Speaker Bio:

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Kathryn Stoner is the Deputy Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. She teaches in the Department of Political Science at Stanford, and in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. Prior to coming to Stanford in 2004, she was on the faculty at Princeton University for nine years, jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School for International and Public Affairs. At Princeton she received the Ralph O. Glendinning Preceptorship awarded to outstanding junior faculty. She also served as a Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at McGill University. She has held fellowships at Harvard University as well as the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. 

In addition to many articles and book chapters on contemporary Russia, she is the author or co-editor of five books: "Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective," written and edited with Michael A. McFaul (Johns Hopkins 2013);  "Autocracy and Democracy in the Post-Communist World," co-edited with Valerie Bunce and Michael A. McFaul (Cambridge, 2010);  "Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia" (Cambridge, 2006); "After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions" (Cambridge, 2004), coedited with Michael McFaul; and "Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional" Governance (Princeton, 1997). She is currently finishing a book project entitled "Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order" (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

She received a BA (1988) and MA (1989) in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University (1995). In 2016 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Iliad State University, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. 

 

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Laura Jakli is a Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation draws on digital survey and ad experiments, machine learning, and qualitative fieldwork to examine the relationship between digital politics and political radicalization. Her related research examines how digital networks shape migration patterns and refugee behavior. She holds a Master of Arts in Political Science with Distinction from the University of California, Berkeley. Her undergraduate degree is from Cornell University, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

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Maiko Ichihara is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Law and the School of International and Public Policy at Hitotsubashi University, Japan, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She is a committee member of the World Movement for Democracy, East Asia Democracy Forum, and Partnership for Democratic Governance (Japan), and is a co-chair of Democracy for the Future project at the Japan Center for International Exchange. Throughout her career, she has undertaken research on international relations, democracy support, and Japanese foreign policy. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from the George Washington University and her M.A. from Columbia University. Her recent publications include: “Universality to Plurality? Values in Japanese Foreign Policy,” in Yoichi Funabashi and G. John Ikenberry, eds., The Crisis of Liberalism: Japan and the International Order (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, forthcoming); “International Power Structure and Strategic Motivations: Democracy Support by Japan and Indonesia,” JICA-RI Working Paper, No. 194 (August 2019); and Japan’s International Democracy Assistance as Soft Power: Neoclassical Realist Analysis (New York and London: Routledge, 2017).

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Nancy Okail is a visiting scholar at CDDRL. She has 20 years of experience working on issues of democracy, rule of law, human rights, governance and security in the Middle East and North Africa region. She analyzes these issues and advocates in favor of human rights through testimony to legislative bodies, providing policy recommendations to senior government officials in the U.S. and Europe. She is currently the president of the board of advisors of The Tahrir Institue for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), previously she was the Institute’s executive director since its foundation. Dr. Okail was the director of Freedom House’s Egypt program. She has also worked with the Egyptian government as a senior evaluation officer of foreign aid and managed programs for several international organizations. Dr. Okail was one of the 43 nongovernmental organization workers convicted and sentenced to prison in a widely publicized 2012 case for allegedly using foreign funds to foment unrest in Egypt. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in the UK; her doctoral research focused on the power relations of foreign aid. 

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Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, and New York, and as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is also coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5^th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.   He has edited several books, including Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy (Oxford Press, 2008); The Health Care Case: The Supreme Court’s Decision and Its Implications (Oxford Press 2013); and Solutions to Political Polarization in America (Cambridge Press, 2015).   He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.  

Abstract:

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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Abstract:

Ahmet T. Kuru will talk about his new book  Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Why do Muslim-majority countries have high levels of authoritarianism and low levels of socio-economic development in comparison to world averages? Kuru elaborates an argument about the ulema-state alliance as the cause of these problems in the Muslim world from the eleventh century to the present. Criticizing essentialist, post-colonialist, and new institutionalist alternative explanations, Kuru focuses on the relations between intellectual, economic, religious, and political classes in his own explanation.

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Monica Prasad's areas of interest are political sociology, economic sociology, and comparative historical sociology. Her new book Starving the Beast asks why Republican politicians have focused so relentlessly on cutting taxes over the last several decades--whether the economy is booming or in recession, whether the federal budget is in surplus or deficit, and even though total taxes in the U.S. are already lower than in other developed countries. Drawing on archival documents that have never before been seen, Prasad traces the history of the famous 1981 "supply side" tax cut which became the cornerstore for the next several decades of Republican domestic economic policy. She argues that the main forces behind tax cuts are not business group pressure, racial animus, or a belief that tax cuts will pay for themselves. Rather, the tax cut movement arose because in America--unlike in the rest of the advanced industrial world--progressive policies are not embedded within a larger political economy that is favorable to business, a situation whose origins she explored in a prior book

This event is co-sponsored with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/cPaeCJiRWuM

About this Event: In 2011, the impact of the Arab Spring and the emergence of YouTube videos evidencing ballot stuffing during Russian parliamentary elections, which nearly led to a revolution in Russia, forced Kremlin strategists to suddenly realize that the Internet had become a major media — and a major power. This was the case not only in Russia, but everywhere on the planet. The Kremlin spent years and billions of dollars [or rubles?] to subdue this power, and  to learn how to make use of it. Was this crusade successful? Is it true that Putin is now capable of influencing elections everywhere in the world? Will he be able to cut Russia off from the global internet? And what are the troll farms trying to achieve? Leonid Volkov, an internet expert and the founder of the Internet Protection Society, the leading Russian digital rights NGO—and, simultaneously, Chief of Staff for Alexey Navalny, the leader of Russian opposition—is known for his optimistic view on these issues. While Putin is far from possessing almighty internet warfare, the situation has complex implications for Russian society and democracy.

About the Speaker: Leonid Volkov is a Russian politician and IT-expert. He oversees regional political operations, IT and electoral campaigns for the leader of Russian opposition Alexey Navalny. Previously Volkov served as campaign manager and chief of staff for Alexei Navalny’s 2013 mayoral campaign for Moscow, as well as for Navalny’s attempt to get registered for the 2018 presidential election. Leonid Volkov is a former deputy of the Yekaterinburg City Duma. He has over 20 years of experience as an IT professional, running and consulting several of Russia’s largest software firms. Since 2016 Leonid is active also as founder and chairman of the Internet Protection Society, a NGO focused on internet freedom and digital rights in Russia.