On April 26, 2023, Israel will mark its 75th birthday as a modern independent state. It is a bittersweet anniversary.

On the one hand, Israelis can (and do) look back at 75 years of remarkable socio-economic, technological, diplomatic, and political development achieved under conditions of extreme adversity. On the other hand, Israel is currently experiencing its worst constitutional crisis and is facing a number of internal and external challenges that threaten to unravel its political order, divide its people, distance it from its closest allies, empower its adversaries, and undermine its national security.

The occasion of this significant anniversary provides a unique opportunity to discuss the past, present, and possible futures of Israeli democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Amichai Magen is a visiting Associate Professor and visiting fellow in Israel Studies at Stanford University. In Israel he serves as the head of the MA Program in Diplomacy & Conflict Studies, and Director of the Program on Democratic Resilience and Development (PDRD) at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, Reichman University, Herzliya. Magen’s research and teaching interests include Democracy, the Rule of Law, Liberal Orders, and Political Violence.

Amichai Magen received the Yitzhak Rabin Fulbright Award (2003), served as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), Stanford University, and was the first Israeli to be awarded the prestigious National Fellow Award at the Hoover Institution (2008). In 2016 he was named Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy, an award that recognizes outstanding thought-leaders around the world. Between 2018 and 2022, he was Principal Investigator in two European Union Horizon 2020 research consortia, EU-LISTCO and RECONNECT.

Amichai Magen is a Board Member of the International Coalition for Democratic Renewal (ICDR), the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR), the Israeli Association for the Study of European Integration (IASEI), and the Institute for Political Studies at the Catholic University of Lisbon, Portugal. He also serves on the Editorial Board of the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs (IJFA), published quarterly by Taylor & Francis.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Over the past decade, illiberal demagogues around the world have launched ferocious assaults on democracy. Embracing high-dominance political styles and a forceful argot of national greatness, they hammer at their supposed superiority as commanders, protectors, and patriots. Bewildered left-liberals have often played to the type their tormentors assign them. Fretting over their own purported neglect of the folks’ kitchen-table concerns, they leave the guts and glory to opponents who grasp that elections are emotions-driven dominance competitions.

Consequently, in America, democracy’s survival now hangs on the illiberal party making colossal blunders on the eve of elections. But in the wake of Putin’s attack on Ukraine, a new cohort of liberals is emerging in Central and Eastern Europe. From Greens to right-center conservatives, they grasp the centrality of messaging, nationalism, chutzpah, and strength. They’re showing how to dominate rather than accommodate evil. What can American liberals learn from their tactics and ways?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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Steve Fish is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Democracy from Scratch, Democracy Derailed in Russia, and Are Muslims Distinctive? and coauthor of The Handbook of National Legislatures. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Comeback: Crushing Trump, Burying Putin, and Restoring Democracy’s Ascendance around the World.

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution.

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Across Europe, social democratic (or more broadly center-left) parties are a shadow of their former selves.

Most treatments of the center-left's decline stress economic factors like globalization or the decline of manufacturing or social factors, like the decline of the traditional working class. While such factors are important, they alone cannot explain the center-left’s decline if only because such factors do not correlate well with the fortunes of center-left parties across either time or space. This talk will accordingly focus on the political causes of the center-left's decline, in particular its shift to the center on economic issues and the dilution of its class-based political appeals during the late 20th century. This transformation had a variety of unintended and detrimental consequences for center-left parties, played a significant role in the rise of the populist right, and contributed to reshaping the dynamics of western democracies more generally.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution.

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Every year, millions of low-income households around the world receive over $100 billion in anti-poverty aid. This research shows how psychologically savvy and culturally attuned narratives of anti-poverty policies can both improve recipients’ economic outcomes and build public support. This research suggests that status quo narratives of aid that are focused on recipients’ neediness and helplessness may paradoxically maintain cycles of stigma, prejudice and poverty. However, a series of experiments in East and West Africa demonstrate that these cycles can be interrupted when narratives represent aid as an opportunity for recipients to realize their agency and aspirations in culturally resonant ways. Lab and field experiments with low-income recipients of aid in East and West Africa demonstrate how such narrative-based interventions can enhance the cost-effectiveness of large-scale anti-poverty programs. Online experiments in the US show how such narratives can mitigate welfare-related prejudice and build support for policies like universal basic income.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Infrastructure development requires democracies to balance multiple, competing governance priorities. The representativeness of the decision-making process must be balanced against the benefits of impartial technical assessments by the civil service, and both must be balanced against the efficiency of infrastructure development and government actions. Using the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) as a case study, we will argue that California has become a “vetocracy” in which decisions in favor of collective action have become extremely difficult to arrive at. This presentation is based in part on CDDRL’s recent research on California governance, in collaboration with the California 100 Initiative. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

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Dr. Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), and the Pardee Rand Graduate School. He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and at the Center for Global Development. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Governors of the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and the Volcker Alliance. He is a member of the American Political Science Association and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.
 

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Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Our empirical and theoretical focus is on what constitutes political equality as "equal consideration" in advanced capitalist democracies. We claim that political inequality is a distinctive type of inequality. First, although affected by the factors that routinely go into thinking about social, economic and power inequality, it cannot be reduced to those factors. Second, its currency is performative, not only distributive. To make our case, we focus on three broad dimensions of political equality: participation, representation, and responsiveness. Although there is some research on each of these dimensions, influential commentators on political equality have tended to focus almost exclusively on political participation. We develop concepts and measurement for all three and then weigh the trade-offs among these dimensions.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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She earned her BA from Bryn Mawr College in 1968 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1974, the year she joined the faculty of the University of Washington. Levi is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and seven books, including Of Rule and Revenue; Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism; Analytic Narratives; Cooperation Without Trust?; In the Interest of Others; and A Moral Political Economy.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

The use of machine learning for causal inference has become increasingly popular in the social sciences. But relatively less attention has been paid to how machine learning (ML) algorithms can be used to generate novel measures in data-sparse environments like those that prevail in many developing countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa.

Here, I present results from a suite of projects that utilize high-resolution measures of economic development generated by a convolutional neural net trained on satellite imagery. I show that, in addition to superior spatial and temporal coverage, this ML-generated data resolves serious inferential shortcomings in existing national and sub-national estimates of wealth, alters influential findings in African political economy, and opens up several promising avenues of research. I demonstrate one such avenue by discussing ongoing work that investigates the impact of climate change on political behavior, an emerging area of scholarship that demands accurate, high-resolution data in places where such data rarely exist. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

According to U.N. projections, 86% of global population growth over the next two decades will occur in cities of low and middle-income countries. While social science scholarship typically focuses on megacities, most population growth will occur in small- and medium-sized urban centers. Meanwhile, many countries have decentralized significant policy responsibilities to municipal governments over the last three decades. Expectations derived from the literature on fiscal federalism suggest that this is a cause for concern, as larger cities are thought to deliver public goods more effectively than smaller ones owing to economics of scale. This book project examines the relationship between city size and the types of political demands citizens make of local governments, the ways in which local elected officials respond to these demands, and public service access and quality. Analysis focuses on four large, highly decentralized democracies: Argentina, Brazil, India, and Indonesia. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors from any university department who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL). 

On Wednesday, January 17 at 12:00 pm PT, join CDDRL faculty and current honors students to discuss the program and answer questions.

The application period opens on January 8, 2024, and runs through February 9, 2024.

For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.