UCLA Political Science

Marschak Colloquium with Melissa Schwartzberg
2018-01-11 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Marschak Colloquium with Melissa Schwartzberg
DateJanuary 8, 2015
Time3:00pm
Location
Young Research Library, Conference Room 11360
Contact
Contact Information
lohmann@ucla.edu
Presenter:Melissa Schwartzberg, New York University PoliticsHost:Giulia Sissa, UCLA Political Science & ClassicsTitle: “Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule”Abstract:Supermajority rules govern many features of our lives in common: from the selection of textbooks for our children’s schools to residential covenants, from the policy choices of state and federal legislatures to constitutional amendments. It is usually assumed that these rules are not only normatively unproblematic, but necessary to achieve the goals of institutional stability, consensus, and minority protections. Professor Schwartzberg challenges the logic underlying the use of supermajority rule as an alternative to majority decision-making. She traces the hidden history of supermajority decision-making, which originally emerged as an alternative to unanimity rule, and highlights the tensions in the contemporary use of supermajority rules as an alternative to majority rule. Although supermajority rules ostensibly aim to reduce the purported risks associated with majority decision-making, they do so at the cost of introducing new liabilities associated with the biased judgments they generate and secure.The Jacob Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral Sciences at UCLA.
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How I Learned to Embrace Anger and Love the Bomb
2018-01-10 00:00
How I Learned to Embrace Anger and Love the Bomb
DateJanuary 8, 2014
Time7:00am to 9:30am
Location
11377 Bunche Hall
Contact
Aggression constitutes an essential element in a great deal of violence. We seek to examine how dispositional aggression influences attitudes toward foreign policy. Secondarily, we also provide some analysis that interrogates the etiology of aggression. Recent work has begun to examine whether the tendency to engage in physical aggression might have some roots in genetic traits. In combination with particular environmental variables, certain heritable characteristics appear to predispose certain individuals to a higher risk of responding aggressively to threat. We present results which include an analysis for the effects of sex, education, and parental and partner bonding on aggression. In addition, we undertake a sociological and genetic analysis of traits related to aggression in a large population of Australians, and their examine effects on attitudes toward foreign policy and moral dilemmas. Integrating genetic and environmental factors to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the effect of aggression on political attitudes and moral values uncovers new possibilities for interventions designed to ameliorate the effects of violence on society.
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Fall Quarter begins/Instruction begins – Monday
2018-01-08 00:00
Fall Quarter begins/Instruction begins – Monday
DateJanuary 5, 2015
Time6:00am
Location
Contact
Fall Quarter begins/Instruction begins – Monday
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Evangelical Reform and the Origins of the Modern Constitutional Order
2018-01-08 00:00
Evangelical Reform and the Origins of the Modern Constitutional Order
DateJanuary 6, 2014
Time4:00am to 5:30am
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
In twenty-first century America, religion seems to go hand in hand with veneration of the Constitution and its framers. But during the nineteenth century, deeply religious Americans were almost as likely to condemn the Constitution as to praise it. Why did early religious activists often express disdain for a constitutional inheritance that their twenty-first-century successors regard with awed reverence? The answer, in short, is that Americans living in the aftermath of the great religious revivals of the early nineteenth century came to regard as sinful many activities and forms of property – from liquor, to lottery tickets, to slavery – that the founding generation had tolerated, or even actively promoted. In order to rid the nation of sinful forms of property, evangelicals found it necessary to challenge some of the framers’ most basic constitutional principles, from their expansive conception of property rights to their commitment to decentralized regulatory authority. Evangelical reform efforts thus helped facilitate the birth of a new constitutional order in which conceptions of property rights and state-federal relations are increasingly viewed as fluid, socially constructed, and subject to modification by democratic majorities. In short, the “living Constitution” which modern-day social conservatives routinely disparage was in no small part the creation of an earlier generation of religious activists.
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