Meeting January 28, 2021 Professor Susan Hyde of UC Berkeley

Professor Susan Hyde

Professor Susan Hyde

Professor Susan Hyde
UC Berkeley
THURSDAY, JANUARY 28, 2021
7:00 PM – Meeting with Dr. Hyde
6:15 PM – Informal Sharing
Title of Talk: Did Democracy in the USA Bend or Break? Democratic Institutions in Global Context
The San Ramon Valley Democratic Club welcomes Susan Hyde, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Her field of study is international influences on domestic politics with a focus on the developing world, international election observation, election fraud, and democracy promotion. She has published articles in academic journals, including Science magazine with the article “Democracy’s Backsliding in the International Environment

Besides being a Professor of Political Science, Susan D. Hyde is the Avice M. Saint Chair in Public Policy, and the Interim Co-Director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2006, was on the faculty at Yale University from 2006-2016, and held residential fellowships at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. From 2016-2018 she served a three year elected term as the Executive Director of the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network. She has published numerous journal articles, most recently in International Organization and Science, and several books.

Her research on election observation included serving on missions in Afghanistan, Albania, Indonesia, Liberia, Nicaragua, Pakistan and Venezuela, and she has worked with the Carter Center, the National Democratic Institute, Democracy International, the International Republican Institute, and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems on democracy promotion issues and researching how democracy promoting organizations can evaluate the effects of their work.

Susan Hyde and her co-author Elizabeth Saunders won an ALBIE AWARD for 2020! What is an ALBIE AWARD?  The annual award, named after renowned social scientist Albert O. Hirschman, is given to the ‘best work in political economy published in the previous year  that has made us rethink how the world works in such a way that we will never be able to “unthink” the argument. 

The scientific publication for which Susan Hyde and Elizabeth Saunders won the ALBIE Award:
“Recapturing Regime Type in International Relations: Leaders, Institutions, and Agency Space,” International Organization, January. For decades, international relations scholars believed that democracies had attributes that gave them certain advantages in world politics. The past two decades of scholarly research has challenged some of these presumptions, as has the past decade or so of real life. In their review essay, Saunders and Hyde do an excellent job of stocktaking. They further offer up a useful framework to explain why regime type retains more explanatory power than many scholars and pundits believe.