Wellesley professors Chipo Dendere and Ismar Volić

Chipo and Ismar will discuss their fascinating books about voting. Moderated by fellow Wellesley professor Kellie Carter Jackson.
About this Event

If you would prefer to buy your ticket by phone, you may call Wellesley Books at 781-431-1160.

About ticketing:

• Admission to the event is $5.
• To purchase the book with your admission, choose Admission + Book and we will waive your admission fee.
• If you decide to purchase the book at the event, we will discount your book purchase by $5.

Please note that you must purchase your copy of the book from Wellesley Books in order to have the author sign it at the event.

Please also note that we cannot issue ticket refunds within 48 hours of the event.

Lastly, please be aware of our new parking system for the lot behind the store. Parking is free, but you must check in with Vend Park. We recommend setting this up before the event.

ABOUT DEATH, DIVERSION, AND DEPARTURE

There are many explanations for the survival of long-serving political parties, from access to state wealth to the use of excessive violence. A yet unexplored reason, particularly for parties that have survived under extreme conditions, is voter exit.

In Death, Diversion, and Departure, Chipo Dendere shows that voter exit creates new opportunities for authoritarian regime survival. With an empirical focus on Zimbabwe, Dendere centers two types of voter exit: death and migration. She shows how the exit of young, urban, and working professional voters because of mass death due to the AIDS pandemic and mass migration in the wake of economic decline has increased the resilience of a regime that may have otherwise lost power.

With authoritarianism on the rise globally and many citizens considering leaving home, Death, Diversion, and Departure provides timely insights into the impact of voter exit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Chipo Dendere is a Zimbabwean-born American academic and an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College. Her research focuses on democratization, elections, and voting behavior in Africa, as well as the influence of social media on politics. Additionally, Dr. Dendere is working on significant projects related to chocolate politics and African First Ladies' political lives. At Wellesley, she teaches comparative politics, elections, resources, and African politics courses. Dendere frequently provides commentary on African politics for CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera, and she writes for a public audience across various platforms. She is active on X (formerly Twitter) under the username @drDendere. For more information about or to contact Dr. Dendere, visit drdendere.com.

ABOUT MAKING DEMOCRACY COUNT

What’s the best way to determine what most voters want when multiple candidates are running? What’s the fairest way to allocate legislative seats to different constituencies? What’s the least distorted way to draw voting districts? Not the way we do things now. Democracy is mathematical to its very foundations. Yet most of the methods in use are a historical grab bag of the shortsighted, the cynical, the innumerate, and the outright discriminatory. Making Democracy Count sheds new light on our electoral systems, revealing how a deeper understanding of their mathematics is the key to creating civic infrastructure that works for everyone.

In this timely guide, Ismar Volić empowers us to use mathematical thinking as an objective, nonpartisan framework that rises above the noise and rancor of today’s divided public square. Examining our representative democracy using powerful clarifying concepts, Volić shows why our current voting system stifles political diversity, why the size of the House of Representatives contributes to its paralysis, why gerrymandering is a sinister instrument that entrenches partisanship and disenfranchisement, why the Electoral College must be rethought, and what can work better and why. Volić also discusses the legal and constitutional practicalities involved and proposes a road map for repairing the mathematical structures that undergird representative government.

Making Democracy Count gives us the concrete knowledge and the confidence to advocate for a more just, equitable, and inclusive democracy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ismar Volić is a Professor of Mathematics and the Director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College. He received a B.A. from Boston University and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Brown University. His research is in topology and social choice theory. He is the author of many articles and books and has delivered more than three hundred lectures in over twenty countries. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University, MIT, and the University of Virginia. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Simons Foundation, and the Fulbright Fellowship among others. His writing has appeared in The Hill, Time, and on Literary Hub, among other leading publications.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Kellie Carter Jackson is the Michael and Denise Kellen ’68 Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. Her book Force and Freedom was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. Her latest book, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance, was the winner of the Organization of American Historians’ 2025 Darlene Clark Hines Award and was named a Best Book of 2024 by Smithsonian, Kirkus, Chicago Review of Books, Emancipator, and Ms. Magazine.

She lives outside of Boston with her husband and three children.