Speaker Bio:

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She was a predoctoral and postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL (2012-2015).

This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Haas Center for Public Service.

Abstract:

The peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next is a hallmark of American democracy, but this hand-off is often rushed and chaotic, leaving new presidents unprepared to govern. Executing a successful presidential transition requires establishing policy goals, understanding agency issues, preparing to manage a 4 million person organization with a budget of almost $4 trillion, finding capable people for 4,000 politically appointed jobs and being ready to handle a foreign or domestic crisis on day one. The Partnership for Public Service has assisted this year’s presidential candidates by providing information and guidance on organizing a transition, sharing a management strategy to implement policies, working with the White House and agencies to ensure coordination with the new president’s team, and establishing a program to help political appointees to succeed.

Speaker Bio:

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Max Stier is the founding president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service. Under his leadership, the Partnership has been widely praised as a first-class nonprofit organization and thought leader on federal government management issues.

Max has worked previously in all three branches of the federal government. In 1982, he served on the personal staff of Congressman Jim Leach. Max clerked for Chief Judge James Oakes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1992 and clerked for Justice David Souter of the United States Supreme Court in 1994. Between these two positions, Max served as Special Litigation Counsel to Assistant Attorney General Anne Bingaman at the Department of Justice.

In 1995, Max joined the law firm of Williams & Connolly where he practiced primarily in the area of white collar defense. Max comes most recently from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, having served as the Deputy General Counsel for Litigation.

A graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School, Max is a member of the National Academy of Public Administration, the Administrative Conference of the United States and the National Advisory Board for Public Service at Harvard College.

ABSTRACT

By now, those following the news on Syria have been saturated with analysis, data, information, and misinformation on developments there since 2011. Yet we observe an increasing gravitation to mutually exclusive narratives that adorn websites and publications on the situation in Syria: (a) the narrative of pure and consistent revolution versus that of (b) external conspiracy/designs on Syria. Both narratives carry grains of truth, but are encumbered by maximalist claims and fundamental blindspots that forfeit various potentials for enduring cease-fires and/or transitions, let alone mutual understanding. This talk will address these competing narratives in the context of international escalation marked by increasing US-Russian tension and continued multi-layered conflicts on the battlefield. It closes with addressing a framework for understanding and gauging potential prospects despite conflicting declarations by all parties involved.

SPEAKER BIO

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*This event is supported by the Stanford Initiative for Religious and Ethnic Understanding and Coexistence

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Abstract:

Sunil Khilnani’s new book, Incarnations, tells India’s history through 50 biographical essays, ranging from the Buddha to a contemporary billionaire. Building on rich recent scholarship about Indian history and culture, Khilnani’s work ventures to integrate the fragmented character of disciplinary knowledge of India, and to suggest an alternative to both popular religious and secular nationalist accounts of India’s past. Recovering the stories of remarkable individuals, his talk will highlight experiments in living and radical, dissenting ideas as drivers of Indian history, and contend that many of India’s choices about its future depend on which historical lessons get drawn from its past.

Speaker Bio:

Sunil Khilnani is currently Avantha Professor and Director of the India Institute, established by him at King’s College London in 2011. From 2002 to 2011 he was Starr Foundation Professor and Director of South Asia Studies at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington D.C.; and before that, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He received his BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge, and he has been a Fellow of Christ’s College Cambridge; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin; and the American Academy in Berlin, as well as holding a Leverhulme Fellowship.

His publications include: Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (Yale, 1993), The Idea of India (Penguin/FSG, 7th edn. 2016), and several collaborative volumes, including: Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge, 2000); NonAlignment 2.0: a Foreign Policy for India in the 21st Century (Penguin, 2013); An Indian Social Democracy (Academic, 2013); and Comparative Constitutionalism in South Asia (Oxford, 2013). His most recent book is Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives (Penguin/FSG 2016), accompanied by his 50-part BBC radio and podcast and radio series.

Abstract:

China's government alternately appears in western scholarship as an idealized meritocracy or a corrupt cohort of venal officials. Yet empirical attempts to place China's government in comparative perspective are limited. We develop and exploit a new empirical source--survey testimony from political insiders--to measure three Weberian qualities of Chinese bureaucracy: meritocracy, autonomy, and morale. By translating questions from a major survey of U.S. officials, we place the responses of Chinese officials in comparative perspective. In contrast to claims that political connections dominate official promotions in China, Chinese bureaucrats are markedly more likely than U.S. bureaucrats to report that their agencies recruit people with the right skills and promote people based on performance. Responses from municipal governments in China resemble those of high-performing federal bureaucracies in the United States, such as NASA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. However, the Chinese advantage shrinks in autonomy and nearly disappears in workplace morale.

Speaker(s) Bio:

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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) 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.

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Greg Distelhorst is the Mitsubishi Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies contemporary Chinese politics and public policy, as well as the social impacts of multinational business. He was a CDDRL Predoctoral Fellow in 2012-2013.

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Margaret Boittin is Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada. She studies Chinese law and politics. She was a predoctoral and postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL (2012-2015).

Abstract:

The paper introduces the public sector as a major source of infrastructural state capacity that helps autocrats survive. Education or social services organizations are embedded in everyday life and trusted by the people, which makes them a unique tool in autocrats’ hands. These organizations significantly extend the ability of the state apparatus to implement political decisions on the ground. Using quantitative analysis of seventy-nine Russian regions and qualitative evidence from the media, I demonstrate that Vladimir Putin’s regime used schoolteachers, who were frequently members of local electoral commissions, to implement wide-scale electoral fraud during the 2012 presidential elections in Russia. The school system served as an organizational base for this maneuver, which allowed Putin’s regime to withstand the challenge of decreased popular support. The paper proposes a distinction between the redistributive and infrastructural roles of the public sector.

Speaker Bio:

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