CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program trains students from any academic department at Stanford to prepare them to write a policy-relevant research thesis with global impact on a subject touching on democracy, development, and the rule of law. Please join us for this seminar to hear our Honors Program award winners present their research.

The Limits of Payout Politics: How Biden-Harris Federal Spending Shaped (and Didn't Shape) the 2024 Presidential Vote

By Charles Sheiner (2025 Firestone Medal Winner)
Under the advisement of Larry Diamond and Jonathan Rodden

This thesis examines whether the Biden-Harris administration’s signature spending programs — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS Act — yielded electoral rewards in the 2024 presidential election. Using an original dataset of over 40,000 geocoded federal projects representing $227 billion in county-level investments, I find no statistically significant association between per-capita spending and Democratic vote margin shifts, even when accounting for partisan context and project visibility. Through interviews with federal and local officials, I identify three explanatory mechanisms: implementation lags prevented most projects from reaching completion before Election Day, administrative and policy bottlenecks systematically delayed development, and Republican messaging successfully reframed spending as inflationary. These findings suggest that retrospective voting operates primarily through immediate, visible benefits rather than campaign promises or announced investments, with significant implications for how policy initiatives must be designed to deliver outcomes within electoral cycles.

The Gavel and the Gun: Post-War Trials and State-Building Politics in Yugoslavia (1945-1949)

By Adrian Feinberg (2025 CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Award Winner)
Under the advisement of Aron Rodrigue

This thesis explores how Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) authorities used the post-World War II justice process to consolidate power from 1945 to 1949. Drawing on trial transcripts, newspapers, and other archival materials, the study argues that the Yugoslav state instrumentalized judicial structures in three distinct stages: first, using honor courts to assert basic state capacity; second, conducting public-facing war crimes trials to promote the state’s ideological legitimacy; and third, orchestrating espionage trials to suppress dissent and entrench single-party rule. While affirming that the KPJ often subordinated judicial integrity to its state-building project, the thesis complicates conventional narratives by attending to the moral ambiguities, partial truths, and undeniable moments of justice present in even the most politicized of trials. In doing so, it offers broader insights into the fraught intersection of law, memory, and power in postwar societies.

Philoxenia: Local Responses to Immigration in Calabria, Italy

By Adelaide Madary (2025 CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Award Winner)
Under the advisement of Vasiliki Fouka, Ph.D.

Over recent decades, many nations across Europe and the Americas have responded to mass migration movements across the globe with hostile policies, xenophobic sentiment, and poorly managed immigration systems. At the same time, several municipalities in Calabria, Italy that struggle with severe depopulation and economic hardship have experienced positive transformations upon opening refugee reception centers, including reversals to declining population trends, job creation and the continuation of important public goods, such as elementary schools—but not all towns that have a demand for immigration respond in the same way. Many Calabrian municipalities have not opened refugee resettlement centers, and others have become a breeding ground for labor exploitation among migrant workers. This thesis employs a mixed-methods approach to consider how structure, agency, and culture account for the variation in local responses to migrants and refugees throughout the relatively homogenous region of Calabria. A systematic analysis of quantitative municipal-level data paired with four granular case studies suggests that a municipality’s structural characteristics alone do not explain the variance in local responses to immigration. Rather, the presence of an entrepreneurial local actor, such as a mayor or non-profit leader with strong humanitarian commitments, is necessary to recognize and actualize the aligned interests between locals and newcomers and bring about cultures of hospitality. While much of the literature on local responses to immigration has focused on urban settings, this thesis aims to widen academic discussions to include more rural contexts and contributes to the underdeveloped literature on hospitality, rather than hostility, toward newcomers.

Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

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