Speaker Bio:

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), the Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and the Mosbacher Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).  He is also a professor by courtesy in the Department of Political Science. He was previously at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, where he was the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and director of SAIS' International Development program.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning democratization and international political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book is Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and a twice a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He served as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.

Abstract:

High bureaucratic transaction costs can make it impossible for individuals to claim welfare benefits. Instead, these costs make individuals dependent on intermediaries who facilitate access to welfare. Especially in contexts of weak and corrupt policy implementation, politically motivated intermediaries demand political loyalty in return for their assistance, a practice known as clientelism. Although intermediaries may be efficient and even compensate for deficiencies in state capacity, they can also have long-run consequences for individuals' political autonomy and capacity to hold governments accountable. As a result, instead of promoting autonomous political participation, the pursuit of social welfare benefits through intermediaries can intensify ties of dependency. Worryingly, this research suggests that studying distributive outcomes without understanding mediating institutions may produce misleading conclusions. However, an important implication of this theory is that vicious markets of mediation can be weakened by reducing the costs that citizens face in obtaining welfare benefits directly from the state.

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Tesalia is a Post Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University. Starting fall 2020, she will be joining the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Merced as Assistant Professor. She completed her PhD in Political Science at MIT. Tesalia is also a research affiliate at the MIT Governance Lab.

Her research is in comparative political behavior, with a particular focus on how citizens make demands on the state. Her book-project, titled “Intermediaries of the State: Bureaucratic Transaction Costs of Claiming Welfare in Mexico” explores how bureaucratic transaction costs prevent individuals from directly claiming welfare benefits. Instead, these costs make citizens dependent on clientelist brokers and intermediaries, who demand political favors in return for access.

Abstract:

Political polarization is tearing at the seams of democracies around the world—from Brazil, India, and Kenya, to Poland, Turkey, and the United States. Drawing on his new co-edited volume (with Andrew O’Donohue), Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization, Carnegie Endowment scholar Thomas Carothers will analyze the global spread of political polarization, drawing on examples from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America. Questions to be addressed include: Why has polarization come to a boil in so many places in recent years? What are its consequences? Once democracies have become deeply divided, what can they do to restore at least some consensus? Is polarization in the United States similar to or different from polarization elsewhere?

Speaker Bio:

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30 years ago, communist rule ended across central Europe in a dramatic series of events ranging from Solidarity's election triumph in Poland on 4 June 1989, through the ceremonial reburial of Imre Nagy in Budapest (with a fiery young student leader called Viktor Orbán demanding the withdrawal of all Soviet troops), to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Timothy Garton Ash witnessed these events and described them memorably in his book The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague and Berlin.

Now he has revisited all these countries, to explore the long term consequences of the revolutions and subsequent transitions. What went right? More pressingly: What went wrong? For today, Orbán is presiding over the systematic dismantling of democracy in Hungary, the Law and Justice party in Poland is trying to follow his example, the prime minister of the Czech Republic is an oligarch and former secret police informer, while a xenophobic populist party, the AfD, is flourishing in the former East Germany. In this lecture, Garton Ash will explore the peculiar character of populism in post-communist Europe, and the considerable forces of resistance to it.

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Co-Sponsors: Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, The Europe Center, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies and the Hoover Institution.

Light refreshments will be served after the lecture, and copies of The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague and Berlin, will be on sale

This event is free and open to the public.

Abstract:

A criminal trial is likely the most significant interaction a citizen will ever have with the state; its conduct and adherence to norms of fairness bear directly on the quality of government, extent of democratic consolidation, and human rights. While theories of repression tend to focus on the political incentives to transgress against human rights, we examine a case in which the institutionalization of such violations follows an organizational logic rather than the political logic of regime survival or consolidation. We exploit a survey of the Mexican prison population and the implementation of reforms of the justice system to assess how reforms to criminal procedure reduce torture. We demonstrate that democratization produced a temporary decline in torture which then increased with the onset of the Drug War and militarization of security. Our results show that democracy alone is insufficient to restrain torture unless it is accompanied by institutionalized protections.

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Abstract:

The dynamic game between political and business elites in both democratic and non-democratic countries has received much attention since the rise of the super-rich in global politics. How does the Chinese Communist Party manage its rising super-rich in the private sector in order to prevent state capture and stay in power? Using a mixed-method approach, this research project details how the super-rich have become a particular target of the party-state, which aims to monitor them and channel their involvement in politics in ways that minimize their potentials to capture the state and maximize their willingness to cooperate with the regime. This inquiry proposes a new perspective for understanding how China has maintained regime stability thus far with its rapid economic development, and what processes may lead to destabilization.

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Abstract:

What explains the political momentum of far right parties? I argue that the far right has broadened its base by mobilizing contingent extremists—supporters who have long held extreme beliefs, but who were inactive in more hostile political opinion climates. To test this theory, I field a priming experiment in Germany, Hungary, and France (n=4,776) to measure respondents’ willingness to identify as far right supporters when assigned to more or less ‘favorable’ information about far right party popularity through experimentally varied polls. I find strong evidence that (1) contingent extremists exist; and (2) that significantly more extremists are ‘contingent’ in voting districts where the far right is electorally weak. This suggests that extremists’ direct social environments moderate the effect of the media on their political mobilization. Moreover, I identify a minimal ‘climate of opinion’ threshold at which extremists begin to support the party openly.

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Abstract:

Anti-corruption efforts by authoritarian regimes are often assumed to be political charades or excuses to purge rivals. The common view is that meaningful corruption control involves strengthening democratic institutions, such as judicial independence and the rule of law, which autocrats are largely unwilling to do. However, I argue that successful anti-corruption reform by nondemocratic governments is more common than is widely acknowledged. Using a novel scoring system for anti-corruption efforts, I show that there have been at least nine successful reforms in autocracies in recent decades. Moreover, my research finds that in these cases autocrats did not reduce corruption through the conventional democratic approach, but instead used decidedly authoritarian methods, and often strengthened their regimes in the process. I illustrate these points by analyzing Xi Jinping’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign in China, alongside cases in authoritarian South Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere.

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