Stanford University

CANCELLED - Power to the Parents?

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Abstract:

Community-driven development programs that decentralized administrative, fiscal, and political functions have become a popular policy tool to deliver public services.  We study a large reform in the city of Delhi that decentralized the management of discretionary school budgets to elected bodies of parents.  Using household surveys, non-participant observation in schools, semi-structured interviews, and administrative data we ask if decentralization has brought expenditures closer in line to the preferences of parents?  We find that expenditures are heavily skewed to the preferences of more traditionally powerful actors, namely men and members of the government bureaucracy.

 

Speaker Bio:

emmerich davies
Emmerich Davies specializes in education policy and politics, the political economy of development, and the politics of service provision, with a regional focus on South Asia.  His work has been published in Comparative Political Studies.  His book manuscript examines the growth of non-state service provision in low-income democracies, and the consequences for democratic politics. Davies earned his B.A. in Economics and Political Science with honors from Stanford University in 2007, worked for two years for the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab in Kolkata, India, and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania.  He is on leave for the 2019-2020 as the W. Glenn Campbell & Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Susan Louise Dyer Peace Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Emmerich Davies Assistant Professor of International Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
Seminars

Can American Democracy Survive the 2020 Elections?

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Abstract:

As the 2020 presidential campaign begins to take shape, there is widespread distrust of the fairness and accuracy of American elections. Four factors increasing the mistrust. Voter suppression has escalated as a Republican tool aimed to depress turnout of likely Democratic voters, fueling suspicion. Pockets of incompetence in election administration, often in large cities controlled by Democrats, have created an opening to claims of unfairness. Old-fashioned and new-fangled dirty tricks, including foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns via social media, threaten electoral integrity. Inflammatory rhetoric about “stolen” elections supercharges distrust among hardcore partisans.
 
Taking into account how each of these threats has manifested in recent years—most notably in the 2016 and 2018 elections—this presentation concludes with concrete steps that need to be taken to restore trust in American elections before the democratic process is completely undermined.

 

Speaker Bio:

richard hasen
Professor Richard L. Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Hasen is a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, writing as well in the areas of legislation and statutory interpretation, remedies, and torts. He is co-author of leading casebooks in election law and remedies.

From 2001-2010, he served (with Dan Lowenstein) as founding co-editor of the quarterly peer-reviewed publication, Election Law Journal. He is the author of over 100 articles on election law issues, published in numerous journals including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review and Supreme Court Review. He was elected to The American Law Institute in 2009 and serves as Reporter (with Professor Douglas Laycock) on the ALI’s law reform project: Restatement (Third) of Torts: Remedies. He also is an adviser on the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Concluding Provisions.

Professor Hasen was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by The National Law Journal in 2013, and one of the Top 100 Lawyers in California in 2005 and 2016 by the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journal.

His op-eds and commentaries have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and Slate. Hasen also writes the often-quoted Election Law Blog, which the ABA Journal named to its “Blawg 100 Hall of Fame” in 2015. The Green Bag recognized his 2018 book, The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption, for exemplary legal writing, and his 2016 book, Plutocrats United, received a Scribes Book Award Honorable Mention. His newest book, Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy will be published by Yale University Press in 2020.

Richard Hasen Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine
Seminars

Resurrecting Compliance in Assessing Law’s Impact on Behavior

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Abstract:

Legal compliance has gotten a bad rap in international relations research. Compliance – the state of being on the “legal” side of a legal/illegal binary – has been largely set aside as a variable of interest in empirical studies of international law in favor of more substantive measures of behavioral change. Nevertheless, efforts to frame political science inquiry in terms of law’s effects have not succeeded in sidestepping compliance. To the contrary, none of the core functions of law (guiding behavior, assessing it, attributing responsibility, or assigning remedies) is possible without an applied concept of legal compliance as an orienting point on the horizon. This paper reclaims compliance as an essential concept for the empirical study of international law—albeit in a transformed state that emphasizes its potential for contextual variability and its essentially legal-political character.

 

Speaker Bio:

putnam
Tonya Putnam (Ph.D., Stanford, 2005; J.D., Harvard 2002) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Her work exploresthe intersectionsof international relations and international law in relation tointernational and transnational regulationand jurisdiction, human rights, international humanitarian law, migration, international dispute resolution, institutional design, and judicial politics.Professor Putnamis the author ofCourts Without Borders:Law, Politics, and U.S. Extraterritoriality(Cambridge University Press 2016). Herresearch has appeared inInternational Organization, International Security,Human Rights Review, Journal of Physical Securityand in edited volumes.She was a Post-DoctoralFellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University and a Pre-and Post-Doctoral Fellow at CISAC.She is currently completing a second book on why and how social scientists should factor basic properties of law, such as its semantic indeterminacy, into theories and empirical models of its impact on behavior.Professor Putnam is also a member (inactive) of the California State Bar.

Resurrecting Compliance in Assessing Law's Impact on Behavior
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Tonya Putnam Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University
Seminars

Trajectories and Consequences of Authoritarian Elite Persistence Under Democracy

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Abstract:

When authoritarian-era elites return to positions of power under democracy, what are the implications for the quality of democracy? We investigate this question using an original dataset that tracks former authoritarian elites’ capture of high-level posts under democracy across Latin America from 1900 to 2015. We find that when authoritarian-era elites capture a wide range of posts across disparate government branches – spanning the executive, legislature, judiciary, military, and local elected office – such “elite dispersion” undercuts the quality of democracy. It also harms specific dimensions of democracy such as accountability, openness of competition, breadth of inclusion, and egalitarianism. These results are robust to prominent alternative explanations of the quality of democracy, and in particular, explanations that underscore the importance of formal organizations and institutions such as autonomous militaries, dominant political parties, and holdover autocratic constitutions. Elite dispersion matters for the quality of democracy even after controlling for these more visible channels of former authoritarian elite influence.

 
 
Speaker Bio:

albertus casbs
Michael Albertus is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. His research interests include political regimes, inequality and redistribution, clientelism, and civil conflict. He has published two books, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform (2015, Cambridge University Press) and Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy (2018, Cambridge University Press), and a host of articles in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Comparative Political Studies. He also writes regularly for public audiences in outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs.

Michael Albertus

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CDDRL Visiting Scholar, Winter-Spring 2026
CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow, 2011-2012
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Michael Albertus is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of five books. 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. It tells the story of how land came to be power within human societies, how it shapes power, and how its allocation determines the major social ills that societies grapple with.

Albertus studied math, electrical engineering, and political science at the University of Michigan and earned degrees in all three in 2005. He then did a PhD in political science at Stanford University, completing in 2011. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Albertus joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2012 and has since been on sabbatical twice back at Stanford, including as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences. In addition to his books, Albertus is also the author of over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles, including at flagship journals like the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and World Politics. He has taught courses to undergraduate, Masters, and PhD students on topics including inequality and redistribution, democracy and dictatorship, comparative politics, and political and economic development and policy in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.

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.

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Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago
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Movement Resilience in Sudan’s Popular Uprising

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Abstract:

 

What explains sustained mobilization — social movement resilience — in the face of severe autocratic repression? This question is especially relevant given the recent uptick in protest movements across the world. We examine this question through the case of Sudan’s popular uprising, which lasted from December 2018 until the country began a formal transition to democracy in July 2019. Drawing on in-depth field research during and after the uprising, we look at the role of organizational legitimacy, elite unity, and the evolution of repression evasion tactics. We find that the movement’s organizational form and mobilization tactics coevolved with the actions of the security apparatus. 

 

Speaker Bio:

 

mai hassan
Mai Hassan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and a current visiting fellow at CASBS. Her work has been published in various outlets, including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Democracy, and the Journal of Politics. She received her PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2014.

 

 

 

 

Mai Hassan Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan
Seminars

Incentives for Police Professionalization in Mexico

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Abstract:

In the face of mounting challenges from criminal activity and citizen demands for improved public safety, Mexico has undertaken significant efforts at police reform. Those efforts would presumably enhance the capacity of police forces to fight and deter crime. This paper explores the quantity and quality of police in Mexico, a federation where multi-tier government makes incentives for police professionalization more challenging than in unitary systems. The paper calculates, the true size of police forces, comparing them to all legal specialists in the use of violence, including private security guards at homes and businesses. It then estimates the implicit wage incentives given to experience and human capital formation in the different types of police corporations during the Calderón and Peña Nieto presidential administrations. Finally, we use a municipal cross section to gain further insight into the effects of police professionalization on interpersonal violence, as measured by homicide rates. The overall findings suggest that improving policing in Mexico is not merely a question of adding manpower or spending more budgetary resources, but of changing career incentives for greater professionalization.

 

Speaker Bio:

alberto diaz
Alberto Diaz-Cayeros joined the FSI faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as the director of the Center for US-Mexico studies at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C. in Mexico from 1997-1999. His work has focused on federalism, poverty and violence in Latin America, and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English. His book Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 (reprinted 2016). His latest book (with Federico Estevez and Beatriz Magaloni) is: The Political Logic of Poverty Relief Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. His work has primarily focused on federalism, poverty and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular, with more recent work addressing crime and violence, youth-at-risk, and police professionalization. 

 

 

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros

Encina Hall, C149
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(650) 725-0500
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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
alberto_diaz-cayeros_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and co-director of the Democracy Action Lab (DAL), based at FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL). His research interests include federalism, poverty relief, indigenous governance, political economy of health, violence, and citizen security in Mexico and Latin America.

He is the author of Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America (Cambridge, reedited 2016), coauthored with Federico Estévez and Beatriz Magaloni, of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief (Cambridge, 2016), and of numerous journal articles and book chapters.

He is currently working on a project on cartography and the developmental legacies of colonial rule and governance in indigenous communities in Mexico.

From 2016 to 2023, he was the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University, and from 2009 to 2013, Director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UCSD, the University of California, San Diego.

Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
Director of the Center for Latin American Studies (2016 - 2023)
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The Impeachment Conundrum

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The Democrats are facing a dilemma: If they defend democratic norms by acting to remove President Trump from office, they risk getting dragged into a polarizing style of politics that works to his political advantage. Read here.

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America in One Room

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Are we really more divided than ever, politically? The results of 'America in One Room' show we're not. Larry Diamond explains that when people meet face-to-face, with access to expert information and the ability to ask questions, the gap narrows. Listen here.

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Are we really more divided than ever, politically? The results of 'America in One Room' show we're not. Larry Diamond explains that when people meet face-to-face, with access to expert information and the ability to ask questions, the gap narrows.

‘The Beacon Has Gone Out’: What Trump and Giuliani Have Wrought

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Our Francis Fukuyama and UELP alumni, Sergii Leshchenko (Draper Hills Summer Fellow 2017) and Oleksandra Ustinova (Ukrainian emerging leaders 2018-9), are feat inMichelle Goldberg's NYT opinion piece "The Beacon Has Gone Out: What Trump & Giuliani Have Wrought." Read here.

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Member of Ukrainian Parliament Sasha Ustinova Weighs In On What Really Happened with Ukraine’s Former Prosecutors General

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As details about the July 25 phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continue to emerge, Oleksandra “Sasha” Ustinova — a member of the Ukrainian parliament who has been fighting corruption in the country for years — said that Ukrainians are reacting to the news differently than Americans are.

For one thing, Ukrainians are paying less attention to what Trump said and more attention to Zelensky’s side of the phone call, Ustinova told Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) Director Michael McFaul on the World Class podcast.



While many Ukrainians acknowledge that the newly-elected Zelensky was in a tough position going into his first conversation with the president of the United States on July 25, many were disappointed to learn that Zelensky promised Trump that the next prosecutor general of Ukraine would be “100 percent my person, my candidate,” especially given the country’s recent controversies surrounding the past two men to serve in that position.

“That is not acceptable,” Ustinova said. “The prosecutor general should be independent. We have already seen many corrupt prosecutor generals.”

Take Viktor Shokin for example, who served as the prosecutor general of Ukraine from 2015 to 2016, explained Ustinova. He is being described by some Americans as an honest man who was forced out of office in part by former Vice President Joe Biden, who supposedly asked the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin because he had been investigating Burisma Holdings, a Ukranian company on which his son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board.

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That story couldn’t be farther from the truth, Ustinov said.

“Shokin was not trying to investigate corruption — he was trying to help a former corrupt state official, Mykola Zlochevsky, escape criminal prosecution,” she explained. “I was actually one of the people who organized demonstrations in front of the general prosecution office because everybody was so sick of Shokin, and so disappointed in him for helping former [corrupt] officials to get back into the country.”

Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who was Ukraine’s prosecutor general from 2016 through August 2019, also did not have the Ukrainian people’s best interests at heart, she said. Under Lutsenko, four of the five outstanding criminal cases against Zlochevsky were shut down. Zlochevsky – a Ukrainian oligarch who founded Burisma Holdings — was required to pay a $4 million fine and was ultimately allowed back in Ukraine.

“Ukrainians know that Shokin and Lutsenko are the bad guys in our country,” she said.. “So of course it was disappointing to hear [people speaking about them in a positive way], but I hope that getting the facts and the truth out there will help a lot of people – not only in Ukraine, but also in the U.S. — to understand who is good and who is bad.”
 

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Member of the Ukrainian parliament Oleksandra “Sasha” Ustinova speaks at an event at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law on October 2, 2019. Photo: Rod Searcey
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