Stanford University

How Nations Succeed: Reducing Extreme Violence

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Abstract:

From El Salvador to Pakistan, high levels of internal violence characterize a growing number of poorly consolidated electoral democracies. Gangs, violent criminals, insurgents, and low-intensity conflict seem to entrench in many of these countries for decades. But some countries have managed to reduce extreme levels of violence. How did they succeed? And why were other, similarly situated countries unable to achieve similar success? Based on current and historical case studies, this upcoming book identifies continuities that suggest why these countries are so violent, and commonalities in the paths countries have taken to reduce violence. The findings are policy-focused and unexpected, even undesired. But they offer ideas to policy-makers based on the reality of what has worked, rather than the hopes of what might be achieved.

 

Speaker Bio:

kleinfeld rachel
Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she focuses on the rule of law, security, and governance. She previously served for nearly ten years as the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project, a movement to promote U.S. security policies that advance stability, security, and human dignity worldwide, for which Time Magazine named her one of the top 40 under 40 political leaders in the United States. From 2011-2014 she was chosen by Hillary Clinton to serve on the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, which advises the Secretary of State quarterly. Rachel has consulted on governance, security, and the rule of law for the U.S. and other governments, and international, nonprofit, and private organizations. She appears regularly in national and international media, and is the author of multiple books and articles, including Advancing the Rule of Law Abroad: Next Generation Reform, which was named one of the best foreign policy books of 2012 by Foreign Affairs magazine. She received her M. Phil and D. Phil from St. Antony’s College, Oxford, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar, and her B.A. from Yale University. Rachel was born in a log cabin on a dirt road in her beloved Fairbanks, Alaska.

Rachel Kleinfeld Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
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Deservingness, Self-interest and the Welfare State

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ABSTRACT

A common assumption in political economy is that voters are self-regarding maximizers of material goods, choosing their preferred level of social spending accordingly. In contrast, students of American politics have emphasized the key role of an other-regarding motive that makes support for social transfers conditional on the perceived deservingness of recipients. The two motives often conflict as large portions of the poor (rich) find recipients undeserving (deserving). I argue that material self-interest overruns perceptions of deservingness when the share of income affected by social transfers is high. Using European data, I show that low (high) income individuals are less (more) likely to be driven by considerations of deservingness. Cross-nationally, the more working-age benefits are evenly spread across income groups, the less deservingness considerations  permeate public debates on welfare state reform.  This framework has important implications for understanding attitudinal change in two high inequality countries, the United States and Great Britain.

 

 

SPEAKER BIO

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Charlotte Cavaille is a research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Toulouse. She received a PhD in Government and Social Policy from Harvard University in November 2014. Her work examines changes in mass attitudes toward redistributive policies in advanced capitalist countries. Her dissertation focuses on the disconnect between rising income inequality and stable levels of support for income redistribution in Great Britain and the United States. Some of her findings have been published in the Journal of Politics.

Deservingness, Self-interest and the Welfare State
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Charlotte Cavaille Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies in Toulous Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies in Toulous
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Stanford's JSK Fellows on Liberation Technology

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The JSK Journalism Fellowships at Stanford (jsk.stanford.edu) each year brings 20 outstanding journalists and journalism innovators to pursue their ideas for improving journalism. JSK Fellowships focuses on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership, as JSK fellows create new models, tools and approaches that are redefining journalism. Each fellow comes to Stanford with a “journalism challenge”: a question they seek to answer, a problem they seek to solve, an opportunity they seek to explore. JSK Fellows collaborate with each other, with students, with faculty, researchers and Silicon Valley innovator and entrepreneurs.

They are a diverse group, representing traditional news organizations like The Washington Post and Southern California Public Radio, as well as newer ventures like Vox or Re/code. Seven of them are international fellows, some coming from countries where the news media is well established, and others from countries like Ukraine and Venezuela, where independent journalists often are under siege. This class marks the 50th year of journalism fellowships at Stanford and the seventh under the program’s heightened emphasis on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership.

 

Oleksandr Akymenko: From Yanukovych Leaks to Implementing New Business Models to Sustain Independent Media in Ukraine

Oleksandr Akymenko is a Ukrainian entrepreneur, journalist with experience in online, television and magazine reporting. Cofounder of http://platfor.ma, a media website aimed at the Creative Class. In 2014, Akymenko participated in YanukovychLeaks, a collaborative effort by journalists to salvage and publish the archives of former Ukranian president Viktor Yanukoyvch that had been dumped in a river. Akymenko had previously created and led the investigative department of Forbes Ukraine, where his reporting included a 2-year investigation of a young oligarch, Sergey Kurchenko. When Kurchenko bought the magazine’s parent company in mid-2013, Akymenko and several other staff members resigned in protest. Before joining Forbes, Akymenko had helped found Svidomo, which produces investigative projects and worked at an investigative program on one of Ukraine’s largest television channels. Twitter: @akymenko_o

Subramaniam Vincent: The Digital Public of Bangalore

Subramaniam Vincent is a software engineer turned journalist entrepreneur. He first came to the United States to pursue a master’s in computer engineering at the University of Southern California. After graduating, he worked at Cisco Systems in San Jose, California. He kept up with news of home by reading Indian newspapers online. When he and a friend became frustrated with their coverage of socio-economic issues, they decided in 1998 to start India Together, an e-journal focused on tracking campaigns for reform in India. Five years later, in Bangalore, they turned India Together into the country’s first reader-financed publication covering development. He later co-founded and is also editor-in-chief of Citizen Matters, a Bangalore-focused civic newsmagazine that uses the work of citizen and professional journalists. It is owned by Oorvani Media, of which he is CEO and co-founder. Currently, the journalism in both publications is funded by the non-profit Oorvani Foundation, where he is a trustee. Journalism in Citizen Matters and India Together has been awarded 10 times in 11 years. Twitter: @subbuvincent

Jacob Fenton: Open Data for Political Accountability in the U.S.

Jacob Fenton is a journalism and software developer who's worked in newsrooms and nonprofits the U.S. for the last decade. Most recently, Fenton was an editorial engineer for the Sunlight Foundation in Washington, D.C. where he worked extensively on campaign finance, TV ad disclosure, and congressional expenditure reporting. His responsibilities were split between developing new web sites and transparency tools, and using them as a journalist. He led the development of Sunlight’s real-time, federal campaign finance site, which was widely cited in the 2012 and 2014 election cycles. He previously has worked as a software developer in Palo Alto, California, a reporter in the Philadelphia suburbs and in a variety of roles that drew on his reporting and coding skills. He was database editor at The Morning Call newspaper, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he started the paper’s data center and wrote some of its first news applications. In 2010, he was selected as the first director of computer-assisted reporting at the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit investigative news startup at American University’s School of Communications. http://www.jacobfenton.com/

Oleksandr Akymenko
Subramaniam Vincent
Jacob Fenton
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Liberation Technology Seminar Series
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Where's Taiwan on the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

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With the announcement on Monday that an agreement has been reached on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the controversial trade accord is in the news all across Asia this week. Taiwan is not one of the founding participants, but its leaders have reiterated their determination to join the next round of negotiations if the agreement is ratified and comes into effect. Taiwan's prospects for entry remain uncertain, however, and will depend to a great degree on the attitudes of decision-makers in the United States and the People's Republic of China.

The Taiwan Democracy Project (TDP) at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law has been at the forefront of research and discussion on this topic. In the fall of 2013, the TDP held a conference to explore the prospects for Taiwan’s participation in the TPP that brought together policymakers and scholars from Taiwan along with with leading specialists from other Asian countries and the U.S. The key findings of the conference are summarized in a conference report. The key conclusions of the conference remain valid today: it is in Taiwan's national interest to join the TPP; external obstacles to Taiwan's accession to the partnership are signficant but not insurmountable; and Taiwanese policy-makers need to worry about domestic obstacles as much as international ones in seeking TPP membership. 

The Taiwan Democracy Project will continue to monitor TPP-related developments over the coming months and plans to revisit Taiwan's prospects for TPP entry in a symposium in February 2016. 

 

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In Search of Sustainable Democracy: Reflections on Three Decades of Research

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Due to overwhelming demand, the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law has closed registration for this event. If you are still interested in attending the talk, please sign up for the wait list.

We will contact you should additional seats become available. 

Abstract:

InSearchofDemocracy

This seminar will reflect on my three decades of research seeking to identify the conditions for sustainable democracy.  What have we learned about the conditions that support and undermine democracy?  What is the relationship between democratic quality and democratic persistence?  Is "democratic consolidation" a useful concept?  Can consolidated democracies become "de-consolidated"--and if so, when and why?  Do the current travails of the advanced democracies represent merely ongoing challenges of governance, or are we entering a period of more fundamental challenge to democratic norms and institutions?  Finally, what does all of this imply for the policy agendas of democracy reform and promotion?

Bio:

Larry Diamond hs (2)

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and he continues to lead its programs on Liberation Technology, Arab Reform and Democracy, and Democracy in Taiwan.  He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His sixth and most recent book, In Search of Democracy (Routledge, 2016), explores the challenges confronting democracy and democracy promotion, gathering together three decades of his work on democratic development, particularly in Africa and Asia.  He has also edited or co-edited more than 40 books on democratic development around the world.

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Larry Diamond

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Stanford University
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Conference on Democracy and its Discontents

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The Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective is holding a conference on Democracy and its Discontents on October 8-10 in Budapest, Hungary. The conference, co-hosted with Central European University, will bring together scholars of American and European politics to examine topics such as democratic backsliding, inequality, and money in politics. Saskia Sassen of Columbia University will deliver the keynote address. 

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In Search of Democracy

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This book evaluates the global status and prospects of democracy, with an emphasis on the quality of democratic institutions and the effectiveness of governance as key conditions for stable democracy. Bringing together a wide range of the author’s work over the past three decades, it advances a framework for assessing the quality of democracy and it analyzes alternative measures of democracy. Drawing on the most recent data from Freedom House, it assesses the global state of democracy and freedom, as of the beginning of 2015, and it explains why the world has been experiencing a mild but now deepening recession of democracy and freedom since 2005.

A major theme of the book across the three decades of the author’s work is the relationship between democratic quality and stability. Democracies break down, Diamond argues, not so much because of economic factors but because of corrupt, inept governance that violates individual rights and the rule of law. The best way to secure democracy is to ensure that democracy is accountable, transparent, genuinely competitive, respectful of individual rights, inclusive of diverse forms and sources of participation, and responsive to the needs and aspirations of ordinary citizens. Viable democracy requires not only a state that can mobilize power to achieve collective goals, but also one that can restrain and punish the abuse of power—a particularly steep challenge for poor countries and those with natural resource wealth.

The book examines these themes both in broad comparative perspective and with a deeper analysis of historical trends and future prospects in Africa and Asia,. Concluding with lessons for sustaining and reforming policies to promote democracy internationally, this book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in democracy, as well as politics and international relations more generally.

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Democracy still holds promise globally, though in retreat for now, Diamond says

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In a recent piece in Stanford News, FSI Senior Fellow Larry Diamond expresses his thoughts on the ebbing of global democratic expansion, highlighting that not all countries have equal opportunities at achieving democracy and that democratic change should be approached multilaterally.

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Larry Diamond speaks on his new book "In Search of Democracy," at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Washington, D.C.
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Timeline: Democracy in Recession

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In an op-ed for The New York Times, Larry Diamond presents a timeline of democracy charting the spread, regression, and sometimes even collapse, of democracy in the last 40 years.

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When Democracies Deliver: Governance Reform in Argentina and Brazil

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Abstract:

Scholars of governance reforms in developing countries often argue that the surest way to address the maladies of the state—corruption, cronyism, inefficiency, and red tape—is swift, dramatic change enacted by political leaders during moments of upheaval. This research finds that a very different type of change is not only possible but also more effective and enduring. A comparison of attempts to increase accountability, transparency, and institutional strength in Brazil and Argentina demonstrates that incremental changes sequenced over time in response to failings in previous policy provide two crucial advantages over wholesale and rapid overhauls of the state: (1) continual adjustments and modifications benefit from learning; and (2) an incremental approach makes reform more durable and helps preserve bureaucratic autonomy.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Katherine Bersch is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Her research is broadly focused on democratic quality in developing countries, with an emphasis on governance reform and state capacity in Latin America. She employs a range of research methods to understand the political conditions under which policies designed to reduce corruption, increase transparency, and enhance accountability are successful and durable. Bersch’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Comparative Politics, the European Journal of Development Research, Information Polity, and in Miguel Centeno, Atul Kohli, and Deborah Yashar's edited volume with Dinsha Mistree, States in the Developing World. Her research on state capacity with Sérgio Praça and Matthew M. Taylor recently won the LAPIS Best Paper Award from the Latin American Studies Association. Bersch received her PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin.

Katherine Bersch Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University
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