Stanford University

The U.S. Was Wrong to Think Russia Was No Longer a Player

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"One mistake was to discount Russia’s importance in international affairs. The U.S. became engrossed in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, thinking that Russia was weak, and generally unimportant. Under President George W. Bush, the U.S. assumed that the world was unipolar after the Cold War, and that it would always be so," writes Kathryn Stoner, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and faculty director of the Ford Dorsey Program on International Policy Studies at Stanford for the New York Times "Room for Debate". Read the article here.

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Global Population Change and Global Disorder

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In Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, I showed that turning points in global population trends have been driving waves of political stability or crisis for at least the last 500 years. We are currently seeing a new turning point, as rich countries enter a period of workforce decline and emerging markets divide into those with falling fertility vs. stable and still-high fertility. Drawing on experience from previous centuries in Europe and Asia, we can forecast political trends; these include a new wave of revolutions in Africa and the Middle East and a surge in populist and protectionist politics in Europe and the U.S., but also eventual peaceful transitions to democracy in Russia and China.

 

Speaker Bio:

jack goldstone
Jack A. Goldstone (PhD Harvard) is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. Previously, Dr. Goldstone was on the faculty of Northwestern University and the University of California, and has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, awarded the 1993 Distinguished Scholarly Research Award of the American Sociological Association; Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History; and co-editor of Political Demography: How Population Changes are Reshaping International Security and National Politics. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and won Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has also won the Arnoldo Momigliano Award of the Historical Society, the Myron Weiner award of the International Studies Association, and been Holbrooke lecturer at the American Academy in Berlin. His current research focuses on conditions for building democracy and stability in developing nations, the impact of population change on the global economy and international security, and the cultural origins of modern economic growth.

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Jack A. Goldstone Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University
Seminars

Democracy and Its Enemies

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Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, touched base on why democracy is important, revisited events in Iraq, spoke about Russia and other issues in the Q&A with Jay Nordlinger. Listen to the podcast here. 

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The Art of Authoritarian Control in China

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When villages in China began to introduce local elections in the 1980s it was, for many, a moment of great optimism about the prospects for local democracy in the Peoples' Republic. Yet village self-government has not curbed the power of local officials in China to confiscate the wealth from the rural poor. Following the introduction of village elections, over 60 million villagers have had their land seized by their local governments. These land seizures amount to a redistribution of trillions of dollars of wealth from smallholders to the government. In this talk, I argue that local self-government in China is a strikingly effective tool for top-down authoritarian control. I focus on the consequences of including communal elites, like the leaders of lineages or religious groups, in village institutions of self-government. The view that local democracy nurtures accountability would suggest that the inclusion of communal elites in village government would strengthen villagers' land rights. After all, these communal elites face strong social expectations that they cooperate with their group and enact policies that benefit them. Drawing on case studies and a new dataset, I show that when communal elites join local institutions of self-government, the state is instead able to expropriate more land than when these elites remain outside of government. I argue that these communal elites are important intermediaries that help China's authoritarian state control and extract from their groups.

 

Speaker Bio:

daniel embedded
Daniel Mattingly is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. Starting in summer 2017, he will join the department of political science at Yale as an assistant professor. Dan’s dissertation focuses on the sources of state power in China, and shows how the ruling party uses democratic institutions to strengthen its political control over rural China. More broadly he is interested in local governance, state-building, authoritarian rule, and political accountability. His work appears in Comparative Political Studies and World Politics.

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow, 2016-17
Seminars

Russia and the Threat to Liberal Democracy

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"Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history. Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive" writes Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, for The Atlantic. Read the whole article here.

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The Dangers of Disruption

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"In Silicon Valley, where I live, the word “disruption” has an overwhelmingly positive valence: Thousands of smart, young people arrive here every year hoping to disrupt established ways of doing business — and become very rich in the process. For almost everyone else, however, disruption is a bad thing," writes CDDRL Mosbacher Director, Francis Fukuyama for New York Times. Read the article here.

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The Evolution of Autocracy

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Globalization, shifting great power dynamics, and the growing accessibility of Internet and communication technology has changed the environment within which autocrats operate. Many analysts have noted these changes and concluded that the masses now hold the upper hand and that dictators’ days are surely numbered. It may be true that 21st century autocrats face more and increasingly complex challenges to their rule. But current accounts of dictatorship seriously underestimate the adaptability of authoritarian systems. Since the end of the Cold War, dictators have evolved to survive and even thrive amid changes in their domestic and international environments. In this presentation, I examine the evolution of authoritarianism since the end of the Cold War. Since 1991 there have been substantial changes in the ways that dictators assume power, in the tactics they use to maintain power, and in the ways in which they lose power. Each of these changes has significant implications for the political dynamics in today’s autocracies.

Speaker Bio:

andrea kendall taylor

Andrea Kendall-Taylor works at the National Intelligence Council, where she is a deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. During her seven years in the U.S. government, she has focused her research and analysis on the political dynamics of authoritarian regimes, political stability, democratization, and civil society, with a particular focus on Russia and Eurasia. Dr. Kendall-Taylor is also a non-resident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the Human Rights Initiative and an adjunct professor in political science at Georgetown and American Universities. Her work has been published in numerous political science journals, including the Journal of Peace Research, Democratization, and Journal of Democracy, as well as a number of policy outlets such as Foreign Affairs, the Washington Quarterly, and Foreign Policy. Dr. Kendall-Taylor received her B.A. in politics from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor Deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia
Seminars

Making Politics Work for Development

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Synthesizing the vanguard of economics research on the functioning of political markets, the World Bank’s Policy Research Report, Making Politics Work for Development, distils implications for policy and future research. It shows how political engagement—the processes through which citizens select and sanction the leaders who wield power in government—is fundamental to understanding and solving government failures to pursue good public policies. The confluence of political engagement with transparency can be a driving force for countries to transition toward better-functioning public sector institutions, starting from their own initial and contextual conditions. But good outcomes are far from guaranteed, with many risks of unhealthy political engagement by citizens and repressive responses by leaders. To harness the potential of these forces, the report offers ideas for policy actors to target transparency to improve citizens’ ability to hold leaders accountable for the public goods needed for development.

 

Speaker Bio:

stuti khemani
STUTI KHEMANI is a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. She joined through the Young Professionals Program after obtaining a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her area of research is the political economy of public policy choices, and institutional reforms for development. Her work is published in economics and political science journals, such as the American Economic Journal, Journal of Development Economics and American Political Science Review. She has studied the impact of electoral politics on fiscal policy and intergovernmental fiscal relations; drawn policy implications for the design of institutions to promote fiscal responsibility; and analyzed political constraints to efficient allocation of resources for health and education services. She is currently examining the role of mass media and local elections in building effective public sector institutions. She is also the lead author of the Policy Research Report Making Politics Work for Development: Harnessing Transparency and Citizen Engagement. Her research and advisory work spans a diverse range of countries, including Benin, China, India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda.

Stuti Khemani Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank
Seminars

Whither Parties?

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Scholars of comparative politics have long examined political parties as organized vehicles of mass mobilization, interest mediation, and policy formation. But with mounting evidence that parties in the twenty-first century serve different purposes, how are we to understand the role of traditional, mainstream parties today? This talk examines factors driving a decline in traditional party organization, which includes an erosion of social and intermediary groups, insufficient state capacity, delegation of party functions to private interests, and ideological convergence between the mainstream parties. It argues for more rigorous conceptualization of the role parties serve in representative democracies, and greater theoretical examination of the link between parties and governance outcomes.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
didi_kuo_2023.jpg

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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