Spring 2025
Tariffs? Technical Barriers to Trade and Dollar Hegemony: External Restrictions for Economic Development with Andrés Arauz
February 18, 2025
This lecture examines the colonial origins and enduring impact of international economic law and institutions, technical barriers to trade (TBTs), and dollar hegemony as instruments of external restriction on economic development. Drawing on Andrés Arauz’s policymaking experience at the Secretaría Nacional de Planificación y Desarrollo (Senplades) and the Ministerio Coordinador de la Política Económica (MCPE) in Ecuador, his doctoral research at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and his reports for the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), the lecture highlights how these mechanisms perpetuate structural dependency and limit policy autonomy in the Global South.
Due to the WTO and a “spaghetti bowl” of free-trade agreements, tariffs have lost importance as trade barriers. They have evolved into sophisticated technical and technological barriers that protect industries in former colonial powers while restricting industrialization in developing economies. Global trade rules enforce asymmetries that undermine strategic industrial policies, particularly in dollarized economies. Research at UNAM on monetary sovereignty further reveals how dollar hegemony, understood as a U.S. banks-centered global financial system, constraints fiscal and trade policies by imposing liquidity shortages and external vulnerabilities. Studies at CEPR on financial flows illustrate how this system reinforces capital dependency, amplifying economic shocks in periphery nations.
Through historical and empirical analysis, this lecture traces how these colonial heirs continue to shape the global economic order. It concludes by exploring strategies for overcoming external constraints by effectively reclaiming policy space for development, including regional monetary arrangements and explicit industrial policy.
Sponsored by: Munk-Darling Lecture Fund in International Relations and the Walter Krause (Econ ‘38) Economics Lecture Fund
Election 2024 and the Persistent Force of Gender in U.S. Presidential Politics
February 20, 2025
Gender is a persistent force in presidential politics, a fact repeatedly demonstrated regardless of whether women have been on major party presidential ballots. The 2024 election again demonstrated how intersectional effects of gender and race shaped not only the experiences, treatment, and strategic calculations of candidates—men and women alike—but also how deeply rooted forces of sexism and racism affected the presidential contest. This lecture will focus on the myriad ways in which gender and racial dynamics—including the dominance of whiteness and masculinity—contributed to the 2024 presidential election and its outcome. It will move beyond the question of whether or not the country is "ready" for a woman president to interrogate the complex ways in which both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump navigated gendered and racialized terrain in contemporary U.S. politics.
Kelly Dittmar is an associate professor of political science at Rutgers University–Camden and Director of Research and Scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics. She is the co-author of A Seat at the Table: Congresswomen’s Perspectives on Why Their Representation Matters (Oxford University Press, 2018) with Kira Sanbonmatsu and Susan J. Carroll and author of Navigating Gendered Terrain: Stereotypes and Strategy in Political Campaigns (Temple University Press, 2015). Dittmar’s research focuses on gender and American political institutions. Dittmar was an American Political Science Association (APSA) Congressional Fellow from 2011 to 2012. At CAWP, she manages national research projects, helps to develop and implement CAWP's research agenda, and contributes to CAWP reports, publications, and analyses. She has been an expert source and commentator for media outlets including the Associated Press, 19th News, NPR, PBS, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Dittmar earned her B.A. from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, MI and her Ph.D. from Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
An American Problem: Voting Rights in the Modern Era
April 10, 2025
In the decades after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, Congress and the Courts finally took steps toward realizing real multiracial democracy in the United States. In 2013, however, the Supreme Court suspended a key provision of the VRA, severely weakening protections for nonwhite voters. This has had disastrous consequences in the past decade, and, in many ways, we find ourselves in a similar legal landscape to that prevalent prior to the passage of the VRA. of the for Justice will discuss the parallels between the midcentury environment and today, and detail the effects of unraveling of the VRA, drawing from research from a forthcoming book on this subject.
Kevin Morris is a Senior Research Fellow and Voting Policy Scholar at the Brennan Center for Justice, where his work focuses on voting rights, election administration, and the effects of the criminal legal system on political participation. Much of his work addresses important public policy and social justice issues, using innovative and cutting edge statistical tools to connect a massively large, twenty year national vote file with billions of records joined to geospatial information on things like occurrences of different types of police violence, residential location near formerly incarcerated citizens, or having a family member die of COVID-19 impacts voter turnout and other ways of political engagement.
His scholarly work has been published in journals like the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Politics, while his public-facing writing and Congressional testimony has received a wide audience outside the academy. Dr. Morris’s work has been cited by state and federal courts, including the US Supreme Court.
His public scholarship includes the recently released report, “Growing Racial Disparities in Voter Turnout, 2008-2022”, the first and more comprehensive tracking of the racial turnout gap and the ongoing impact of the Shelby County v. Holder decision.
Dr. Morris received his bachelor's degree from Boston College, a masters degree in urban planning from the NYU-Wagner School, and a PhD in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center.