Facilitators

Professor of Public Policy & Political Science

Sarah Anzia is a political scientist who studies American politics with a focus on state and local government, elections, interest groups, political parties, and public policy. She is the author of Local Interests: Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which evaluates the political activity of interest groups in US local governments and how interest groups shape local public policies on housing, business tax incentives, policing, and public service provision more broadly.

Lecturer of Public Policy and Management at the School of Finance and Management at SOAS University of London 

Chase Foster is a political scientist who studies the politics of market regulation in Europe and North America. His interests include the relationship between competition law and the organization of capitalism; the geopolitics of regulatory policymaking and enforcement; the political economy of industrial policy; and the politics of regulating Big Tech. An expert in the comparative political economy of market regulation, his work has been published or is forthcoming in academic journals such as Socio-Economic Review, Regulation & Governance, European Union Politics, and Comparative Political Studies. His current book manuscript, Trust on Trial: Competition Law, Coordination Rights, and the Making of Modern Capitalism comparatively examines the durable ways that competition law and policy shaped the development of capitalism in Europe and the United States across the long 20th century. 

Foster is currently Lecturer of Public Policy and Management at the School of Finance and Management at SOAS University of London where he also serves as the director of the Centre for Financial and Management Studies. He received his BA in public policy analysis from UNC-Chapel Hill and his MPP and Ph.D. (Government) degrees from Harvard University. For more information visit http://www.chasefoster.com.

My research is in comparative and international political economy with a substantive focus on market regulation and economic policy. Broadly speaking, I am interested in the regulatory role of the state within capitalism: how and why state regulatory regimes developed historically; how state institutions have shaped the development of market economies; and how domestic regulatory regimes have evolved in response to convergence pressures stemming from globalization.

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Empirically, much of my work focuses on the political economy of competition law: how and why the rules governing market competition developed differently across political systems; the partially autonomous role of courts in structuring the development of competition regimes; the global diffusion of competition law; and the political and economic factors that shape the transnational and extraterritorial enforcement of competition rules. 

I have particular interests in European politics and public policy, especially the politics of European integration, the socio-economic determinants of support for the EU and the relationship between welfare reform and support for populist political parties.

Associate professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley

I am an associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. I was previously associate professor of political science at the University of Washington and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton. 

I study the political economy of the United States. I'm broadly interested in democracy, public policy, racial and economic inequality, American federalism, and statistical methods. Check out my publications and working papers.

Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs, School International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and serves as Vice Dean for Curriculum and Instruction. His teaching and research focuses on understanding the intersection between politics and markets in the United States, the politics of policy design, and labor policy. He is co-director of Columbia’s Labor Lab, which uses social science tools in partnership with labor organizations to build worker power. Hertel-Fernandez recently returned to Columbia after serving in the Biden-Harris Administration in the U.S. Department of Labor and the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. While at the Department of Labor, he led the Department’s research and evaluation activities, including launching initiatives to study and address disparities in access to unemployment insurance and to better measure job quality. He also led the Department’s implementation of President Biden’s historic executive order on racial equity. At the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, he led efforts to expand public participation and community engagement in the regulatory process, reduce burdens in access to government benefits, and served as the lead handling White House review of regulations and forms related to nutrition and food assistance, support for underserved farmers, and rural development.

labor; business; policy design

Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee 

Nate Kelly is Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee (transitioning to Rutgers University fall 2024) and the Inaugural Visiting Fellow in the Hesburgh Program for Public Service at the University of Notre Dame. He has previously been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Carnegie Corporation Fellow. His work focuses on institutions, inequality, and democracy. He is the author or co-author of three books, the latest of which (Hijacking the Agenda) is winner of the Gladys M. Kammerer Award from the American Political Science Association for the best book published in US policy. He has also published numerous articles on the politics and policy of economic inequality in the United States and Latin America.

I am interested in institutions, inequality, and democracy in the United States and the western hemisphere. I seek to understand how various forms of inequality - economic, racial/ethnic, gender - intersect with politics, political institutions, and policymaking. I apply a wide range of methodological techniques, from time series analysis, to cross-sectional analysis of survey data, to qualitative case studies, text analysis, and survey experiments. My most recent project examines how persistent political and economic inequalities, particularly exclusion organized around race and ethnicity, undermines democratic attitudes and institutions. I also analyze how exposure to information about the structural nature of inequality affects policy attitudes and support for democratic institutions and principles.

John Gross Chair, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley

Paul Pierson is the John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the newly established Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative. Pierson is the author or co-author of six books, numerous journal articles, and a wide range of popular writings on American politics and public policy. Four of his books have been co-authored by Jacob Hacker (Franklin Foer in the New York Times Book Review calls them “two of the most reliable and reliably creative thinkers in their discipline”). Their latest book is Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. Previously, the two wrote American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper—a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and a best business book of 2016 according to Strategy+Business. Their 2010 bestseller Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class recast the debate over U.S. economic inequality, showing how the rise of the superrich in the United States is closely linked to American politics and policy. Prior to this Pierson wrote Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis (2004) and Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment (1994). A former Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his recent honors include election to the American Academy of Political and Social Science as the 2022 Robert A. Dahl Fellow.

Associate Professor of Political Science; Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University

I am an associate professor of political science and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, at Northwestern University. I received my PhD from Berkeley in 2013, and have also spent time as a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins and as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. 

My research is at the intersection of American political development and political economy and has focused on the development of social and economic policies, interest groups and social movements, institutional change, and historical analysis. More substantively, I am interested in the politics of housing, consumer credit and debt, and asset and wealth inequality. I have a new book (with Emily Zackin) coming out this summer that examines the political development of debt relief in the United States.