The Arab Spring: Developments in North Africa and the Middle East

Streaming video requires Flash Player, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player to view.The Arab Spring: Developments in North Africa and the Middle East will bring perspectives from the field that give new meaning to events reported in the news. The focus will be on the supporters of the protests and revolutions — who is funding the revolutions and counter revolutions -- as well as democracy and representation in diverse Middle Eastern contexts; war's toll on Libyans and potentially on Syrians; international impact and response-in Europe; refugees; NATO involvement; and protests by Saudi women. The panel will examine the Arab Spring as a whole and in specific contexts.Ohio State University. Middle East Studies CenterOhio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web page, streaming video, event photo

The Global University

Join two experts on the internationalization of higher education for a candid discussion about how local communities and regions benefit from the global efforts of their public universities. Topics will include knowledge hubs and economic development, strategic university-community partnerships, and institutional cooperation, among others. Co-sponsored by the UW-Madison Division of International Studies, WISCAPE, and the Worldwide Universities Network, the Global Public University Series promotes discussion about the trends, challenges, and opportunities that impact public universities throughout the world and how these institutions can learn from and work with each other

Ordinary Voting Behavior in the Extraordinary Election of Adolf Hitler

How did free and fair democratic elections lead to the extraordinary anti-democratic Nazi Party winning control of the Weimar Republic? The profound implications of this question have led "Who voted for Hitler?" to be the most studied question in the history of voting behavior research. Yet, despite the overwhelming attention, scholars have treated these elections as unique events and comparison with other elections as mostly irrelevant. Indeed, the literature rarely builds on insights from voting behavior research in political science or from modern statistical methods. By adding these approaches, we find that some of the most widely accepted current theories of Nazi voting do not distinguish the Weimar elections from almost any others, in any country. Like some researchers, we adopt a restrospective voting account, but we also recognize that the voters who were most hurt by the economic depression and hence most likely to oppose the government fall into two separate groups with divergent interests. With this additional feature and improved methods, we are able to show why some of the downtrodden turned to the Nazis and others turned away. The consequences of the election of Hitler were extraordinary, but available evidence suggests that the voting behavior that led to it was not