This research introduces the concept of police-led armed groups (PLAGs) to better capture the institutional distinctiveness of armed formations organized by active-duty police officers. Unlike traditional non-state armed groups, PLAGs benefit from insider access to state infrastructure, impunity networks, and coercive training — blurring the boundaries between extralegal and illicit violence. The paper distinguishes PLAGs from both autonomous non-state actors and state-aligned militias, offering a conceptual framework based on group composition, organizational autonomy, and the strategic use of police authority. To demonstrate the utility of this framework, I reclassify the armed groups documented in the 2008 CPI das Milícias (Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on Milícias) in Rio de Janeiro. This reclassification reveals that a substantial number of groups previously treated as PLAGs are more accurately understood as non-state armed criminal groups. This conceptual innovation has implications for theories of state violence, criminal governance, and security sector reform in high-violence democracies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ana Paula Pellegrino is the Gerhard Casper Postdoctoral Fellow in Rule of Law at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and will join the School of Government at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile as an Assistant Professor in July 2026. Her research examines criminal and political violence in Latin America, with a particular focus on armed actors — including police and armed groups — their attitudes, and their behaviors. Her book project investigates why police form armed groups. Pellegrino received her Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University in 2025, specializing in Comparative Government. Her work has been supported by Georgetown University, Fundação Estudar’s Leaders program, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation’s Emerging Scholars initiative.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Room E-008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Women’s political participation remains persistently lower than men’s worldwide. This study evaluates whether a group-based training intervention can enhance women’s engagement in local governance. In a randomized controlled trial across 300 communities in southwest Nigeria, we recruited 3,900 politically unaffiliated women into newly formed women’s action committees (WACs). Control WACs received basic civic education, while treatment WACs received additional training aimed at strengthening women’s collective efficacy. Leveraging baseline and endline surveys, as well as behavioral data from a community grant competition, we find that the intervention significantly increased both the level and quality of women’s political participation. It also improved women’s perceptions of community leaders’ responsiveness. Such gains appear to be driven by increased perceptions of individual and collective agency. These findings underscore the potential of addressing both psychological and structural barriers to advance women’s political engagement.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Claire Adida is a Senior Fellow at FSI (CDDRL), Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science, and faculty co-director at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University. She is also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) group, the Policy Design and Evaluation Lab (PDEL), and the Future of Democracy Initiative at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC). She is an invited researcher with J-PAL’s Humanitarian Protection and Displaced Livelihoods Initiatives and an international advisory board member with CFREF’s Bridging Divides research program.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the Philippines Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

We assemble a comprehensive database of historical electoral results for the US House, Senate and presidential contests, from the 19th century until today. We analyze long run trends in election vote margins and party seat margins. Seat margins declined in the recent period, so the margins of control of the House, Senate, and Electoral College by either party have become smaller. However, this was not accompanied by a decline in the margins of victory at the constituency level. We interpret these facts in the context of a simple model of electoral competition where seat margins and vote margins depend on the availability of information about voter preferences, as well as the ability of political candidates to tailor their platforms locally. We argue that the gradual increase in politicians' information about voter preferences, as well as the growing nationalization of politics can explain the long-run decrease in seat margins and the concurrent stability in vote margins.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Clemence Tricaud is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is also a research affiliate of the NBER and CEPR. She received her Ph.D in Economics from Ecole Polytechnique and CREST in 2020. Her research lies at the intersection of political economy and public economics. Her work combines quasi-experimental designs with administrative data to better understand the determinants and consequences of citizen and policymaker behaviors. The first part of her research studies the factors affecting voters' and candidates' behavior during elections and the consequences of their choices on electoral outcomes. The second part of her work explores how the identity of policymakers and the level of governance affect the design of local public policies and the provision of public goods.

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

We examine the impact of ethics and integrity training on police officers in Ghana through a randomized field experiment. The program, informed by theoretical work on the role of identity and motivation in organizations, aimed to re-activate intrinsic motivations to serve the public, and to create a new shared identity of "Agent of Change." Data generated by an endline survey conducted 20 months post training, show that the program positively affected officers' values and beliefs regarding on-the-job unethical behavior and improved their attitudes toward citizens. The training also lowered officers' propensity to behave unethically, as measured by an incentivized cheating game conducted at endline. District-level administrative data for a subsample of districts are consistent with a significant impact of the program on officers' field behavior in the short-run.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Danila Serra is Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford. She is an applied behavioral economist employing experimental methods to address policy-relevant questions in political economy, development, education, and gender economics. Her work has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the World Bank, the IZA G²LM|LIC program, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) and the Arnold Foundation. In 2017, she was the inaugural recipient of the Vernon Smith Ascending Scholar Prize, given by the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics (IFREE) to an exceptional scholar using experiments in economics research.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Delegation of authority is central to the functioning of bureaucracies and, indeed, to political institutions as a whole. It is today at the center of the contemporary assault on the "administrative state," and its importance is widely misunderstood. In this seminar, Francis Fukuyama will discuss how a well-functioning government needs to provide bureaucrats with sufficient authority and that this is something that the US has failed to do.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy Program, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book,  Liberalism and Its Discontents, was published in the spring of 2022.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.  

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), and the Pardee Rand Graduate School. He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. Who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment. Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, from Soviet and Maoist collectivization to initiatives turning large estates over to family farmers. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career’s worth of original research and on-the-ground fieldwork, Land Power shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis—and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michael Albertus is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of five books. His research examines democracy and dictatorship, inequality and redistribution, property rights, and civil conflict. His newest book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, was published by Basic Books in January 2025. In addition to his books, Albertus is also the author of nearly 30 peer-reviewed journal articles, including at flagship journals like the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and World Politics. The defining features of Albertus' work are his engagement with big questions and puzzles and the ability to join big data and cutting-edge research methods with original, deep on-the-ground fieldwork everywhere from government offices to archives and farm fields. He has conducted fieldwork throughout the Americas, southern Europe, South Africa, and elsewhere. His books and articles have won numerous awards and shifted conventional understandings of democracy, authoritarianism, and the consequences of how humans occupy and relate to the land.
 

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the Philippines Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Once a centralizing force of the democratic process, political parties have eroded over the past fifty years. In her new book, The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't, Didi Kuo explores the development of political parties as democracy expanded across the West in the nineteenth century. While parties have become professionalized and nationalized, they have lost the robust organizational density that made them effective representatives. After the Cold War, the combination of a neoliberal economic consensus, changes to campaign finance, and shifting party priorities weakened the party systems of Western democracies. In order for democracy to adapt to a new era of global capitalism, The Great Retreat makes the case for stronger parties in the form of socially embedded institutions with deep connections to communities and citizens.

Kuo will give a brief talk about the book before being joined by Jake Grumbach, Julia Azari, and Bruce Cain for a panel discussion.

This talk will examine how technology can amplify deliberative democracy to foster a more informed and engaged society. Drawing on findings from two nationally representative online Deliberative Polls called America in One Room, the talk will demonstrate how online deliberation is alleviating polarization and producing lasting effects with hopes for a more deliberative society. The talk will also explore how the AI-assisted Stanford Online Deliberation Platform, which has logged over 100,000 deliberation hours in over 35 countries and 25 languages, has been used to facilitate high-quality, structured discussions on complex issues, including democratic reform and the implications of generative AI and metaverse governance. By integrating insights from research and practice, the session will demonstrate how deliberation can empower voters, improve decision-making, and counteract the polarization threatening democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alice Siu received her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication at Stanford University, with a focus in political communication, deliberative democracy, and public opinion, and her B.A. degrees in Economics and Public Policy and M.A. degree in Political Science, also from Stanford.

Siu has advised policymakers and political leaders around the world at various levels of government, including leaders in China, Brazil, and Argentina. Her research interests in deliberative democracy include what happens inside deliberation, such as examining the effects of socio-economic class in deliberation, the quality of deliberation, and the quality of arguments in deliberation.

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