The New Right in Latin America

Date: 

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


For a recording of this event, please click here.

Speakers: Lindsay Mayka, Associate Professor of Government, Colby College; Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, Assistant Professor of International Development, University of Bath; Cristobal Rovira, Professor of Political Science, Universidad Diego Portales
Moderated by: Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies

Lindsay Mayka is an Associate Professor of Government at Colby College. Her research and teaching interests include citizen participation in the policymaking process, social-citizenship rights, social policy, urban governance, and institutional change, with a regional focus on Latin America. Her book, Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examines the divergent trajectories of nationally mandated participatory institutions in Brazil and Colombia. She is currently engaged in research projects analyzing the politics of urban security interventions and the rights of marginalized groups, policies and coalitions to address the sexual exploitation of children in Latin America, and grassroots mobilization by right-wing movements. In 2020, she received the Clarence Stone Scholar Award by the APSA Urban and Local Politics section. Prior to coming to Colby, Mayka was a Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Rosana Pinheiro-Machado is an Assistant Professor of International Development in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath (UK), and a fellow of the British Higher Education Academy. Previously, she was a Lecturer at the University of Oxford, and held visiting positions at the University of São Paulo and Harvard University. Pinheiro-Machado is also an awarded-winning columnist, with words in The Intercept, El Pais, and The Washington Post. Her most recent work discusses the rise of the radical right in Brazil and the Global South.

Cristobal Rovira is a full professor at the School of Political Science of the Diego Portales University (UDP) in Santiago de Chile and an associate researcher at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) He received his PhD in political science from the Humboldt-University of Berlin in 2008. His main area of research is comparative politics and he have a special interest in the ambivalent relationship between populism and democracy. Before his current job, he worked as a research fellow at the University of Sussex, the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) and the Human Development group of the Chilean Bureau of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Together with Cas Mudde (Georgia University), he has written the book “Populism. A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford University Press, 2017), which has been translated into several languages, including Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai amongst others.

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.

Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs