Election 2020: What’s Next?

Henry E. Brady is the Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy in the Goldman School of Public Policy  at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as dean of the Goldman School from 2009-2021. He received his PhD in economics and political science from MIT. He has written on electoral politics, political participation, social welfare policy, political polling, and statistical methodology. He has worked for the federal Office of Management and Budget and other organizations in Washington, DC. He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2003 and as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006. He is the co-author of The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy and Unequal and Unrepresented:  Political Inequality and the People's Voice in the New Gilded Age, Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (1992), Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (1995), Expensive Children in Poor Families: The Intersection of Childhood Disability and Welfare (2000); and Counting All the Votes: The Performance of Voting Technology in the United States (2001). 

Lisa García Bedolla is a Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies. She uses the tools of social science to reveal the causes of political and economic inequalities in the United States, considering differences across the lines of ethnorace, gender, class, geography, sexuality, et cetera. She has used a variety of social science methods – participant observation, in-depth interviewing, survey research, field experiments, and geographic information systems (GIS) – to shed light on this question.

She has published four books and dozens of research articles, earning five national book awards and numerous other awards. She has consulted for presidential campaigns and statewide ballot efforts and has partnered with over a dozen community organizations working to empower low-income communities of color. Through those partnerships, she has developed a set of best practices for engaging and mobilizing voters in these communities, becoming one of the nation’s foremost experts on political engagement within communities of color.

Her current projects include: a multi-year study of Integrated Voter Engagement efforts conducted by six community organizations in California (with Marisa Abrajano, UCSD); the development of a multi-dimensional data system, called Data for Social Good, that can be used to track and improve organizing efforts on the ground; and the creation of a university-based center, called the Center on Democracy and Organizing, to support academics interested in conducting research in partnership with practitioners with a focus on addressing inequality in civic engagement (with Hahrie Han, UCSB and Taeku Lee, UC Berkeley).

Professor García Bedolla earned her Ph.D. in political science from Yale University and her B.A. in Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley.