In the 1990s, Australia began in 1900. Not a lot of people left from that founding moment by 1994 if they were. They weren't very effective in government. So it was really a new generation creating a new fiscal contract with the population. Is there some sense in which pressure builds up and the government sort of accumulates deviation from trustworthiness? And then some kind of revolt happens, either financial or political or something like that. The government has to correct itself. If it goes too far, then we're in trouble. Sometimes that's the form it takes for sure. And sometimes it's a big rupture. I mean, I found Trump a big rupture with what I understood government
Why do people voluntarily hand over authority to a government? Under what conditions should they do so? These questions are both timeless and extremely timely, as modern democratic governments struggle with stability and legitimacy. They also bring questions from moral and political philosophy into conversations with empirically-minded social science. Margaret Levi is a leading political scientist who has focused on political economy and the nature of trust in government and other institutions. We talk about what democracy means, its current state, and how we can make it better.
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Margaret Levi received her Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. She is currently Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. She is also co-director of the Stanford Ethics, Society and Technology Hub, and the Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the winner of the 2019 Johan Skytte Prize and the 2020 Falling Walls Breakthrough. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Association of Political and Social Sciences. She served as president of the American Political Science Association from 2004 to 2005. In 2014 she received the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science, in 2017 gave the Elinor Ostrom Memorial Lecture, and in 2018 received an honorary doctorate from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
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