Stanford University

Democracy, Dictatorship and Demophily

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Abstract:

The hegemony of the democratic ideal may be waning. Until recently, even the custodians of dictatorships claimed democratic status for their regimes. Many still do. But other rulers now drop the pretense of democracy and claim that their nondemocratic regimes provide the people with conditions that are superior to those found in democracies. They portray themselves as demophiles rather than democrats, and claim that their concern for their people provides a superior alternative to popular control over the state. What is more, some actually do pursue policies that differ meaningfully from the predation that characterizes the behavior of elites in many nondemocratic regimes. How may we understand contemporary demophily, and how does it challenge democracy?

Speaker Bio:

M. Steven Fish is a comparative political scientist who studies democracy and regime change in developing and postcommunist countries, religion and politics, and constitutional systems and national legislatures. He is the author of Are Muslims Distinctive? A Look at the Evidence (Oxford, 2011). He is also author of Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge, 2005), which was the recipient of the Best Book Award of 2006, presented by the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association, and Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton, 1995). He is coauthor of The Handbook of National Legislatures: A Global Survey (Cambridge, 2009) and Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (Princeton, 2001). He served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Airlangga University, Surabaya, Indonesia, in 2007 and at the European University at St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2000-2001. In 2005, he was the recipient of the Distinguished Social Sciences Teaching Award of the Colleges of Letters and Science, University of California-Berkeley.

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M. Steven Fish Political Scientist Speaker UC Berkeley
Seminars

Advance Screening of "A Whisper to a Roar"

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You're invited!
 

Advance Screening of "A Whisper to a Roar"

A new feature documentary film on the global struggle for democracy
 

 Inspired by Larry Diamond's book

"The Spirit of Democracy"

 Presented by The Moulay Hicham Foundation

 Directed and produced by Ben Moses, creator of "Good Morning, Vietnam"

 

THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2012

7:00pm
A discussion with the filmakers will follow screening

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Cemex Auditorium
Knight Management Center
Stanford University

Larry Diamond

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 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.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Stanford's Fukuyama launches new project to measure governance

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Measuring the quality of governance is a challenge for social scientists trying to assess a country’s ability to deliver public services to its citizens. Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, recognized that many of the current ways to assess good governance are too general and do not account for the variations that occur within complex societies such as China or the United States. Fukuyama has also realized that democracy is not always a necessary ingredient for good governance and in some cases authoritarian countries govern more effectively than their democratic counterparts.

The Governance Project was launched in January 2012 at FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law to engage scholars around the world in the exercise of evaluating the quality of state institutions and government effectiveness. Over the next year, workshops at Stanford and in China will bring governance experts together to showcase the ongoing work in this field and contribute original scholarship to a working paper series. Case studies of China and the United States will conceptualize and measure state performance in the world’s largest economies, comparing and contrasting both models to better understand the inner-workings of governance.    

 

 

 

 

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Sizing Up Taiwan's 2012 Election

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Abstract:

One of Taiwan's leading political scientists and most widely quoted authorities on Taiwan politics and cross-Strait relations, Professor Chu will address five issues in his talk:

   First, how should we interpret the outcome of the January election and the nature and extent of President Ma's renewed mandate?

   Second, to what extent has the 2012 election enhanced the overall quality of Taiwan's democracy?

   Third, what can we expect in terms of President Ma's domestic agenda for the next four years?

   Fourth, how much further and faster can the warming of cross-Strait relations proceed during President Ma's second term?

   Fifth, what are the challenges and opportunities for the US-Taiwan relationship in the coming year?

 Speaker Bio:

Yun-han Chu is Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica and Professor of Political Science at National Taiwan University. He also serves concurrently as President of Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. Professor Chu joined the faculty of National Taiwan University in 1987. He was a visiting associate professor at Columbia University in 1990-1991 and has held a visiting professorship at Peking University since 2007. Professor Chu specializes in politics of Greater China, East Asian political economy, international political economy, and democratization. He is the Coordinator of Asian Barometer Survey, a regional network of survey on democracy, governance and development covering more than seventeen Asian countries. He currently serves on the editorial board of Pacific Affairs, International Studies Perspective, China Review, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of East Asian Studies and Journal of Democracy. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of thirteen books. Among his recent English publications are Consolidating Third-Wave Democracies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), China Under Jiang Zemin (Lynne Reinner, 2000), The New Chinese Leadership: Challenges and Opportunities after the 16th Party Congress (Cambridge University Press 2004) and How East Asians View Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2008).

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Yun-han Chu Distinguished Research Fellow at Academia Sinica; Professor of Political Science Speaker National Taiwan University
Seminars

Patterns of Elderly Life Expectancy in Three Chinese Cities: Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei

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Life expectancy at aged 65 is remarkably similar in the three Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei, even though the cities differ in levels of socioeconomic development, health systems, and other factors. Edward Jow-Ching Tu will discuss research that aims to understand this phenomenon. Despite unprecedented increases in life expectancy and attainment of similar current levels of life expectancy, the cities differ in the contributions of changes in major causes of death to the improvements in life expectancy among the elderly. Tu and colleagues have explored several possible determinants of these different patterns and trends in the three cities, including socioeconomic development, health service delivery systems, cause-of-death classification systems, and competing risks from cardiovascular disease and other diseases. Their analysis suggests that the effect of equity of health service delivery has become more important over time.

Edward Jow-Ching Tu is a senior lecturer of demography in the Division of Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His work is focused on the impact of fertility, mortality, and migration on socio-economic changes in East Asia countries with special emphasis on nations experiencing a transition from planned economy to market economy; on causes and impacts of mortality changes and health transition on aging societies; and on the causes of lowest-low fertility in many East Asia countries. He has several active research projects ongoing in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He holds graduate degress from West Virginia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). Tu has worked extensively in Asia, and has served as an adjunct professor and taught in many universities in China, including Peking University, Peoples University, Nankai Univerity, and Fudan University. He had served as a senior research scientist at the New York State Health Department and as a research fellow (full professor) at the Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy at Academia Sinica. Tu has also taught at the State University of New York in Albany.

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Edward Jow-Ching Tu Senior Lecturer of Demography at the Division of Social Science Speaker Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
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Addressing the supply and demand side of the sex trafficking industry

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Jean Enriquez, executive director of the coalition Against Trafficking of Women Asia-Pacific, presented at the sixth installment of the Sanela Diana Jenkins International Speaker Series at Stanford’s Bechtel Center on February 21. Enriquez focused on the problem of sex trafficking in the Asia-Pacific countries, arguing that prostitution is incompatible with dignity and respect for human rights. Enriquez emphasized the importance of considering both the supply and demand side when individuals, organizations and governments address human trafficking.

“There are well-known push factors on the supply side,” noted Enriquez as she listed causes of vulnerabilities such as unemployment, poverty, lack of education and information, socialization of women and children as sexual objects, history of abuse, displacement due to natural calamities or conflict, liberalization of tourism, opening up of mining areas, conversion of agricultural lands and labor exports.

On the demand side, she suggested that militarism, pornography, cybersex and a corrupted idea of masculinity are drivers for commercial sex and sex trafficking. Enrique added that the supply and demand equation results in considerable profits. According to Enriquez, the sex industry accounts for 4.4% of Korea’s GDP, approximately the same portion as the agriculture and fishery industry.  

Enriquez also highlighted the link between militarism and sex trafficking citing data collected from victims of the Burmese junta and of soldiers stationed or in passage in the bases of Okinawa and Korea.

Addressing the difficulties of enforcing accountability, she highlighted the need for a cross-border and multi-sectoral cooperation that shifts punishment from victims to “buyers” and businesses. She added that her organization, in addition to working to strengthen and support victims, also devotes special attention to sensitizing men towards the plight of women and children forced into prostitution.

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New Stanford summer course to bring leading human rights actors inside the classroom

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The Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, together with Stanford Summer Session are proud to offer a special session on human rights June 25 - July 25, 2012.  The new course entitled, New Global Human Rights presents the question of human rights from an interdisciplinary perspective, taking into account the 21st century context, which requires that both state and non-state actors are included in the movement for rights for all. The course will examine emerging trends in international human rights with an analysis of new categories of human rights victims, actors, and technologies. Other related courses will be offered to allow students to build a summer schedule that allows them to engage in the academic study of human rights in a truly transformative way.

Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights will teach the course which draws on the expertise of leading figures in the field of human rights. Keynote speakers include Fatou Bensouda, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the former solicitor-general, attorney-general, and Minister of Justice of The Gambia. Last December, Bensouda was elected as the new ICC chief prosecutor and is the first African to hold a top position at the ICC. According to Stacy, “Her (Bensouda's) visit to Stanford is a unique opportunity for the Stanford community to learn about the continuity of the work of the ICC from someone who is genuinely concerned about human rights issues,” said Stacy.

Fatou Bensouda, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), speaking at Stanford on June 27, 2012 

Philip Gourevitch, an American author and journalist will also speak at the summer course. Gourevitch has written feature stories and books documenting global human rights abuses, including; the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia, the dictatorships of Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe; the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka; and the abuses committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. “Gourevitch has reported on some of the major and current human rights issues across the globe, " said Stacy, "To hear him speak is the closest we can get the primary account on these situations.”

This course is cross-listed in POLISCI, IPS, and INTNLREL, and open to registered Summer Session students (including Stanford students who register for units in the summer) who wish to explore courses outside their major, or simply accelerate their degree program. They will be joined by students from around the world who are invited to experience campus life at Stanford. To find out more information or to apply, please visit summer.stanford.edu.

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Michael A. Seeberg

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Visiting Researcher
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Michael Aagaard Seeberg is a CDDRL visiting researcher in winter and spring 2012, while researching on his PhD project titled “Democracy Against the Odds”. He expects to obtain his PhD from Aarhus University, Denmark in the fall 2013.

Michael Seeberg’s PhD project seek to understand the emergence of stable (though minimalist) democracy in a number of countries despite low levels of modernization, lack of democratic neighboring countries and other factors consistently related to democratic stability in the literature. Cases in point are Ghana, India, Mauritius and Mongolia. The study of deviant democracies can give us some leverage in understanding the determinants of democracy – determinants that have not really been uncovered yet. Current accounts stress the absence of ‘damaging factors’ as decisive for the successful emergence of democracy. With the project, Michael Seeberg hope to refine existing explanations of democratization while, on the other hand identify the positive drivers that also contributed to new stable democracies. The overall aim is to build a foundation for a better understanding of why some regime changes result in stable democracies whereas others are stuck as hybrid regimes or return to the set of outright autocracies.

Prior to his PhD studies, Michael Seeberg has been a visiting scholar at the University of Washington, Seattle, assistant attaché at the Danish Mission to the United Nations in New York, and a visiting scholar at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds an MSc in political science from Aarhus University. Concurrently with his PhD studies, Michael Seeberg is engaged in the Scouts in Denmark, where he is a member of the executive board at the YMCA Scouts, and member of the Steering Committee for the Project supporting Guiding and Scouting in Eastern and Central Europe.

 

Publications

  • "Mongolian Miracles and Central Asian Disappointments: Nomadic Culture, Clan Politics and the 16. Soviet Republic”, Politica, 2009, 41(3): 315-330.

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