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Today, nearly 9% of people in Latin America identify as Indigenous, ranging from 2% in Argentina to 30% in Guatemala with high within-country variation. Levels of Indigenous self-identification have also increased in the last decades in the region. Using a multi-method approach that combines surveys, archival research, text analysis, and machine learning, I study how different institutional frameworks have shaped the persistence of language, Indigenous last-names, and local governance from the colonial times to the 21st century. I also provide a novel theoretical framework to understand Indigenous agency and their capacity to resist, survive and adapt to colonial rule.

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In electoral autocracies, why do some citizens view the state as autocratic, while others see it as democratic and legitimate? Traditionally, indicators such as income and education have been the most important factors to explaining why different types of citizens understand politics. This paper argues that in electoral autocracies, we must also take into account the role of political geography. Opposition parties are often one of the only actors that provide information about the authoritarian nature of the regime, but their message tends to get quarantined within their strongholds. I argue that regardless of income, education, ethnicity, or access to government spending, citizens living in opposition strongholds should be far more likely to view the state as autocratic and illegitimate than citizens living in ruling party strongholds. I find evidence for this theory using Afrobarometer survey data paired with hand-coded constituency-level electoral returns from five electoral autocracies in sub-Saharan Africa.

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State repression is used in many countries by unpopular regimes. Why does repression deter dissent in some cases, but encourage it in others? I argue that repression is most effective against the poor because they are both physically and psychologically more vulnerable to violence. I test this prediction using data on pre-election repression in Zimbabwe and two empirical strategies at the constituency and individual level that draw on exogenous variation in poverty and exposure to repression. Across multiple analyses, I find evidence that the poor are less likely to dissent after repression. I also rule out several important alternative explanations including changes in preferences, differences in the type of repression, or differences in the effectiveness of clientelism. These results may help explain why poverty is associated with authoritarian, non-responsive institutions, and why we see little redistribution to the poor in non-democratic states.

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While numerous studies examine the relationship between social media and political behavior, scholars continue to debate its effects on political polarization. To inform this debate, we measure the effect of social media echo chambers on public opinion by evaluating 40,000 tweets around major breaking news stories, and comparing pre-and post-event policy positions amongst far and moderate right, and far and moderate left groups on Twitter. Our research improves on current approaches of measuring polarization by combining network analysis with supervised machine learning to examine what sampled individuals within different social media networks actually say about political topics. We find that individuals’ opinions on a variety of political issues converge on the modal opinion of media elites within their echo chamber following large-scale media events. We use this evidence to argue that people become more ideologically sorted—rather than more ideologically polarized—vis-à-vis social media echo chambers.  

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Laura Jakli is a Predoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation draws on digital survey and ad experiments, machine learning, and qualitative fieldwork to examine the relationship between digital politics and political radicalization. Her related research examines how digital networks shape migration patterns and refugee behavior. Her research appears in International Studies Quarterly and the Virginia Journal of International Law. Her co-authored book chapter is forthcoming in Democratization (Oxford University Press).
 
 
 

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Please join Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) on Sept. 27 for the launch of Francis Fukuyama's latest book, "Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment." Fukuyama, the Mosbacher Director of CDDRL, will be joined in conversation with Michael McFaul, the director and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Affairs. The event will begin promptly at 4:00 pm and be followed by a light reception and book signing from 5:30-6:30 pm. 

Please note that there is only 1 ticket permitted per person. 

In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to the people, who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole. Demand for recognition of one's identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today.

The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious identity liberalism of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.