Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin

Events

October 2008

Title	Date & Time	Location	Description	Sponsor
Palestinian Politics After Arafat: A Failed National Movement?	October 10, 2008 1:00 PM-3:00 PM	Texas Union Theater 2.228	In this talk, Dr. Ghanem attempts to understand the situation of the Palestinians and their national movement at the start of the twenty-first century. He will attempt to trace and analyze concrete aspects of the state of the Palestinian national movement in the post-Oslo era. What happened during the past decade to the Palestinians in general, and to their national movement in particular, led to the internal and external failure. Externally, this failure was manifested in the disintegration of the regional and international status of the Palestinian national movement. Concomitantly, the efforts to establish a Palestinian state and resolve the conflict reached a dead end because of the deep internal schism which had developed, and which is incompatible with national unity. As'ad Ghanem is head of the Government and Political Philosophy Department in the School of Political Science at the University of Haifa. He is currently a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.	This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, and the Department of Government.
''Complex Systems Approaches to Budget Change in Dynamics: Model Frameworks for Institutional Decision Making''	October 14, 2008 2:00 PM-3:30 PM	Batts Hall 5.108	Péter Érdi Henry R. Luce Professor of Complex Systems Studies Center for Complex System Studies, Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, MI and Dept. Biophysics, KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Science, Budapest In this talk, Professor Erdi will discuss complex systems approaches to studying social systems in broad perspective. Then he will discuss some of the work he and his students have been doing in collaboration with Bryan Jones on policy dynamics, in particular work on public budget dynamics.	Department of Government
2008 Election Panel	October 14, 2008 4:00 PM	BAT 5.108	Professors Daron Shaw and Sean Theriault will lead a discussion about the 2008 Elections three weeks before Americans choose their next president and Congress. They will discuss the current status of the key states and races and make their predictions for what will happen on election night in November. Open to the UT public. Seating space is limited, so please arrive early. If you have any questions, please contact the Government Advising Office at 512-232-7283.	Dept. of Government, Pi Sigma Alpha
COMPARATIVE POLITICS SPEAKER SERIES The Recursive Relation between Patronage and Popular Protest	October 16, 2008 12:30 PM-2:00 PM	Batts Hall 5.108		Department of Government and the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson Texas Politics Speaker Series	October 16, 2008 3:30 PM	GEB 3.312, Dean's Conference Room	The Texas Politics Speaker Series welcomes Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson. As state senator for District 11 (Harris, Galveston, Brazoria), Patterson's major legislative successes include passage of the historic concealed handgun law, the state coastal management plan, and the creation of the Texas State Veterans Home Program. He also chaired the first Veterans Affair committee in the Texas Senate and hosted the first POW/MIA day at the Texas Capitol. Patterson, a native Texan, received his undergraduate degree from Texas AandM and received his commission in the United States Marine Corps. More about Texas Politics Speaker Series	Liberal Arts ITS
''Social and Political Rights in the New Latin American Constitutions''	October 21, 2008 12:30 PM	Batts Hall 5.108	Roberto Gargarella is Professor of Constitutional Theory and Political Philosophy at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. He holds graduate degrees in Law and Sociology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, a Master¹s degree in Political Science from the Facultad Latinomamericana de Ciencias Sociales in Buenos Aires, and a J.D. and LLM from the University of Chicago. He has conducted post-doctoral research at Balliol College, Oxford. Professor Gargarella has published extensively in English and in Spanish on Constitutional and democratic law and theory, with a special focus on economic and social rights. He has received numerous awards and scholarships for his scholarly work, including a Tinker Scholarship (2007), a Fulbright Scholarship (2007) and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship (2002-03). He was also named ³Best Professor² at Di Tella in 2006 and 2007. Professor Gargarella has lectured extensively throughout the world.
Heinrich Best, ''The Europe of Elites: Dimensions and Determinants of European Identity Among Political and Economic Elites''	October 24, 2008 12:00 PM	BAT 5.108	Speaker: Prof. Heinrich Best, Institut fur Soziologie, Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena Prof. Best is a leader of the massive EU-funded study of elite and mass identities in all member states. He is co-author of two books reporting an earlier and equally far-reaching study: Parliamentary Representatives in Europe, 1848-2000 (OUP 2002) and Democratic Representation in Europe (OUP 2007).	Center for European Studies, Dept. of Government