Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
"What do I do about the chickens?"
When assistant professor of medicine Eran Bendavid began a study on livestock in African households to determine impact on childhood health, he'd already anticipated common field problems like poorly captured or intentionally misreported data, difficulty getting to work sites, or problems with training local volunteers.
But he'd never gotten that particular question from a fieldworker before. It didn't occur to him that participating families, in reporting their livestock holdings, would completely omit the chickens running around at their feet, thereby skewing the data.
"They didn't consider chickens to be livestock," recalled Bendavid. Along with Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow at FSI, and associate professor of political science and FSI senior fellow Beatriz Magaloni, Bendavid spoke to a full house last week on lessons learned from fieldwork gone awry. The return engagement of FSI's popular seminar, "Everything that can go wrong in a field experiment” was introduced by Jesper Sørensen, executive director of Stanford Seed, and moderated by Katherine Casey, assistant professor of political economy at the GSB. The seminar is a product of FSI and Seed’s joint Global Development and Poverty (GDP) Initiative, which to date has awarded nearly $7 million in faculty research funding to promote research on poverty alleviation and economic development worldwide.
Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program, spoke of the obstacles to accurate data gathering, especially in rural areas where record-keeping is inaccurate and participants' trust is low. Arriving in a Chinese village to carry out child nutrition studies, said Rozelle, "we found Grandma running out the back door with the baby." The researchers had worked with the local family planning council to find the names of children to study, but the families thought the authorities were coming to penalize them for violation of the one-child policy.
Cultural differences make for entertaining and illuminating (if frustrating) lessons, but Beatriz Magaloni, director of FSI's Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law had a different story to tell. Over the course of three years, her GDP-funded work to investigate and reduce police violence in Brazil - a phenomenon resulting in more than 22,000 deaths since 2005 - has encountered obstacle after obstacle. Her work to pilot body-worn cameras on police in Rio has faced a change in police leadership, setting back cooperation; a yearlong struggle to decouple a study of TASER International’s body worn cameras from its electrical weapons in the same population; a work site initially lacking electricity to charge the cameras or Internet to view the feeds; and noncompliance among the officers. "It's discouraging at times," admitted Magaloni, who has finally gotten the cameras onto the officers' uniforms and must now experiment with ways to incentivize their use. "We are learning a lot about how institutional behavior becomes so entrenched and why it's so hard to change."
Experimentation is a powerful tool to understand cause and effect, said Casey, but a tool only works if it's implemented properly. Learning from failure makes for an interesting panel discussion. The speakers' hope is that it also makes for better research in the future.
The Global Development and Poverty Initiative is a University-wide initiative of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (Seed) in partnership with the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). GDP was established in 2013 to stimulate transformative research ideas and new approaches to economic development and poverty alleviation worldwide. GDP supports groundbreaking research at the intersection of traditional academic disciplines and practical application. GDP uses a venture-funding model to pursue compelling interdisciplinary research on the causes and consequences of global poverty. Initial funding allows GDP awardees to conduct high-quality research in developing countries where there is a lack of data and infrastructure.
Designing peace agreements that can be signed and sustained can be difficult in civil conflict. A recent transformation in successful settlement design has produced many cases that include electoral or other political participation provisions. In this paper, we examine popular support for the transformation from bullets to ballots, testing whether individuals object to providing former rebels with the protections and legitimacy of electoral participation. Using a survey experiment in the context of Colombia’s current peace process between the Government and the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), we find that the latter is a highly controversial actor in the country—indeed, invoking the specific group diminishes support for the peace process, particularly accords that would allow for increased representation in municipalities more affected by conflict. These findings are important to understanding how to design settlements, providing policy implications for the peace process with the FARC in Colombia but also in other civil conflicts that negotiators may seek to end through electoral participation by the former rebels, a proposal that has become common in many cases, including the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Ongoing crises of urban insecurity in Central America have spurred novel forms of state engagement in high-risk neighbourhoods. In 2012, the Guatemalan government deployed new urban security task forces in some of the capital’s most notorious ‘red zones’, the poor neighbourhoods where gangs, violence, and delinquency are seen to be concentrated. While officials trumpeted their success in pacifying these sectors, their gangs (maras) continued to operate much as they previously had under the new military occupations.
Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in one red zone neighbourhood, this paper examines both gang violence and state power from the perspective of residents struggling to secure a measure of order in a dangerous and volatile environment. I argue that situations of chronic urban insecurity can create opportunities for the state to tighten its relationship with marginal communities, but that they do so in a way that may raise further impediments to substantively improving democratic governance.
Katherine Saunders-Hastings is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She employs ethnographic methods to study the impact of violence and insecurity on the social and political life of vulnerable urban neighbourhoods, focusing particularly on the changing gang cultures and criminal economies of Central America. Katherine earned her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2015 and also holds degrees from McGill University and the University of Cambridge. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Clarendon Fund, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. She has worked with the International Centre for the Prevention of Crime (Montreal, Canada) and the Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales (Guatemala City, Guatemala).Image
The recent rise in mass popular protests – many with regional spillover effects and some with far-reaching consequences for international peace and security – has raised the question of how the international community should respond to these events, and to what end. For the United Nations, the question becomes acute in protest situations in which there is a tangible risk of large-scale violence and human rights violations. Yet mounting a rapid and effective response is a particular challenge in these contexts. Drawing on case studies, practitioner interviews, and the author’s UN experience, this presentation will examine five variables that are critical to success: timing, access, leverage, the ability to propose solutions for non-violent change, and finding the right mix of principle and pragmatism. It will argue that these variables are not static, but dynamic and inter-independent. Getting them ‘right’ in an unfolding crisis is difficult, but it is possible to draw some preliminary lessons from the cases reviewed.
Alexandra Pichler Fong is visiting CDDRL on leave from the United Nations, where she headed the Policy Planning Unit of the Department of Political Affairs in New York. Her work focuses on cross-cutting peace and security issues, such as conflict prevention, preventive diplomacy and peacemaking, as well as policy matters pertaining to UN peace operations in a rapidly changing international security environment. She recently completed an assignment reporting to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for West Africa, based in Dakar, Senegal, to advance the implementation of the UN’s regional strategy for the Sahel. She joined the UN in 2002 as political affairs officer and has served as adviser in the cabinet of three successive Under-Secretaries-General for Political Affairs, focusing on the regions of Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific as well as thematic issues such as UN reform. Before entering the UN, Alexandra worked at the International Crisis Group; a European network of development NGOs; and the European Commission. She holds a B.A. Hons. degree in Modern History and Literature from Oxford University and a Master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics. Image
Why do some former authoritarian elites face punishment for their misdeeds after democratic transition whereas others remain untouched or even end up being re-elected to political office, re-appointed in government, or on the boards of state-owned or major private enterprises? Drawing on a new dataset on the upper echelon of outgoing authoritarian elites in countries across Latin America over the last century, this project investigates for the first time why new democracies punish selected former authoritarian elites whereas others elide punishment entirely and even flourish under democracy.
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Michael Albertus is the 2015-16 W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the William C. Bark National Fellow. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His main research focus is on the political conditions under which governments implement egalitarian reforms.
His first book, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform, published by Cambridge University Press, examines why and when land reform programs are implemented. His second book project, Flawed by Design: Authoritarian Legacies Under Democracy, explores the role of outgoing authoritarian elite-designed institutions on democratic functioning. Other research interests include political regime transitions and stability, politics under dictatorship, clientelism, and civil conflict. Albertus' work has been published in the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Economics & Politics, Comparative Politics, World Development, International Studies Quarterly, and Latin American Research Review.
