in the field of comparative politics with an emphasis on democracy: its quality, its institutions, and its innovations. He is the author of Direct Democracy Worldwide (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Citizenship and Contemporary Direct Democracy (Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming). He has twice received the Uruguayan National Prize for Political Science. He serves as Project Manager of Varieties of Democracy. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and a B.A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Rossana Castiglioni holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame. She is Associate Professor of the Political Science School at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. She works on comparative politics, with an emphasis on comparative social policy and democratic representation in Latin America. She was the recipient of the 2003 Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Graduate School Award in the Social Sciences. Her work has appeared in Electoral Studies, Latin American Politics and Society, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Canadian Journal of Political Science, The Developing Economies, and Revista de Ciencia Política. She has been a visiting scholar at Leiden University, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and Oxford University. Her book The Politics of Social Policy Change in Chile and Uruguay: Retrenchment versus Maintenance, 1973-1998 (New York & London, Routledge) was published in 2005 and reprinted in 2013.

Presented in collaboration with Harvard Club de Chile.