DIAS Guest Lecture: Politics by design

Patrick Emmenegger, Professor of Comparative Political Economy and Public Policy at University of St. Gallen.



Invited and presented by DIAS Chair of Humanities, Professor Klaus Petersen, Cpop, DaWS



Politics by design: How political institutions privilege some groups over others



Political institutions are not neutral. Instead, political institutions such as electoral systems have important distributional consequences, leading to the systematic underrepresentation of some political groups.



This talk examines how electoral systems, the unequal geographical distribution of voters, and the organization of a country into electoral districts cause representational biases that may privilege urban or rural voters, and left-wing or right-wing parties, depending on the “fine print” of the electoral institutions.



Furthermore, it will be shown that these biases are often the result of deliberate political decisions, giving the designers of political institutions long-lasting advantages over their competitors.




About:

Patrick Emmenegger is Professor of Comparative Political Economy and Public Policy at the School of Economics and Political Science, University of St. Gallen.



He is the co-editor of the Socio-Economic Review (since 2017), the chair of the PhD Program in International Affairs and Political Economy (since 2016), and serves on the Federal Commission on Vocational Education and Training of the Swiss Government (since 2016).



From 2015 to 2018, he was the President of the Swiss Political Science Association.





The lecture takes place in the DIAS Auditorium, Fioniavej 34. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed.





Live stream it at youtube.com/@danish-ias