Why are opposition party leaders able to form multiparty coalitions to compete against entrenched incumbents in some African countries, but not in others? Leo Arriola challenges the conventional wisdom by showing that opposition coalitions are formed more frequently than is suggested by the region's relatively high reelection rates. Using data on executive elections held in 33 African countries between 1990 and 2005, he demonstrates that opposition coalitions are more likely to be affected by economic conditions than by ethnic divisions or institutional arrangements.

Leo Arriola is a pre-doctoral fellow at CDDRL. He seeks to understand under what conditions opposition parties in Africa can achieve coordination in running against incumbents. He takes Kenya, Ethiopia, Senegal and Cameroon as his main case studies. Leo is advised by Jim Fearon and David Laitin at Stanford, and has returned from fieldwork in Senegal and Cameroon in the Summer of 2006. He has previously spent time conducting research in Ethiopia and Kenya. He has a BA from Claremont, McKenna, and an MPA in International Relations from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. When he leaves CDDRL next summer, he will become Assistant Professor of Political Science at Berkeley.

Alexandra Huneeus recently completed her dissertation entitled "The Dynamics of Judicial Passivity: Chilean Court Deference in an Age of Judicial Power," under the direction of Bob Kagan, Martin Shapiro and Gordon Silverstein. As a post-doctoral fellow at CDDRL, she is currently working on turning her dissertation into a book manuscript. This research seminar Ms. Huneeus will discuss her theoretical propositions about the role of judicial deference in the Chilean case and in democratic transitions more generally. She holds a BA, JD, and now PhD from Berkeley.

Nikolay Marinov is Assistant Professor in the Political Science department at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 2004. He spent 2004-2005 as a Global Fellow at UCLA. His current research looks at the effectiveness of economic sanctions, at the role of the international community in the spread of democracy around the world, and at the effects of international institutions.

Rajko Grlic was born 1947 in Zagreb, Croatia. He graduated a feature film directing from the FAMU Film Academy in Prague, Czech Republic. He has directed and cowritten ten theatrical feature films, including Border Post in 2006 and Josephine in 2002.

His films have been distributed all around the world and shown in competition at many major film festivals. They have received more than fifty international awards, including the Tokyo International Film Festival Grand Prix and Best Director.

He has written nine produced feature screenplays and two television serials. He has received numerous awards for writing, including a UNESCO award, FIPRESCI award, and Peter Kastner award. He has produced four theatrical feature films and five short films. He has also directed three television documentary serials and a dozen short films.

Grlic is Ohio Eminent Scholar in Film at Ohio University, Athens, OH and Artistic Director of Motovun Film Festival, Croatia.

Sponsored by the Mediterranean Forum, the Film and Media Studies Program, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, CREES, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Dr. Andrei Illarionov served as President Valdimir Putin's Chief Economic Advisor (2000-2005) and his personal representative to the G-8 (2002-2005). He resigned from both posts in December 2005, in objection to the government's curtailment of political freedoms. From 1993 to 1994, Illarionov served as chief economic advisor to the prime minister of the Russian Federation, Viktor Chernomyrdin. He resigned in February 1994 to protest changes in the government's economic policy. From 1994 to 2000, Illarionov was the director of the Institute of Economic Analysis.

Andrei Illarionov is a passionate advocate of an open society and democratic capitalism in Russia and a forceful and articulate critic of the political, economic, and social situation in the country.

Illarionov received his PhD in economics in 1987 from the Leningrad State University. Illarionov has coauthored several economic programs for Russian governments and has written three books and more than 300 articles on Russian economic and social policies. He joined the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity in 2006 as a senior fellow.

Justin Hastings is a fifth-year PhD student in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in East and Southeast Asian politics, nuclear weapons policy, and nontraditional security issues. He has been a Boren Graduate Fellow, and a Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Fellow with UC's Institute on Global Cooperation and Conflict. In 2005 he was a visiting associate at the Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore. During the course of his graduate studies he has worked in the Department of Defense on East Asian security issues, and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on nonproliferation issues. He has an MA in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an AB in public and international affairs from Princeton University.

Eric Heginbotham, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, has joined the Pacific Council on International Policy, as a non-resident fellow focused on East Asian political and security issues. Among the projects he will carry out is a monograph on the triangular relationship among the United States, China and Japan. Heginbotham earlier served as a senior fellow of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and has also been a visiting faculty member of Boston College's political science department. He speaks Japanese and Chinese and lived in Asia for more than 10 years. Heginbotham received a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He recently completed a book manuscript on civil-military relations in East Asia, Crossed Swords: Divided Militaries and Politics in East Asia, and has published articles on Japanese and Chinese foreign policy in Foreign Affairs, International Security, and the National Interest, as well as chapters in several edited books.

Ron E. Hassner (speaker) is a graduate of Stanford University with degrees in political science and religious studies and a CISAC affiliate. His research revolves around symbolic and emotive aspects of international security with particular attention to religious violence, Middle Eastern politics and territorial disputes. His publications have focused on the role of perceptions in entrenching international disputes, the causes and characteristics of conflicts over sacred places, the characteristics of political-religious leadership and political-religious mobilization and the role of national symbols in conflict. Professor Hassner was a fellow of the MacArthur Consortium on Peace and Security in 2000-3. In 2003-4 he was a post-doctoral scholar at the Olin Institute for International Security, Harvard University.

Gail Lapidus (respondent) is a senior fellow emerita at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Lapidus is also professor emerita of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as chair of the Berkeley-Stanford Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies from 1985 to 1994. A specialist on Soviet society, politics and foreign policy, she has authored and edited a number of books on Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, including The New Russia: Troubled Transformation (Westview Press, 1995), From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in the Soviet Republics, with Victor Zaslavsky and Philip Goldman (Cambridge University Press, 1992), The Soviet System in Crisis, with Alexander Dallin (Westview, 1992), and Women in Soviet Society (University of California Press, 1979). A graduate of Radcliffe College, she received her MA and PhD from Harvard University.

Eleonora Pasotti is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Cruz and Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL. Her work has been concerned with the relationship between democracy, personal power and electoral law. Pasotti's research at CDDRL is directed toward three aspects of this relationship: how proportional and majoritarian electoral systems interact with clientelistic networks; how institutions shape the cost structure of political mobilization; and how institutions of vote mobilization, from clientelism to mass campaigning, distort the normative goal of democracy. Her previous work has been based largely on the politics of Naples, Italy, but has broad comparative implications for the study of clientelism, patronage politics and populism in the developing world as well. Prior to joining the faculty at Santa Cruz, Eleonora completed a PhD in Political Science at Columbia University under the direction of Charles Tilly, Jon Elster, and Ira Katznelson. She also holds an MSc in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences from the London School of Economics and Political Science.