The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) dismantled the institutional barriers that had suppressed political participation of African Americans in the U.S. South since the end of Reconstruction. Did it also win hearts and minds in the racially conservative South? In this paper, we study this question using newly collected data on county-level voter registration rates by race. Exploiting variation induced by a special provision of the VRA (“coverage”), we find that covered counties with higher shares of African Americans experienced a larger increase in Black and white registration rates.

Democracies have historically restrained against the tyranny of the majority by developing norms of international human rights, cultural minority rights, and ideas of multiculturalism.

Why are elite Republicans—those who burnish longstanding establishment credentials—finding it so difficult to keep control of their party?

Houssam is chief of the Private Sector Partnerships MENA unit of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). He started the unit in the United Arab Emirates and is now covering the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with a regional team that focuses on providing diversified funds for the regional and global needs of refugees. In his talk, Houssam will take you through the journey of where and how he started and what are the challenges and opportunities in a fundraiser’s career.

The German colonial empire was the first of the European overseas empires of modern times to be dissolved. From 1919, German politics and society had to adjust to a world order that continued to be dominated by rival European global powers. This had a direct impact on German foreign policy, trade and consumption, as well as on science and culture; it also shaped the self-image of German society and its conceptions of the world.