Populism and the Autonomous Role of Politics

A lecture by Monica Prasad examining the economic, social, and political dynamics that refashioned the Republican Party from a party of balanced budgets to a party of tax cuts, as laid out in her 2018 book, Starving the Beast: Ronald Reagan & the Tax Cut Revolution, with an aim to understand the populist tendencies within the party today.
Monica Prasad is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Her areas of interest are political sociology, economic sociology, comparative historical sociology, and the sociology of development. She has written three award-winning books using comparative and historical methods to examine the political economy of the United States and Europe, including the history and divergent trajectories of welfare states, the rise of “neoliberalism”, and the origins of distinct patterns of economic growth in different countries and their consequences for redistribution. Her scholarship has received the Fulbright award, the National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and several other grants and awards.