Center for Public Policy Events
The Hobby School of Public Affairs invites you to attend the Center for Public Policy speaker events.
Hobby School of Public Affairs
Center for Public Policy Speaker Series
Upcoming Speakers
Walter Actis, Supply Chain Vice President, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF) Argentina
Date: October 24, 2025
Time: 2:00pm
Location: 240, Bates Law
About the speaker: Walter Actis is the Supply Chain Vice President of YPF. He served as Executive Manager of Critical Projects reporting to the CEO of YPF S.A. during 2023. Actis started his career in the YPF Group as CEO of AESA between September 2018 and December 2020, and served as Manager of the Supply Chain Department in 2021 and 2022. He began his professional career at Schlumberger where he occupied different roles as Operations Manager for Argentina and Chile, for Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, he was D&M personnel manager in Houston, Vice President of Artificial Lift for Latin America, General Manager for Argentina, Bolivia and Chile and Commercial Director of Drilling for the group. Actis holds an electronic engineer degree from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
Jorge Mangonnet, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University
Date: November 4, 2025
Time: 12:00pm
Paper Title: How the Pampas Was Won: Ethnic Rivalries and State Formation in Argentina.
Abstract: What is the impact of internal conflict on state formation? While existing scholarship emphasizes the role of interstate war in prompting political elites to define borders and assert control, the consequences of internal conflict remain less clear. Focusing on nineteenth-century Argentina, this paper examines how a common form of internal conflict in colonial and postcolonial societies––ethnic rivalries––shapes territorial consolidation. Drawing on fine-grained, archival military data from 1854–1876, we examine how the Argentine state expanded its frontier in response to sustained Indigenous plunder raids against settlers, known as malones. Using a difference-in-differences design that leverages the spatial and temporal variation of Indigenous raids, we provide causal evidence that areas affected by a malón were more likely to be incorporated into the national territory. Our findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between internal conflict and modern nation making.
Date: Novermber 17, 2025
Time: 12:00pm
Location: Heritage Room (201), Bates Hall
Paper title: Kiss, Marry, Kill: Appearance-Based Discrimination in Politics
Abstract: Democracy is premised on voters’ ability to identify qualified candidates for office. However, extensive evidence suggests that candidate appearance has a non-trivial impact on voter decision-making. Social scientists often argue that the brain’s tendency to take cognitive shortcuts explains these phenomena, but this theory still fails to explain why the brain takes one shortcut over another. Weaving together experimental and observational evidence, I show that when visual cues are provided, voters rely on mental “hardware” (cognitive modules) originally built for person-evaluation tasks like threat detection and mate selection. In turn, stereotypes—our socially-conditioned “software”—make us likely to evaluate members of some groups as more threatening or more attractive than others. I find evidence of these biases even in real elections where voters see candidates’ other qualifications. When aggregated, these tendencies affect election outcomes and have attendant pernicious consequences for descriptive representation of women and ethnic minority candidates, as well as for democratic accountability in locales that hold direct elections of candidates.
Aaron R. Kaufman, Associate Professor at the New York University Abu Dhabi
Date: December 1, 2025
Time: 12:00pm
Location: Heritage Room (201), Bates Hall
Paper title: Are Firms Gerrymandered?
Abstract: We provide the first evidence that firms, not just voters, are gerrymandered. We compare allocations of firms in enacted redistricting plans to counterfactual distributions constructed using simulation methods. We find that firms are over-allocated to districts held by the mapmakers’ party when partisans control the redistricting process; maps drawn by courts and independent commissions allocate firms more proportionately. Our results hold when we account for the gerrymandering of seats: fixing the number of seats the mapmakers’ party wins, they obtain more firms than expected in their districts. Our research reveals that partisan mapmakers target more than just voters, shedding new light on the link between corporate and political power in the United States and opening new pathways for studying how mapmakers actually draw district boundaries.
About the speaker: Aaron R. Kaufman is an Associate Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. He also holds affiliations with the Department of Politics and the Center for Data Science at New York University, the Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP), and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. His research interests leverage cutting-edge methods in computer science and causal inference to solve measurement problems in political science. He also produces open-source tools to help researchers work more efficiently. He is committed to research transparency and open science.