Stanford University

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Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama and the 2012 Elections

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Abstract
Drawing on open-ended interviews with more than sixty political staffers, accounts of practitioners, and fieldwork, in this talk I present the previously untold history of the uptake of new media in Democratic electoral campaigning from 2000 to 2012. I follow a group of technically-skilled Internet staffers who came together on the Howard Dean campaign and created a series of innovations in campaign organization, tools, and practice. After the election, these individuals founded an array of consulting firms and training organizations and staffed a number of prominent Democratic campaigns. In the process, they carried their innovations across Democratic politics and contributed to a number of electoral victories, including Barack Obama's historic bid for the presidency, and currently occupy senior leadership positions in the president's re-election campaign. This history provides a lens for understanding the organizations, tools, and practices that are shaping the 2012 electoral cycle.  

In detailing this history, I analyze the role of innovation, infrastructure, and organization in electoral politics. I show how the technical and organizational innovations of the Dean and Obama campaigns were the product of the movement of staffers between fields, organizational structures that provided spaces for technical development, and incentives for experimentation. I reveal how Dean's former staffers created an infrastructure for Democratic new media campaigning after the 2004 elections that helped transfer knowledge, practice, and tools across electoral cycles and campaigns.  Finally, I detail how organizational contexts shaped the uptake of tools by the Obama campaign in 2008 and 2012, analyze the emergence of data systems and managerial practices that coordinate collective action, and show how digital cultural work mobilizes supporters and shapes the meaning of electoral participation.

I conclude by discussing the relationship between technological change and democratic practice, showing how from Howard Dean to Barack Obama, new media have provided campaigns with new ways to find and engage supporters, to run their internal operations, and to translate the energy and enthusiasm generated by candidates and political opportunities into the staple resources of American electioneering.  While these tools have facilitated a resurgence in political activity among the electorate, this participation has come in long institutionalized domains: fundraising, volunteer canvassing, and voter mobilization.  Meanwhile, participation is premised on sophisticated forms of data profiling, targeted persuasive communications, and computational managerial practices that coordinate collective action.  As such, I argue that the uptake of new media in electoral campaigning is a hybrid form of organizing politics that combines both management and empowerment. 

Daniel Kreiss is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kreiss's research explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice. In Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012), Kreiss presents the history of new media and Democratic Party political campaigning over the last decade. Kreiss is an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and received a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University. Kreiss's work has appeared in New Media and Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, The Journal of Information Technology and Politics, and The International Journal of Communication, in addition to other academic journals.

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Daniel Kreiss Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication Speaker University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Social Foundations of Institutional Order in Latin America

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Abstract:

This talk will present an account of long-run institutional development in Latin America that emphasizes the social and political foundations of state-building processes. The argument focuses on societal dynamics that have path-dependent consequences at two critical points: the initial consolidation of national institutions in the wake of independence, and at the time when the "social question" of mass political incorporation forced its way into the national political agenda across the region during the Great Depression. Dynamics set into motion at these points in time have produced widely varying, but highly stable distributions of state capacity in the region.

About the speaker:

Marcus Kurtz is an Associate Professor at Ohio State University. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of comparative politics, democratization, political economy and development, with a focus on Latin America. His publications have appeared in such journals as American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, Journal of Politics, and Politics & Society. He has written two books, Free Market Democracy and the Chilean and Mexican Countryside (Cambridge, 2004) and Latin American State Building in Comparative Perspective (forthcoming, Cambridge 2013).

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Marcus Kurtz Associate Professor, Department of Political Science Speaker Ohio State University

Francis Fukuyama

Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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Francis Fukuyama Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow Moderator CDDRL, Stanford University
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The Arab Uprising

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Abstract:

Nearly two years after the Tunisian uprisings launched a massive wave of regional protest across the Arab world, many important and highly contested questions remain. How has the protest wave affected the dynamics of regional politics? Has the protest wave ended, or is it likely to recur? What explains the timing, the accomplishments and the limitations of that protest wave? What does the survival of many Arab regimes, the frustration of revolutionaries, the rise of Islamist movements in electoral politics, and the spiraling conflict in Syria mean for hopes of democratization and peaceful political change?

About the speaker:

Marc Lynch is associate professor of political science and international affairs at The George Washington University, where he directs the Institute for Middle East Studies. He also directs the Project on Middle East Political Science, edits the Middle East Channel for ForeignPolicy.com and the Columbia University Press book series Columbia Studies on Middle East Politics, and is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. His most recent publications include The Arab Uprising (PublicAffairs 2012), Islamists in a Changing Middle East (ForeignPolicy 2012), and Blogs and Bullets II: New Media and the Arab Spring (US Institute for Peace).

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Marc Lynch Director, Institute for Middle East Studies Speaker George Washington University
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Visualizing Political Struggle in the Middle East

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Abstract:

Marking the publication of Lina Khatib's latest book Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle, this seminar focuses on the evolution of political expression in the Middle East over the past decade, highlighting the visual dimension of power struggles between citizens and leaders in Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Syria.

About the speaker:

Lina Khatib is a co-founder and Program Manager of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She joined Stanford University in 2010 from the University of London where she was an Associate Professor. Her research is firmly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersections of politics, media, and social factors in relation to the politics of the Middle East. She is also a consultant on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, US public diplomacy towards the Middle East, and political media and conflict in the Arab world, as well as on the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She has an active interest in the link between track two dialogue and democratization policy. She is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and, from 2010-2012, a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

Lina is a founding co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, a multidisciplinary journal concerned with politics, culture and communication in the region, and in 2009 co-edited (with Klaus Dodds) a special issue of the journal on geopolitics, public diplomacy and soft power in the Middle East. She also edited the Journal of Media Practice from 2007-2010. She is one of the core authors of the forthcoming Arab Human Development Report (2012) published by the UNDP.

She has written two books, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (IB Tauris 2006), which is a study of the link between international relations and film, focusing on 25 years of cinematic representation of politics in the region (1980-2005), from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the Gulf War to Islamic fundamentalism, and Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond (IB Tauris 2008). The book takes a socio-political approach to the study of Lebanese cinema over the last thirty years, focusing on the issues of Lebanese national identity, history, sectarian conflict, and memory of the Civil War.

Lina has recently finished writing a book titled Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle for IB Tauris. The book examines the power struggles among states, other political actors, and citizens in the region that are expressed through visuals, and focuses on case studies from Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Iran, with a focus on the role of the image as a political tool in the Arab Spring. She has also recently led a multidisciplinary research project on US public diplomacy in the digital age, in collaboration with the University of Oxford and the University of Wolverhampton, the outcome of which will appear in the Middle East Journal in 2012.

Before joining the academic field, Lina worked in broadcast journalism in Lebanon. She is a frequent commentator on the Middle East in the media with appearances on Al-Jazeera (Arabic and English), CNN, BBC, Sky News and other media outlets across the globe

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Lina Khatib Program Manager for the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker CDDRL
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Exploring new technologies at Stanford to monitor human rights

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It's the middle of the night when Maina Kiai receives an urgent plea from a human rights advocate in Russia. A recent draft law threatens to block civil society organizations from accessing foreign funding, cutting off their financial lifeline and exposing them to close monitoring by the state. Their work reporting on the government's moves to choke public dissent and suppress free speech is in jeopardy if this law is passed by the Russian legislature.

As the special rapporteur on the rights of peaceful assembly and association for the United Nations, Kiai's job is to collect first-hand information on human rights abuses and bring it to the attention of the international community.

Kiai is one of about 50 lawyers, experts and advocates around the world who volunteer their time as special rapporteurs for the U.N. Human Rights Council. With mounting case loads, a limited staff and shrinking budgets, special rapporteurs are left with little support to fight injustice and aid victims of some of the gravest human rights abuses.

In search of new tools to empower their work, the rapporteurs are now tapping the academic and innovative resources at Stanford to help them do their jobs better.

Harnessing the power of technology

Professor Jeremy Weinstein led the August workshop on new technologies and human rights monitoring.
Photo credit: Sarina Beges

Recognizing that technology can increase productivity and efficiency, Stanford’s Jeremy M. Weinstein organized a workshop to bring technologists together with the rapporteurs and other experts to explore how new technologies can help them magnify their impact.

Weinstein, an associate professor of political science and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford, pushed for the use of new technologies as tools for promoting human rights and democracy when he served as the director of democracy and development on the National Security Staff of the White House.

“Special Rapporteurs occupy a unique position, with the legitimacy and mandate of the United Nations behind them as they track human rights abuses around the world," Weinstein said. "New technologies have the potential to amplify their voices, extend their reach, and ensure that citizens around the world have access to this valuable mechanism.”

Weinstein says the rapporteurs can use simple technologies such as database management systems and mobile phone applications to manage the volume of inquiries they receive, increase their response time to victims’ needs and build political support for their recommendations.

Juan Méndez, the rapporteur responsible for tracking torture and other abuses, receives upwards of 50 complaints a day from citizens and NGOs around the world. He wants a way to better organize, process and prioritize inquiries that would allow him to respond to victims in a more strategic, timely and systematic way.

"We have been self conscious of the need to apply new technologies and we are always looking for better ways of applying technology," Méndez said. "In my case, there is quite a learning curve to understand what the new technologies are and how they might work."

One of the most powerful tools for a special rapporteur is the country visit where they spend two to three weeks in a country of concern, visiting local nongovernmental organizations, meeting with government officials, holding press conferences and arranging visits with victims. Special rapporteurs must be invited by the host government to visit and countries with some of the most egregious human rights abuses on record - such as Iran and Zimbabwe - deny them access.

Due to the sensitivity of their findings, special rapporteurs are granted independence and impartiality in their jobs as they often have to say things that make governments uncomfortable. Sharing their findings is a challenge. Other than media coverage, the rapporteurs don’t have easy access to a large audience or the resources to disseminate their findings and recommendations widely in local languages.

But social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter could help heighten their profiles and improve communication with the public. During country missions, for instance, tweets and Facebook posts could easily advertise their visits to attract media and share their findings.

Tapping Stanford's technical edge

Since returning to Stanford where he is a resident faculty member at FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), Weinstein has been using the university's technical edge to benefit those working to advance democratic practices.

Technologists and human rights leaders gathered at Stanford’s d.school to innovate and create new technologies for U.N. special rapporteurs.
Photo credit: Sarina Beges

Teaming up with the Brookings Institution and Google, CDDRL hosted an August workshop to bring together four special rapporteurs, civil society activists, technologists, and government donors to brainstorm how to best pair human rights monitors with the technology they need to be more effective in their work.

"What we’ve done is bring together a group of people who normally don’t talk to each other and got them to think about the subject from various users' points of view - the human rights victim, the civil society activist, the governments, and the special rapporteurs themselves,” said Ted Piccone, a senior fellow and deputy director for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and author of a new book, Catalysts for Change: How the UN’s Independent Experts Promote Human Rights . “But we also have experts from technology, from human rights organizers, from think tanks and research organizations, so the combination of smarts and ideas in that mix is fantastic."

The second day of the workshop was held at Stanford's d. school – the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design – where participants put the needs of the user at the center of the design process. Armed with an endless supply of markers, sticky notes and whiteboards, participants divided into groups to brainstorm how technology can assist the special rapporteurs with their mounting caseloads.

The ideas laboratory

Bringing the human rights and technology communities together underscored the gap that exists between the two worlds. Few of the special rapporteurs were using or familiar with technology tools ranging from social media, database management and encryption software.

While the digital divide may be large for some, it was evident from the technologists in the room that there are an abundance of innovative technologies to validate, manage and interpret data for special rapporteurs’ use.

"I would really love a streaming analysis, so public information out there is streamed to me live," said Kiai, the special rapporteur who focuses on assembly and association rights. "I would also like to have a website that can be accessed by activists around the world as a way to communicate and send updates to me."

Sanjana Hattotuwa demonstrates a mock-up of the Web-based dashboard designed for the special rapporteurs.
Photo credit: Sarina Beges

One of the ideas presented by Sanjana Hattotuwa, a special advisor to the ICT4Peace Foundation based in Geneva, is a mobile application that would allow anyone anywhere in the world to utilize audio, video, or text to submit a report of a human rights abuse.

"They could track it with a confirmation number, and it's a very easy way of submitting information to the special rapporteurs," said Hattotuwa. This could be a very promising innovation for victims to submit reports from the ease of a mobile device, and to bring them to the attention of the special rapporteurs in real time.

Hattotuwa said data obtained through this app could be fed into a Web-based dashboard system that would feature a world map highlighting where the reports are coming from, allowing the special rapporteur to process and visualize information. The dashboard would also feature a curated news feed.

While the special rapporteurs left the workshop more informed of these new tools and with some tangible ideas of how to enhance their work, many questions remained about the costs and training required for the users, as well as how to build political support for a future with more visible and accessible special rapporteurs.

"I think that there will always be institutional constraints - political constraints - things that we need to work through," said Méndez, the rapporteur who tracks torture cases. "But the four rapporteurs that are here these two days can actually carry the message of technology's use to the U.N. and try to resolve them."

Bringing the two worlds together for this workshop helped close the digital gap and introduce the potential that technology represents to the human rights community and beyond.

"What struck me most is how much there is out there, and how hard it is for us without context, to understand the tech world and how useful it can be," said Kiai. "So that of itself was a revelation."

 

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The War Within the War for Afghanistan

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Abstract:

Rajiv Chandrasekaran will discuss his new book, LITTLE AMERICA: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, which focuses on President Barack Obama's decision to surge troops and aid to Afghanistan. Chandrasekaran found the effort sabotaged not only by Afghan and Pakistani malfeasance but by infighting and incompetence within the American government: a war cabinet arrested by vicious bickering among top national security aides; diplomats and aid workers who failed to deliver on their grand promises; generals who dispatched troops to the wrong places; and headstrong military leaders who sought a far more expansive campaign than the White House wanted. Through their bungling and quarreling, they wound up squandering the first year of the surge.

About the speaker:

Rajiv Chandrasekaran is a senior correspondent and associate editor of The Washington Post. From 2009 to 2011, he reported on the war in Afghanistan for The Post, traveling extensively through the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar to reveal the impact of President Obama's decision to double U.S. force levels. He has served as The Post's national editor and as an assistant managing editor. In 2003 and 2004, he was The Post's bureau chief in Baghdad, where he was responsible for covering the reconstruction of Iraq and supervising a team of Post correspondents. He also wrote Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a best-selling account of the troubled American effort to reconstruct Iraq. He has served two terms as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he holds a degree in political science from Stanford University, where he was editor in chief of The Stanford Daily. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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Rajiv Chandrasekaran Senior Correspondent and Associate Editor Speaker The Washington Post
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Ramesh Srinivasan

Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Visiting Associate Professor, Fall 2012
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Ramesh Srinivasan, Associate Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He has worked with bloggers, pragmatically studying their strengths and limitations, who were involved in recent revolutions in Egypt and Kyrgyzstan, as discussed in a recent NPR interview. He has also collaborated with non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. His work has impacted contemporary understandings of media studies, anthropology and sociology, design, and economic and political development studies.

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Greg Distelhorst

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Greg Distelhorst is a Ph.D. candidate in the MIT Department of Political Science and a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His dissertation addresses public accountability under authoritarian rule, focusing on official responsiveness and citizen activism in contemporary China. This work shows how citizens can marshal negative media coverage to discipline unelected officials, or "publicity-driven accountability." These findings result from two years of fieldwork in mainland China, including a survey experiment on tax and regulatory officials. A forthcoming second study measures the effects of citizen ethnic identity on government responsiveness in a national field experiment. His dissertation research has been funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Boren Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation. A second area of research is labor governance under globalization, where he has examined private initiatives to improve working conditions in the global garment, toy, and electronics supply chains.

For more on Greg's research, please visit:
Governance Project Pre-doctoral Fellow 2012-2013

Q&A: Stanford experts on Kofi Annan's resignation as Syria envoy

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When Kofi Annan announced his plans to step aside as special envoy for the conflict in Syria by the end of the month, he put much of the blame on the United Nations Security Council for the failure to make peace in the war-ravaged country.

"When the Syrian people desperately need action, there continues to be finger pointing and name calling in the Security Council," Annan said. "It is impossible for me or anyone to compel the Syrian government and also the opposition to take the steps to bring about the political process. As an envoy, I can't want peace more than the protagonists, more than Security Council or the international community, for that matter."

The uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad began in March 2011 and rights activists say it has left more than 19,000 dead. Annan became the U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria in February, with the goal of getting both sides to put down their weapons. He designed a six-point plan for peace, which was never fully implemented.

Stephen J. Stedman, FSI's Freeman Spogli Senior Fellow, and Larry Diamond — a senior fellow at FSI and the Hoover Institution as well as director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law — offer their analysis of the impact of Annan's resignation.

Does the resignation of Annan, who is well respected among diplomats, signal that there is no hope for peace in Syria?

Diamond: I think it's been apparent for several weeks, at least, that the peace mission was doomed, that the Assad regime was not prepared to negotiate, and that the refusal of Russia and China to agree to any kind of meaningful pressure on the Assad regime has left violent resistance by the opposition and the society as the only option.

Syria is sinking deeper and deeper into all-out civil war, and only an escalation of military pressure and economic sanctions on the Assad regime and its principal leaders and supporters offers any hope of resolution. Sometimes, when one or both parties refuse to negotiate, the only way to end a civil war is for one side to win. Libya provides the most recent example of that. If Assad and his allies are going to negotiate a peaceful exit, it will only be because they are staring at the prospect of fairly imminent military defeat.

Could Annan have done something differently?

Diamond: It is very difficult to negotiate with a regime that is bent on repression and total domination, especially when you can't credibly threaten to impose formidable costs on the regime if it refuses to compromise. I don't think there was anything more that Annan could have done, because he had no leverage, no tools to work with, as a result of the inability of the Security Council to agree on tough sanctions.

Will the failure to make peace in Syria tarnish Annan's legacy?

Stedman: The failure to make peace in Syria should not and will not tarnish Annan's legacy. First, he is already a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and one failure in an extraordinarily difficult case does not diminish the rest of his diplomatic successes. With regards to Syria, no one expected him to succeed, but he needed to try and he needed to be seen to try. His position was special envoy of the Security Council, and if anyone is looking for a scapegoat they should start looking at the council.

Diamond: No, I don't think this will tarnish Annan's legacy. He had a nearly impossible mission; everyone knew that. The failure was a collective failure of the international system, not the failure of an individual mediator. Annan is a great man who has made major contributions to world peace and security. It's not his fault that a brutal regime, backed by the world's two most powerful authoritarian states, refused to negotiate.

Brooke Donald is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

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The Long and Winding Road: Brazil's unique path to a Truth Commission and the hopes for justice in the future

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On May 16, 2012, President Dilma Rousseff inaugurated the Truth Commission (Comissão da Verdade) and announced the Access to Information Law (Lei de Acesso à Informação).  Inspired by other Truth Commissions in other countries such as Argentina, Chile, Peru, Guatemala and El Salvador, the Brazilian Truth Commission has its own distinctive characteristics that respond to specific national political culture and costumes. Understanding these characteristics is fundamental to recognize how these laws may represent and advance the process of accountability for human rights violations in Brazil and the challenges that still persist due to opposing positions between the Legislative and Executive powers that have recognized these violations and a conservative Judiciary supported by the military.

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Nadejda Marques Manager Speaker Program on Human Rights
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