Brown Bags

The Rise of the Rural One Percent

Date: 17 March 2016
Speaker: Joseph Baines

In rural America, recent high and volatile agricultural prices have seen the average commercial farm ascend into the top income percentile of US households.

Joseph Baines is a Fellow in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics.

Religion and the Delegated State in America

Date: 15 March 2016
Speaker: Margaret Weir

Non-profit organizations have become key arms of the American welfare state. Yet accounts of the rise of the third sector have little to say about the South and the Southwest, areas of the country where population and poverty have grown the most over the past two decades.  Historical legacies of race, religion, and immigration gave rise to diverse organizational ecologies for assisting the poor in different parts of the country, resulting in two distinct forms of delegated state in America: a civic-public model in the North and Midwest and a religious-private model in the South and Southwest.  These regional differences mean that organized resources for resisting neoliberalism vary systematically in different parts of the country.

Margaret Weir is Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

The American Democratic Deficit

Date: 24 February 2016
Speaker: Lawrence Jacobs

American presidents often claim to speak for the "people" but new research based on White House archives demonstrates that presidents largely respond to the affluent and well-organized.

Lawrence R. Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance in the Hubert H. Humphrey School and the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota.

Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and the Decline of the Eastern Establishment

Date: 2 February 2016
Speaker: Luke Nichter

Senator, statesman, presidential advisor, and presidential candidate by popular demand, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and his national political career that stretched from the 1930s to the 1970s have up to now escaped biographical treatment.

Luke A. Nichter is an Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University - Central Texas. He tweets at @lukenic.

Currency Politics,  Political Economy and the Gold Standard

Date: 19 January 2016
Speaker: Jeffry Frieden

For much of the late nineteenth century the United States was a hotbed of exchange rate controversy, but by 1896 the election of William McKinley, the pro-gold candidate, signalled the triumph of the Gold Standard and  paved the way for dollar hegemony. What can the experiences of the 1890s tell us about today's currency politics?

Jeffry Frieden is Professor of Government at Harvard University, specializing in the politics of international monetary and financial relations. Frieden is the author of Currency Politics: The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy (2015), co-author (with Menzie Chinn) of Lost Decades: The Making of America's Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery (2012), and the author of Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (2007).