Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is proud to announce our four incoming fellows who will be joining us in the 2016-2017 academic year to develop their research, engage with faculty and tap into our diverse scholarly community. 

The pre- and postdoctoral program will provide fellows the time to focus on research and data analysis as they work to finalize and publish their dissertation research, while connecting with resident faculty and research staff at CDDRL. 

Fellows will present their research during our weekly research seminar series and an array of scholarly events and conferences.

Topics of the incoming cohort include electoral fraud in Russia, how the elite class impacts state power in China, the role of emotions in support for democracy in Zimbabwe, and market institutions in Nigeria. 

Learn more in the Q&A below.

Hometown: Tomsk, Russia

Academic Institution: Northwestern University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: Sociology, April 2017

Research Interests: authoritarianism, state capacity, social policy, civil society, trust, Russia and post-communist countries

Dissertation Title: The State that Betrays the Trust: Infrastructural State Power, Public Sector Organizations, and Authoritarian Resilience in Putin's Russia

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? I study the connection between state capacity and political regimes - the topic that is at the core of many research initiatives at CDDRL. Learning more about this work and receiving feedback for my dissertation will enrich and sharpen my analysis, while helping me to place it into a comparative context. I am looking forward to discussing my work with the faculty who study the post-Soviet region. I also will explore policy implications of my work with the help of policy experts at CDDRL.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? Besides finishing writing my dissertation, I will workshop three working papers to prepare them for publication. The first one argues that Putin's regime used the school system to administer a large-scale electoral fraud in 2012 presidential elections; the second one shows how the networks of social organizations were used by subnational autocrats to strengthen the regime; and the third one will look at the factors that make the abuse of such organizations more difficult in some regions. In addition to these papers I will continue developing my post-graduation research project exploring the relationship between social trust and distrust, institutions, political competition, and democratization.

Fun fact: I have spent 25 years of my life in Siberia, and I can tell you: Chicago winters are worse!

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Shelby Grossman

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Reading, MA

Academic Institution: Harvard University

Discipline & Graduation Date:  Government, Summer 2016

Research interests: political economy of development, private governance, market institutions, Sub-Saharan Africa, survey methods

Dissertation Title: The Politics of Order in Informal Markets: Evidence from Lagos

What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? I was attracted to CDDRL largely for its community of scholars. Affiliated faculty work on the political economy of development and medieval and modern market institutions, topics that are tied to my own interests.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? I plan to prepare a book manuscript based on my dissertation, a project that explains variation in the provision of pro-trade institutions in private market organizations through the study of physical marketplaces in Nigeria. In addition, I will continue to remotely manage an on-going project in Nigeria (with Meredith Startz) investigating whether reputation alleviates contracting frictions. I also plan to work on submitting to journals a few working papers, including one on the politics of non-compliance with polio vaccination in Nigeria (with Jonathan Phillips and Leah Rosenzweig). 

Fun fact: Contrary to popular belief, not all cheese is vegetarian. I have a website to help people determine if a cheese is vegetarian or not: IsThisCheeseVegetarian.com. 

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Daniel Mattingly

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Oakland, California

Academic Institution: University of California, Berkeley

Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science, Summer 2016

Research Interests: Governance, rule of law, state building, authoritarian politics, Chinese politics

Dissertation Title: The Social Origins of State Power: Democratic Institutions and Local Elites in China

What attracted you to CDDRL?  The Center has a fantastic community of scholars and practitioners who work on the areas that I'm interested in, including governance and the rule of law. I'm excited to learn from the CDDRL community and participate in the Center's events. The fellowship also provides me with valuable time to finish my book manuscript before I start teaching.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? While at CDDRL, I plan to prepare my book manuscript and to work on some related projects on local elites and state power in China and elsewhere. 

Fun fact: I grew up on an organic farm in Vermont.

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Lauren E. Young

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Saratoga, CA

Academic Institution: Columbia University 

Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science (Comparative Politics, Methods), May 2016 (defense), Oct 2016 (degree conferral)

Research Interests: political violence, political economy of development, autocratic persistence, democratization, protest, electoral violence

Dissertation Title: The Psychology of Repression and Dissent in Autocracy

What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? As a graduate of the CISAC honors program when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, I have seen first-hand how intellectually stimulating, collaborative, and plugged into policy CDDRL is. While at the center I will be revising my dissertation work on the political psychology of participation in pro-democracy movements in Zimbabwe for submission as a book manuscript, and moving forward new projects that similarly seek to understand how different forms of violence by non-state actors affects citizens' preferences and decision-making. Because of its deep bench of experts on autocracy, narco-trafficking, and insurgency, CDDRL will add enormous value to these projects.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL?  During my fellowship year, my primary goal is to revise my research on Zimbabwe into a book manuscript. I defended my dissertation as three stand-alone articles, including two experiments showing that emotions influence whether opposition supporters in Zimbabwe express their pro-democracy preferences and a descriptive paper showing that repression has a larger effect on the behavior of the poor. To prepare the book manuscript during my fellowship, I will bring in additional quantitative and qualitative descriptive evidence and tie the three papers together into a cohesive argument about how opposition supporters make decisions about participation in protest, why emotions have such a large effect on these decisions, and how this affects variation across individuals and the strategic choices of autocrats and activists.

Fun fact: During my fieldwork I took an overnight train from Victoria Falls to a southern city in Zimbabwe and hitch-hiked into a national park. It got a little nerve-wracking when night started to fall, but ended with  an invitation to a barbecue! 

On December 2, CDDRL Research Associate Kharis Templeman and Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) Distinguished Fellow Thomas Fingar spoke about Taiwan’s recent local elections, which were a major defeat for the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and President Ma Ying-jeou. They were joined by Dennis Weng, a visiting assistant professor of political science at Wesleyan University, and Winnie Lin, a Stanford junior and research assistant for the Taiwan Democracy Project. The event was hosted by the Taiwan Democracy Project at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Templeman opened the roundtable by describing the “historic nature” of the November 29th elections. For the first time, all elected local officials in Taiwan from the mayor of Taipei down to rural village leaders - more than 11,000 positions in total - were chosen at the same time. In the highest-profile votes for mayors and county executives, the KMT suffered a drubbing. The ruling party's loss to an independent in Taipei was widely anticipated, but KMT candidates in central and southern Taiwan also were defeated badly in races that were expected to be competitive, and several more were upset in former party strongholds in northern counties and cities. The main beneficiary of the ruling party's troubles was the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which picked up seven local executive seats and made significant gains in local councils as well.

President Ma Ying-jeou attends a news conference in Taipei January 12, 2012.

According to Templeman, the election results were clearly tied to the ruling party’s poor image. President Ma, who until the election loss doubled as the KMT party chairman, had approval ratings in the teens for much of the past two years, and he struggled to win support for his policy initiatives even from members of his own party caucus in the legislature. The central government was also beset by a series of crises in recent months, including student-led protests against a trade agreement with China, a pipeline explosion in the southern city of Kaohsiung, and a wide-ranging food quality scandal. The resulting damage to the KMT party brand "nationalized" the elections and led to a consistent swing in support away from the party across races that normally turn on more local issues.

Weng took on the question of why pre-election polls were so dramatically wrong in several races. Election telephone polls in Taiwan are taken quite frequently and usually provide reliable forecasts of election outcomes, yet in this election they were sometimes off by 20 points or more. Weng highlighted the youth vote as a possible explanation: Voters under 40 were significantly more anti-KMT than other generations and might have turned out at a higher rate than expected. Because young voters are disproportionately likely to have cell phones and not land lines, telephone polls have a hard time capturing a representative sample of this subset of the electorate. In the past, these problems were muted, but they might have been large enough in this election to throw off the polls.

Lin, a Taiwanese citizen who returned to Taipei to vote, then gave the audience a first-hand account of the political currents in Taiwan during the days around the election. The high-profile Taipei mayor’s race stood out both for the fact that the KMT’s main opponent was an independent, Ko Wen-je, rather than an official nominee of the DPP, and for Ko’s unconventional campaign strategy. Ko produced no television ads and eschewed buying billboard ads or producing campaign flags, instead directing much of his campaign efforts to online outreach and playing up his "non-partisan" background. Lin emphasized the effectiveness of this social networking strategy in raising interest and support among her own friends and colleagues.

The panel concluded with a look at the impact the election results might have on cross-Strait relations. Fingar, a former State Department official and past chairman of the National Intelligence Council, suggested that authorities in Beijing were “disappointed, but not surprised” by the election results, which greatly strengthened the position of the pro-independence DPP. From past experience, Beijing has learned not to try to influence the outcome of elections in Taiwan, and despite its historical antipathy toward the DPP, it is prepared to deal with the party's representatives and even a potential DPP presidential administration in 2016 as "legitimate political actors" in cross-Strait relations. Chinese policy towards Taiwan is unlikely to be affected much in the short run by the KMT’s defeat, although Beijing might also interpret the result as a signal that Taiwanese voters have not yet gotten enough economic gains out of the cross-Strait relationship. More troubling from the Chinese leadership's perspective is that the vote was held at all: Taiwan's local polls reinforce that elections are "not ill-suited for all people who speak Chinese,” and the kinds of practical complaints about governance and corruption that contributed to the KMT’s defeat are also pervasive in mainland China.