Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
The multidisciplinary environment at CDDRL is an ideal venue to explore the ways in which regime (authoritarian or democratic) matters in encouraging or suppressing economic development. This question sits at the very nexus of political science, economics and law.
The Freeman Spogli Institute's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) has established a new Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World, the result of a generous gift from the Foundation for Research and Development in the Middle East (FDRDME), based in Geneva, Switzerland. The program, which runs for five years beginning in September 2009, conducts research, organizes conferences and seminars and sponsors visiting scholars at CDDRL. The program's scholarly research examines the different social and political dynamics within Arab societies and the evolution of political systems, with an eye on the prospects, conditions, and possible pathways for political reform.
The new program brings together scholars and practitioners from Arab countries and their Western counterparts, as well as local actors of diverse backgrounds, to consider how democratization and more responsive and accountable governance might be achieved, as a general challenge and within specific Arab countries. Among the program's first research projects is one on transitions from absolute monarchy in historical and comparative perspective. To this effect, are there any lessons that can be drawn from past experiences, and across different settings, and to what degrees can they apply to the Arab world? A conference taking stock of democratic progress and conditions in the Arab world is planned for May 10-11, 2010.
Center Director Larry Diamond thanked the Foundation for its visionary contribution. "This gift puts Stanford on the map in contemporary Arab studies and will make CDDRL one of the most important academic sites for studying these issues. In the modern history of the Arab world, there has never been a more compelling and opportune moment to examine current conditions of governance and factors that might facilitate or obstruct democratic change.
"In the modern history of the Arab world, there has never been a more compelling and opportune moment to examine current conditions of governance and factors that might facilitate or obstruct democratic change"
"The striking political continuity in the Arab world is not just of analytic interest, but is a challenge to sustained long-term economic development, stability, and peace." Diamond stated. "From the expressions and actions of vibrant and diverse civil societies in the region, and a growing wealth of public opinion-survey evidence, we know that peoples of the region desire political emancipation and self-determination no less than others around the world. The challenge is to figure out how indigenous democratic change might be negotiated in ways that generate broad societal consensus and do not risk violence or instability."
"From the expressions and actions of vibrant and diverse civil societies in the region, and a growing wealth of public opinion survey evidence, we know that peoples of the region desire political emancipation and self-determination"
The program is supervised by Diamond and CDDRL Deputy Director Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, and managed by Lina Khatib, in interaction with Professor Olivier Roy, in his capacities as a leading Western scholar of political Islam and as director of FDRDME. Roy, a long-time scholar and research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) who has recently been named Professor of Mediterranean Studies at the European University Institute in Florence, will be a frequent participant in program events and a recurrent visitor to CDDRL. Other program participants include Hicham Ben Abdallah and Hind Arroub from Morocco, Visiting Scholars at CDDRL, and Sean Yom, a political science PhD from Harvard University, who is a postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL in 2009-10.
There is a general sense that the legal system in India is inefficient. First, there is over-legislation and unnecessary State intervention, both in the form of statutes and administrative law (rules, regulations, procedures). This increases non-transparency and contributes to rent-seeking, which is not distributionally neutral, because the relatively poor tend to suffer more. Second, over-legislation exists simultaneously with under-governance, because laws aren't enforced and the dispute resolution system, including enforcement of contracts, isn't credible.
Reforming legal institutions is not only a desirable end in itself, it also has the byproduct of adding to GDP growth. While these points are unassailable, most empirical work on documenting inefficiencies of the Indian legal system is fraught with problems. For a start, cross-country comparisons tend to be overly simplistic, ignoring the specifics of the legal regime and the context within which the country is situated. In addition, legal indicators used, even when they are not cross-country, tend to be too macro and aggregate and are indiscriminately used. For instance, data collected for Hyderabad are applied to all of Andhra Pradesh. This paper adopts a different approach. It draws contrasts between Gurgaon and Faridabad, districts (and towns) not only located within the same State, but also districts with similar historical and geographical backgrounds. This enables one to control for many variables that cause different trajectories of legal and economic development within and across countries. The paper then seeks to explain the differential growth in these two geographical regions through differences in the legal land regimes.
Private sector participation and private investment have become the mainstay of the Government of India's policy toward infrastructural development. The success of the ongoing eleventh five-year plan critically depends on the success of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure. Moreover, several state governments are also trying to attract PPPs for the provision of public goods.
In this paper, we have studied the performance of the Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) programme of Government of India, for development of highways and expressways. The focus of the study is on the following questions: Why have some projects attracted private investment while others have not? Why only a few states have attracted PPPs, while some others have completely failed to do so? We have also discussed some other issues related to the PPP policy and its limited success. We have provided a set of legal and economic variables that explain the skewed distribution of PPPs across projects as well as across the states. We have shown that the richer states have attracted more PPPs than the poorer ones. Besides, the probability of PPP is higher for projects located on national highways connecting richer states, and those located closer to mega cities. Moreover, ceteris paribus, the quality of governance, in terms of the level of property rights protection, in a state is also a significant explanatory variable. Empirical evidence in support of these claims is conclusive and robust. In the light of our findings, we have answered the following additional questions: Is PPP a viable and desirable public policy for development of infrastructure in poor states? What are the lessons emerging from the Indian experience with PPPs so far? Our dataset includes all of the highway and expressway projects that have been or are being developed as a part of the National Highways Development Project (NHDP).
Paul Romer is a Senior Fellow in the Stanford Center for International Development (SCID) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). His contributions to the field of economics include being the primary developer of New Growth Theory, which reduces the traditional emphasis on the scarcity of objects and directs attention to the power of new ideas. His theory has brought renewed optimism about the potential for growth in both advanced and developing economies.
For his work on the economics of ideas, Paul was named one of America's 25 most influential people by TIME magazine (1997), elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000) and awarded the Horst Claus Recktenwald Prize in Economics (2002). He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Prior to his current Stanford University position, he taught in the university's Graduate School of Business as the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics and was honored with the Distinguished Teaching Award (1999). Before moving to Stanford, Paul taught economics at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.
In addition to his career in teaching and research, Paul founded Aplia, Inc., which is now part of Cengage Learning. Aplia, which develops and applies technologies to improve student learning, grew out of Paul's conviction that it is possible to use information technology to raise productivity in education. This lesson has important implications for how societies keep up with the growing demand for highly educated workers-a demand that is driven by the use of new technology in all other sectors of the economy.
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This seminar examines possible explanations for a striking anomaly in the distribution of democracies around the world. While 60 percent of all the independent states in the world are at least electoral democracies, the Arab world is alone among major regions in lacking a critical mass of democracies. In fact, not a single one of the states of the Arab Middle East is classified by Freedom House as a democracy today. This presentation examines possible cultural, historical, economic, political, institutional, and geostrategic explanations for the democracy deficit in the Arab world. Rejecting some of these possible explanations as implausible or untenable, it affirms others and considers what factors might foster transitions to constitutional democracy in the Arab world.
Summary
Larry Diamond's presentation explored the question of why there is no Arab democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. Using Freedom House panel data, he demonstrated the relatively stagnant levels of democratic freedoms that have typified this authoritarian slice of geography for the last several decades: only two countries out of nearly twenty could be considered electoral democracies, and these were the non-Arab states of Turkey and Israel. He next sifted through several potential explanations for the absence of democratization.
The first was the culturalist thesis, that something inherent within Islam or Arab culture precludes the formation of a genuinely democratic set of institutions and values. However, the presence of democracy in other non-Western regions casts doubt on this contention. The second was economic development, a popular variable often correlated with democratic transitions; however, Arab autocracies each have analogues in other regions with similar levels of development but with democratic governments. More plausibly, a variety of political and institutional variables lay at the heart of the problem. For one, these regimes have become extremely adept at repressing dissidents and reformists within their societies. For another, they have adopted an adaptable ecology of liberalization, in which short bursts of political reform relieve temporary demands for reform while leaving intact executive monopolies over state resources. Further, they efficiently divide opposition parties and civic forces, often by imposing electoral rules and regulations that make it impossible for civil society-which is generally weak and fragmented-to mount concerted campaigns against the state apparatus. Finally, the dual conundrums of Islamism and the Arab-Israeli conflict play into each regime's survival strategy.
Authoritarian incumbents play up the nightmare of Islamic extremists gaining power to curry favor with the West and delay reforms; they also use the Palestinian issue to defuse popular grievance by way of rechanneling indignation against Israel.
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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 World; Will 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.
Rising leaders from some of the world’s most complex and challenging nations, including China, Russia, Ukraine, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have just completed a three-week seminar at Stanford as Draper Hills Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development. This year’s extraordinary class of fellows included members of parliament, government advisors, civic activists, leading jurists, journalists, international development experts and founders of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
Each year, several hundred applicants apply to FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), the convener of the program, for the 26-28 slots available to study and help foster linkages among democracy, economic development, human rights, and the rule of law. Now in its fifth year, the program has received generous gifts from William Draper III, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, in honor of his father, Maj. Gen. William H. Draper, Jr., a chief advisor to Gen. George Marshall and chief diplomatic administrator of the Marshall Plan in Germany, and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills, a former journalist, in honor of her husband, Reuben Hills, a leading San Francisco philanthropist and president and chairman of the board of Hills Bros. Coffee.
Draper Hills Summer Fellows are innovative, courageous, and committed leaders, who strive to improve governance, enhance civic participation, and invigorate development under very challenging circumstances," said CDDRL Director Larry Diamond. “This year’s fellows were absolutely extraordinary, learning from us we hope, but also teaching all of us about the progress they are making and the obstacles they confront in a diverse set of countries. We were not only sobered by the difficulties they must address on a daily basis but also uplifted by their accounts of programs that are working to deepen democracy, improve government accountability, strengthen the rule of law, energize civil society, and enhance the institutional environment for broadly shared economic growth.”
The three-week seminar is taught by an all star faculty, which in addition to Diamond, includes CDDRL Deputy Director Kathryn Stoner, Stanford president emeritus and constitutional law expert Gerhard Casper, FSI Deputy Director and political science professor Stephen D. Krasner, Erik Jensen and Allen S. Weiner from the Stanford law school, Avner Greif from the Department of Economics, Peter Henry from the Graduate School of Business, FSI Senior Fellow Helen Stacy, former FSI Director and current Program on Food Security and the Environment deputy director Walter P. Falcon, Mark C. Thurber, acting director of FSI’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, and Nicholas Hope, director of the Stanford Center on International Development.
Other leading experts and practitioners who engaged the fellows included democracy and governance expert Francis Fukuyama, who joins CDDRL as Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow in July 2010, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, United States Court of Appeals Judge Pamela Rymer, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict founding chair Peter Ackerman, the center’s president, Jack DuVall, former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo, and former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Condoleezza Rice.
Faculty devoted the first week of the seminar to defining the fundamentals of democracy, good governance, economic development, and the rule of law, and in the second week turned to the issue of transitions and the feedback mechanisms between democracy, development, and a predictable rule of law. The third week examined the critical – and often controversial – role of international assistance to foster and support democracy, judicial reform, and economic development, including the proper role of foreign aid.
Against this backdrop, fellows emphasized domestic imperatives for fostering growth, social inclusion, and transformation, centering on the importance of political will and sound institutions. In session after session, they wrestled with the concrete and all too common impediments to progress—from corruption, cronyism, and authoritarian regimes, to the fragility of conflict-ridden, multi-ethnic polities. As an activist from strife-torn Iraq said, “Democracy is not just a way of governing. It is a way of living, a way of thinking about life.”“Democracy is not just a way of governing. It is a way of living, a way of thinking about life”
In spirited debates, in the formal seminar sessions and beyond the classroom to the Munger residence where the fellows stayed, the fellows stressed how they had all taught and learned from each other. A rising leader from South Africa aptly summarized, “We have dispelled each other’s myths.”
As the Draper Hills Fellows expressed their profound gratitude to their faculty and mentors, they reinforced the importance of staying in touch through a virtual online community – a “common space” as defined by a member of parliament from Ukraine, that would let them look forward and look back, perhaps a decade from now, at case studies of success and failure, and the all important roles that political will and leadership played in determining outcomes. “Stay tuned,” said Diamond and Stoner-Weiss. “Important lessons are still to come.”
Boris Begovic is president at the Center for Liberal-Democratic studies (CLDS) and professor of economics at the School of Law, University of Belgrade. He received his education at the University in Belgrade, London School of Economic and JFK School of Government, Harvard University. His field of expertise includes industrial organization, economic analysis of law, economic growth, economics of competition policy, and urban economics. Begovic was a chief economic adviser of the Federal Government of Yugoslavia (Serbia & Montenegro) 2000-2002, mainly involved in negotiations with IFIs, WTO accession and foreign trade liberalization, price liberalization and foreign debt rescheduling. Recent publications include: Corruption: An Economic Analysis (2007), Greenfield FDIs in Serbia (2008), Economics for Lawyers (2008) and From Poverty to Prosperity: Free Market Based Solutions (2008).
As democracy is based on one person - one vote rule and freedom of expression and it can bring a strong political pressure for compulsory redistribution, contrary to authoritarian political environment. Is there a systematic difference in redistributive and other economic policies between democracies and other countries? What are the effects of incentives created by democratic political decisions to the most productive segments to the society and economic growth they create? To what extent compulsory redistribution is violating protection of property rights and undermining sustainable economic growth? Do we have a consistent theory that can explain these relations? Is there any consistent empirical evidence? Are the consequences of democracy to the economic growth the same if the country came from the left wing or right wing authoritarian societies. These issues will be reviewed on the seminar.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Fariz Ismailzade, Azerbaijan, is director of the Advanced Foreign Service Program at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy (ADA) within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Prior to joining ADA, Fariz worked for 10 years in the NGO sector of Azerbaijan, most recently as director of political programs at the International Republican Institute. Fariz has also conducted research at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. His research mainly focuses on the geopolitics of the Caucasus region and CIS affairs. Fariz is a regular correspondent for Eurasianet.org, Transitions on Line, Jamestown Daily Monitor and Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst and has written on the politics and economics of Azerbaijan and the Caucasus region for Institute for War and Peace Report, East-West Institute, Analysis of Current Events, Freedom House, CaucasUS Context, Azerbaijan International and Collage. Fariz has also presented at international conferences, including the Middle Eastern Studies Association, NATO Advanced Research Workshop in Kiev, Ukraine, and the Association for Studies of Nationalities in New York. Since 2006, he has been a recipient of the International Policy Fellowship Research Award. Fariz earned his BA in political science from Western University in Baku and holds a Masters in social and economic development from Washington University in St. Louis.
Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan, is Azerbaijan’s first Consul General to Los Angeles, California with personal rank of Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. Prior to that he served as Senior Counselor at the Foreign Relations Department, Office of the President in Baku, Azerbaijan and as Press Officer of the Azerbaijani Embassy in Washington, DC. Before joining diplomatic service, Mr. Suleymanov worked with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Azerbaijan and with the Open Media Research Institute in Prague, Czech Republic. A graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Massachusetts, Mr. Suleymanov also holds graduate degrees from the Political Geography department of the Moscow State University, Russia, and from the University of Toledo, Ohio. Mr. Suleymanov speaks Azerbaijani, English, Russian and Czech languages.
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