As part of Stanford Democracy Day, several Stanford scholars share their perspectives on domestic and comparative erosion of democracy, providing context for current elections in the United States and around the world.

Speakers:

Christophe Crombez, Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, lobbying, party politics, and parliamentary government.

Anna Grzymała-Busse, Professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.

Hakeem Jefferson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Center for American Democracy. His research focuses primarily on the role identity plays in structuring political attitudes and behaviors in the U.S., with a special interest in understanding how stigma shapes the politics of Black Americans, particularly as it relates to group members’ support for racialized punitive social policies. 

Hesham Sallam, Senior Research Scholar at CDDRL, where he serves as Associate Director for Research. He is also Associate Director of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. Sallam is co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine and a former program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His research focuses on political and social development in the Arab World. Sallam’s research has previously received the support of the Social Science Research Council and the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and teaches in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

In this talk, Michta focuses on the current condition of European security and defense policy, including the roles played by the US and NATO, and Europe’s attempts to build up an EU-based security architecture.  He will explore the hard security/military dimension of the issue in the context of a broader discussion of regionalized security optics and internal political change. 

Speaker: Andrew A. Michta is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Hamilton School. Before joining Hamilton, Michta was a Senior Fellow with the GeoStrategy Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the former dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. He holds a PhD in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University. His areas of expertise are international security, NATO, and European politics and security, with a special focus on Central Europe and the Baltic states.

His most recent book with Paal Hilde, The Future of NATO: Regional Defense and Global Security, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2014. He is currently completing a book Europe Reconfigured: U.S. Europe Strategy for an Age of Great Power Conflict, funded by a two-year grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation. The book will be published in 2026.

Michta is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. He is fluent in Polish and Russian and proficient in German and French.

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

Image

In its early days, the European Union was accused of having a democratic deficit because its central institutions were not elected.  The response was to increase the democratic responsiveness of the European Parliament and to give it a greater role in lawmaking.  As for the Commission and the Council, however, the argument was that Member States populated these bodies and the governments of those states were democratically elected so those institutions were indirectly democratically accountable.   But what happens if some Member States are no longer reliably democratic?   This talk traces the way that the EU responded to first Hungary and then Poland taking an autocratic path, and assesses the successes and failures of those EU efforts.

Speaker: Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University and visiting professor of law at Stanford Law School. Scheppele's work focuses on the rise and fall of constitutional democracy. After 1989, Scheppele studied the new constitutional courts of Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. After 9/11, she researched the effects of the international "war on terror" on constitutional protections around the world.   Since 2010, she has been documenting attacks on constitutional democracy by legalistic autocrats. Her book Destroying (and Restoring) Democracy by Law is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. 

Scheppele is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the International Academy of Comparative Law. In 2014, she received the Law and Society Association’s Kalven Prize for influential scholarship in comparative constitutional law and in 2024, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on democratic backsliding. She started her career in the political science department at the University of Michigan before moving to a full-time law teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the founding director of the gender program at Central European University Budapest and has held visiting faculty positions in the law schools at Yale, Harvard, Erasmus/Rotterdam, and Humboldt/Berlin. She was President of the Law and Society Association from 2017-2019. 

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

Image

Mary Elise Sarotte received her AB in History and Science from Harvard and her PhD in History from Yale. She is an expert on the history of international relations, particularly European and US foreign policy, transatlantic relations, and Western relations with Russia. Her book, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, was shortlisted for both the Cundill Prize and the Duke of Wellington Medal, received the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize Silver Medal, and won the Pushkin House Prize for Best Non-Fiction Book on Russia. Not One Inch is now appearing in multiple Asian and European languages, including a best-selling and updated version in German, Nicht einen Schritt weiter nach Osten. In 2026, Sarotte will return to Yale for a joint appointment as a tenured professor in both the Jackson School of Global Affairs and the School of Organization and Management.

Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford, and she teaches in the Department of Political Science, in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.