Monday, June 21, 2021
9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EDT
via Zoom
We were pleased to invite you to a new webinar series, “Facing Inequality”, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. This virtual series focuses on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe. The series brings attention to aspects of inequality being made increasingly relevant by the current COVID-19 pandemic and associated crises. The series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Faculty Affiliate Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History. The series is co-sponsored by the GW Interdisciplinary Inequality Series, co-organized by Prof. Jackson from the Department of History and Prof. Bryan Stuart from the Department of Economics. The inaugural event in the series featured Branko Milanovic.
The goal of the series is to bring together historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and epidemiologists, both within the academy and without, to present their work and to discuss both their ideas and methods, with the intention of working towards new interdisciplinary approaches to the problem of inequality. This is a platform for dialogue and debate, and will help cultivate a community of current and future researchers and practitioners. We invite you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.
In many countries, the political elites appear to be dominated by wealthy individuals. One commonly cited reason is the nature of the campaign finance system. Weak limits on campaign spending and rules protecting the role of outside funding may be especially advantageous for well-off candidates, given their greater ability to self-finance and stronger connections to deep-pocketed donors. While intuitive, this conjecture has scarcely been studied systematically across countries due to the lack of comprehensive data on politicians’ wealth. At the same time, insights on the topic from the U.S. are difficult to generalize from its highly idiosyncratic campaign finance regime. Drawing on newly-collected data from asset disclosures in a number of countries around the world, the paper examines cross-nationally the extent to which the variation in elected officials’ wealth is correlated with differences in limits on campaign spending. The paper further explores potential mechanisms by which campaign spending caps affect the composition of political elites by exploiting the recent campaign finance reforms enacted in Brazil and Chile.
Meet the Speakers:
Marko Klašnja is an assistant professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Government Department. He holds a PhD in political science (NYU, 2015). In 2014-2015, Marko was a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Princeton. His research focuses on democratic accountability and the inequalities in political representation, with a special focus on the electoral fortunes of corrupt politicians, the role of parties in democratic accountability, the causes and consequences of politicians’ wealth, and the political attitudes and preferences of wealthy individuals. At Georgetown, Marko teaches courses on comparative political economy and quantitative research methods.
Nina Eichacker is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Rhode Island. She earned her PhD at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her work synthesizes Post Keynesian economic theory with International Political Economy to better understand the effects of globalization, financial liberalization, and public intervention in neoliberalism and beyond. Her teaching interests lie in critical macrofinance, money and banking, and the economics of globalization.
Tim Shenk is an assistant professor in the department of history at GW and co-editor of Dissent. He is currently working on two books. The first, based on his dissertation and under contract with Princeton University Press, examines the emergence of the idea of “the economy” in the United States during the twentieth century. The second explores the intellectual history of the American political elite from the writing of the Constitution down to the present. Tentatively titled The Golden Line: The People, The Powerful, and the American Political Tradition, it is under contract with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
