Please note that this event is from 3:30-5:00pm. 

About the Topic: This presentation will describe a pilot program being developed by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for the Prevention of Genocide (CPG) that will give policy makers, analysts, advocates, journalists, scholars, students, and the public at large reliable, up-to-date forecasts of the risk of mass atrocities in countries worldwide. The central aim of this program is to enhance efforts to prevent atrocities by giving concerned actors better risk assessments with more lead time. The CPG expects to launch this pilot program in early 2014.

About the Speaker: Jay Ulfelder is an independent consultant and owner of the blog, The Dart-Throwing Chimp. From 2001 until 2011, he served as research director for the Political Instability Task Force, a U.S. government-funded research program that aims to forecast and explain various forms of political change in countries worldwide. Ulfelder's research interests include democratization, political violence, social unrest, state collapse, and forecasting. His publications include Dilemmas of Democratic Consolidation: A Game-Theory Approach and “Democratic Transitions” in The Routledge Handbook of Democratization and co-authored “A Global Model for Forecasting Political Instability” in the American Journal of Political Science. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 1997 and his B.A. in Comparative Area Studies--USSR and Eastern Europe from Duke University in 1991. 

This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

The study of the political consequences of unemployment has a long history in political science. Regarding the electoral impact of unemployment, studies have focused both on its impact on political alienation, as well as its partisan effects. The financial crisis, which unfolded following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and rapidly spread to Europe, provides us with the opportunity to make several methodological improvements over the previous literature. In our empirical analysis, we use fine-grained registry-based data on the economic impact of the crisis and how it varied across Sweden’s more than 5000 electoral districts. We combine this with district-level data on vote-shares for all major parties in parliamentary elections before and after the crisis.

The economic impact varied a great deal across Sweden, mainly affecting industrial centers. Because the impact was so diverse across electoral districts, we are able to estimate the electoral impact of unemployment more efficiently than most previous studies. Moreover, the sources of the crisis were not domestic. Because the crisis was an exogenous shock to the Swedish economy, the selection bias that is usually inherent in estimating the electoral impact of unemployment is mitigated. According to the results, the electoral impact of crisis-induced unemployment was large, leading to a marked fall in the vote share of the established left parties and a corresponding increase in that of the main radical right party.

Kåre Vernby is Associate Professor at the Department of Government, Uppsala University, where he teaches courses in comparative politics and methods.  His research interests are in political economy and political behavior and his papers have been published or are forthcoming in academic journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, European Union Politics and Politics & Society as well as several edited volumes. 

This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

How do geopolitical forces influence international capital markets? In particular, do market actors condition their responses to crisis lending initiatives on the political incentives of major lenders? In this paper, Randall Stone and co-writers Terrence Chapman, Songying Fang and Xin Li  analyze a formal model which demonstrates that the effect of crisis lending announcements on international investment flows is conditional on how market actors interpret the political and economic motivations behind lending decisions on the part of the lender and borrower. If investors believe the decision to accept crisis lending is a sign of economic weakness and lending decisions are influenced by the political interests of the major donor countries, then crisis lending may not reduce borrowing costs or quell fears of international investors. On the other hand, if market actors believe that crisis lending programs, and attendant austerity conditions, will significantly reduce the risk of a financial crisis, they may respond with increased private investment, creating a "catalytic effect."  In this model, the political biases of key lending countries can affect the inferences market actors draw, because some sovereign lenders have strategic interests in ensuring that certain borrowing countries do not collapse under the strain of economic crisis. Although this theory applies to multiple types of crisis lending, it helps explain discrepant empirical findings about market reactions to IMF programs. The implications of their theory is tested by examining how sovereign bond yields are affected by IMF program announcements, loan size, the scope of conditions attached to loans, and measures of the geopolitical interests of the United States, a key IMF principal.

Randall Stone (Ph.D. 1993, Harvard) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester.  His research is in international political economy and combines formal theory, quantitative methods, and qualitative fieldwork.  He is the author of Controlling Institutions:  International Organizations and the Global Economy (Cambridge University Press 2011), Lending Credibility:  The International Monetary Fund and the Post-Communist Transition (Princeton University Press, 2002) and Satellites and Commissars:  Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade  (Princeton University Press, 1996), as well as articles in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Review of International Organizations, and Global Environmental Politics.  He has been awarded grants by the NSF, SSRC, NCEEER, and IREX, was the last recipient of the Soviet Peace Prize (1991), and has been a Senior Fulbright Scholar visiting the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin.  He speaks German and Russian fluently and Polish moderately well, and reads all Slavic languages. 

This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), if successful, will eliminate trade barriers between the US and the EU, both of which already have free trade agreements with many other countries, including several that are in FTAs with both (Canada, Korea, Mexico to name just a few).  Is TTIP therefore achieving true free trade with this larger group?  No. Restrictive rules of origin apply, and these can potentially interfere with trade and reduce welfare even when compared to a world without any of these FTAs.

Alan V. Deardorff is John W. Sweetland Professor of International Economics and Professor of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan.  With a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University, he has been on the faculty at the University of Michigan since 1970, where he has served as Chair of Economics and now Associate Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.  His research has included both contributions to the theory of international trade and, with Robert M. Stern, development of the Michigan Model of World Production of Trade, used for analysis of multi-country, multi-sector changes in trade policy.

This seminar is part of the "European Governance" program series.

The number of international courts/international tribunals has burgeoned in the past two decades, with the continued proliferation of international agreements and the growing importance of globalization for the world economy.  Do these courts matter?  We develop a theory of how an international court lacking any power to enforce its rulings can promote compliance among the member governments and enhance the performance of international agreements. We argue that the adjudication process can cause governments to comply with adverse rulings because it facilitates enforcement of the agreement by the other member states.  This argument implies two empirical predictions that we examine in the European Union using an original dataset of rulings of the European Court of Justice from 1960-1999. We show that ECJ rulings are sensitive to the enforcement concerns identified by our theory. Further, we show that ECJ rulings designed to liberalized trade (a key goal of the EU) are only effective when the adjudication process reveals that noncompliance will be punished by third-party governments.

Matthew Gabel is Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and and M.A. from the College of Europe (Bruges).  He is the associate editor of the journal European Union Politics.  His research has examined a variety of topics of international political economy and comparative political economy in Europe, particularly in the context of European integration.  This includes public support for European integration, judicial politics at European Court of Justice, and the legislative politics in the European Parliament. Separately, he also collaborates with Neurologists and Psychiatrists on the diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease.

The process of joining an IO may cause liberalization before membership. Thus studies that only evaluate compliance after membership underestimate the effects. Conditional membership may be one of the most important sources of leverage for IOs.  The rule-makers establish rules that don't go far beyond what they would otherwise do, but rule-takers often must accept a broad range of policy reforms they would not otherwise consider. The influence of accession conditions has been studied in the context of EU and NATO, where sizeable benefits and formal conditions motivate major concessions by applicants. This paper proposes to examine a much less powerful organization, the OECD. Here the qualifications for membership are ambiguous and leave open room for informal pressure for a range of economic reforms. The politics of joining organizations touch closely on concerns about status and legitimacy as well as functional demands for cooperation in complex issue areas. I will examine how OECD membership has motivated specific reforms in regulatory policies and trade in a comparison of the East European transition economies accession with that of Japan, Mexico, and Korea. Statistical analysis of patterns of when countries apply for membership will test for the role of economic and political conditions as well as the political relations among members.