About the Event:  Decentralization and community-driven development programs have become increasingly common policies to attempt to improve the distribution of public goods across low- and middle-income countries. We study a series of reforms in the city of Delhi that decentralized the administration of discretionary school-level budgets to elected bodies of parents. We find that parents have preferences for representatives that are substantially more educated than them and discriminate against Muslims. Parents act on these preferences when given the opportunity to elect SMC members. They elect parents that are wealthier and more educated and are also of higher status. The paper provides empirical evidence to the question of under what conditions decentralization leads to elite capture. When bureaucrats have a stronger say in the selection of representatives, budgets are captured to reflect the preferences of state representatives, rather than constituents.

Image

About the Event:   The number of Americans arrested, brought to court, and incarcerated has skyrocketed in recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly different ways. How and why is the court process unequal? This talk draws on findings from my book Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Princeton University Press, November 2020). Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in the Boston court system, I show that lawyers and judges often silence, coerce, and punish disadvantaged defendants when they try to learn their legal rights and advocate for themselves. These dynamics reveal how unwritten institutional norms devalue the exercise of legal rights among the disadvantaged, and that ensuring effective legal representation is no guarantee of justice. Drawing on other research and activism on the courts as a tool of racialized social control, I conclude with reflections on the democratic potential and possibilities of criminal court abolition.  

Image

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, is a sweeping bill that aims to strengthen American democracy. Included in the bill are reforms to election administration, campaign finance, gerrymandering, and voting rights. H.R. 1 passed the House in 2019, and is likely to be brought up in Congress again this year.  

What exactly is included in H.R. 1 and what are the arguments of its supporters and detractors? Join us for a deep dive into four components of this historic legislation. Each panel brings together advocates, critics, and academics to describe the specific reforms under consideration.   

These panels are co-sponsored by the Stanford University Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.

For more on H.R. 1, please visit our resource page here. 

Slides from the Brennan Center on the For the People Act can be found here.

Monday, Feb 1, 12:00 - 1:15 PM (PACIFIC): Election Administration 

H.R. 1 creates federal standards for the administration of elections, eases voter registration rules, expands ballot access through early and mail voting, and strengthens voting system security.  

Session Moderators: 

Nate Persily, Co-Director of the Program on Democracy and Internet at Stanford PACS and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project 
Didi Kuo, Associate Director for Research, Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University  
 

Session Speakers:

Leigh Chapman, Senior Director of Voting Rights Program, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights 
Nick Penniman, Founder and CEO, Issue One  
Wendy Weiser, Vice President for Democracy, Brennan Center for Justice  
Charles Stewart III, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, Co-Director of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project 
David Becker, Executive Director and Founder, Center for Election Innovation & Research

Tuesday, Feb 2, 12 - 1:15 PM (PACIFIC): Voting Rights

H.R. 1 recommits to the protections of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, restores felony voting rights, creates safeguards against purges of voting rolls, and requires voter-verified paper ballots.

Session Moderators: 

Nate Persily, Co-Director of the Program on Democracy and Internet at Stanford PACS and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project 
Didi Kuo, Associate Director for Research, Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University 

Session Speakers:

Dale Ho, Director, ACLU Voting Rights Project  
Myrna Perez, Director, Brennan Center's Voting Rights and Elections Program  
Janai Nelson, Associate Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF)  
Guy-Uriel Charles, Edward and Ellen Schwarzman Professor of Law, Duke Law School

Monday, Feb 8, 12 - 1:15 PM (PACIFIC): Gerrymandering

H.R. 1 bans partisan gerrymandering, establishes uniform rules for the drawing of districts, and requires independent redistricting commissions for congressional redistricting.

Session Moderators: 

Nate Persily, Co-Director of the Program on Democracy and Internet at Stanford PACS and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project 
Didi Kuo, Associate Director for Research, Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University 

Session Speakers:

Ben Ginsberg, Lecturer, Stanford Law School  
Ruth Greenwood, Co-Director of Voting Rights and Redistricting, Campaign Legal Center 
Michael Li, Senior Counsel, Brennan Center’s Democracy Program  
Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Tuesday, Feb 9, 12 - 1:15 PM (PACIFIC): Campaign Finance

H.R.1 includes several changes related to disclosure of certain campaign finance activities, regulation of on-line campaigning, and enforcement through the Federal Election Commission.

Session Moderators: 

Nate Persily, Co-Director of the Program on Democracy and Internet at Stanford PACS and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project 
Didi Kuo, Associate Director for Research, Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University 

Session Speakers: 

Bradley Smith, Josiah H. Blackmore II/Shirley M. Nault Professor of Law, Capital University Law School  
Richard Pildes, Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law, New York University School of Law 
Meredith McGehee, Executive Director, Issue One  
Alex Kaplan, Vice President of Policy & Campaigns, RepresentUs  
Adav Noti, Senior Director, Trial Litigation & Chief of Staff, Campaign Legal Center

**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the Event: The paradox of analyzing politics in Myanmar is never knowing whether or not events should surprise us. What Myanmar’s traumatic political history tells us is likely to happen is often diametrically opposed to what comparative and theoretical perspectives tell us is likely to happen. This presentation will consider Myanmar’s past decade of experimenting with reversible political reforms – which at least for now seems to have culminated in the military coup of February 1^st – from both of these divergent perspectives. It will then draw upon those perspectives to offer several optimistic scenarios, before puzzling over how to assess the relative likelihood of the main optimistic and pessimistic scenarios coming to pass.

Image

About the Event:  Increasing access to higher education is often seen as a threat to authoritarian regimes. Accordingly, authoritarian rulers would limit access to avoid the spread of anti-regime sentiments. Turkey suggests an interesting case. The consolidation of single party-rule overlapped with an impressive expansion of higher education, by 170 percent, from 76 in 2002 to 206 in 2020. This paper examines these two trends in connection with each other by focusing on universities' role as infrastructural mechanisms for both democratic culture and state coercion.  

Image

About the Speaker:  Ayça Alemdaroğlu is the Associate Director of the Program on Turkey and Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She is a political sociologist, focusing on social and political inequality and change in Turkey and the Middle East.

Ayça’s recent work examines youth politics, and authoritarianism. In “Governing youth in times of dissent: Essay competitions, politics of history and affective pedagogies” (forthcoming in Turkish Studies), she  examines the politics of history and emotional tactics the Justice and Development Party (AKP) uses in its effort to control, administer and recruit youth. In this work, she argues that the resilience of the AKP regime lies not only in the benefits the party has provided to previously disadvantaged groups and its coercive methods towards dissent, but also lies in the party’s articulation of political differences and its mobilization of emotions through intermediary channels between the party and the people. In “The AKP’s Problem with Youth”, Ayça examines the significance of youth for the AKP and the politics of its tremendous expansion of religious education in Turkey. In “Dialectics of Reform and Repression: Unpacking Turkey’s Authoritarian ‘Turn’”, she analyzes the dynamics and dialectics of reform and repression in the last two decades. Instead of reading contemporary Turkey as a case of relapse from reform into repression, as many commentators do, the article shows that reform and repression have been concomitant and complementary modes of the AKP governments.

She received her BSc. degree in political science and sociology from the Middle East Technical University, her MA in political science from Bilkent University, and her PhD in sociology from University of Cambridge. 

About the Event: Do programmatic policies always yield electoral rewards? A growing body of research attributes the adoption of programmatic policies in African states to increased electoral competition. However, these works seldom explore how the specifics of policy implementation condition voters’ electoral responses to programmatic policies over time, or changes in electoral effects throughout policy cycles. We analyze the electoral effects of both the promise and implementation of a programmatic policy designed to increase secondary school enrollment in Tanzania over three election cycles. We find that the incumbent party benefited from a campaign promise to increase access to secondary schooling, but incurred an electoral penalty following implementation of the policy. We do not find any significant electoral effects by the third electoral cycle. Our findings illuminate temporal dynamics of policy feedback, the conditional electoral effects of programmatic policies, and the need for more studies of entire policy cycles over multiple electoral periods.

Image

About the Event:  In the wake of the racial unrest of 1968, the federal government  embarked on a series of social programs designed to  respond to the cries of Black communities demanding an end to police brutality, access to quality housing, and economic investment in schools and jobs.  Often, these cries were not fully heeded, and the marketplace became a terrain on which corporate America and the state argued that Black lives could be improved.  In this presentation on her most recent book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, historian Marcia Chatelain links the rise of black capitalism with the fracturing of the mid-century civil rights struggle and eclipsing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of economic justice.  In lieu of policies that could enhance the quality of life in America’s cities, many Black neighborhoods were offered fast food outlets, low-wage work, and an enmeshed relationship with corporate benevolence.

Image

About the Speaker:  Marcia Chatelain is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Georgetown University. The author of books, South Side Girls and Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Her work has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, and The Washington Post.

About the Event:  Why have conservatives decried “activist judges”? And why have liberals - and America's powerful legal establishment - emphasized qualifications and experience over ideology? This transformative text tackles these questions with a new framework for thinking about the nation's courts, 'the judicial tug of war', which not only explains current political clashes over America's courts but also powerfully predicts the composition of courts moving forward. As the text demonstrates through novel quantitative analyses, a greater ideological rift between politicians and legal elites leads politicians to adopt measures that put ideology and politics front and center - for example, judicial elections. On the other hand, ideological closeness between politicians and the legal establishment leads legal elites to have significant influence on the selection of judges. Ultimately, the judicial tug of war makes one point clear: for good or bad, politics are critical to how judges are selected and whose interests they ultimately represent.

Image

**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the Event: This book examines the creation and consequences of executive constraints in authoritarian regimes. How do some dictatorships become institutionalized ruled-based systems, while others remain heavily personalist? Once implemented, do executive constraints actually play an effective role in promoting autocratic stability? To understand patterns of regime institutionalization, I study the emergence of constitutional term limits and succession procedures, as well as elite power-sharing within presidential cabinets. This project employs a wide range of evidence, including an original time-series dataset of 46 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1960 to 2010, formal theory, and case studies. Altogether this book paints a picture of how some dictatorships evolve from personalist strongman rule to institutionalized regimes. 

Image

About this Event: In India there persists a striking gender gap in political participation. Women's political participation is important both on normative grounds of inclusion and because when women do participate, politics changes. I develop a theoretical model of political behavior arguing that women's lack of political participation is the result of the structure of women's political networks in patriarchal societies. I then evaluate the effect of expanding women's networks by leveraging a natural experiment that created as-if random variation in access to women-only credit groups. Participation in these groups had a significant and substantial impact on women's political participation - women's attendance at public meetings doubled. I provide suggestive evidence of three mechanisms underlying this effect: (1) larger networks, (2) increased capacity for collective action within networks, and (3) development of civic skills. These findings contribute to our understanding of how networks affect political behavior and underlie gendered inequalities in political participation.

Image