Stanford University

Why Authoritarian Regimes Sabotage Economic Growth: Land Reform in Mexico

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Encina Basement Conference Room

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros

Encina Hall, C149
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 725-0500
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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
alberto_diaz-cayeros_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and co-director of the Democracy Action Lab (DAL), based at FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL). His research interests include federalism, poverty relief, indigenous governance, political economy of health, violence, and citizen security in Mexico and Latin America.

He is the author of Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America (Cambridge, reedited 2016), coauthored with Federico Estévez and Beatriz Magaloni, of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief (Cambridge, 2016), and of numerous journal articles and book chapters.

He is currently working on a project on cartography and the developmental legacies of colonial rule and governance in indigenous communities in Mexico.

From 2016 to 2023, he was the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University, and from 2009 to 2013, Director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UCSD, the University of California, San Diego.

Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
Director of the Center for Latin American Studies (2016 - 2023)
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Alberto Diaz-Cayeros Assistant Professor of Political Science, CDDRL Faculty Associate Speaker Stanford

Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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Beatriz Magaloni Assistant Professor of Political Science, CDDRL faculty associate Speaker Stanford
Barry Weingast Ward C. Krebs Family Professor and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor, by courtesy, of Economics Speaker Stanford
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Two new conference reports available: "Stabilizing Iraq" and "2006 Mexican Elections"

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The reports from two CDDRL sponsored conferences held in March have now been made available. The first is from the conference called Stabilizing Iraq: Options for Democracy, Security, and Development and the second is from the conference called 2006 Mexican Elections: A Challenge for Democracy.
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2006 Mexican Elections: A Challenge for Democracy

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This coming July, Mexicans will not only have the chance to democratically elect a president, but more importantly, they will have the opportunity to endorse democracy. On July of 2000, Mexico had its first democratic elections after being ruled by a single party - PRI - for seventy one years. The question is not whether Mexico has transited to democracy, but rather, whether Mexicans - the government, the politicians, the media, civil society, and the citizens in general can sustain and consolidate the new democratic system.

With the intent of shedding some light on this question, Mexicanos at Stanford University, the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists, and Yost House organized the conference "2006 Mexican Elections: A Challenge for Democracy." The event took place on Saturday March 11, 2006 in Stanford's Kresge auditorium.

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, The Charles F. Riddell Fund - Yost House, the Center for Latin American Studies, VPUE/DOSA - New Student Initiatives, Bechtel International Center, El Guiding Concilio - El Centro Chicano, Camacho Fund, ASSU Speakers Bureau, and United Airlines were co-sponsors of the conference.

The 2006 Mexican Elections conference proved to be wonderfully enriching for anyone with an interest in Mexican politics and/or in democratic consolidation. The conference consisted of three sections: a) a roundtable that discussed the role of the media in the 2006 electoral process; b) a keynote address given by one of the most respected figures in Mexican academia, the historian and essayist Enrique Krauze, on the progress that Mexico has achieved in the political arena in the last decade, and on the challenges that Mexicans will face in the coming 2006 presidential election; and, c) a political debate between representatives of the three main political parties in Mexico - PRI, PAN and PRD.

This report provides a brief summary of the main arguments addressed by each speaker, the most important themes and points of discussion that arose in each panel, a brief analysis of each section, and a conclusion.

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The Rule of Law and Democracy in Mexico

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Encina Basement Conference Room

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros

Encina Hall, C149
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 725-0500
0
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
alberto_diaz-cayeros_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and co-director of the Democracy Action Lab (DAL), based at FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL). His research interests include federalism, poverty relief, indigenous governance, political economy of health, violence, and citizen security in Mexico and Latin America.

He is the author of Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America (Cambridge, reedited 2016), coauthored with Federico Estévez and Beatriz Magaloni, of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief (Cambridge, 2016), and of numerous journal articles and book chapters.

He is currently working on a project on cartography and the developmental legacies of colonial rule and governance in indigenous communities in Mexico.

From 2016 to 2023, he was the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University, and from 2009 to 2013, Director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UCSD, the University of California, San Diego.

Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
Director of the Center for Latin American Studies (2016 - 2023)
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Alberto Diaz-Cayeros Speaker
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Alberto Díaz-Cayeros

Encina Hall, C149
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 725-0500
0
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
alberto_diaz-cayeros_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and co-director of the Democracy Action Lab (DAL), based at FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL). His research interests include federalism, poverty relief, indigenous governance, political economy of health, violence, and citizen security in Mexico and Latin America.

He is the author of Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America (Cambridge, reedited 2016), coauthored with Federico Estévez and Beatriz Magaloni, of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief (Cambridge, 2016), and of numerous journal articles and book chapters.

He is currently working on a project on cartography and the developmental legacies of colonial rule and governance in indigenous communities in Mexico.

From 2016 to 2023, he was the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University, and from 2009 to 2013, Director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UCSD, the University of California, San Diego.

Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
Director of the Center for Latin American Studies (2016 - 2023)
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Democratic Accountablitity and the Rule of Law in Mexico

This is an international conference sponsored by CDDRL's Rule of Law Program and the Stanford University School of Law. Participants include lawmakers, judges and analysts from Mexico as well as from the Stanford community. A full agenda will be posted shortly.

Okimoto Conference Room

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Renowned political economist and author Francis Fukuyama speaks on state-building

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In a May 14 lecture hosted by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Francis Fukuyama, PhD -- professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University and renowned author of The End of History and the Last Man -- discussed the problem of weak, underdeveloped nation-states; the effectiveness of various approaches to strengthening such states; and the importance of culture, context and history in the task of state-building. His lecture, titled "State-building: A Framework for Thinking about the Transfer of Institutions to Developing Countries," drew a full room of attendees to the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall

A former member of the RAND Corp. and the U.S. Department of State who has written widely on issues of democratization and international political economy, Fukuyama first presented a framework with which nation-states can be evaluated according to two key criteria: the strength of the state, and the scope of its functions. The first refers to a state's ability to enforce its own laws and policies; the second refers to how involved the state becomes in carrying out various societal functions, ranging from basic functions such as maintaining law and order and protecting public health, to more "activist" functions such as running industries and redistributing wealth.

Fukuyama asserted that from a development standpoint, nation-states should be strong but should carry out only the minimum necessary functions. He said that only one country he has studied -- New Zealand -- has effectively moved toward this ideal in recent years. He noted that many struggling, developing nations, such as Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan and Turkey, are overly ambitious in their scope -- attempting to run vast industries, for example -- but are weak and unable to carry out their policies because of factors like corruption. Other states that Fukuyama identified as "failed states," such as Haiti and Sierra Leone, are both limited in scope and weak, attempting to carry out only the most basic governmental functions and not doing it very well.

Fukuyama then discussed and evaluated various approaches to strengthening developing nations. He noted that in recent years much emphasis has been placed on encouraging such nations to reduce the scope of their functions, through deregulation and privatization, but said the effectiveness of this approach is now in question. A more effective approach, he said, is helping weak nation-states build their own strong institutions, such as political parties, public health networks and central banking.

Unfortunately, Fukuyama said, sometimes the efforts of outside organizations to strengthen a country's institutions only make things worse, because solutions are imposed from outside rather than developed from within. "Ideally, we would want a country's own public health system to handle that country's problems with AIDS or malaria," he said. "But when you flood the country with your organization's own doctors and nurses and infrastructure, what do the local doctors do? They quit their government posts to get on the payroll of your NGO." In a few months or years, when the organization withdraws its support, Fukuyama noted, the system collapses, because it was not built to be self-sustaining.

At the end of his talk, Fukuyama emphasized the importance of understanding local culture, context and history in the task of state building. For example, he said, those who run programs aiming to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa should consider working with traditional faith healers, as they are an important part of the healthcare system in Africa.

Francis Fukuyama is dean of faculty and the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. His book The End of History and the Last Man was published in 1992 and has appeared in more than 20 foreign editions. It made the bestseller lists in the United States, France, Japan and Chile, and has been awarded the Los Angeles Times' Book Critics Award.

Fukuyama received a BA in classics from Cornell University and a PhD in political science from Harvard University. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation from 1979-1980, then again from 1983-89, and from 1995-96. In 1981-82 and in 1989 he was a member of the policy planning staff of the U.S. Department of State. In the early 1980s he was also a member of the U.S. delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy. He is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, the American Political Science Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the Global Business Network.

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Democracy in Latin America: Degrees, Illusions, and Directions for Consolidation

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How can external actors - governments, regional organizations, the United Nations, financial institutions, nongovernmental organizations - affect the process of democratic transition and consolidation? In Beyond Sovereignty, leading scholars and policy experts examine the experiences of a variety of Latin American nations and the relevant characteristics of intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations to draw lessons that can be applied globally.

The contributors begin by discussing evolving views of sovereignty, democracy, and regional security. They review the past efforts and present capacity of various international organizations - the United Nations, the Organization of American States, external financial institutions, and transnational nongovernmental organizations - to further efforts to deepen democracy. They also offer case studies of how these organizations related to democratic development in Chile, El Salvador, Haiti, and Peru.

The last section applies lessons learned to two problematic regimes: Cuba and Mexico. This timely and useful collection will be of interest to all who study democratic transition and consolidation, comparative politics, Latin American politics, international organizations, and international relations more generally.

Contributors: Domingo E. Acevedo, Larry Diamond, Jorge I. Dominguez, Denise Dresser, Stephanie J. Eglinton, Patricia Weiss Fagen, Tom Farer, David P. Forsythe, Alicia Frohmann, Claudio Grossman, Anita Isaacs, Anthony P. Maingot, Joan M. Nelson, David Scott Palmer, Karen L. Remmer, Kathryn A. Sikkink, and Fernando R. Tesón.

From the Introduction:

"Concern over democracy's uncertain prospects inspired the project that culminates in this volume. Two assumptions shaped the collective effort of its contributors: one, that external actors can contribute to the defense and enhancement of democracy, and two, that tolerance for such external action has increased dramatically--even measures that would once have been widely condemned as impermissible intervention are acquiring a remarkable aura of legitimacy. An increase in tolerance is least marked, however, for unilateral action of a coercive nature, which in the Western Hemisphere usually means action that the Unites States has taken on its own initiative."

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Johns Hopkins University Press in "Beyond Sovereignty: Collectively Defending Democracy in the Americas", Tom Farer, ed.
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Larry Diamond

Politics in Developing Countries

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This second edition of the highly regarded Politics in Developing Countries again presents case studies of experiences with democracy in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, along with the editors' synthesis of the factors that facilitate and obstruct the development of democracy around the world. The new edition adds a chapter on South Africa and brings the other nine studies current through 1994.

The recent developments covered in the book include:

  • the reemergence of democratic politics in Chile
  • the impeachment of President Collor and the crisis of democracy in Brazil
  • the growing pressure for substantive democratization in Mexico
  • the 1994 elections in Chile, Brazil, and Mexico
  • the leadership transition in Turkey following the death of President Ozal
  • the growing ethnic and religious strife in India
  • the overthrow and reemergence of democracy in Thailand and the country's economic boom
  • the quest for democratic consolidation in South Korea under new President Kim Young Sam
  • the political and economic crisis in Nigeria
  • the difficulties facing the one-party dominant regime in Senegal following the 1993 elections
  • the 1994 elections and democratic transition in South Africa
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Lynne Rienner Publishers
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Larry Diamond
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