SURF Research and Publications
SURF provides students with a unique opportunity to engage in research training in international relations and simultaneously conduct their own research.
Students will participate in several workshops to learn how to formulate a research question, collect data, and identify the appropriate method to analyze that data. The workshops are designed so students can immediately apply this knowledge to their own research projects. While we expect that students already have some research experience, our program is tailored specifically to address the questions of international collaboration. Each SURF participant is an expert in their area of interest, and the SURF program is a way to leverage that expertise and apply it in a new context.
Memos
Keep it Simple: A Field Experiment on Information Sharing Among Strangers
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The obsolescing bargain crosses the Belt and Road Initiative: renegotiations on BRI projects
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A study examining the BRI through the lens of the obsolescing bargain to evaluate the practices of China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and policy banks in mitigating political risk.
Driving while unauthorized: Auto insurance remains unchanged when providing driver licenses to unauthorized immigrants in California
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What is the effect of offering driver's licenses to undocumented people? Hans Lueders and Micah Mumper offer answers.
A short book about the challenges to liberalism from the right and the left by the bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order.
Pascaline Dupas and co-authors Agness, Baseler, Chassang, and Snowberg leverage individual choice data they generate on farmers in western Kenya to solve a general problem: do behavioral phenomena drive individual choices when trading off cash for time, or cash and time for goods?
Pandemic Spikes and Broken Spears: Indigenous Resilience after the Conquest of Mexico
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In a new paper for the Journal of Historical Political Economy, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Saumitra Jha examine the conditions under which indigenous communities in Mexico were able to overcome the onslaught of disease and violence that they faced.
Displacing fishmeal with protein derived from stranded methane
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Stanford researchers reveal how to turn a global warming liability into a profitable food security solution
Democracy's Arc: From Resurgent to Imperiled
In his final essay as co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, Larry Diamond calls this moment the darkest for freedom in a half-century. Whether democracy regains its footing will depend on how democratic leaders and citizens respond to emboldened authoritarians and divisions within their own societies.
Nate Grubman shows how the repeated failures of Tunisia’s once-promising democratic transition created a crisis ripe for exploitation by a populist outsider
How Voters Respond to Presidential Assaults on Checks and Balances: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Turkey
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Why do voters support executive aggrandizement?
We're pleased to share CDDRL's 2021 Year in Review where you can learn about the important work the Center has accomplished over the last year. We're grateful to our community committed to our mission and to our generous supporters.
Towards a unified approach to research on democratic backsliding
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A growing literature examines democratic backsliding, but there is little consensus on when, where, and why it occurs.
Community policing does not build citizen trust in police or reduce crime in the Global South
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When no bad deed goes punished: Relational contracting in Ghana and the UK
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Youth Politics (chapter in The Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Turkey)
Markets under Siege: How Differences in Political Beliefs can move Financial Markets
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Can differences in beliefs about politics, particularly the benefits of war and peace, move markets? During the Siege of Paris by the Prussian army (1870-71) and its aftermath, we document that the price of the French 3% sovereign bond (rente) differed persistently between the Bourse in Paris and elsewhere, despite being one of the most widely held and actively traded financial assets in continental Europe. Further, these differences were large, reaching the equivalent of almost 1% of French GDP in overall value. We show these differences manifested themselves during the period of limited arbitrage induced by the Siege and persisted until the terms of peace were revealed. As long as French military resistance continued, the rente price was higher in Paris than the outside markets, but when the parties ceased fire and started negotiating peace terms this pattern was reversed. Further, while the price responded more to war events in Paris, the price responded more to peace events elsewhere. These specific patterns are difficult to reconcile with other potential mechanisms, including differential information sets, need for liquidity, or relative market thickness. Instead, we argue, these results are consistent with prices reflecting the updating of different prevailing political beliefs that existed in Paris and elsewhere about the benefits of war and peace.
The Impact of Community Masking on COVID-19: A Cluster-Randomized Trial in Bangladesh
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A randomized trial of community-level mask promotion in rural Bangladesh during COVID-19 shows that the intervention increased mask-use and reduced symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections.
Transitional Justice As Communication: Why Truth Commissions and International Criminal Tribunals Need to Persuade and Inform Citizens and Leaders, and How They Can
This Article reframes transitional justice as communication. It argues that the impact of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) and international criminal tribunals (ICTs) on countries where human rights violations occurred depends largely on these institutions changing what those countries’ citizens and elites know and believe. More precisely: most of the ways TRCs and ICTs could advance their goals—such as reconciliation and deterrence—require informing these domestic audiences about the institutions’ activities, methods, and findings, and persuading them to accept the institutions’ conclusions. Communication-specific activities, such as public outreach and media relations, are essential. Yet shaping elite and popular knowledge and opinion are not mere add-ons to what some see as TRCs’ and ICTs’ “core” work: investigating human rights violations, holding hearings, writing reports, and indicting and trying perpetrators. Rather, the imperative of influencing local people must shape how these institutions conduct those activities and sometimes even what conclusions they reach. Unfortunately, TRC commissioners, ICT judges and prosecutors, and their staff, along with transitional justice scholars, have underestimated the importance of influencing domestic audiences for advancing TRCs’ and ICTs’ goals. As a result, the institutions have devoted too little attention and resources to communication.
The Article also provides a typology of the activities and occasions through which TRCs and ICTs can influence domestic audiences. It offers examples of effective and ineffective practice from five international criminal tribunals, such as the International Criminal Court and Special Court for Sierra Leone, and over a dozen truth commissions, such as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Where evidence permits, it assesses individual institutions’ performance. Finally, the Article analyzes the most important challenges that TRCs and ICTs encounter in communicating with domestic audiences.
Is Deliberation an Antidote to Extreme Partisan Polarization? Reflections on “America in One Room”
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This paper stands at the intersection of two literatures—on partisan polarization and on democratic deliberation—that have not had much connection with one another. If readers find some of the results surprising, the authors have had the same reaction. In this paper we describe these results and our approach to explaining them.
Kathryn E. Stoner’s Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order and James Reilly’s Orchestration: China’s Economic Statecraft Across Asia and Europe
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Experimental Evidence on Semi-structured Bargaining with Private Information
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