Stanford University

Measuring Governance Cross-Nationally

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CLOSED WORKSHOP

Since 2012, the Governance Project at CDDRL has sought to develop better comparative measures of state quality. Existing measures like the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, TI’s Transparency Perceptions Index, or the state-quality measures in the Varieties of Democracy series are based on perception or expert surveys.  They often produce aggregate measures for an entire country, without distinguishing between ministries, levels of government, or regions within countries.  And almost none of them measure aspects of governance like bureaucratic autonomy that many observers feel are critical to state performance.

The Governance Project has developed a survey instrument that seeks to correct some of these deficiencies by surveying bureaucrats in different countries directly.  While such a survey is obviously subject to its own problems like social acceptability bias, they at least try to reach into the insides of executive branches in ways that existing perception surveys do not.  To date, the project has completed surveys in China, Brazil, Ukraine, and is undertaking one in India.  The survey instrument is based on the Federal Viewpoint Survey (FedView), which has surveyed US bureaucrats over an extended length of time and can serve as a comparative baseline.  These surveys are conducted in conjunction with local partners that perform the actual surveys and provide input and analysis into the survey instrument.

It is our hope to generate cross-national comparative data that will encompass an increasing number of countries, and in the long-run produce time-series data.  Our model is the World Values Survey, which from the 1980s going forward has expanded the number of countries covered.  We hope to make this data publicly available to academic researchers around the world.

The Governance Project has entered into a cooperative agreement with the World Bank and University College, London, to devise a common survey instrument, to standardize surveying practices, and to coordinate the choice of survey targets for future surveys.  

This workshop is co-sponsored with Stanford University's Center on Global Poverty and Development.

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Koret-Taube Conference Center
366 Galvez St.
Stanford, CA 94305

Workshops

Can Nationalism Be A Resource for Democracy? Lessons From Asia

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Abstract:

Inequality has long been widely and rightly seen as one of the greatest threats to democracy. For political scientists, the most lethal kind of inequality for democracy is some form of economic inequality. In this project, I adopt a more historical and ideological approach to the question of how inequality threatens democracy. Specifically, focusing on twentieth-century post-colonial contexts, I argue that inequalities of citizenship that are historically grounded in founding narratives of nationalism are also detrimental to a country’s democratic prospects across time.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Maya Tudor is Associate Professor in Politics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. Her research investigates the historical origins of stable, democratic and effective states across the developing world, with a particular emphasis upon South Asia. She was educated at Stanford University (BA in Economics) and Princeton University (MPA in Development Studies and PhD in Politics and Public Policy). She has held fellowships at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of Inequality and Democracy and currently, at Stanford University's Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She is the author of “The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan.” She is currently writing a comparative study of nationalisms and democracy.

Maya Tudor Associate Professor in Politics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
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PODCAST: So what is RT exactly?

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Global Digital Policy Incubator’s Associate Director for Research, Megan Metzger, was on the Stats + Stories podcast speaking about RT news online, and how it fits into the Russian state’s information strategy. She also spoke more broadly about the opportunities and challenges that social media has created, and what we as individuals can do to make the internet a better place.

 

Listen here.

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PODCAST: China and the Global Challenges to Democracy: A Conversation with Larry Diamond

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In this episode of the Power 3.0 podcast, Larry Diamond discusses the Chinese Communist Party's range of influence and interference in activities that target the public, civic, and social institutions of democracies.

 

Listen here.

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Social Voting in Semi-Authoritarian Systems

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Abstract:

In dominant-party states, why do individuals vote in elections with foregone conclusions when they are neither bought nor coerced? I propose that a social norm of voting motivates turnout in these least-likely contexts. Motivated by the belief that regimes reward high turnout with public goods, citizens view elections as an opportunity for community-wide benefit and use social sanctions to enforce the norm. Using lab-in-the-field voting experiments together with survey data, I document the strong influence of a social norm of voting in two semi-authoritarian states in east Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. I find that norm compliance is driven by those most dependent on their local community. This project helps to explain high turnout in elections, individual-level variation in voting behavior, and authoritarian endurance. The results suggest that rather than government accountability, elections may instead be about local accountability to one's community.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Leah is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France and a research affiliate at MIT GOV/LAB. She received her PhD in political science from MIT in 2018. Leah studies political behavior in sub-Saharan Africa and examines questions of citizen engagement, compliance, and government accountability. Her current book project investigates how social norms of voting help to explain high turnout in dominant-party states in East Africa. She is also working on a project on urban informality in Lagos, Nigeria. Before starting graduate school, Leah worked as the program manager at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in Nigeria.

 

Leah R. Rosenzweig

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CDDRL Postdoctoral Scholar, 2020-21
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My research centers on topics in comparative politics and the political economy of development. I focus on the micro-foundations of political behavior to gain leverage on macro-political questions. How do autocrats survive? How can citizen-state relations be improved and government accountability strengthened? Can shared identities mitigate out-group animosity? Adopting a multi-method approach, I use lab-in-the-field and online experiments, surveys, and in-depth field research to examine these questions in sub-Saharan Africa and the US. My current book project reexamines the role of elections in authoritarian endurance and explains why citizens vote in elections with foregone conclusions in Tanzania and Uganda. Moving beyond conventional paradigms, my theory describes how a social norm of voting and accompanying social sanctions from peers contribute to high turnout in semi-authoritarian elections. In other ongoing projects, I study how national and pan-African identification stimulated through national sports games influence attitudes toward refugees, the relationship between identity, emotions, and belief in fake news, and how researchers can use Facebook as a tool for social science research.

postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France
Seminars

The Polarization of Nationalist Cleavages and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

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Abstract:

Using survey data from a variety of sources, I examine how multiple conceptions of American nationhood shaped respondents’ voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and how the election outcome built on long-term changes in the distribution of nationalist beliefs in the U.S. population. The results suggest that nationalist beliefs constituted important cultural cleavages that were effectively mobilized by candidates from both parties. In particular, exclusionary varieties of nationalism were associated with Trump support in the Republican primary and the general election, while disengagement from the nation was predictive of Sanders support in the Democratic primary. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, nationalism has become sorted by party: Republicans have become predominantly ethno-nationalist, while Democrats have increasingly embraced a creedal conception of nationhood. The resulting mutual reinforcement of nationalist cleavages with other sources of distinction is likely to shape future elections and threaten the stability of U.S. democracy.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Bart Bonikowski is Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Resident Faculty at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, a Faculty Affiliate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (where he co-directs the Research Cluster on Global Populism / Challenges to Democracy), and a 2018-19 Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Relying on survey methods, computational text analysis, and experimental research, his work applies insights from cultural sociology to the study of politics in the United States and Europe, with a particular focus on nationalism, populism, and the rise of the radical right. His research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, British Journal of Sociology, European Journal of Political Research, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Brown Journal of World Affairs, and a number of other peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.
 
Bart Bonikowski Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University
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