About the Event:  Increasing access to higher education is often seen as a threat to authoritarian regimes. Accordingly, authoritarian rulers would limit access to avoid the spread of anti-regime sentiments. Turkey suggests an interesting case. The consolidation of single party-rule overlapped with an impressive expansion of higher education, by 170 percent, from 76 in 2002 to 206 in 2020. This paper examines these two trends in connection with each other by focusing on universities' role as infrastructural mechanisms for both democratic culture and state coercion.  

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About the Speaker:  Ayça Alemdaroğlu is the Associate Director of the Program on Turkey and Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She is a political sociologist, focusing on social and political inequality and change in Turkey and the Middle East.

Ayça’s recent work examines youth politics, and authoritarianism. In “Governing youth in times of dissent: Essay competitions, politics of history and affective pedagogies” (forthcoming in Turkish Studies), she  examines the politics of history and emotional tactics the Justice and Development Party (AKP) uses in its effort to control, administer and recruit youth. In this work, she argues that the resilience of the AKP regime lies not only in the benefits the party has provided to previously disadvantaged groups and its coercive methods towards dissent, but also lies in the party’s articulation of political differences and its mobilization of emotions through intermediary channels between the party and the people. In “The AKP’s Problem with Youth”, Ayça examines the significance of youth for the AKP and the politics of its tremendous expansion of religious education in Turkey. In “Dialectics of Reform and Repression: Unpacking Turkey’s Authoritarian ‘Turn’”, she analyzes the dynamics and dialectics of reform and repression in the last two decades. Instead of reading contemporary Turkey as a case of relapse from reform into repression, as many commentators do, the article shows that reform and repression have been concomitant and complementary modes of the AKP governments.

She received her BSc. degree in political science and sociology from the Middle East Technical University, her MA in political science from Bilkent University, and her PhD in sociology from University of Cambridge. 

About the Event: Do programmatic policies always yield electoral rewards? A growing body of research attributes the adoption of programmatic policies in African states to increased electoral competition. However, these works seldom explore how the specifics of policy implementation condition voters’ electoral responses to programmatic policies over time, or changes in electoral effects throughout policy cycles. We analyze the electoral effects of both the promise and implementation of a programmatic policy designed to increase secondary school enrollment in Tanzania over three election cycles. We find that the incumbent party benefited from a campaign promise to increase access to secondary schooling, but incurred an electoral penalty following implementation of the policy. We do not find any significant electoral effects by the third electoral cycle. Our findings illuminate temporal dynamics of policy feedback, the conditional electoral effects of programmatic policies, and the need for more studies of entire policy cycles over multiple electoral periods.

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About the Event:  In the wake of the racial unrest of 1968, the federal government  embarked on a series of social programs designed to  respond to the cries of Black communities demanding an end to police brutality, access to quality housing, and economic investment in schools and jobs.  Often, these cries were not fully heeded, and the marketplace became a terrain on which corporate America and the state argued that Black lives could be improved.  In this presentation on her most recent book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, historian Marcia Chatelain links the rise of black capitalism with the fracturing of the mid-century civil rights struggle and eclipsing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of economic justice.  In lieu of policies that could enhance the quality of life in America’s cities, many Black neighborhoods were offered fast food outlets, low-wage work, and an enmeshed relationship with corporate benevolence.

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About the Speaker:  Marcia Chatelain is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Georgetown University. The author of books, South Side Girls and Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Her work has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, and The Washington Post.

About the Event:  Why have conservatives decried “activist judges”? And why have liberals - and America's powerful legal establishment - emphasized qualifications and experience over ideology? This transformative text tackles these questions with a new framework for thinking about the nation's courts, 'the judicial tug of war', which not only explains current political clashes over America's courts but also powerfully predicts the composition of courts moving forward. As the text demonstrates through novel quantitative analyses, a greater ideological rift between politicians and legal elites leads politicians to adopt measures that put ideology and politics front and center - for example, judicial elections. On the other hand, ideological closeness between politicians and the legal establishment leads legal elites to have significant influence on the selection of judges. Ultimately, the judicial tug of war makes one point clear: for good or bad, politics are critical to how judges are selected and whose interests they ultimately represent.

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**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the Event: This book examines the creation and consequences of executive constraints in authoritarian regimes. How do some dictatorships become institutionalized ruled-based systems, while others remain heavily personalist? Once implemented, do executive constraints actually play an effective role in promoting autocratic stability? To understand patterns of regime institutionalization, I study the emergence of constitutional term limits and succession procedures, as well as elite power-sharing within presidential cabinets. This project employs a wide range of evidence, including an original time-series dataset of 46 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1960 to 2010, formal theory, and case studies. Altogether this book paints a picture of how some dictatorships evolve from personalist strongman rule to institutionalized regimes. 

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About this Event: In India there persists a striking gender gap in political participation. Women's political participation is important both on normative grounds of inclusion and because when women do participate, politics changes. I develop a theoretical model of political behavior arguing that women's lack of political participation is the result of the structure of women's political networks in patriarchal societies. I then evaluate the effect of expanding women's networks by leveraging a natural experiment that created as-if random variation in access to women-only credit groups. Participation in these groups had a significant and substantial impact on women's political participation - women's attendance at public meetings doubled. I provide suggestive evidence of three mechanisms underlying this effect: (1) larger networks, (2) increased capacity for collective action within networks, and (3) development of civic skills. These findings contribute to our understanding of how networks affect political behavior and underlie gendered inequalities in political participation.

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**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the Event: Following the Allied invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. government and military officials revived counterinsurgency doctrine and practice—widely employed, though not invented, during the era of decolonization—in service of the nation’s ongoing War on Terror. This revival was dramatized during a widely publicized screening at the Pentagon of Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic film The Battle of Algiers (1966). What insights into (Algerian) insurgency and (French) counterinsurgency did U.S. officials hope to glean from Pontecorvo’s film? And how would these insights be mobilized, if at all, for the occupation of Iraq and other insurgent geographies? 

This talk revisits this historical moment and the questions it raises about the relationship between U.S. militarism and the uses of literature and film in the management of insurgency in Africa and Western Asia.

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In October, the Justice Department sued Google for violating antitrust laws.These antitrust concerns are motivated by the potential economic harms caused by the tech giants’ monopoly positions, but there might be greater reason to worry about the political harms that the platforms pose to American democracy because of their control over the modern information ecosystem. If the antitrust laws are designed to address economic harms, how should policymakers confront the political harms from dominant digital platforms?

Join us on November 18th at 10 a.m. PST to discuss recommendations from the new White Paper of the Stanford Working Group on Platform Scale, where we will assess how today’s digital platforms pose threats to American democracy and a proposal for how creative technological interventions might mitigate the platform’s growing power. Panelists include Francis Fukuyama, Mosbacher Director of Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and a leader at the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet, Ashish Goel, Professor of Management Science and Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University, Barak D. Richman, Professor of Law and Business Administration at Duke University, Luigi Zingales, Professor of Economics at the Chicago Booth School of Business and Co-host of the podcast Capitalisn't, and Dick Costolo, former CEO of Twitter, founder and CEO of multiple startups, and now a Managing Partner at 01 Advisors, in conversation with Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Center as they discuss new ideas in antitrust.

This event is open to Stanford undergraduate students only. 

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The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors on who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department.  The application period opens on January 11, 2021 and runs through February 12, 2021.   CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.

For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.

**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone