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Sam Trachtman reflects on the BESI panel event he moderated back last month.

On April 27, 2026, California climate policy experts joined BESI's Samuel Trachtman for a candid discussion on California's climate track-record and potential paths forward.

In an op-ed for Project Syndicate, BESI's Brian Judge argues that the digital euro can change how the European public perceives integration — but only if leaders resist their technocratic impulse and show how it improves their daily lives.

On February 10, 2026, Stanford political scientist gave a talk on his book Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency. He argues that Republican backlash to the progressive administrative state has motivated the party to seek a strongman presidency that governs unilaterally in defiance of democracy and the rule of law.

In this talk recorded at BESI on January 27, 2026, Boston University political scientist Erik Peinert explains the ever-narrowing group of companies that monopolizes American and international markets by dredging up the economic research, theories, and interests that motivated policy discussions at key moments during the 20th century.

Recorded at BESI on March 4, 2026, this talk with Princeton sociologist of science and technology Janet Vertesi summarizes her "Opt Out" experiments and the lessons for fighting back against surveillance capitalism.

Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy research director Brian Judge joined Garth Bray on The New Zealand Herald's "HNOW: Business" to discuss how diminishing investor confidence in private credit funds signals broader risks for the global financial market.

Set against the backdrop of recent proposals by states to tax their wealthiest residents, this conversation explores how the “grand bargains” between the rich and the rest of us became embedded in law and civic culture, how they have broken down over time, and how a renewed interest in taxation might inform a political and regulatory agenda for the future.

As high-profile private credit fund managers face a surge in withdrawals stemming from jitters over the economy, BESI's Brian Judge observes echoes of the months leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

Jones joined the DE during her third year as a graduate student. We caught up with her to learn more about her research and how her involvement in the DE contributed to her award-winning scholarship.

BESI senior researcher Samuel Trachtman shares his top three takeaways from a recent panel discussion featuring California political scholars and practitioners.

Motivated by recent major governance problems and policy implementation failures in California, BESI assembled an expert panel of scholars and practitioners to explore the underlying causes of the disfunction and examine potential remedies.