Corruption
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Three years ago, world leaders from 8 countries came together to launch the Open Government Partnership (OGP) - a multi-stakeholder initiative that brings together domestic reformers committed to making their governments more open, accountable and responsive to citizens. Since then, the partnership has rapidly grown from 8 to 65 countries. In this talk, Linda Frey speaks about OGP's new approach to multilateralism, and how the uniqueness of its model is helping to spur progress on concrete open government reforms in a diverse group of countries.  Frey will draw on the findings of OGP's Independent Reporting Mechanism to speak to early successes, as well as implementation challenges and areas for further study.  

 

Speaker Bio

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Munyema Hasan

Munyema Hasan

Program Officer
Open Government Partnership, Support Unit

Munyema joined the OGP Support Unit in January 2014 as Program Officer. She has spent the past four years working in the field of transparent and accountable governance, with organizations like the World Bank, International Budget Partnership, Stanford University and the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability. Munyema holds a M.Sc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the American University in Cairo, Egypt and the University of California, Berkeley.

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series

PLEASE NOTE: NEW ROOM

School of Education 

Room 128

 

Munyema Hasan Open Government Partnership
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Abstract

Civil society is under siege in many parts of the world.  Governments have arrested human rights activists, closed humanitarian NGOs, and banned peaceful protests. Simply stated, governments are criminalizing dissent and confining civic space.  Join Doug Rutzen for a discussion of the global backlash against civil society and ongoing efforts to protect the freedoms of association and assembly around the world.

Speaker Bio

douglas rutzen photo Douglas Rutzen

Doug Rutzen is President and CEO of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which has worked on the legal framework for civil society in 100 countries.  Doug also teaches “global revolutions, social change, and NGOs” at Georgetown law school.  On the margins of the 2013 UN General Assembly, Doug joined President Obama on a panel discussing civil society.  Under Doug’s leadership, ICNL received a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, the organizational analogue to MacArthur's "genius award" for individuals.  Earlier this year, the Nonprofit Times named Doug as one of the most influential nonprofit leaders in the United States.


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Encina Hall, 616 Serra Street, Stanford, CA 94305

Commentator Director, Program on Human Rights, Commentator
Doug Rutzen President and CEO Speaker International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, Washington, DC, Speaker
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Qing Gu, team leader for the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Poverty, Equity, and Governance unit in Beijing, China, spoke at CDDRL's Program on Human Rights on November 19, commenting on recent developments on rule of law in China. 

Gu is cautiously optimistic about the slow consolidation of the rule of law in China. Many positive programs have been put into place regarding law development in China, and Gu discussed the political implications that are behind these changes. While it is still a long way from being fully implemented, there has been a renewed focus on the rule of law under Xi Jinping’s leadership. Jinping has even equated the “Chinese Dream” with the “Dream of Constitutionalism.”

However, this has not been without controversy. A similar statement published in the South China Weekend in 2013 led to the newspaper’s recall by the government. Gu argues that this demonstrates that the Party is not yet ready to accept the rule of law.

China’s Fourth Plenum, a key governmental meeting that took place in October 2014, laid out what Gu called “a blueprint” for constitutional reform, rule of law and anti-corruption mechanisms for the judicial system and overall Party leadership. Gu’s hope is that this blueprint will be realized in the near future.

The talk concluded with a series of questions from the audience, ranging from philosophical questions regarding rule of law in China, to pragmatic questions concerning the “Western” media’s role in shaping U.S.-China relations and the impact of the rule of law on legal practitioners in China. In response, Gu pointed out that instituting the rule of law in the country requires deep restructuring of the system's foundations. However, she considers Confucianism to offer a compatible construction of the rule of law that will propel China’s moves to end corruption while still holding on to its rich cultural traditions that embody Chinese identity.

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Citing recent attempts to amend presidential term limits in Burkina Faso, CDDRL pre-doctoral fellow Ken Opalo provides insights on why leadership turnover is essential for democratic growth and political stability in Africa. Published in The Washington Post, Opalo underscores the rising challenge Africa faces as leaders seek out new and creative methods to stay in power. 

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President Paul Kagame of Rwanda at the World Economic Forum in 2009.
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Larry Diamond
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Is democracy heading toward a depression? CDDRL Director Larry Diamond answers in a recent Foreign Policy piece, assessing the challenges of overcoming a global, decade-long democratic recession. With much of the world losing faith in the model of liberal democracy, Diamond believes the key to setting democracy back on track involves heavy reform in America, serious crackdowns on corruption, and a reassessment of how the West approaches its support for democratic development abroad. 

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'Protect your Republic Protest' in Anıtkabir, Ankara, Turkey. 14 April 2007.
Selahattin Sönmez, Wikimedia Commons
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Abstract:

Why have militarized interventions to curtail violence by drug cartels had wildly divergent results? In the past six years, state crackdowns drove a nine-fold increase in cartel-state violence in Mexico, versus a two-thirds decrease in Brazil. Prevailing analyses of drug wars as a criminal subtype of insurgency provide little traction, because they elide differences in rebels’ and cartels’ aims. Cartels, I argue, fight states not to conquer territory or political control, but to coerce state actors and influence policy outcomes. The empirically predominant channel is violent corruption— threatening enforcers while negotiating bribes. A formal model reveals that greater state repression raises bribe prices, leading cartels to fight back whenever (a) corruption is sufficiently rampant, and (b) repression is insufficiently conditional on cartels’ use of violence. Variation in conditionality helps explain observed outcomes: switching to conditional repression pushed Brazilian cartels into nonviolent strategies, while Mexico’s war “without distinctions” inadvertently made fighting advantageous.

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In a recent seminar at Stanford University, CDDRL Director Larry Diamond addresses the question of whether or not there is an emerging global crisis of democracy. Though brazen corruption, democratic breakdown, democratic paralysis and military authoritarian rule threaten to undermine the integrity of democracy, Diamond argues that hope is not lost and that the human species today has done better with democracy than what history might predict.
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Abstract:

Political polarization has paralyzed the functioning of democracy in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Taiwan, where students have recently occupied the parliament building.  Civil liberties and political opposition are under intensified assault by an abusive prime minister in Turkey.  Indian democracy is increasingly diminished by brazen corruption and rent-seeking. Several African democracies have failed, and others are slipping.  The Arab Spring has largely imploded, and Egypt is in the grip of military authoritarian rule more repressive than anything the country has seen in decades.  After invading and swallowing a piece of Ukraine, Russia now poses a gathering threat to its democratic postcommunist neighbors.  For the eighth consecutive year, Freedom House finds that the number of countries declining in freedom have greatly exceeded the number improving.  And most of the advanced industrial democracies, including the United States, seem unable to address their long-term fiscal and other policy challenges.  Is there an emerging global crisis of democracy?  And if so, why?

Speaker Bio:

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he directs the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Diamond also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Co-Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant (and previously was co-director) at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. During 2002-3, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has also advised and lectured to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental agencies dealing with governance and development. His latest book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (Times Books, 2008), explores the sources of global democratic progress and stress and the prospects for future democratic expansion.

 

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab WorldWill China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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On March 14-15, the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, held a workshop on electoral system alternatives in the United States. The workshop brought together a number of scholars of American electoral institutions, practitioners working to implement electoral reforms, and experts on electoral systems reforms in advanced democracies. The workshop examined how different electoral systems options have worked in other countries, and what the implications of similar reforms might be in the United States.

Among other things, the workshop asked:

  • How might plurality elections in single-member districts in the United States skew democratic outcomes? Is there a relationship between the electoral system and the problems we see today, such as ideological and political polarization?
  • What lessons might be drawn from reforms in other countries? Examples include the single-transferable vote (STV) in Ireland, the alternative vote (AV) in Australia, and mixed-member systems in Italy, Japan, and New Zealand;
  • How might we go about reforming American electoral systems -- through local, state, or federal means, and through engagement with which types of political and civil service actors?
  • How has ranked-choice voting (RCV) worked in local experiments in the United States, including in Minneapolis, MN; San Francisco, CA; Oakland, CA; and Cambridge, MA?
  • How might electoral systems reforms interact with other proposed political reforms in the United States, including the National Popular Vote for the Electoral College, top-four primaries, and the adoption of redistricting commissions? 

 

CONFERENCE PAPERS

Nick Stephanopoulos: Our Electoral Exceptionalism

 

Electoral System Reform in the U.S.
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Oksenberg Conference Room

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