Co-sponsored by the Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence for Comparative Populism, The Tommy Thompson Center, the Elections Research Center, The Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, The Department of Political Science, and WisPolitics.
Ranked-choice voting is being debated around the country and in Wisconsin. Join us for a virtual “breakfast briefing” featuring a panel of experts who will review lessons learned elsewhere to help inform policymakers and the public about how ranked-choice voting would change elections in the Badger State.
The Speakers:
Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America. He is the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America (Oxford University Press, 2020) and The Business of America is Lobbying (Oxford University Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 American Political Science Association’s Robert A. Dahl Award, given for “scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy.” He is also the co-host of the podcast Politics in Question, and writes for the New York Times, Vox, and FiveThirtyEight, among other outlets. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. from Brown University.
Amy Fried is the John Mitchell Nickerson Professor of Political Science at the University of Maine. She formerly served as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Fried was the Policy Advocate in the Rising Tide Center, which was funded by a five-year National Science Foundation ADVANCE-Institutional Transformation grant she co-wrote and for which she served as Co-Principal Investigator Prof. Fried’s research primarily concerns the history and political uses of public opinion in the United States.
Andrea Benjamin is an Associate Professor in the Luper Department of African American studies at the University of Oklahoma. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan and her Bachelor’s in political science and African American studies from the University of California-Davis.
Professor David Farrell is a specialist in the study of representation, elections, parties, and deliberative mini-publics. His most recent books include: The Oxford Handbook of Irish Politics (co edited, Oxford University Press, 2021), Deliberative Mini-Publics: Core Design Features (co-authored, Bristol University Press, 2021), and Reimagining Democracy: Lessons in Deliberative Democracy from the Irish Front Line (co-authored, Cornell University Press, 2019). In addition he has published 20 other books (authored/edited) including the award winning Political Parties and Democratic Linkage: How Parties Organize Democracy, published by Oxford University Press in 2011. His current work is focused primarily on deliberative mini-publics. To date he has advised and/or researched six government-led deliberative mini-public processes in Ireland, the UK and Belgium.
The Moderator:
Michael W. Wagner is a professor in the University of Wisconsin Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His research, teaching, and service are animated by the question, “how well does democracy work?” Wagner approaches this question from a variety of perspectives, incorporating into his work the study of political communication, political parties, journalism, public opinion, political psychology, political behavior, religion and politics, the presidency, and biology