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Democracy Demotion: How the Freedom Agenda Fell Apart

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In the honor of publication of Larry Diamond's "Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency" Foreign Affairs are providing past the paywall article "Democracy Demotion: How the Freedom Agenda Fell Apart" by Larry Diamond. Read here. 


 

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Measuring Governance Cross-Nationally

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CLOSED WORKSHOP

Since 2012, the Governance Project at CDDRL has sought to develop better comparative measures of state quality. Existing measures like the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, TI’s Transparency Perceptions Index, or the state-quality measures in the Varieties of Democracy series are based on perception or expert surveys.  They often produce aggregate measures for an entire country, without distinguishing between ministries, levels of government, or regions within countries.  And almost none of them measure aspects of governance like bureaucratic autonomy that many observers feel are critical to state performance.

The Governance Project has developed a survey instrument that seeks to correct some of these deficiencies by surveying bureaucrats in different countries directly.  While such a survey is obviously subject to its own problems like social acceptability bias, they at least try to reach into the insides of executive branches in ways that existing perception surveys do not.  To date, the project has completed surveys in China, Brazil, Ukraine, and is undertaking one in India.  The survey instrument is based on the Federal Viewpoint Survey (FedView), which has surveyed US bureaucrats over an extended length of time and can serve as a comparative baseline.  These surveys are conducted in conjunction with local partners that perform the actual surveys and provide input and analysis into the survey instrument.

It is our hope to generate cross-national comparative data that will encompass an increasing number of countries, and in the long-run produce time-series data.  Our model is the World Values Survey, which from the 1980s going forward has expanded the number of countries covered.  We hope to make this data publicly available to academic researchers around the world.

The Governance Project has entered into a cooperative agreement with the World Bank and University College, London, to devise a common survey instrument, to standardize surveying practices, and to coordinate the choice of survey targets for future surveys.  

This workshop is co-sponsored with Stanford University's Center on Global Poverty and Development.

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Koret-Taube Conference Center
366 Galvez St.
Stanford, CA 94305

Workshops

Kleptocracy: A Discussion with Charles Davidson, Jeffrey Gedmin, and Oleksandra Ustinova

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Kleptocracy--well-organized elite corruption--has come to characterize Russia and much of the post-Communist space and is one of the chief obstacles to democratic development as well as economic growth in Russia and Ukraine. This panel features three experts who have focused on anti-corruption measures in these countries and will discuss the origins, effects, and future of kleptocracy in the region.

Speakers:

Charles Davidson, the publisher of The American Interest and Director of The Kleptocracy Initiative at the George Mason School of Public Policy.

Jeffrey Gedmin, the editor of The American Interest, who previously was president of the Legatum Institute in London and of Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe in Prague.

Oleksandra Ustinova, Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Fellow 2019 and a leading Ukrainian anti-corruption activist for a conversation on kleptocracy in Russia and Ukraine and how it is abetted by American institutions.

Moderator: Francis Fukuyama, CDDRL Mosbacher Director and FSI Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow.

Watch the video here.

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Information Session - Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program

This event is open to Stanford undergraduate students only. 
 
The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is currently accepting applications from eligible juniors due February 15, 2019 who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department. CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.
 
For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.
 
honors info session 2019 1
 

 

Ground Floor Conference Rm E008 Encina Hall616 Serra MallStanford, CA 94305-6055

 

Stephen J. Stedman

CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-2705 (650) 724-2996
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
Stedman_Steve.jpg PhD

Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.

In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.

In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.

In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.

His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).

Director, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law
Director, Program in International Relations
Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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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
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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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Special Nov. 28 Event: Russia's Latest Attack on Ukraine, What does it mean for Ukraine and for the West?

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On November 25, Russian border patrol ships rammed a Ukrainian naval tug and then fired upon and seized it along with two Ukrainian gunboats that were legally attempting to pass through the Kerch Strait into the Sea of Azov. Russia then temporarily closed the strait to all Ukrainian shipping. What is the significance of these Russian actions for Ukraine and, more broadly, for the West, and how should the West respond?  

Stanford's Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, the Europe Center together with FSI faculty members has organized a special panel discussion to address these issues on Wednesday, November 28 at 4:30 pm in the Rueben Hills conference room on the 2nd floor of Encina Hall in the East Wing.

Please join Ambassador Steven Pifer, Ambassador Michael McFaul, and our CDDRL Ukrainian Emerging Leaders (Nataliya Mykolska, Ivan Prymachenko and Oleksandra Ustinova) for this special event to diagnose the situation in Ukraine and what it means from a US and Ukrainian perspective. 

We look forward to seeing you there!

 

Rueben Hills Conference Room, 2nd floor Encina Hall

Governance Innovation for a Connected World: Protecting Free Expression, Diversity and Civic Engagement in the Global Digital Ecosystem

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The emergence of a global digital ecosystem has been a boon for global communication and the democratization of the means of distributing information. The internet, and the social media platforms and web applications running on it, have been used to mobilize pro-democracy protests and give members of marginalized communities a chance to share their voices with the world. However, more recently, we have also seen this technology used to spread propaganda and misinformation, interfere in election campaigns, expose individuals to harassment and abuse, and stir up confusion, animosity and sometimes violence in societies. Even seemingly innocuous digital technologies, such as ranking algorithms on entertainment websites, can have the effect of stifling diversity by failing to reliably promote content from underrepresented groups. At times, it can seem as if technologies that were intended to help people learn and communicate have been irreparably corrupted. It is easy to say that governments should step in to control this space and prevent further harms, but part of what helped the internet grow and thrive was its lack of heavy regulation, which encouraged openness and innovation. However, the absence of oversight has allowed dysfunction to spread, as malign actors manipulate digital technology for their own ends without fear of the consequences. It has also allowed unprecedented power to be concentrated in the hands of private technology companies, and these giants to act as de facto regulators with little meaningful accountability. So, who should be in charge of reversing the troubling developments in our global digital spaces? And what, if anything, can be done to let society keep reaping the benefits of these technologies, while protecting it against the risks?

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