CGD Policy Blogs

This is a joint post with Josh Busby

Our research on the political economy of antiretrovirals (ARVs) is motivated by a key puzzle: why were AIDS activists and AIDS policy entrepreneurs successful in putting universal access to treatment on the international agenda when so many other global campaigns--whether in health care or other issue areas like climate change--have either failed or struggled to have much impact. In our paper, we make the case that the market for ARVs was politically constructed, meaning that activists had to bring the demand and supply sides of the market together through a variety of tactics and strategies (Tim Bartley makes a similar argument on forest certification schemes).

In The Fate of Young Democracies, CGD Visiting Fellow Ethan Kapstein and co-author Nathan Converse attempt to explain why many newly democratized countries experience political reversals. They call these reversals "Major Democratic Transitions"-- a phrase that makes our demographic ears perk up.

When most people think about slavery--if they think about it at all--they probably assume that it was eliminated during the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth.