Inaugural Lecture Series: Professors Matthew Nelson and Rochana Bajpai

Professor Matthew Nelson and Professor Rochana Bajpai from the Department of Politics deliver their inaugural lectures on two different and distinctive themes.

Professor Nelson's inaugural lecture, "Morality Politics" in (Muslim) South Asia: Divergent Agendas in Comparative Democracy Research, explores the relationship between local expressions of morality and democratic governance. 

Within comparative democracy research the importance of “the rule of law” is often taken for granted. Ad hoc expressions of local “morality”, however, often diverge from, even defy, the laws of an elected government’. How do these expressions of morality interact with the concept of democracy? How should they be addressed in comparative democracy research?

Professor Bajpai's inaugural lecture will be, Can liberal institutions save democracy? Political theory as experimental inquiry.

This lecture explores how democratic institutions offer political equality yet repeatedly produce arbitrary rule and majoritarian domination. Can liberal institutions such as constitutions and parliaments help counter these tendencies in democratic ways? Drawing on her research into constitution-making, parliamentary practice, and educational interventions in India, Professor Bagpai argues that they can. 

To understand how, Bajpai develops political theory as experimental inquiry that uses textual, historical, ethnographic, and practice-based methods to learn from institutions’ improvisations, failures, and unexpected democratic effects. This approach recasts liberal institutions as potential sites for dispersing power and generating democratic practices, illuminating how they might counter the growing concentration of political and economic power that threatens democracy today.