Why are opposition party leaders able to form multiparty coalitions to compete against entrenched incumbents in some African countries, but not in others? Leo Arriola challenges the conventional wisdom by showing that opposition coalitions are formed more frequently than is suggested by the region's relatively high reelection rates. Using data on executive elections held in 33 African countries between 1990 and 2005, he demonstrates that opposition coalitions are more likely to be affected by economic conditions than by ethnic divisions or institutional arrangements.

Leo Arriola is a pre-doctoral fellow at CDDRL. He seeks to understand under what conditions opposition parties in Africa can achieve coordination in running against incumbents. He takes Kenya, Ethiopia, Senegal and Cameroon as his main case studies. Leo is advised by Jim Fearon and David Laitin at Stanford, and has returned from fieldwork in Senegal and Cameroon in the Summer of 2006. He has previously spent time conducting research in Ethiopia and Kenya. He has a BA from Claremont, McKenna, and an MPA in International Relations from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. When he leaves CDDRL next summer, he will become Assistant Professor of Political Science at Berkeley.

Nikolay Marinov is Assistant Professor in the Political Science department at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 2004. He spent 2004-2005 as a Global Fellow at UCLA. His current research looks at the effectiveness of economic sanctions, at the role of the international community in the spread of democracy around the world, and at the effects of international institutions.

Dr. Andrei Illarionov served as President Valdimir Putin's Chief Economic Advisor (2000-2005) and his personal representative to the G-8 (2002-2005). He resigned from both posts in December 2005, in objection to the government's curtailment of political freedoms. From 1993 to 1994, Illarionov served as chief economic advisor to the prime minister of the Russian Federation, Viktor Chernomyrdin. He resigned in February 1994 to protest changes in the government's economic policy. From 1994 to 2000, Illarionov was the director of the Institute of Economic Analysis.

Andrei Illarionov is a passionate advocate of an open society and democratic capitalism in Russia and a forceful and articulate critic of the political, economic, and social situation in the country.

Illarionov received his PhD in economics in 1987 from the Leningrad State University. Illarionov has coauthored several economic programs for Russian governments and has written three books and more than 300 articles on Russian economic and social policies. He joined the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity in 2006 as a senior fellow.

On Tuesday, November 14, the Stanford Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) will be hosting a first look at Making IT: The Rise of Asia in High Tech.

Making IT is edited by Henry S. Rowen, Marguerite Gong Hancock and William F. Miller, and features findings by scholars from from the United States, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China and India.

As Stanford University Press publishes Making IT this November, we invite you to attend this first look and discussion among scholars, policymakers and industry leaders.

Eleonora Pasotti is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Cruz and Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL. Her work has been concerned with the relationship between democracy, personal power and electoral law. Pasotti's research at CDDRL is directed toward three aspects of this relationship: how proportional and majoritarian electoral systems interact with clientelistic networks; how institutions shape the cost structure of political mobilization; and how institutions of vote mobilization, from clientelism to mass campaigning, distort the normative goal of democracy. Her previous work has been based largely on the politics of Naples, Italy, but has broad comparative implications for the study of clientelism, patronage politics and populism in the developing world as well. Prior to joining the faculty at Santa Cruz, Eleonora completed a PhD in Political Science at Columbia University under the direction of Charles Tilly, Jon Elster, and Ira Katznelson. She also holds an MSc in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Anders Åslund joined the Institute for International Economics in 2006. He has served previously as the director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 2003 and as codirector of the Carnegie Moscow Center's project on Economies of the Post-Soviet States. He joined the Carnegie Endowment as a senior associate in October 1994. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. His work examines the transformation of formerly socialist economies to market-based economies. While the central areas of his studies are Russia and Ukraine, he also focuses on the broader implications of economic transition.

Åslund has served as an economic adviser to the governments of Russia and Ukraine and to President Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan. He was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and director of the Stockholm Institute of East European Economics. He has worked as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Poland, Geneva, and Moscow. He is a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and an honorary professor of the Kyrgyz National University. He is co-chairman of the Economics Education and Research Consortium and chairman of the Advisory Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE), Warsaw.

He is the author of Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge University Press, 2001), How Russia Became a Market Economy (Brookings, 1995), Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform, 2d ed. (Cornell University Press, 1991), and Private Enterprise in Eastern Europe: The Non-Agricultural Private Sector in Poland and the GDR, 1945-83 (Macmillan, 1985) and editor or coeditor of several books, including with CDDRL Director, Michael McFaul, Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006).

This event is co-sponsored with the Center on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Motoo Noguchi is a professor at UNAFEI (United Nations Asia and Far East Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders) in Tokyo, serving concurrently as senior attorney at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Legal Affairs Bureau.

He started his career as public prosecutor at the Ministry of Justice in 1985 and has accumulated considerable experience in criminal investigations and trials. He also has long experience in the provision of legal technical assistance for developing countries in Asia including Cambodia, firstly as professor at the Research and Training Institute of the Ministry of Justice, then as counsel at the Asian Development Bank, and currently as professor at UNAFEI. Noguchi was appointed in May 2006 to be one of three international judges of the Appeals Chamber of the Khmer Rouge Trials by the government of Cambodia. The trial will bring to justice members of the Khmer Rouge government accused of massacres in the 1970s. The United Nations created the tribunal in 2003 to try former Khmer Rouge Leaders.

Motoo Noguchi is a Graduate of University of Tokyo, Faculty of Law. He was a visiting scholar at University of Washington, Law School, USA from 1992-93 and a visiting professional at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands in 2005. He was a visiting fellow at Yale last fall and will be a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School during his stay at Stanford in January.