Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
In a CDDRL seminar series talk, Daniel Chen — Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research and Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics — examined whether data science can improve the functioning of courts and unlock their impact on economic development. Improving courts’ efficiency is paramount to citizens' confidence in legal institutions and proceedings.
In a nationwide experiment in Kenya, Chen and his co-authors employed data science techniques to identify the causes of case backlog in the judicial system. They developed an algorithm to identify major sources of court delays for each of Kenya’s 124 court stations. Based on the algorithm, they compiled a one-page report — specific to the local court and tailored to that month’s proceedings — which provided an analysis of court adjournments, reasons for delay, and tangible action items.
To measure the effect of these one-pagers, Chen established two treatment groups and one control. Those in the first treatment group received a singular one-pager, sent just to the courts. The second received one for the courts and one for a Court User Committee (CUC). The committee, which consists of lawyers, police, and members of civil society, was asked to discuss the one-pagers during their quarterly meetings.
To measure the relevant effects, the authors examined three primary outcomes, namely: (1) adjournment (or case delay) rates; (2) quality and citizen satisfaction; and (3) measures of economic development, including contracting, investment, and business creation.
Results showed the intervention was associated with a 22 percent improvement in adjournments, or a decline in trial length by 120 days. They found that there was no effect on either the number of cases filed or the proxies for quality. Citizen satisfaction rates also went up, with a reduction in complaints about speed and quality, and the intervention was associated with an increase in formal written contracts and higher wages.
Improving courts’ efficiency is paramount to citizens' confidence in legal institutions and proceedings, explains Daniel Chen, Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research and Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics.
Are you interested in discussing Generative AI on Stanford’s campus? Feeling excitement or existential dread about the ethics of Gen AI, ChatGPT in the classroom, and the role it plays in your life? Join a group of diverse Stanford students for a structured discussion on Democracy Day (NO CLASSES), Tuesday, November 7, at 9:30 am @ OLD UNION!
📣 These events will be structured similarly to a Deliberative Poll, a format that has been run in over 34 countries around the world to engage citizens on public policy issues. You do not need any prior knowledge of any of these topics to participate; you will be provided with brief learning materials in advance to contextualize the issues being discussed.
🤝🏿 This event is being organized by students and faculty from Stanford University, in partnership with CDDRL's Deliberative Democracy Lab.
Old Union at Stanford
520 Lasuen Mall, Stanford, CA 94305
This event is only open to current Stanford students.
Every day, data scientists are analyzing vast amounts of information about the world, using computational methods to find new ways to understand a problem or phenomenon, and deciding what to do about it.
But it’s not enough to use data on its own – it must be understood within its social and political context as well, according to Stanford political scientist Jeremy Weinstein. This year, Weinstein, along with Stanford statisticians Guenther Walther and Chiara Sabatti, has launched two new degrees: a Bachelor of Science in Data Science and a Bachelor of Arts in Data Science & Social Systems.
Read the full story in the Stanford Report.
The gateway course for the new Data Science & Social Systems major teaches students how data can be used to address important social problems.
This chapter explores the potential for gamesmanship in technology-assisted discovery. Attorneys have long embraced gamesmanship strategies in analog discovery, producing reams of irrelevant documents, delaying depositions, or interpreting requests in a hyper-technical manner. The new question, however, is whether machine learning technologies can transform gaming strategies. By now it is well known that technologies have reinvented the practice of civil litigation and, specifically, the extensive search for relevant documents in complex cases. Many sophisticated litigants use machine learning algorithms – under the umbrella of “Technology Assisted Review” (TAR) – to simplify the identification and production of relevant documents in discovery. Litigants employ TAR in cases ranging from antitrust to environmental law, civil rights, and employment disputes. But as the field becomes increasingly influenced by engineers and technologists, a string of commentators has raised questions about TAR, including lawyers’ professional role, underlying incentive structures, and the dangers of new forms of gamesmanship and abuse.
In Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice, editor David Freeman Engstrom (Stanford Law School) and his 28 co-contributors, including Diego Zambrano, dissect the legal and policy implications of the technologies that are poised to remake the civil justice system.
The Chinese government is revolutionizing digital surveillance at home. Are digital technology transfers from Huawei, China’s leading information technology company, enabling recipient governments to expand their digital surveillance operations and engage in more targeted repression against dissidents? To answer this question, we focus on the African continent, which has received nearly half of all global Huawei technology transfers. Using a series of identification strategies, we show that the effect of Huawei transfers on digital surveillance and targeted repression depends on preexisting political institutions in recipient countries. In Africa’s autocracies, which account for 81% of transfers to the continent, Huawei technology transfers facilitate digital surveillance, internet shutdowns, and targeted repression. In Africa’s democracies, Huawei technology may induce a small reduction in human rights abuses, though the effects are less consistently estimated. Most broadly, this paper suggests that China’s digital technology exports are reinforcing repressive governments.
The Chinese government is revolutionizing digital surveillance at home. Are digital technology transfers from Huawei, China’s leading information technology company, enabling recipient governments to expand their digital surveillance operations and engage in more targeted repression against dissidents?
The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law’s (CDDRL) Leadership Network for Change (LNC) is an expansive group that encompasses over 2,000 up-and-coming leaders and change-makers from all corners of the globe. This diverse and widespread network is comprised of alumni of three practitioner programs based at CDDRL: the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program, Leadership Academy for Development, and the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program.
Last summer LNC, in partnership with the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), launched an RFP for an innovative grant program — the Local Democracy in Action Grants Initiative. These collaboration grants were designed to bring together LNC leaders and CIPE partners to work across industry, sectors, and borders to introduce local democratic approaches, analysis, research, or dialogue to improve the way in which local communities solve today’s greatest democratic challenges.
We were pleased to award grants to six teams of alumni whose projects aimed to support democratic reform efforts, civic discourse, and the incorporation of new technology to make a wider impact on the local political and economic environment:
On August 17, 2022, CIPE convened the grantees to present the culmination and impact of their work. Below you can view a recording of the event and read about each of the six projects.
CDDRL's Leadership Network for Change and the Center for International Private Enterprise awarded collaboration grants to six teams of alumni to foster cooperation and strengthen democratic development on a regional and global scale.
Eddie Yang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at UC San Diego. His research focuses on repression and the politics of Artificial Intelligence. His dissertation studies how existing repressive institutions limit the usefulness of AI for authoritarian control, with a focus on China. His work has been published in both computer science and political science.
With starting the war in Ukraine Vladimir Putin started the war on information within Russia: in a couple of weeks Russian authorities shut down all the independent media, dozens of independent journalists were forced to leave the country. Russian propaganda is working really hard to convince Russians to support the war in Ukraine. Is there a chance to win in Russian propaganda war. Tikhon Dzyadko, editor in chief of TVRain, the last independent TV-station in Russia, believes that it is possible and will explain what is needed to be done in order to succeed.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Tikhon Dzyadko is a Russian journalist, television presenter and media manager. He is the former editor-in-chief for TV Rain, one of the last independent television stations in Russia, and host of the Russian Television International (RTVI TV) network, a Russian-language television station based in New York.
At this time, in-person attendance is limited to Stanford affiliates only. We continue to welcome our greater community to join virtually via Zoom.
This event is co-sponsored by CDDRL and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
The Stanford Working Group on Platform Scale’s central proposal was to outsource the moderation of political content from the big platforms—Twitter, Facebook, and Google—to a layer of competitive middleware companies as a means of reducing these platforms’ power over political speech. In this exchange on platform power, Robert Faris and Joan Donovan, Nathalie Maréchal, and Dipayan Ghosh and Ramesh Srinivasan all argue in different ways that middleware would not stem the flow of toxic content, and in certain ways might actually intensify it. What three of our critics do not take into account is the illegitimacy of using either public or private power to suppress this hazard. Our working group’s promotion of middleware rests on a normative view about the continuing importance of freedom of speech. Middleware is the most politically realistic way forward.
This essay is a part of an exchange based on Francis Fukuyama’s “Making the Internet Safe for Democracy” from the April 2021 issue of the Journal of Democracy.
