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People are fed up with political parties, and that's a big problem for democracy, says political scientist Didi Kuo. She joins host Michael McFaul on the World Class podcast to discuss why we need well-functioning parties, how we got the party system we have today, and what can be done to course correct and build better parties for the future.

Watch the video version of their conversation above, or listen to the audio below, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other major podcast platforms. A full transcript of the episode is also available.

Kuo's latest book is The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't, published by Oxford University Press.

TRANSCRIPT:


McFaul: You're listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I'm your host, Michael McFaul, the Director of FSI. Today, I'm talking with Didi Kuo, a Center Fellow here at th Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law. 

She's an expert on comparative politics, democratization, political reform, and she's the new author of this fantastic book called The Great Retreat, How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't.  You should all buy it now. 

Didi, thanks for coming on to World Class with us.

Kuo: Thank you Mike

McFaul: What's the origin story here? Why did you decide to write this book?

Kuo: It's interesting that we're both here at CDDRL because this is very much a product of our intellectual programming. So when I first got to Stanford ten years ago, we started a program on American democracy in comparative perspective.

We at CDDRL have primarily been concerned with how to build strong democracies in places where democracy is emerging and how to have that partner with effective development.

And we started this program on U.S. democracy because we noticed there were these new challenges in the U.S.. I mean, they have historical roots, of course. But we wanted to look abroad and see, are these challenges just in the United States or are they in a lot of other places? And also, what kind of lessons can we draw from them?

And as a result, I got a lot of cool opportunities with the reform community around the United States. And one thing that really struck me is there's deep and widespread anti-party sentiment among a lot of people who care deeply about American democracy. And as a political scientist and a comparativist in particular, it runs counter to everything we know about the relationship of parties and democracy. And really the long-running empirical finding, in anyone who studies democratic consolidation and stability, is that you need strong and robust parties in order to ensure good democratic outcomes.

So, this book was born of a sort of understanding of this big disconnect. We have a public that increasingly dislikes and distrust parties. We also have a lot of historical evidence that we need strong parties to get better democratic outcomes. And in particular, to mediate this relationship of democracy and capitalism that has long been considered stable, but has been fraught, especially at the start in the 19th century.

This book is to try to help us understand what parties historically have been good for, why it is that they're weak today, and why we should think in a kind of pro-party or a party-building framework when we also think about democratic renewal.

McFaul: Well, that's a great segue. Those are three great questions. You just asked three big ‘why’ questions. Let's talk about them in detail.

So, why parties in the first place, right? It's not intuitive, I think, to a lot of people that parties are necessary for democracy. Tell us that story.

And then the next ‘why’ question is, why are they in retreat?

Kuo: There's a long history. We could go all the way back to the beginning of modern democracy when democracy was very limited, right?

So you had these little proto democracies, including the United States, that had legislatures but were not popularly elected in many cases and suffrage was not universal. And in those places you had what Duverger referred to as kind of elite cadre parties. So loose factions in the legislature.

McFaul: Talk about who Duverger is. That just rolls off of your lips, but not necessarily everybody else's.

Kuo: He's a French political scientist who did very early studies of political parties and he's someone who's most well known for an adage that if you have single member districts and first-past-the-post elections, you're likely to get two political parties. And if you have proportional representation, you get multiple parties.

When he was sort of thinking of the history of parties, he noted that they were initially just these elite factions in the legislature. But as democracy expanded and suffrage itself was extended to people who didn't have to own property to vote, there was this kind of dilemma: How do you actually mobilize people into a democratic system and how do you make it actually representative?

And the answer was party organizations.

So parties had to build local chapters. A lot of campaigning and electioneering was very labor intensive. So you had to deploy election agents and volunteers to go literally register people to vote. Parties purveyed the initial journalism, literature, party pamphlets. And elections themselves were often big spectacles. There were public rallies, people voted viva voce, by voice, before the secret ballot. So parties distributed ballots once we got to that era of voting. So a lot of the actual coordination of democratic elections was through parties.

But at the same time, parties performed this linkage function of trying to understand—what are the segments in society? How can we create distinct parties around them that will represent specific constituencies and segments?

And so we have this famous idea from political science that political parties freeze the divisions in society in various ways.

That's kind of a static conception of the party, but over time parties, of course, adapt to the modern era. Once we have full suffrage, for example, parties already have an infrastructure that allows them to integrate new voters. And as we move into the post-war era, in the 19th century, there was a lot of skepticism about whether or not you can have market capitalism and democracy. People like Karl Marx said that these institutions are just going to get captured, right?

McFaul: Right. Right.

Kuo: The post-war consensus about democratic capitalism was because political parties could serve a function of mobilizing interests distinct to capital. You got labor parties and social democratic parties that had strong ties to trade unions. You had the mainstream parties of the center-left and the center-right that alternated in power, competed in fairly predictable ways along a set of economic interests and issues, and developed policy programs that hewed to their different kind of ideological conceptions of the relationship of states and markets.

That's a long way of answering the question of why we have parties. They serve an electoral function and they also serve a representative intermediary linkage function.

Now the retreat. The retreat is after the 1970s, which is an era that, you know . . .

McFaul: It was way back then! Oh! Not just in the last four or five years. That's interesting. Go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead.

Kuo: No, it's okay! So you get a bunch of different things happening beginning in the 70s, but really accelerating in the 90s.

First, parties adapt to changing communications technology. They become more professionalized and more nationalized. So you start to see an atrophying of local party organizations arise in the use of, first it was direct mail and then of course, if we accelerate way into the nineties, it starts to be a little bit digital. And now, television advertising, et cetera, allows parties to reach voters directly.

So they rely more on professional polling strategists, consultants, to do a lot of the campaign messaging that used to be done in-house or even through a more bottom-up process. And those have had the effects of potentially eroding the intermediary and linkage function of parties, despite the fact that parties continue to be very good at winning elections.

The book focuses at length, I would say, on the 90s, the end of the Cold War, when there's a real consensus about market and political liberalization around the world. And the way that that takes root in Western democracies is through cross-partisan agreement that economic growth should be the foremost goal of government, and that the way to achieve growth is through policies we would associate with neoliberal orthodoxy.

So, deregulation, free trade, globalization, cutting corporate taxes. And that basically creates a consensus in favor of a pro-market, anti-state relationship of democratic capitalism.

McFaul: Just so I'm clear, that happened in both Europe and the United States? Left parties both moved that way, right? I know the American story pretty well. That's like Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council and the Third Way. It was not just in our countries, it was in Europe as well?

Kuo: Right! And there's a really interesting history of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, new leaders who led these insurgent factions within parties of the left to say we have an electability crisis. In order to become a majority party once again, we're going to need to adopt some of the policies of the right and we can do it with social democratic characteristics. We can still care about alleviating poverty through market means. We don't have to rely on the state.

And so you have people like Bill Clinton saying the era of big government is over. But you also have Western European leaders within the social democratic parties getting together at different Third Way conferences and conventions talking about a new era of global social democracy.

And in Europe, the way that that really took hold was the project of the European Union, which provides a really interesting comparison to the United States because once the EU is up and running as a common currency union and it is responsible for a lot of macroeconomic policy, and the free movement of goods, people, and capital across borders, it constrains what national governments can offer. And political parties across Europe, especially of the left, become more constrained in the kinds of economic policies that they adopt in elections. And that kind of convergence of parties nationally provides ample opportunity for extremist parties to fill that void in representation.

It is not dissimilar from what happened in Latin America after structural adjustment policies implemented and mandated by the West take hold in the 80s and 90s, where you have parties along the political spectrum of the left and the right implementing very similar austerity policies, scaling back the scope of their bureaucracies, and in doing, also muddled party distinctions in a way that created more voter antipathy and distrust and ultimately paved the way for more extremist leaders there as well.

McFaul: So, to fast-forward, let's do America and if we have time, we'll come back to Europe . . . tell us a little more about the more recent, and let's focus on Trump first, right?

So Trump seems to be a highly disruptive person within the Republican Party, both in terms of his worldviews and his ideas, but also in terms of his methods, right? Tell us how Trump took over the Republican Party.

Kuo: So there are two things I would point to here.

One is that some of the trends that we've already talked about, including professionalization and nationalization have been true everywhere, right? You need less of a party infrastructure these days. It's something that Allen Hicken and Rachel Riedl have called party deinstitutionalization around the world. Nowadays, a lot of leaders can just use social media to connect directly to audiences.

McFaul: Right. As Trump most certainly did, right? I mean, the first time he ran, he just went, he was on Twitter. He didn't have to go through the party and he didn't have to go on TV.

Kuo: Well, he was already a celebrity.

McFaul: He was already a celebrity, right.

Kuo: As a result, you can obviate a party infrastructure entirely as a candidate. And that's led to trends of personalization. And there's a great new book about how we're entering an era of personalistic parties where they still compete in democratic elections, but they are vulnerable to takeover by specific individuals.

Of course, the way that parties succeed in supporting democracy is when they can transcend the needs of any one individual, right? And they become these brands that last over time and people need to kind of put aside their self-interest to work in the interest of a party. It has a disciplining effect.

Under a personalistic party, of course, there is no such thing and it starts to resemble more of the worlds that you're familiar with: one in which loyalty to an individual is paramount and institutions are only important in so far as they serve the desires of that individual.

I was just reading this morning—and I know we're going a little wide—that Republican members of Congress are now asking for specific exceptions to the DOGE cuts. Which is, of course, what happens in a patrimonial regime and in an era, that I've written about, when patronage and clientelism were far more pervasive than they are today. So building a clean state takes a very long time. Dismantling it can be very fast.

So, on the one hand, there are some trends in political parties and the way they organize that make it more likely that an individual can come to power very quickly. But on the other hand, the other trend that I think is global rather than—or at least in the West—is that of far right extremism.

You and I have written about global populism years ago and we now see through any number of different kinds of overlapping reasons, but one of them is that people are upset at, sort of, this bargain of democratic capitalism, right? It hasn't worked for a lot of people, especially the workers who are left behind by the promise of globalization.

And if we think of the 21st century, the global financial crisis didn't translate into some kind of change in the political alignment or the left and the right, at least that change hasn't been fast by any means. And after the COVID pandemic, that's kind of a juncture of even more distrust. It accelerated that. As a result, you have a lot more general grievance, discontent in the electorate that, again, is ripe for extremist messaging. People don't feel loyal to democratic institutions or processes.

Now, it's not a given that just because there's a combination of democratic and economic unrest that you're necessarily going to get strongman leaders, but it certainly makes it more likely. It can facilitate that kind of politics.

Those are both what I see as long running factors that produced President Trump.

And then I'll just point to a very quick thing is that in the book, I spent some time in the conclusion arguing that when there's a imbalance between who democracy serves—you know, say we go in a much more sort of pro-market private sector direction—it makes it much harder for the government to articulate its raison d'être and the way that the government has effectively protected people or implemented programs that people care about.

These anti-state attitudes have been building in the United States for a really long time and that has made it more likely that people think the private sector should solve problems and it has also has really accelerated the thing that none of us really foresaw which is things like the private sector now, Elon Musk, being asked to make decisions about how the federal government should operate.

For the world's richest man, who's not democratically elected, to take a chainsaw to government and to seemingly do it without being held to account, because the litigation process is going to be slow and is likely to have differential outcomes depending on which circuit court you go to, that is an outcome that I didn't really anticipate: that we would literally just give capitalists the keys to the kingdom.

McFaul: Well, you and me both. I mean, just one more question on that and then let's talk about some solutions or party systems that work.

So this paradox in the United States: I'll just make it personal, but it's an anecdote about a bigger story that's in your book.

I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in Montana. Both my parents were members of unions. And my grandfather was a union leader in Wisconsin at a factory, right?

They voted for decades for Democrats, no question about it. There was never any debate. It was just, “we’re part of the Democratic Party.” And now, seeing the data from the last several election cycles, you have this flip where people that self-identify as working class or less well-off in terms of income, vote for, as you say, a billionaire who's a president who's got as his lieutenant or co-president the richest man in the world. That's such a paradox to me. How did that happen?

Kuo: This his realignment of around class and education has been somewhat long in the running, I suppose.

Since the 90s, people have noted that there's new middle-class coalitions that support, for example, the DLC and the project of the Third Way. Whereas the Republican Party, which used to be very reliably the party of capital, has very recently been breaking its long-standing alliance with business.

When Kevin McCarthy was speaker, he argued that corporations are becoming “too woke.” That chambers of commerce are not reliably Republican enough. And we've started to see these tensions, within and among capitalists themselves, they say we need to move towards stakeholder capitalism rather than shareholder capitalism and embrace environmental, social, and governance goals and implement DEI projects.

All of that has been under attack by certain Republican leaders and Republican governors like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis. And today, I think we have a very uneasy relationship between capitol and the Republican Party. We've seen a lot of owners of corporations capitulate very quickly to Trump. But again, I don't think that this is like a long-term winning strategy.

But the realignment is also around education. So part of it is that there's not really a reliable party of the working class. And the left is in crisis across the advanced democracies. The social democrats have had very bad electoral showings. In Germany, the worst post-war electoral showing ever was a few weeks ago.

And when that happens, the parties of the left now are more likely to represent people who are better educated. So professionals with higher levels of education, more reliably vote for parties of the left.  Whereas the working class is either up for grabs or increasingly is targeted by parties of the right, not necessarily through economic appeals, but instead through kind of grievance and nationalism, xenophobia, those kinds of cultural issues.

There are some scholars who have been able to empirically document that contestation over economic policy has either declined or stayed the same over the past 30 or 40 years, while there's been an uptick in contestation over cultural issues or ones that are person-based, that are less divisible, that there's less issues, areas for compromise. And that's how you're simultaneously able to see polarization between parties, even though there's also kind of an underlying—or was for a while, at least—economic consensus.

Which is all just to say that the issue of “who do the working class vote for?” is increasingly unsettled.  And both parties claim to represent the working class, although they do so in very different ways.

McFaul: Two last questions. I know we're running out of time. First, what's a good example of a well-functioning party system in the world?

Kuo: A party system that functions well is one that kind of preserves democracy and party competition.

And there are many places in Western Europe, where we still see similar trends of  less rates of party membership. People are less likely to want to join parties. They may switch their votes more, but those parties are still able to preserve democratic procedures and fairness.

I would point to places where parties have actually succeeded in blocking anti-democratic candidates.

In France, there have been multiple times that Marine Le Pen's National Rally made it to the final round of the French presidential election and the parties worked together to stop that. And that was also true when it looked as if that party, the National Rally, was going to make inroads in French legislative elections. All parties worked together to preclude that from happening by sort of bargaining over where they would run candidates.

You know that Poland's Law And Justice party finally suffered electoral defeat and was precluded from a majority by, again, a lot of civil society actors coming together with political parties across the spectrum to block PiS. 

And in Brazil and South Korea, leaders who have overreached have been held to account. 

That's less about parties in general and more about parties in moments of democratic crisis when there's a real possibility of an anti-democratic leader being elected. But I think that in the United States, we now face this question that is prior to building strong parties, we need to establish pro-democracy coalitions across people who disagree, you know, whose issues are not the same, who care about different things. But you have people in the center-right, who now don't have a party. You have people across the political spectrum who should care more about principles and American values than they do about whether or not they should continue to capitulate to this administration in this moment.

McFaul: Right. Well, you may have just answered my last question, but if you were going to write a decade from now, a new book called The Great Renewal, How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Do, what would have to change in that decade for you to be able to write that book?

Kuo: There's one theory of democratic transition called “pacting” about when, you know, elites come together and create just an agreement that they're going to put down their arms and agree on these rules of the game. 

The most basic thing that needs to happen is a recommitment to American values and holding people accountable who have violated those values. And I would say those values have to do with accountability, rule of law.

But that's a conversation for another time  But the first thing would be to get the democratic house in order to allow fair play and reestablishing the rules of the game.

The other things that I would really like to see are for parties to reestablish themselves as linkage organizations. And you could do this in any number of ways. One is that parties have been delegating a lot of the work of elections to outside groups. So get out the vote efforts, messaging, issue areas. They can bring that back in-house.

And Giovanni Sartori, a political scientist, once described parties as a transmission belt between society and leaders. If they want to do that again, they will need to bring all of that knowledge and work back within the parties and allow for a bottom-up process of listening to what it is people on the ground want. I don't want to just say voters, because they are more than that. Citizens, people who are living in this country and making their living here and trying to make it a better place also need some way of having their voices heard within the party and for parties to serve that sort of deliberative, factional, mediating function again.

I'd also like to see changes to campaign finance where we learn from most other democracies that have reigned in how private money can affect elections. We have really a diffuse campaign finance system now where many—especially billionaires—can influence politics or at least get their preferred outcome by acting through any number of channels outside the party. But given the current Supreme Court interpretation of speech and equating it to money, it's unlikely that we'll see that anytime soon, but I think it would be good for our political system.

And finally, I would like people who have an issue they care about, or who think the parties are failing, to work within parties rather than outside of them. You can build power outside of a party, but eventually you will need to work within the channels of party organizations to accomplish long-lasting change.

And I think that if people could sort of imagine a world in which they are partisans, but not in a fake way or a way that's highly attenuated from everyday action, but partisans who realize that compromise is part of this, and negotiation, and doing the hard work of everyday politics, seeing that as a goal rather than an enemy, I think would be very helpful.

McFaul: Well those are all very practical things to think about and for people to do.

So Didi, congratulations! Thanks for being on World Class.

The book is called The Great Retreat, How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't.

Please buy this book. If you don't buy books like this, they won't get written in the future. And we need this kind of research for the health of our democracy. This book is not just about parties; it's really about the future of democracy here in the United States and Europe.

So congratulations, Didi! Great to have you on World Class.

Kuo: Thanks Mike, thanks everyone for listening.

McFaul: You've been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on what's happening in the world and why.

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In a novel contribution to the field of comparative foreign policy analysis, this book, edited by Klaus Brummer (Katholische Universiteit Eichstätt, Germany) and Šumit Ganguly (Hoover Institution, Stanford University, California), carefully delineates how states, regardless of regime, have formulated policies to deal with their national communities aboard. Some states, depending on their domestic political ideologies, cultures and capabilities, have extensive institutional mechanisms in place for coming to the aid of their nationals abroad. Others, however, have also used these capabilities in adverse ways. Chapters focusing on individual countries explore the rationale behind state policies that differentiate treatment for distinct groups, such as tourists, migrants, and diasporas. Amongst the intriguing findings is the fact that state capacity alone does not explain the ability or willingness of states to assist their nationals abroad in times of need. Furthermore, in some cases, communities abroad can also actively mobilize against their home state, thus play key roles in conflict and even regime change.
 

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‘As migration reshapes the world, this pioneering study sheds light on the vital issue of how states engage with their nationals abroad. Brummer and Ganguly show how a host of political and economic factors lead states to support or repress their overseas citizens. This fascinating volume is an essential guide to understanding a key dimension of international relations.'

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‘This uniquely focused and masterfully designed collection examines the intricate relations between states and their nationals abroad from a comparative and global perspective. It sheds significant light on interdisciplinary studies in foreign policy, comparative government, diaspora, and migration. An essential reading for understanding world politics amidst the dynamics of globalization.'

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Throughout the week, students will have the opportunity to learn about the government's vision for democracy at the National Security Council, explore an academic view of development from scholars at the World Bank, and dive into the challenges and advantages of empowering local democratic activists — particularly in countries hostile to democracy — with speakers at the National Endowment for Democracy, among other exciting site visits. They are also encouraged to use this time to connect with experts related to their thesis question. The culminating event of the trip will bring current honors students together with alumni from across the greater D.C. area for a networking happy hour.

CDDRL’s Fisher Family Honors Program brings together undergraduates from diverse fields and methodologies who are united by their passion for understanding democracy, development, and rule of law (DDRL). The aim of the program is for students to carry out original, policy-relevant research on DDRL and produce a coherent, eloquently argued, and well-written honors thesis.

This year's Honors College begins on Sunday, September 15, and will be led by Didi Kuo and Stephen Stedman, who jointly direct the honors program, alongside Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy Larry Diamond.

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Gillian completed her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University in 2024. She earned her M.Phil. in Criminology at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Herchel Smith Harvard Scholar. Gillian graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Social Studies and a minor in Psychology. Her research has been recognized with Centennial, Charlotte Elizabeth Procter, Marion J. Levy, Jr., and P.E.O. Scholar fellowships.

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In May 2024, Georgia's president, Salome Zourabichvili, vetoed the Parliament's contentious anti-foreign agent law, but called her act "symbolic," as the majority Georgian Dream party promised to override the veto at their next session.

In a talk hosted by The Europe Center on May 28, Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), explored Georgia's democratic aspirations within the context of the law, dissecting its potential ramifications for civil society, political freedoms, and Georgia's European integration ambitions.

Professor Stoner, who was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2016 from Iliad State University in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, also discussed the politics and complexities of the recent law and its implications for Georgia's future.

A recording of the talk can be viewed below:

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Francis Fukuyama, Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, is leading an effort to protect and reform the U.S. public service. He has organized a Working Group to Protect and Reform the Civil Service in response to plans elaborated in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 to strip civil service protections from all federal workers and replace them with political loyalists in a future administration.

The Need for Reform


A group of nonpartisan experts and scholars recently convened at the National Academy of Public Administration to discuss civil service reform. This discussion is critical in light of plans to revive "Schedule F," an executive order that would reclassify many federal positions, remove civil service protections, and allow political loyalty to dictate hiring and firing.

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The Working Group proposes an alternative vision for a more effective federal workforce based on five principles:

  1. Agility: Modernizing outdated systems to adapt to technological, economic, and social changes.

  2. Accountability: Ensuring federal employees remain loyal to the Constitution while being responsive to elected officials.

  3. Collaboration: Leveraging skills and knowledge across various sectors, including private industries and universities.

  4. Outcomes: Focusing on producing real-world results valued by the public and simplifying government procedures.

  5. Capacity: Providing federal workers with the skills, training, and education needed to fulfill their missions effectively.
     

Risks of “Schedule F”


Reviving “Schedule F” would undermine these goals, promoting politicization over merit-based results. Government workers might avoid necessary risks and innovation if judged on political loyalty. The Working Group plans to detail further how the federal government can evolve to meet these challenges and become a 21st-century government.

Fukuyama and the Working Group call for support in protecting and reforming the civil service to ensure a competent, non-partisan, and effective federal workforce. Click here to read their statement in full.

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Francis Fukuyama
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Francis Fukuyama Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award

The Fred Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement in Public Administration is an academic award given annually by the Section on International and Comparative Administration of the American Society for Public Administration.
Francis Fukuyama Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award
Solving Public Policy Problems
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Reimagining Public Policy Education at Stanford and Beyond

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is proud to announce the launch of a new free massive open online course aimed at providing participants with a foundational knowledge of the best means for enacting effective policy change in their home countries.
Reimagining Public Policy Education at Stanford and Beyond
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A new working group led by Francis Fukuyama seeks to protect and reform the U.S. civil service by promoting nonpartisan, effective, and adaptable workforce practices while opposing politicization efforts like "Schedule F."

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CDDRL Visiting Scholar, 2023-25
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Mona Tajali is a scholar of gender and politics, specializing in women's political participation and representation in Muslim countries, with a comparative focus on Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkey. Her research includes analysis of feminist mobilization against patriarchal structures as well as the experiences of institutionalization of women's rights in semi-democratic and non-democratic contexts. She is the author of Women’s Political Representation in Iran and Turkey: Demanding a Seat at the Table (2022) and co-author of Electoral Politics: Making Quotas Work for Women (2011), both published as open access. She is also the co-editor of Women and Constitutions in Muslim Contexts (2024), the first compilation analyzing several national constitutions of the Muslim world through a gender lens.

A firm believer in engaging across the academic-practitioner divide, Tajali has been a long-term collaborator with transnational solidarity network and Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), and, since 2019, has served as a member of its executive board. She is published in both academic and popular outlets, among them the Middle East JournalPolitics & GenderThe Conversation, and The Washington Post. Tajali is a former associate professor of international relations and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.

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Every September, rising seniors in the Fisher Family Honors Program travel to the nation's capitol for CDRRL's Honors College. During this week-long program, students visit a wide variety of policy-related institutions in Washington, D.C., and gain firsthand exposure to how these organizations, the federal government, and think tanks work to advance democracy and development around the world.

Throughout the week, students will have the opportunity to learn about the government's vision for democracy at the National Security Council, explore an academic view of development from scholars at the World Bank, and dive into the challenges and advantages of empowering local democratic activists — particularly in countries hostile to democracy — with speakers at the National Endowment for Democracy, among other exciting site visits. They are also encouraged to use this time to connect with experts related to their thesis question. The culminating event of the trip will bring current honors students together with alumni from across the greater D.C. area for a networking happy hour.

CDDRL’s Fisher Family Honors Program brings together undergraduates from diverse fields and methodologies who are united by their passion for understanding democracy, development, and rule of law (DDRL). The aim of the program is for students to carry out original, policy-relevant research on DDRL and produce a coherent, eloquently argued, and well-written honors thesis.

This year's Honors College begins on Sunday, September 17, and will be led by Didi Kuo and Stephen Stedman, who jointly direct the honors program, alongside Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy Larry Diamond.

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Fisher Family Honors Program Class of 2024
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Introducing Our 2023-24 CDDRL Honors Students

We are thrilled to welcome ten outstanding students, who together represent eleven different majors and minors and hail from four countries, to our Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.
Introducing Our 2023-24 CDDRL Honors Students
2023 Honors Thesis Award Winners, Tara Hein and Sean Michael
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Graduating CDDRL Honors Students Recognized for Outstanding Theses

Tara Hein ('23) is a recipient of the 2023 Firestone Medal and Sean Michael ('23) has won CDDRL's Outstanding Thesis Award.
Graduating CDDRL Honors Students Recognized for Outstanding Theses
Phi Beta Kappa graduates
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CDDRL Congratulates Newly Elected 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Members

Tara Hein and Sorcha Whitley (honors class of 2023) are among the newest members of this prestigious academic honors society.
CDDRL Congratulates Newly Elected 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Members
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From September 17 through 23, the Fisher Family Honors Program class of 2024 will attend CDDRL's annual Honors College, gaining firsthand exposure to how the federal government, policy organizations, and think tanks work to advance democracy and development around the world.

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Governance in California
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Governance is the way that societies make decisions and solve problems. Good governance is difficult when a society is divided in its values, when trust in governing institutions is low, when political participation is biased along various social lines, and when there is not enough reliable information and structured debate in the media. Complicating matters further, governments may not be able to reach important decisions when there are too many veto points that enable small groups to delay or stop decisions, regardless of their merit or public support. Finally, even after a decision is made, governmental agencies may lack the personnel and capacity to implement and administer policies.

While California’s governance system has solved many problems, its governance system suffers from significant challenges in many areas. These include: hard problems (with large-scale challenges associated with climate change, housing, poverty, and more), multiple veto points in public decision-making, partisan division, and polarization, lack of trust in institutions, biased participation in public decisions, and the need to accelerate the modernization and strengthening of civil service in state and local government.

SCENARIOS FOR THE FUTURE


The following are presented as four possible scenarios for California’s governance, media, and civil society future.
 

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A California 100 Report on Policies and Future Scenarios

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Henry E. Brady
Francis Fukuyama
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Hesham Sallam
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In a talk hosted by the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy on October 31, 2022, Hicham Alaoui, founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation, discussed his latest book – Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

During the event, co-sponsored by Stanford’s Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Center for African Studies, Alaoui presented a new theory for how democracy can materialize in the Middle East, and the broader Muslim world. He explained that one pathway to democratization lays not in resolving important, but often irreconcilable, debates about the role of religion in politics. Rather, it requires that Islamists and their secular opponents focus on the concerns of pragmatic survival—that is, compromise through pacting, rather than battling through difficult philosophical issues about faith.

You can purchase the book online, and watch a recording of the event below:

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To mark the 20th anniversary of the establishment of CDDRL, the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD) at CDDRL hosted a talk featuring Hicham Alaoui, founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation, who discussed his latest book – Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

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