The American election closed out a year of momentous elections. Almost two decades on from the financial crisis of 2007 that helped unleash a wave of authoritarian, populist, and nativist movements in global democracies, a range of social and political forces have reshaped elections around the world.

What do the election results tell us about the health or fragility of global democracy, and how might we better understand the outcome of the American election as part of a broader global process?

Recorded on November 21, 2024, this panel featured a group of UC Berkeley scholars discussing the 2024 elections in different parts of the world. The panel featured James Vernon, Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor, History; Alison Post, Associate Professor, Political Science; Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor, History; Aarti Sethi, Assistant Professor, Anthropology; and Kwanele Sosibo, Lecturer, Art History.

Presented as part of the Global Democracy Commons initiative.

A transcript of this episode is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/making-sense-elections.

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Tara Chandra, a consultant and independent researcher who received a PhD in in Political Science with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from UC Berkeley. Chandra's research focuses on the intersection of gender and international security. Prior to beginning her PhD, she worked in foreign policy in Washington, D.C. She holds a Master's degree in Global Affairs from Yale and a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago.

The interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Social Science Matrix, and focused on Chandra's work on gendered violence in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. [Note that the interview was conducted while Chandra was still a PhD candidate.]

A transcript of this episode is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/tara-chandra.

In this "New Directions" panel, recorded on December 2, 2024, an interdisciplinary group of UC Berkeley graduate students explored the evolving dynamics of work, management, and labor organization.

The panel featured research by three current Berkeley PhD students: William Darwell (Jurisprudence and Social Policy), Kristy Kim (Economics), and Vera Parra (Sociology). The panel was moderated by John Logan, Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

The presenters' studies focus on such topics as the impact of pension systems on workforce participation, labor union organizing in automotive supply chains across North America, and how different political and economic systems influence workplace management practices.

This event was co-sponsored by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), the UC Berkeley Labor Center, and the Berkeley Law Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. 

A transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/new-directions-labor.

Recorded on December 3, 2024, this podcast episode features an Authors Meet Critics panel on Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States by Stephanie L. Canizales, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.

Professor Canizales was joined in conversation by Kristina Lovato, Assistant Professor of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, and Caitlin Patler, Associate Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Sarah Song, Professor at Berkeley Law, moderated.

This event was presented by Social Science Matrix as part of the Authors Meet Critics book series, which features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.

The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the Center for Race and Gender, the Othering and Belonging Institute, and the Latinx Research Center.

A transcript of this episode is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/sin-padres.

Recorded on November 13, 2024, this Authors Meet Critics" panel centered on the book Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China, by Yan Long, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology.

Professor Long was joined in conversation by Matthew Kohrman, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University; and Rachel E. Stern, Professor of Law and Political Science at Berkeley Law, and the Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies. The panel was moderated by Tom Gold, Professor of Sociology Emeritus at UC Berkeley.

The panel was presented as part of the Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series, which features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars.

About the Book

Authoritarian Absorption portrays the rebuilding of China’s pandemic response system through its anti-HIV/AIDS battle from 1978 to 2018. Going beyond the conventional domestic focus, Yan Long analyzes the influence of foreign interventions which challenged the post-socialist state’s inexperience with infectious diseases and pushed it towards professionalizing public health bureaucrats and embracing more liberal, globally aligned technocratic measures. This transformation involved a mix of confrontation and collaboration among transnational organizations, the Chinese government, and grassroots movements, which turned epidemics into a battleground for enhancing the state’s domestic control and international status.

Foreign interveners effectively mobilized China’s AIDS movement and oriented activists towards knowledge-focused epistemic activities to propel the insertion of Western rules, knowledge, and practices into the socialist systems. Yet, Chinese bureaucrats played this game to their advantage by absorbing some AIDS activist subgroups—notably those of urban HIV-negative gay men—along with their foreign-trained expertise and technical proficiency into the state apparatus. This move allowed them to expand bodily surveillance while projecting a liberal façade for the international audience.

Drawing on longitudinal-ethnographic research, Long argues against a binary view of Western liberal interventions as either success or failure, highlighting instead the paradoxical outcomes of such efforts. On one hand, they can bolster public health institutions in an authoritarian context, a development pivotal to China’s subsequent handling of COVID-19 and instrumental in advancing the rights of specific groups, such as urban gay men. On the other hand, these interventions may reinforce authoritarian control and further marginalize certain populations—such as rural people living with HIV/AIDS and female sex workers—within public health systems. 

A transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/authoritarian-absorption-panel.

Gold Okafor is a PhD candidate in social and personality psychology at UC Berkeley. She investigates racial and gender disparities through emotion research. Her research questions include, "how does the race and gender of an emotional person influence the judgments of the emotional person?" For example, how is an angry Black woman judged differently from an angry White woman, and what are the downstream consequences? And how do we accurately measure mindfulness, an emotion regulation strategy, within Black Americans?

Okafor is Ford Predoctoral Fellow and a recipient of an American Psychological Foundation Scholarship. Her past papers include "Measuring Mindfulness in Black Americans: A Psychometric Validation of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire." This interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, who was formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at Social Science Matrix.

A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/gold-okafor.

Recorded on October 25, 2024, this panel examined the shifting demographic and political forces that are redefining the traditional bases of the Democratic and Republican parties and their efforts to build new electoral coalitions. Panelists analyzed voter trends and realignment along key dimensions, including gender, age, race and ethnicity, and explored how issues like the economy, abortion, immigration, and threats to democracy are motivating different segments of the electorate.

The panel featured Ian Haney López, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC Berkeley; David Hollinger, the Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus of History at UC Berkeley; and Omar Wasow, Assistant Professor in Department of Political Science. Moderated by G. Cristina Mora, Associate Professor of Sociology and Chicano/Latino Studies (by courtesy), and Co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.

The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the Institute of Governmental Studies, and the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.

Matrix on Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public. 

A transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/shifting-alignments.

In the run up to the American election we talked to Todd Wolfson, the new President of AAUP, about how public disinvestment from higher education and the culture wars have transformed colleges in ways that make them less democratic places — and imperil democracy across the country.

A transcript of this episode is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/todd-wolfson.

About the Series

One measure of the fragile state of many democracies is the way in which public universities have come under attack around the world. A new monthly podcast series, produced as part of the Global Democracy Commons project, seeks to address the myriad forces seeking to foreclose public universities as spaces of critique and democratic protest across the globe.

The series explores diverse trends such as related to the defunding of higher education; its redefinition as a private not a public good; the increasing authoritarian nature of university management; the use of culture wars and discourses of civility to police classrooms; the waves of layoffs and closures of departments and programs; and the attempts to delimit academic freedom, free speech, and rights of assembly and protest.

We hope our conversations with those who work in higher education around the world will allow us to consider the degree to which the university has become the canary in the coal mine for the fate of democracy.

Over the past few years, Arlie Hochschild has been in conversation with citizens of Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia; Jenny Reardon has been biking through her home state of Kansas, talking to farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the prairie; and Lisa Pruitt has straddled the rural-urban divide over the course of her life in Arkansas and California and as a scholar of rural legal access.

As the nation braced for a decisive election, this conversation — recorded on October 21 — sought to illuminate the frequently overlooked yet politically potent voices emanating from America’s rural heartlands and small towns. The panel was moderated by Cihan Tuğal, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS), and the Berkeley Center for Right Wing Studies.

About the Speakers Arlie R. Hochschild is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, details rise of the right. Her latest book, ‘Stolen Pride: loss, shame and the rise of the right’ is based on six years of field work in eastern Kentucky and focuses on the politics of pride and shame. In particular, it focuses on the distress caused by “structural shaming” in an era of post-70s economic decline, a shame which enhances the appeal of Trump’s politics of displacement.

Lisa Pruitt is Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Davis. Pruitt’s work reveals how the economic, spatial, and social features of rural locales, (e.g., material spatiality, lack of anonymity) profoundly shape the lives of residents, including the junctures at which they encounter the law. This work also considers how rurality inflects dimensions of gender, race, and ethnicity, including through a lens of whiteness studies and critical race theory.

Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005) and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago University Press, Fall 2017). Recently, she started a project to bike over one thousand miles through her home state of Kansas to learn from farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the high plains about how best to know and care for the prairie.

Cihan Tuğal (moderator) studies social movements, populism, capitalism, democracy, and religion. In his recent publications, he discusses the far right, neoliberalization, state capitalism, and populist performativity in Turkey, the United States, Hungary, Poland, India, and the Philippines. Tuğal is currently working on a book that will incorporate these case studies, along with an analysis of populism in Brazil. He has also initiated a team project to study the ecological crisis of capitalism, with special emphasis on the role of labor and community struggles in developing sustainable energy.

Watch the panel above or on YouTube.

Listen to the panel as a podcast below or on Apple Podcasts.

A transcript of this podcast is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/voices-heartland.

Recorded on October 9, 2024, this video features an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era, by Paul Pierson, the John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Eric Schickler, the Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.

The authors were joined in conversation by Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a faculty member of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and Didi Kuo, a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. Mark Danner, Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, moderated.

The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics event series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.

The ground beneath American political institutions has moved, with national politics subsuming and transforming the local. As a result, American democracy is in trouble. In this paradigm-shifting book, political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring a sharp new perspective to today’s challenges. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras.

In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape—state parties, interest groups, and media—varied locally and reinforced the nation’s stark regional diversity. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. The result is that today’s polarization is self-perpetuating—and intensifying.

Partisan Nation offers a powerful caution. As a result of this polarization, America’s political system is distinctly and acutely vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America’s unusual Constitutional design. Combining the precision and acuity characteristic of their earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy.

Watch the video on YouTube.

A transcript of this event is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/partisan-nation.