Spring Symposium on Democracy at Scale

Ambassador Flake

Ambassador Flake recently served as the United States Ambassador to The Republic of Türkiye.

Prior to his ambassadorial service, Ambassador Flake represented Arizona in the United States Senate from 2013 to 2019. He also represented Arizona in the United States House of Representatives from 2001 to 2013.

Before entering Congress, Ambassador Flake served as Executive Director of the Goldwater Institute in Arizona, and he directed the Foundation for Democracy in Namibia during that nation’s transition to independence.

Ambassador Flake holds a BA degree in International Relations and an MA degree in Political Science from Brigham Young University. He has guest lectured at Stanford, Princeton and Yale, and he was a Resident Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics.

He currently serves as the Director of the Institute of Politics (IOP) at Arizona State University, and as Chairman of the Board of World Trade Center Utah. He also serves as a visiting fellow at Brigham Young University. 

In January of 2025, Ambassador Flake was knighted by the Swedish Government, receiving the “Royal Order of the Polar Star” for his pivotal role in securing Sweden’s accession to NATO while serving as Ambassador to Türkiye.

He is the author of the New York Times best seller Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle.

Ambassador Flake and his wife, Cheryl, are the parents of five grown children.

Youssef Chahed 

Youssef Chahed was the Republic of Tunisia's youngest-ever appointed head of government, holding the position from August 2016 to February 2020. He had previously served as the secretary of state for fisheries and the minister of local affairs. Since the Tunisian revolution in January 2011, Chahed has been a supporter of freedom of the press, expression, and diversity. Throughout his term in office, he successfully fought against terrorist organizations like ISIS and Al Qaida. He was the first Arab leader to start a war against organized crime, smugglers, and corruption. He was successful in addressing Tunisia's public finance problems and lowering the public deficit as a result of a program negotiated between Tunisia and the IMF/WB despite a challenging economic environment.

After obtaining his Ph.D. in agribusiness sciences from the National Institute of Agriculture in Paris (France) in 2003, Chahed worked as a professor and an international expert in agriculture.

Jamila Michener

Jamila Michener is a professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University. She studies poverty, racism, and public policy, with a particular focus on health and housing. She is author of Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power (Princeton University Press, 2026). She is co-editor of Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis (Sage Publications, 2024). She is Inaugural Director of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures and Senior Associate Dean for Public Engagement at the Brooks School of Public Policy.

Michener's research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Institute for Research on Poverty, the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, and the Ford Foundation. Her public writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vox, and many other outlets. She works closely with community-based organizations around the country to apply research insights to address urgent problems facing racially and economically marginalized communities.

Prior to working at Cornell, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at the University of Michigan. She received her MA and PhD from the University of Chicago and her undergraduate degree from Princeton University.

Daniel Ziblatt

Daniel Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and Director of Harvard University's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He also leads a research group on democracy and democratic erosion at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in Germany.

He is the author of four books, including How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), co-authored with Steve Levitsky, a New York Times best-seller and described by The Economist magazine as "the most important book of the Trump era." The book has been translated into thirty languages. In 2017, he authored Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), an account of the history of democracy in Europe, which won the American Political Science Association's 2018 Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book in government and international relations and American Sociological Association's 2018 Barrington Moore Prize. His first book was an analysis of 19th century state building, Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton, 2006). In Fall 2023, his newest book entitled Tyranny of the Minority (co-authored with Steve Levitsky) puts America's contemporary transition into a multiracial democracy in comparative and historical perspective, and shows the distinctive vulnerabilities of the U.S. constitutional order.

Ziblatt maintains an active research program that is published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and World Politics. In 2023, he was elected member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.