Models of Labor Market Compensation in the COVID-19 Crisis in Latin America

Date: 

Tuesday, November 29, 2022, 12:00pm to 1:20pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S250

This event will be hybrid. To register for virtual, click here; to register for in-person, click here.

Speaker: Sebastián Etchemendy, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies, Torcuato Di Tella University, Argentina; DRCLAS Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor
Moderated by: Steve Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; Frances Hagopian, Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government, Harvard University and Alisha Holland, Associate Professor of Government Department, Harvard University

Sebastián Etchemendy is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Studies, Torcuato Di Tella University, Argentina. He received his BA from the University of Buenos Aires, and his PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the comparative political economy of Latin America and Western Europe, with special attention to the study of business and labor actors. He received the International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) from the New York Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright Fellowship for Studies in the US. He has published individual articles in Comparative Political Studies (2), Comparative Politics, Latin American Politics and Society (2), and in the Journal of Latin American Studies, and co-authored articles in Politics & Society and Desarrollo Económico. He also published Models of Economic Liberalization: Business, Workers and Compensation in Latin America, Spain and Portugal (Cambridge University Press 2011, in Spanish EUDEBA 2015) and Labor Outsourcing in Argentina: Diagnosis and Trade Union Strategies (editor and co-author, in Spanish, Biblos 2018). Between 2012 and 2015 he was advisor to the Minister of Labor and Undersecretary of Labor Policy, at the Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Security of Argentina.

Steven Levitsky is the Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. As the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, his research focuses on democratization, authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions. He is author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), a New York Times Best-Seller that has been published in 25 languages, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge, 2010), and Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2003), and co -editor of Informal Institutions and Democracy in Latin America (with Gretchen Helmke) and The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (with Kenneth Roberts). He has written frequently for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Vox, The New Republic, The Monkey Cage, La República (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil). He is currently writing a book (with Lucan Way) on the durability of revolutionary regimes. Levitsky received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Frances Hagopian is Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government and Faculty Co-Chair of Harvard’s Brazil Studies Program. She specializes in the comparative politics of Latin America, with emphasis on democratization, political representation, political economy, and religion and politics. Hagopian is author of Reorganizing Representation in Latin America (2014, Cambridge University Press), editor of Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), co-editor (with Scott Mainwaring) of The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America: Advances and Setbacks (Cambridge 2005), and author of Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and numerous journal articles and book chapters. Her current work focuses on the establishment of a social welfare regime in Brazil, and the political economy of inequality in Latin America. She previously taught at the University of Notre Dame, where she was Director of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, as well as Tufts and Harvard Universities. She has also been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford.

Alisha Holland is an Associate Professor (untenured) in the Government Department at Harvard University. Before joining the Harvard faculty, she was an Assistant Professor in the Politics Department at Princeton University and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She studies the comparative political economy of development with a focus on urban politics, social policy, and Latin America. Her book, Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics), looks at the politics of enforcement against property law violations by the poor, such as squatting, street vending, and electricity theft. Her current book project focuses on the politics of large infrastructure projects in Latin America. Her other research interests include law, migration, crime control, and subnational governance. Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, Latin American Research Review, Perspectives on Politics, and World Politics. Holland hold an AB from Princeton University (2007) and a PhD from Harvard University (2014).

Presented in collaboration with Weatherhead Center for International Affairs