The amount of money spent on election campaigns in the United States has increased dramatically over time, sparking debate on the influence of money in politics and its impact on the democratic process. While less in focus during this year’s turbulent election season, the topic remains critical as campaign financing has substantial potential to influence voter behavior and shape the political landscape. How are presidential and congressional races generally funded and how are the current contenders for the White House financing their campaigns? Which consequences does the current legal framework around campaign financing in the U.S. have for transparency and fairness and how does it differ from the German model? To what extent does money determine election outcomes?
Join us for a virtual conversation as part of the Transatlantic Tandem Talk Series with Sandra Navidi, CEO, BeyondGlobal, LLC, and Dr. Maureen Edobor, Assistant Professor of Law, Washington and Lee School of Law; with welcoming remarks by Dr. Eva Bosbach, Executive Director, University of Cologne New York Office, and Viktoria Harbecke, Director, AmerikaHaus NRW e.V.
Sandra Navidi is CEO of the New York-based advisory firm BeyondGlobal. She is admitted to practice law in the State of New York and in the Federal Republic of Germany. Previously, she worked closely with noted economist Professor Nouriel Roubini at Roubini Global Economics. Prior to that, she held positions as an investment banker, general counsel, and management consultant. Ms. Navidi is known for her prescient expert media commentary on geopolitical and economic issues, featured on CNN, CNBC, Fox Business, and C-SPAN, among other notable platforms, as well as in numerous international documentaries. For the last 15 years, Sandra Navidi has been an economic and political analyst at Germany’s premier news outlet, n-tv (RTL). She also co-hosts n-tv’s business podcast Biz & Beyond. She is a WEF Davos veteran of almost two decades, one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices, and a TEDx Speaker. Ms. Navidi is the bestselling author of award-winning $uperHubs: How the Financial Elite and their Networks Rule Our World, one of Bloomberg’s Best Books of the Year. Thereafter, she published Future IQ: Your Success Strategies in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, which Handelsblatt recommended as a must-read. Her third book Die DNA der USA: Wie tickt Amerika, where she analyses America’s political and economic future, was shortlisted for the Frankfurt Book Fair’s German Business Book Award 2023. Sandra Navidi is an alumna of the University of Cologne.
Maureen Edobor is an Assistant Professor of Law, a DeLaney Center Fellow – W&L’s interdisciplinary academic hub that promotes scholarship on race, electoral politics, and Southern identity – and an Inaugural Steven M. Polan Fellow in Constitutional Law and History at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Professor Edobor teaches and writes in constitutional law, focusing on voting and elections. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania’s Journal of Constitutional Law, the George Washington Law Review, and the Washington and Lee Law Review. Her opinion writing has been featured in The Hill, Bloomberg Law, and The Daily Record. In Professor Edobor’s first year of teaching, she received the Ethan Allen Faculty Fellowship for excellence in scholarship.
The event is part of the NRW-USA Year 2023-2024 and of the Transatlantic Tandem Talks series:
The Transatlantic Tandem Talks are hosted by the University of Cologne New York Office in cooperation with its partners the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in New York, the German Embassy in Washington D.C., Deutsches Haus at NYU, DAAD New York, the German Research Foundation (DFG) North America, the German Center for Research and Innovation (DWIH) New York, 1014 Space for Ideas, the Goethe Institute New York, AmerikaHaus NRW, the American Friends of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and as of 2024, the American Council on Germany (ACG).
