In this paper (co-authored with Meir Alkon, Fordham University) we develop and test the concept of ‘political demonstration effects’: the idea that information about a foreign country’s regime type and regime performance, whether positive or negative, may influence foreign publics’ attitudes towards democracy in general and support for democratic norms in their own country in particular.

Join us as our panel of three major African experts discuss the impact of illicit financial flows and offshore structures on the continent’s development prospects.

Tutu Alicante, Founder and Executive Director, EG Justice
Khadija Sharife, Editor, Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP)
Professor Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, Director, Oxford Martin Programme on African Governance (Chair)
Professor Attiya Waris, UN Independent Expert on foreign debt and human rights

Please note this talk is online only. Please register via Crowdcast.

The event will focus on Mark R. Beissinger’s recent book: The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion (Princeton University Press, 2022). Mark’s book focuses on the question: How and why cities have become the predominant sites for revolutionary upheavals in the contemporary world? He addresses the puzzle by using original data on revolutionary episodes since 1900, public opinion survey and engaging examples from around the world.

Long after universal suffrage and the enfranchisement of women, the demos has continued to expand. In the last decades, new demographics—immigrants, emigrants, and youth—have been granted the right to vote. So far, the academic literature has studied each of these expansions as separate phenomena, to the detriment of common knowledge advancement. I argue that the granting of voting rights to each of these demographics should be jointly studied under the umbrella of contemporary enfranchisement.

In ranked societies, high-rank groups often maintained their social dominance through their control of the state. What happens when they lose control of this instrument? We argue that dominant groups will develop more negative attitudes towards redistribution upon experiencing a loss of control of the bureaucracy. For these groups, losing the state signals a major peril: the possibility that redistributive policies now lead to social integration - including spatially - of their traditionally high-status community with other lower-ranked groups.