Civil Society is Not an Unalloyed Good: The Organizational Foundations of Bolsonarismo

Date: 

Tuesday, November 8, 2022, 12:00pm to 1:20pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S216

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

Speaker: Liz McKenna, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
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

Liz McKenna is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a political sociologist who studies how civil society can both enable and constrain democracy. She uses multiple methods—including ethnographic, interview, geospatial, and social network analysis—to study organizations, political power, and social movements in Brazil and the United States. She received her BA in social studies from Harvard College and her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Liz joins HKS from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University where she was a postdoctoral scholar.

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