Please join us in congratulating Didi Kuo, Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FS), and co-author Andrew S. Kelly, Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Sciences at California State University, East Bay, on being awarded the 2023 Leonard S. Robins Award for the Best Paper on Health Politics and Policy by the American Political Science Association (APSA)!

The Robins Award is named in honor of Leonard S. Robins, who, through his presence and gentle questioning at virtually every health politics panel, graciously nurtured the scholarship of both junior and senior scholars. The award recognizes the best paper on any subject that fits under the rubric of Health Politics and Policy presented at the previous annual APSA meeting.

Kuo and Kelly's award-winning paper, "State Capacity and Public Health: California and COVID-19," investigates the comparative COVID-19 policy response across counties and regions within California. In the description of the 2022 APSA panel "The Politics of Pandemic Response and the Opportunities for Health Policy Reform," during which they presented their paper, it notes that "In moving beyond a consideration of formal state and public health capacity, Kuo and Kelly argue that the more robust policy response of the Bay Area was, in part, a product of partnerships between state and community-based actors. Drawing on the concept of 'embedded autonomy,' Kuo and Kelly reconceptualize public health capacity and consider it within broader issues of state capacity and democracy."

An abstract of the paper can be found below:
 

On March 17, 2020, six counties in the Bay Area jointly issued the nation’s first shelter-in-place orders in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Cities and states across the United States quickly followed suit, with varying degrees of success. Public health officials have been critical in setting policies, enforcing behavioral and non-pharmaceutical interventions, and communicating with the public. This paper explores the determinants of public health capacity, distinguishing between formal institutional capacity (ie budget, staff) and informal embedded capacity (ie community ties, insulation from political pressures). It argues that informal embedded capacity is critical to public health capacity, but difficult to measure empirically. It concludes by relating public health capacity to broader issues of state capacity and democracy.

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is pleased to announce the release of the third module of mini-lectures in our Solving Public Policy Problems massive open online course (MOOC).

Case studies like this are instrumental to the curriculum for both CDDRL’s Leadership Academy for Development (LAD) and the Masters’ in International Policy (MIP). They address a wide range of issues in developing countries and are designed to encourage you to think critically about key decisions that have led to policy reforms. This video refers to the implementation segment of the Problem-Solving Framework (module 1.3).

Case Study: Gifford Pinchot and Sustainable Forest Management

The year was 1909, and Gifford Pinchot, Chief Forester of the United States, faced a terrible personal dilemma. He had discovered a pattern of corruption in the sale of public lands to developers and other private interests. But the new president, William Howard Taft, depended on support from western Republicans and had placed a gag order on the whole affair. Pinchot was outraged at this evidence of corruption reaching the White House, but he wanted to give Taft a fair hearing. The new president had, after all, vowed to support conservation and strong control over federal lands. Taft invited Pinchot to the White House, where he alternately implored Pinchot not to go public with the matter and threatened him with dismissal if he violated the gag order. Pinchot had in his pocket a letter that could expose the scandal. This case explores the dilemma of Pinchot, a mid-level bureaucrat dependent on a president’s good will, and the strategies available to him. It shows the power of a single leader and the similarities the United States once had with many developing nations struggling with widespread corruption.

Through this case, students will gain a better understanding of how good communication is important for persuading stakeholders that a reform objective is both achievable and beneficial.

You can read the case study here, access the full series on our YouTube page, and watch Module 3 below:

California faces a host of difficult, long-term challenges in housing, transportation, water and climate, education, jobs and business, governance reform and other areas. Policy issues are complicated enough, but when one tries to think about them over the long-term, the considerations become even more complex. This project, California Considers: Policy Deliberations for our Long-term Success, will present detailed results on 56 proposed policy options, both in terms of conventional polling and in terms of what a representative sample of more than 700 California residents, gathered together virtually to deliberate in depth from all over the state, think about these policy choices. The result is a Deliberative Poll®, a poll before and after a representative sample deliberates in depth. A separate sample, a control group that did not deliberate answered the same questions in the same time period. Hence the result is an unprecedented experiment probing public opinion about the state’s many long-term challenges.

Partners 

The Deliberative Poll® was conducted by the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, DDL, (housed within the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University), in collaboration with the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the California 100 Initiative. DDL has been involved in more than 120 Deliberative Polls® in 50 countries around the world, but never to probe the public’s considered judgments about the policy challenges of the further future. The deliberations took place on the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform, an AI-assisted form of moderation designed in collaboration with the Crowdsourced Democracy Team at Stanford and its director Professor Ashish Goel of Management Science and Engineering. The deliberations in moderated small group discussions on video in groups of 10 took place over an entire weekend, or during the week, for periods of equivalent length.

Results

The deliberations took place over four sessions during either the weekend or weekday, in the months of February and March. Participants met in moderated small group discussions on video in groups of 10 for periods of equivalent length. After deliberation on the policy proposals, the 700 expressed their conclusions in confidential questions. After considering all the pros and cons, there was supermajority support for ensuring adequate funding for infrastructure for roads and digital broadband, for vouchers for low-income access to public transit, for incentives for the creation of affordable housing, and new support for K-12 education. There was also significantly increased support for reform of CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) and for increasing the threshold by which the state constitution can be changed with an initiative (from majority support to a requirement of 60%). A detailed report can be found here.

This article originally appeared in the Stanford Report. 

Last week, as the world marked one year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk shared a message with Americans:

“It’s not a war for territories or resources. It’s not a regional conflict. It’s a war for freedom and democracy,” he said during a panel discussion Friday at the Bechtel Conference Center at Stanford University.

The public event was hosted by the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) to mark one year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It took place before live and virtual audiences, including many wearing blue and yellow in support of the Ukrainian effort.

Honcharuk served as Ukraine’s 17th prime minister from 2019-2020, and in 2021, was the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Visiting Fellow at FSI. He was joined by Serhiy Leshchenko, a former journalist, member of Ukraine’s parliament (2014-2019), adviser to President Zelenksyy’s chief of staff, and a 2013 alumnus of the Draper Hills Summer Fellows program at the CDDRL; Oleksandra Matviichuk, founder of the Center for Civil Liberties and former visiting scholar with the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program at the CDDRL (2017-2018); and Oleksandra Ustinova, the People’s Deputy of Ukraine, a current member of Ukraine’s Parliament, and a former visiting scholar with the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program at the CDDRL (2018-2019).

Honcharuk, Leshchenko, and Ustinova attended virtually from Kyiv, while Matviichuk joined virtually from Paris, France. During the event, they discussed the impact of the war on daily life, the global democratic order, and Ukraine’s future. The discussion was moderated by Michael McFaul, director of FSI and a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, and ended with a brief Q&A session with audience members.

An edited recording of the panel is available below.