Dr. Cristine H. Legare
Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin
for the UConn Cognitive Science Colloquium Series

Few U.S. government programs that aid democracy abroad today seek to foster regime change. Technical programs that do not confront dictators are more common than the aid to dissidents and political parties that once dominated the field. What explains this “taming” of democracy assistance? Has democracy promotion in the Middle East been effective? Has the presidency of Donald Trump changed U.S. foreign policy related to democracy and human rights? This talk will cover these themes, drawing especially on Dr. Bush’s research in Jordan and Tunisia.

The Middle East and North Africa has historically had the lowest political representation of women in the world, though the number of women officeholders is growing. Will having more women in politics lead women citizens to become more engaged? Or, could it depress overall levels of citizen engagement due to pervasive gender biases? To answer those questions, this paper uses a nationally-representative experiment in Tunisia. It finds that people are significantly less likely to want to contact their representatives when primed to think of a mixed-gender group of officeholders compared to women officeholders. Moreover, this pattern does not vary according to respondents' gender. Further analyses reveal that the effect is concentrated among Islamists, which is consistent with some Islamists’ opposition to gender mixing in public. This finding encourages future work examining women's political presence in socially- conservative environments where gender segregation is common.

Join us for an internship panel and networking with site supervisors from Senator Blumenthal's office, Senator Murphy's office, Sullivan and Shane Inc, and Capitol Consulting LLC

All majors welcome!
Honors event
Light refreshments will be served

POLS Colloquium:

Peter Loge (George Washington University): "A Call to Return to the Study and Teaching of Political Communication Ethics"

Oak 408, 12:30-1:45pm

Please join the History Dept for the 2018 Fusco Distinguished Lecture Series, presenting

Heather Ann Thompson (Michigan)

who will deliver a talk titled

"The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Why It Matters Today"

based on research for her book Blood in the Water: The Attica Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.

Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan, and is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon Books, 2016). Within the first week of its publication Blood in the Water was optioned by TriStar Pictures and will be adapted for film by acclaimed screenwriters Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel and produced by award-winning producers Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor.

Dr. Thompson’s audience goes well beyond her work in Blood in the Water. She also wrote the book Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City in 2001 which was republished in 2017 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Detroit Riot of 1967.

Dr. Thompson is also a public intellectual who writes extensively on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system for The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Jacobin, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, NBC, New Labor Forum, The Daily Beast, and The Huffington Post, as well as for the top publications in her field. Her award-winning scholarly articles include: “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline and Transformation in the Postwar United States,” Journal of American History (December 2010) and “Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards.” Labor: Studies in the Working Class History of the Americas (Fall, 2011).