Since the early 1990s democracies, including European Union member states, Japan, and the United States, have claimed to promote human rights in China. Yet under Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping's decade-long rule modest gains have been reversed, and state-driven abuses now range from pervasive high-tech surveillance to crimes against humanity. Not only has external engagement failed to deter this downward spiral, democracies appear ill-prepared to cope with the Xi regime's increasing threats to democratic processes, the freedom of expression, and the international institutions meant to protect these rights in their own countries. How and why have these democracies failed, and can how can they better insulate themselves from these threats?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sophie Richardson is currently researching democracies’ support for human rights in China. From 2006-2023, she served as the China Director at Human Rights Watch, overseeing the organization’s research and advocacy on Chinese government human rights abuses inside and outside the country. She has worked closely with civil society groups, governments, and United Nations bodies, and published extensively on the topic. Dr. Richardson has testified to the Canadian Parliament, European Parliament, and the United States Senate and House of Representatives. She is the author of China, Cambodia, and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (Columbia University Press, Dec. 2009), an in-depth examination of China's foreign policy since 1954's Geneva Conference, including rare interviews with Chinese policy makers. She speaks Mandarin and received her doctorate from the University of Virginia and her BA from Oberlin College.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Bartels dismantles the pervasive myth of a "populist wave" in contemporary European public opinion. He shows that attitudes regarding immigration, European integration, trust in politicians, and satisfaction with democracy have remained largely unchanged over the past two decades. Electoral gains by right-wing populist parties have mostly reflected idiosyncratic failures of mainstream parties; both their magnitude and their implications have been exaggerated by the press. Europe's most sobering examples of democratic backsliding--in Hungary and Poland--occurred not because voters wanted authoritarianism but because conventional conservative parties, once elected, seized opportunities to entrench themselves in power.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Larry Bartels's research and teaching focus on public opinion, electoral politics, public policy, and democracy. His books include Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2nd edition) and (with Christopher Achen) Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. He has also published dozens of scholarly articles and brief pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, and other popular media outlets. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the American Philosophical Society.

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How do nations grapple with a history of past atrocities? Does recognition of historical crimes in public discourse lead citizens to embrace a past that may devalue their national identity, or does it foster backlash and illiberal nationalism? Perhaps no better example of a paradigm of confronting the past exists than the case of post-war Germany, a country marked by the legacy of the Nazi atrocities in World War II.

More than half a century later, we ask how public recognition of collective culpability in public discourse, education, and culture, has affected German national identity and attitudes towards the country's history. We conducted a nationwide representative survey of German-born adults and relied on an experimental treatment to distinguish between private preferences and their public expression. Our findings suggest that the low levels of national pride and muted emotional connection to German history that are expressed by the German public have been internalized and are not the result of social desirability concerns. Yet a stigma surrounds the public expression of a desire to move on from the historical narrative that emphasizes Germany's role as a perpetrator of atrocities. Our study highlights both the potential for success and the costs of public recognition of a nation's historical sins.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Vasiliki Fouka is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, a Faculty Research Fellow at NBER, and a Research Affiliate at CEPR. Her research interests include historical political economy, political behavior, and cultural economics, with a main focus on immigrant assimilation, the determinants of prejudice against ethnic and racial minorities, and the long-run effects of history for inter-group relations.  

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Despite the policy failures that enabled and even encouraged the buildup of risk in the banking system and ultimately led to the global financial crisis of 2007-2009, “reformed” rules remain poorly designed, the system remains much too fragile and dangerous, and bailouts persist. In resisting beneficial reforms, bank lobbies make false, misleading, and self-serving arguments. The weak rules and poor enforcement reflect the symbiosis of bankers with politicians, the media, lawyers, and economists. They encourage and enable a culture of recklessness, rule infringements, and even criminal behavior, with impunity. The power of bankers to distort rules and political discourse threatens our democracies. This talk will be based on the new and expanded edition of Anat Admati's The Bankers' New Clothes: What is Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press, 2024), coauthored with Martin Hellwig, and other writings.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Anat Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and faculty director of the Corporations and Society Initiative. Her interests lie in the interaction of business, law, and policy, with a focus on governance and accountability issues. Since 2010, Admati has been engaged in policy discussions related to financial regulations. In 2014, she was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and by Foreign Policy magazine as among 100 global thinkers. Admati has written on information dissemination in financial markets, financial contracting, corporate governance, and banking. She is the co-author, with Martin Hellwig, of The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press 2013, expanded edition 2024).

Admati holds BSc from the Hebrew University, MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society, a past board member of the American Finance Association, and a former member of the FDIC’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee and the CFTC’s Market Risk Advisory Committee.

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Why could politicians of religious minority background assume the highest political offices in some countries soon after modern representative institutions were adopted, whereas, in other countries, almost all the national chief executives have been politicians from the religious majority background for decades, if not centuries?

I argue that the leading politicians of religious minority backgrounds in Europe potentially had three “secular” paths out of their marginality: liberalism, socialism, and nationalism. I examine these three paths that religious minority politicians pursued through the cases of Britain (liberalism), France (socialism), Hungary, and Italy (nationalism). I explain the variation in the rise of the first religious minority chief executives at the national level and the prominence of one of these three specific paths based on the religious configuration of the main actors in the constitutive conflict that established the nation-state. Finally, I examine a world-historical example of pattern change, the rise of Catholic-origin politicians to national leadership in previously Protestant-led Germany, which was due to a new constitutive conflict (World War II and the Holocaust) that radically altered the religious-national configuration. Religious minorities’ political (under-)representation constitutes a significant dimension of their (de-)securitization.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Şener Aktürk is Professor in the Department of International Relations at Koç University. He is a scholar of comparative politics, with a focus on comparative politics of ethnicity, religion, and nationalism. After completing his BA and MA at the University of Chicago and his PhD in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Government at Harvard University. His book, Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2012), received the 2013 Joseph Rothschild Book Prize from the Association for the Study of Nationalities.

His articles have been published in World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, Mediterranean Politics, Social Science Quarterly, European Journal of Sociology, Nationalities Papers, Problems of Post-Communism, Turkish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Osteuropa, Theoria, Ab Imperio, Insight Turkey, Turkish Policy Quarterly, Perceptions, and various edited books. He is the recipient of the Peter Odegard Award at UC Berkeley, the Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant, the Baki Komsuoglu Social Sciences Encouragement Award, the Kadir Has Social Sciences Prize, the TUBA Young Scientist Award, the BAGEP Science Academy Award, and the TUBİTAK Incentive Prize.

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Control over patronage appointments is believed to confer an electoral advantage on the incumbent. We study the effects of the introduction of merit civil service legislation between 1900 and 2016 on reelection rates of individual legislators serving across lower houses of U.S. state legislatures. Using recently-developed statistical methods appropriate for the staggered introduction of reform legislation, results show that reelection rates significantly increase following abolition of patronage appointments to the state bureaucracy. To explain this surprising result, we study changes in the pool of politicians and document a selection effect: post-reform states see faster replacement of politicians than their unreformed counterparts. To understand this more fully, we bring in partial data on rerunning and legislator occupational backgrounds. Neither of these shows significant changes with reform. Overall, our results suggest that once rotation between elected and appointed offices was restricted by reform, more ambitious and professional legislators entered elected office. However, these traits appear unobservable.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Miriam Golden holds the Peter Mair Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute. She uses multiple research methods to investigate the political economy of governance, political representation, and corruption in countries around the world. Golden is currently engaged in a large-scale cross-national and historical study of how and when politicians secure reelection and has recently published The Puzzle of Clientelism: Political Discretion and Elections Around the World (Cambridge University Press, 2023) with Eugenia Nazrullaeva. Her articles have been published in The American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, The Annual Review of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and the British Journal of Political Science. She has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences and a recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

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