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. Honors Program award winners, Shayla Fitzsimmons-Call and Marco Widodo will be presenting their award winning presentations. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E-008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

2026 CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Award Winner: Shayla Fitzsimmons-Call

Bound by the Ballot? Autocratic Compliance After Electoral Defeat 

When autocrats lose elections, what determines whether they comply with the electorate's judgment? And if they resist, what determines whether they succeed? Despite the frequency and consequences of autocratic electoral crises, electoral compliance decisions remain undertheorized. To address this gap, I propose a two-stage theory of incumbent compliance. At Stage 1, pre-election structural conditions - military control, elite unity, and international vulnerability - determine whether resistance is viable. At Stage 2, activated only if resistance occurs, two reactive forces- mass mobilization and activated international pressure - become salient. Drawing on an original dataset of elections held in autocratic regimes between 1970 and 2018, the results partially support and partially challenge this theory. While structural weakness reliably precludes resistance, structural strength does not reliably cause it; among cases where resistance occurs, high, cohesive international pressure emerges as the most consistent determinant of whether incumbents ultimately exit. This thesis posits that compliance is best understood as a process shaped by forces operating at different moments, and that this temporal distinction has both implications for how scholars and international actors understand and respond to electoral crises in electoral autocracies.

2026 Firestone Award Winner: Marco Widodo

Why Resist? The Microfoundations of Democratic Resilience in an Age of Backsliding

Why do Indonesian citizens fail to punish democratic backsliding at the ballot box? Across more than a decade of democratic decline, Indonesian voters have registered remarkably little alarm, continuing to reward leaders associated with democratic erosion while still professing support for democracy. This thesis investigates the demand-side foundations of that puzzle, probing whether the content of democracy might itself be the problem. To pinpoint precisely where and how the accountability chain breaks down, I fielded an original nationally-representative survey experiment in February 2026 with Indikator Politik Indonesia (N = 1,566), randomly assigning Indonesian respondents to one of three definitions of democracy—electoral, liberal, or substantive—and tracking their responses across four hypothetical scenarios. To measure treatment comprehension and experimental manipulation, I score open-ended responses using a novel multi-model LLM coding ensemble. Combined, this empirical design enabled me to discriminate between two candidate diagnoses of conceptual failure: that Indonesian citizens hold conceptions of democracy that simply diverge from those of scholars (the divergent conceptions argument), or that “democracy” itself carries too little evaluative content to differentiate governance failures of different kinds (the thinness argument). Ultimately, the evidence points overwhelmingly in support of the latter interpretation—that for many Indonesian citizens, “democracy” functions less as a thick descriptive concept than as a thin term of approval whose application tracks perceived governance quality. The divergent conceptions hypothesis, meanwhile, yields a robust null across thirteen specifications. In this era of backsliding, the conceptual thinning of “democracy” carries severe implications for the validity of cross-comparative survey research, for the elite strategies that exploit the term’s elasticity, and for the resilience of democracy in Indonesia and beyond.

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