Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
His insight led to a system that defends rights while it shares and controls power.
Hosted by the Close Up Foundation in partnership with the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, Generation Lab, and the Hoover Institution’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions, the program challenged participants to deliberate — not debate — some of the nation’s most pressing policy questions ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
A burgeoning literature considers the domestic causes and consequences of democratic backsliding for public perceptions of democracy but has yet to fully examine the role of international factors in explaining these perceptions. The effect of democratic backsliding in one
democracy on public support for democratic principles in other countries has, thus far, defied theoretical and empirical investigation. In “U.S. Democratic Backsliding and the Decline of Democratic Support Abroad,” Amnon Cavari, Amichai Magen, and Benjamin Yoel address this gap in knowledge. They propose and test a theory of the effects of backsliding on global opinion, in which information about democratic decline in one country can lead to diminished support for liberal democracy and increased support for authoritarian governance in another. To test this, they deployed an original survey experiment in Israel to examine the effect of two narratives about the 2020 U.S. elections — one signaling democratic decline and one signaling democratic resilience — on support for authoritarian governance. They found that respondents exposed to the narrative of U.S. democratic decline were more supportive of authoritarian governance than those exposed to the narrative of democratic resilience. Moreover, they find marginal evidence that the respondents’ ideological preferences condition the effect of narrative exposure. Cavari, Magen, and Yoel’s findings suggest that the democratic backsliding literature has insufficiently explored the global consequences of domestic events and processes for democratic decline worldwide.
Democratic erosion is both a supply- and demand-side phenomenon. On the supply side, leaders take anti-democratic actions, such as weakening checks on executive power, which they then justify to the public — on grounds of law and order, threats to the nation, and so on. On the demand side, varied types of social conflict, such as polarization or racial animus, can lead publics to endorse limits on democratic governance.
Real-life models of democratic erosion have ‘diffused’ across borders. For example, strongmen in countries neighboring Russia, such as Alexander Lukashenko and Viktor Orbán, have borrowed from Vladimir Putin’s playbook of jailing opponents and using anti-Western rhetoric. It is less clear, however, whether authoritarian phenomena in one country can prompt changes in the beliefs of ordinary people in other countries.
In “U.S. Democratic Backsliding and the Decline of Democratic Support Abroad,” Amnon Cavari, Amichai Magen, and Benjamin Yoel present results from a survey experiment conducted among Israelis following the January 6 United States Capitol attack. They find that respondents who were randomly exposed to a narrative about US democracy eroding were significantly more supportive of autocracy in Israel. By contrast, those exposed to a narrative about the resilience of US democracy after January 6 were less supportive. These effects were most pronounced among conservative Israelis, perhaps unsurprising given the associations between right-wing ideologies and authoritarianism.
Readers come away with a sense of the varied ways that democratic erosion can diffuse across borders, particularly at the micro level. That changes in American politics can affect the attitudes of Israelis over 6000 miles away suggests that autocrats can be highly effective in shaping the regime trajectories of their more immediate neighbors. This makes it all the more urgent to combat anti-democratic narratives before they take root and spread.
The authors make a straightforward claim: someone in country A who observes democratic norms or institutions being undermined in country B may well question the value of democracy for A. To see this, consider how Nayib Bukele’s campaign of mass imprisonment without due process in El Salvador has appealed to ordinary people across Latin America. In light of the social and economic problems facing democratic countries, unchecked strongmen — and their purported successes — have come to seem more credible and pragmatic.
Democratic erosion in country B should be especially likely to affect the beliefs of people in A when (1) B is a close ally of, or is seen as powerful or influential for A, and (2) events in B are widely covered in A’s traditional or social media. For example, coverage of the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” was shown to influence how people in other European Union countries viewed integration or withdrawal. The authors further posit that democratic erosion will have a larger effect on support for autocracy among those who subscribe to right-wing ideologies — these prioritize social order and religious or racial purity, which can conflict with inclusive democracy.
Israeli democracy has eroded in recent years, particularly as Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has worked to undermine judicial independence and as discrimination against Arab and other ethnic minority Israelis persists. However, Israel’s backsliding also has strong demand-side components: majorities of those surveyed in 2023 agreed that a strong leader — one not limited by the legislature or judiciary — was necessary to solve Israel’s problems, that voting rights should be restricted among those unwilling to declare their loyalty to the state, and that international NGOs should be banned. The authors aim to show that these anti-democratic beliefs stem not only from elite rhetoric or national polarization, but from global backsliding.
The United States is Israel’s closest ally, and the two countries share much in terms of political and social life. Both were founded by groups fleeing persecution, who established a political culture defined by pioneer settlement and the displacement of indigenous peoples. The US has consistently supported Israel’s wars and military operations in the Middle East. A large majority of Israelis view the US as an exemplar of democracy and freedom. This makes Israel an ideal case for measuring how global democratic erosion affects democratic sentiment at home.
The survey was fielded in March 2021, a time of acute political crisis in Israel: this marked the fourth election cycle in less than two years, and the prior two elections had resulted in parliamentary stalemates and short-lived governments. In the prior months, Israeli media had extensively covered Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 elections and ensuing January 6 attack on the Capitol. 92% of survey participants reported following the US elections, and 43% reported doing so closely. A majority reported believing the US strongly influences Israeli politics.
Participants were randomly assigned to read one of two ‘vignettes’ about the 2020 elections. One emphasized that US democracy had faltered, as evidenced by Trump’s behavior and the Capitol attack. Another emphasized the resilience of US democracy, as evidenced by high turnout and the eventual transfer of power — this vignette did not mention January 6. The authors find that those who read the “US democracy faltering” vignette were significantly less likely to agree the US elections were free and fair.
Finally, the authors measure their dependent variable — support for autocracy — in terms of support for restricting speech that is hostile to the government, the permissibility of rule by strongmen, and so on. The key finding is that Israelis exposed to the “US democracy faltering” narrative were significantly more supportive of autocracy.
Figure 3. Support for Authoritative Governance, by Vignette.
These effects were most pronounced among those on the political right, but the main finding holds even when statistically controlling for ideology. In all, the study demonstrates that when democratic erosion diffuses, it can shape not only elite behavior but mass attitudes as well.
Figure 4. Effect of ideology on support for Authoritative Governance by Vignette.
*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.
CDDRL Research-in-Brief [5-minute read]
In late August 2021, United States President Joseph Biden hosted the newly elected Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennet, at the White House for an official meeting. Shortly after, Israeli journalist Barak Ravid reported that Biden and Bennet ‘reaffirmed the strategic understandings’ between the two allies on Israel’s ‘alleged undeclared military nuclear program’, noting that this reaffirmation of policy has been repeated by every US President since Richard Nixon.1 As shall be explored below, this statement is mostly accurate, with the seemingly glaring exception of President George H.W. Bush. Upon its publication, Ravid’s story became the most recent in a long line of reports detailing this repeated commitment by US presidents to their Israeli counterparts.2
What role does this commitment play in Israel’s long history with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)? The primary aim of this article is to answer this question by charting Israel’s relationship with the NPT and its decades-long fear of American coercion to join it. A secondary aim of this article is to provide a concise primer, or introduction, to this nuanced question for scholars and students alike, by reviewing the existing literature and adding insights from new archival sources to this growing body of work.
The paper proceeds in three parts. The first charts the emergence of Israel’s NPT policy and the technical-diplomatic road which led to the emergence of the policy in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. The second charts how this policy impacted Israel’s nuclear energy policy in the following decades, ultimately preventing it from pursuing its plan of launching a massive civilian nuclear infrastructure program, specifically nuclear power plants for electricity production. The third concludes with charting Israel’s NPT policy at the end of the Cold War. Research for this study was conducted in archives in the US, United Kingdom, Canada, and Israel, and taps both primary and secondary sources; Hebrew translations are by the author, unless otherwise noted.3
Democracies face a host of ongoing challenges, including the rise of elected autocrats, income inequality, mainstreamed forms of xenophobic nationalism, and political apathy. All of these challenges pose threats to democratic participation — elected autocrats restrict it, inequality makes it easier for oligarchs to sway election outcomes, and xenophobia can discourage cultural outsiders from voting.
Apart from practical threats to democratic participation, an established intellectual tradition has viewed participation with deep skepticism. In this view, democracy is good simply because it ensures peaceful transfers of power and protects individual rights. Collective decisions, however, cannot be meaningfully viewed as representing the “will of the people” owing to manipulation, apathy, and the high costs of acquiring political knowledge. Is this “realist” vision the best one can hope for in democratic life?
In “Can deliberation have lasting effects?,” James Fishkin, Valentin Bolotnyy, Joshua Lerner, Alice Siu, and Norman Bradburn show how a three-day deliberative experiment in late 2019 had large and long-term effects on turnout and voting behavior. Those most likely to exhibit these civic behaviors nearly a year later had come to follow politics more closely and see their political opinions as valuable. At the same time, the experiment’s effects on participants’ policy views were significant only in the short term — most deliberators eventually reverted to their previously held policy positions.
That three days of deliberation had such lasting civic effects suggests that efforts to create more inclusive forms of democratic participation are both possible and scalable. Moreover, it suggests that academic skepticism about democratic participation is not an argument against citizens’ capacities for reasonable decision-making; rather, it is an argument against our imperfect contexts of participation. Deliberative experiments may offer hope for improving these contexts.
In September 2019 — one week prior to the experiment — a treatment group (i.e., those who would deliberate) of 523 registered voters from around the US and a control group of 844 voters were surveyed on their political attitudes. Members of the treatment group then deliberated on five issue domains (the economy, environment, immigration, health care, foreign policy) in small groups and on 47 policy proposals (e.g., redistributing wealth in some way). 26 of these proposals were characterized by extreme partisan polarization, meaning significant numbers of those who identified as Democrats or Republicans held the most extreme views. After the deliberations ended, both the treatment and control groups were surveyed. Then, three subsequent surveys were conducted in late 2020.
Among the treatment group, deliberation produced significant, short-term depolarization on 20 of the 26 (polarized) policy proposals. In other words, the averages for participants who identified with each party moved closer together (though not necessarily toward the center). These changes were large, sometimes 40 percentage points, as in the case of Republicans abandoning extreme positions on immigration. Meanwhile, the control group’s policy positions changed hardly at all — pointing to the key role played by deliberation. Within the five issue areas, averages among deliberators shifted leftward on all but the economy.
Figure 1. Policy-Based Score (PBS) Changes over Time
Note: Policy-based score (PBS) is constructed for each individual based on responses to 26 questions identified as the most polarizing. The upper chart shows the participant group, and the lower chart shows the control group. T1 is the survey wave prior to the deliberations, T2 is right after the deliberations, and T3 is 10 months after, in July 2020.
By late 2020, however, the treatment group’s policy positions mostly reverted to their pre-deliberation levels. The differences between these two points in time were still significant compared with the control group, yet relatively small in absolute terms. These policy reversions are perhaps unsurprising: deliberators returned to an environment of heightened polarization and aggressive campaigning during the 2020 election cycle. (To be sure, and from the standpoint of finding solutions to collective problems, policy reversion is not especially concerning — the aim of deliberation is to bring citizens together to reason and compromise, which the experiment accomplished.)
The lack of long-term policy effects suggests that three-day deliberations may be limited in their ability to create a more encompassing, participatory society. However, the treatment group demonstrated large and persistent changes in their intention to vote (i.e., turnout) and their candidate of choice. Among the control group, Joe Biden was favored over Donald Trump by about four percentage points — very close to Biden’s actual margin in the popular vote. Among the treatment group, however, Biden was favored by 28 percentage points. The gaps in turnout were similarly large. (Note that these are intentions, not reports of actual decisions. However, Tables 6 and 7 in the article show similar effects for recollected votes after the election.)
Table 2. Voting Intention for Participant and Control Groups, Time 4
These civic outcomes are especially surprising because (a) voting behavior is thought to be stable and deeply rooted in one’s psychology and social context, and (b) experimental efforts to increase turnout have been most successful when undertaken shortly before elections, as opposed to one whole year prior. The effects were most pronounced among political moderates and those without college degrees — perhaps pointing to the educative effects of deliberation.
Figure 5. Effects on Vote Intention Captured by Predictive Modeling, by Education
Note: Middle are those participants who have Policy-Based Scores between 3 and 5 (inclusive) at Time 1. Non-middle participants are all other participants. Positive prediction error shows that, on average, participants were more likely to vote for Biden than predicted by the model. Vote intention data are collected at Time 4, in October, 2020. Full calibrated model used to construct this figure can be found in the APSR Dataverse.
Why did deliberation produce only short-term policy effects but long-term effects on voting behavior? The authors posit that deliberation caused an “awakening of civic capacities.” They reason that deliberation was a transformative experience in terms of stimulating political engagement and a sense of efficacy. And indeed, the treatment group was, in the long term, more likely than the control group to follow the 2020 election campaign, believe their political opinions mattered, and acquire general information about American politics. (The latter is measured in terms of knowing which party controlled the House and Senate.)
Figure 9. Having “Political Opinions Worth Listening to”
Note: Policy-based score is constructed for each individual based on responses to 26 questions identified as the most polarizing. Responses to the question “How strongly would you disagree or agree with the following statement?”[I have opinions about politics that are worth listening to.] were collected at T1 (just before deliberations), T2 (just after), and T3 (10 months later, July 2020).
The authors close by discussing efforts to scale up civic engagement, such as the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform. In all, “Can deliberation have lasting effects?” provides a rigorous case for the value of deliberation in strengthening democratic participation.
*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.
CDDRL Research-in-Brief [4-minute read]
Escalating threats to undersea cable networks, stemming from gray-zone sabotage at vulnerable chokepoints, are receiving long-overdue attention from policymakers and the public. Recent incidents highlight the strategic vulnerability of this infrastructure, due to a lack of redundancy, limited repair capacity, and gaps in international maritime law. Despite attempts at multilateral cooperation through the G7 and the Quad, concrete actions are lagging. The US administration has not directly addressed this issue. To strengthen resilience, democracies must collaborate and invest in hardened cable designs, real-time monitoring and data sharing, routing diversity, regional repair hubs, and enhanced legal frameworks. They must work together to secure their lifeline for economic and national security and future digital-technology advancement.
The Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, based at the University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, today released the findings from two national Community Forums on the evolving expectations around privacy and governance of AI-powered wearable devices. In collaboration with Meta, the forum engaged a representative sample of 550 participants — 300 from the United States and 250 from India — to solicit people's perspectives on user controls and societal expectations. The Community Forums were conducted as national Deliberative Polls.
American Political Development (APD) scholars have long sought to escape notions of American exceptionalism — the view that the United States is qualitatively distinct in ways that limit the usefulness of comparative analysis. This article presents a comparative framework that reframes the issue of exceptionalism by distinguishing between two analytic logics: divergence and lack of convergence. The exercise consists of examining the U.S. divergence from cases with shared starting points in Latin America and assessing convergence — or its absence — with European cases that began from markedly different initial conditions. Viewed from these two lenses, the U.S. fits neither pattern of development neatly. It followed a different trajectory shaped by contingent historical choices and specific structural characteristics. However, treating the U.S. as a comparative case study proves analytically productive: it sharpens counterfactual reasoning, permits the transfer of comparative lessons, and revises interpretations of core theories of political development, including debates over institutional sequencing.
The Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, based at the University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, today released the findings from two national Community Forums on the evolving expectations around privacy and governance of AI-powered wearable devices. In collaboration with Meta, the forum engaged a representative sample of 550 participants — 300 from the United States and 250 from India — to solicit people's perspectives on user controls and societal expectations. The Community Forums were conducted as national Deliberative Polls.
As AI wearables see rapid adoption worldwide, understanding public attitudes can help to ensure these technologies are developed and deployed responsibly. Three key themes emerged from the forum. Participants in both the U.S. and India indicated the highest levels of support for users having controls over when their wearables passively process environments and actively capture data. U.S. participants consistently favored individual agency over how wearables are used, both in public and private settings, whereas in India, there was a slight preference for governments to decide wearable usage rules in public spaces. Additionally, U.S. participants supported workplaces and schools having the primary authority to decide how AI-powered wearables should be used in those environments, while Indian participants also saw a significant role for governments in these settings.
The forum also revealed important nuances in public perspectives. For example, participants expressed a preference for AI wearables that are tailored to cultural and regional contexts, rather than standardized global designs. There was also broad support for AI agents capable of responding to emotional cues, underscoring the public's desire for personalized, human-centric wearable experiences.
"This global forum provided invaluable insights into how the public's expectations around privacy and governance of wearable AI are evolving," said Alice Siu, Associate Director of the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab. "The findings will be essential for policymakers, technology companies, and other stakeholders as they work to ensure these powerful technologies empower users while respecting fundamental rights."
National community forums in the U.S. and India highlight differences in preferences for privacy, user control, and governance of emerging technologies.
There is a growing recognition, both in and outside of the academy, that democracy requires more than simply voting for and removing incumbents during elections. For one, relying solely on elected representatives deprives those being represented of direct control over decisions that affect them. In addition, it can also generate — as it has in the United States and elsewhere — large gaps in responsiveness and representation, particularly for historically disenfranchised and marginal groups.
Participatory budgeting (PB) represents one influential attempt to overcome these gaps in democratic practice. First introduced in the 1980s by the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT), PB empowers voters to allocate public funds to projects that benefit them. Since then, ordinary citizens in thousands of places across the world have helped determine the content of local budgets.
Despite its successes, academics and practitioners remain unclear about how to address and balance considerations related to budget constraints and ease of participation. This coincides with well-known mathematical difficulties surrounding the aggregation of votes, for example, that individually consistent preferences can yield inconsistent group outcomes.
In “Rank, Pack, or Approve,” Lodewijk Gelauff and Ashish Goel introduce a dataset drawn from the novel and comprehensive Stanford Participatory Budgeting platform. The data span over 150 real participatory budgeting processes, or “elections.” Importantly, the elections vary in terms of how ballots are designed and how participants make budgeting decisions. Gelauff and Goel ask how such variation shapes important budgeting outcomes, such as when participants are more likely to become fatigued and abandon the process.
Two key findings from the study are as follows: First, more complex PB designs lead voters to, perhaps unsurprisingly, spend more time participating; however, this does not significantly increase abandonment or “dropout” rates. Second, voting methods that force participants to deal with cost trade-offs — as opposed to merely indicating their preferences — have been found to generate less expensive projects.
The reader comes away with a sense of how subtle differences in the design of budgeting elections meaningfully shape the allocation of resources. This will resonate with social scientists who are familiar with how, for example, different kinds of electoral rules shape political competition. To understand Gelauff and Goel’s findings, it helps to first outline how PB elections differ from one another.
The basic PB setup involves organizers choosing a voting method, a list of projects to potentially be funded, and an authentication process (i.e., checking that participants are valid voters). Voters then select or rank projects given the constraints of each voting rule or method. These three rules, captured in the paper’s title, are as follows:
The first, “K-approval,” asks voters to select up to “K” projects. The top-voted projects receive funding until the budget runs out. K-approval is simple, but its main drawback is that it ignores the costliness of each project: voters only indicate which projects they like, rather than how those choices fit within a fixed budget. The second method, “K-ranking,” asks voters to rank their preferred projects, capturing their preferences in a more fine-grained manner. As votes are aggregated using the Borda scoring method, higher-ranked projects receive greater weight or value. Finally, the “knapsack” method asks voters to choose projects that fit within a fixed budget. This method best allows participants to balance costs in a way that mimics real city councils. However, knapsack is more complex and time-consuming than K-approval or K-ranking, although the online interface design, which mimics a shopping cart, is already much simpler than it would be on paper.
As mentioned, Gelauff and Goel’s data is drawn from the open-source Stanford PB platform. This tool enables cities to conduct online PB elections with a great deal of customizability, including location, budget, language of operation, authentication process (e.g., requiring personal information or sending SMS messages), as well as methods, phases, and windows of voting. Key for the authors’ purposes, it also tracks (anonymous) voters’ choices and how much time they spend during the election. Data collection began in 2014.
The first key finding is motivated by the fact that election organizers often prefer K-approval for its simplicity. As such, Gelauff and Goel analyze how much time participants spend on their ballots and how often they quit. Although more complex ballots — those with a larger budget and number of projects — are shown to predict longer completion times, they do not significantly increase dropout rates. The authors note that more research is needed to assess whether knapsack specifically affects dropout.
The authors also find that voters select more expensive projects with K-approval compared to the knapsack methods. However, voters indicate similarly expensive preferences for their most-preferred projects under both methods; the key difference appears lower down the list of preferences, where the knapsack constraint forces them to be more cost-conscious. In other words, the knapsack cost constraint doesn’t affect which expensive project participants most prefer. Rather, it limits how many extra expensive projects they can add.
Overall, “Rank, Pack, or Approve” deepens our understanding of how PB can improve direct democratic engagement while reducing burdens on participants. It does this while providing a large quantity of real-world data, compared with prior research that has relied on crowdworkers without a real stake in the budgeting outcome. The authors helpfully illustrate how local governments can design PB processes that are clearer and more inviting to ordinary voters. Subsequent research will benefit from using this powerful data resource, as will organizers seeking to expand local engagement.
*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.
CDDRL Research-in-Brief [3.5-minute read]
