Mr. William R. Pace has served as the Convenor of the Coalition for an International Criminal Court since its founding in 1995. He is the Executive Director of the World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy (WFM-IGP) and is a co-founder and steering committee member of the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect. He has been engaged in international justice, rule of law, environmental law, and human rights for the past 30 years. He previously served as the Secretary-General of the Hague Appeal for Peace, the Director of the Center for the Development of International Law, and the Director of Section Relations of the Concerts for Human Rights Foundation at Amnesty International, among other positions. He is the President of the Board of the Center for United Nations Reform Education and an Advisory Board member of the One Earth Foundation, as well as the co-founder of the NGO Steering Committee for the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and the NGO Working Group on the United Nations Security Council. He is the recipient of the William J. Butler Human Rights Medal from the Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights and currently serves as an Ashoka Foundation Fellow. Mr. Pace has authored numerous articles and reports on international justice, international affairs and UN issues, multilateral treaty processes, and civil society participation in international decision-making.

James D. Fearon is Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.  His research focuses mainly on political violence – interstate, civil, and ethnic conflict, for example – though he has also worked on aspects of democratic theory and the impact of democracy on foreign policy. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals, including “Self-Enforcing Democracy” (Quarterly Journal of Economics), “Can Development Aid Contribute to Social Cohesion after Civil War?” (American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings), “Iraq’s Civil War” (Foreign Affairs), “Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States” (co-authored with David Laitin, in International Security), “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War” (co-authored with David Laitin, in American Political Science Review), and “Rationalist Explanations for War” (International Organization). Fearon was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002, and has been a Program Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research since 2004. He served as Chair of the Department of Political Science at Stanford from 2008-2010.

Abstract: 
While the debate rages on regarding the role of social media technologies within the Egyptian revolution of 2011, and more generally the larger wave of ‘Arab Spring’ protests, the more relevant question of today is whether the 18 days of revolt may have done more for social media than vice versa. In different manners, social media technologies appear to be central to this discussion. From the Muslim Brotherhood’s use of technology to engage global publics, to activist uses of social media to build grassroots networks which bypass the barriers of infrastructure and access, or blogger uses of social media to impact older top-down media, social media technologies represent critical sites for analysis and critique. Building on two years of ethnographies and interviews, this paper identifies three key themes by which social media technologies shape political power: 1. Moving Past Bubbles, 2. Linking Older and Newer Media, and 3. Digital Subversion.

Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant 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 recently wrote a front page article on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post, an Op/Ed in the Washington Post on Social Media and the London Riots, an upcoming piece in the Washington Post on Myths of Social Media, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He was also recently in the New Yorker based on his response (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, 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. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv

Abstract
Ever since we started to organize ourselves socially, we have thought hard and long about how to ensure that we can develop checks on the power that we entrust to some in our organization, and how we can ensure that this power is not abused or misused in different ways. There are several different ways to accomplish this goal - from balancing power between different institutions to limiting it in time. One particularly effective and interesting way to accomplish this goal has always been transparency. If we as members of an organization, citizens in a state or just human beings gain insight into how power is used, and how decisions are made, we can review the exercise of power and act on what we find.

But designing transparency is hard, and requires careful thought. As in all institutional design, the end result needs to reflect the set of relationships in the society we live in, and it needs to change when our circumstances materially change as well. In this essay I will argue that we need to examine what it would mean to change from passive access as the goal of our transparency design to active disclosure, and what new institutional challenges that will present us with.

Nicklas Lundblad is senior policy counsel and head of public policy for Google in Mountain View where he leads a small team of policy experts in analyzing and advising on public policy. He has worked with tech policy since he wrote his first article on the politics of crypto in 1994. Prior to joining Google he was senior executive vice president of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce and co-founded Swedishcurrent affairs magazine Neo.. He currently serves on the Swedish ICT-council, advising the Swedish ICT-minister, works as a member of Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt's reference group on Internet Freedom and has been a member of several corporate and organizational boards. Nicklas was recently elected member of the Royal Engineering Academy in Sweden and is an Eisenhower fellow. In 2009 he was recognized as ICT-person of the year by the two largest computer and business publications in Sweden. He holds a B.A. in philosophy, a L.LM and a PhD in applied information technology. He has served on the e-Europe Advisory Board advising then-ICT-commissioner Reding on i2010 as well as represented Google in the OECD, ICC and WTO.

Abstract
Each week brings new stories of how people use digital media to break the rules of political power. Or more accurately, each week brings new stories about how people have used digital media to upset powerful elites, demand political freedoms, and look for justice. Activists armed only with mobile phones take breathtaking risks because they feel empowered by the supporting social networks they have been able to build and nurture for themselves. Yet sometimes digital media also gets used for evil, and we find drug lords, holy thugs, and rogue generals using the latest information technologies to oppress the communities they rule. So how do we add up the impact of such technologies on international politics? If digital media is so important to revolutionaries, dictators and corporate interests around the world, what are the new rules of engagement in global power politics? We are entering a period of global political life I call the Pax Technica that is made possible because of new information technologies. This peace is not so much the absence of war but the presence of transparent governments, empowered citizens, open information systems, and shared norms of information access. Governments don’t always want to be opened up for scrutiny, and activists don’t always use social media very well. But it is clear that the rules of global power politics have changed.

Philip N. Howard is professor of communication, information and international studies at the University of Washington. Currently, he is a fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. His latest book is Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring.  His writings appear at http://philhoward.org and tweets from @pnhoward.

This two day workshop will bring together scholars whose research actively engages problems of electoral irregularities.  Irregularities range from high levels of pre-election violence to electoral fraud to vote-buying and patronage. All these tactics potentially affect the outcomes of elections and all disempower citizens in their attempts to have their voices heard in the polity. On the whole, scholars who have concentrated on understanding patronage and clientelism have not interacted with those working on electoral fraud, and neither group has talked at great length to those expert in electoral violence. This workshop will bring together scholars with specific expertise in each of these topics in order to establish a new dialogue across expertise. 

Agenda (subject to change):

Day One: April 12, 2013

8:30-9:00 am Breakfast

9:00-9:10 am—Welcoming Remarks Beatriz Magaloni, Stanford University; Miriam Golden, UCLA

9:10-10:30 am—Panel 1: Electoral Fraud, Integrity, and Violence (1)

• Karen Ferree, UCSD: “Violating the Secret Ballot: The Political Logic of Fraud in Ghana’s 2008 Elections”
• James Long, Harvard University: “Scalable Information and Communications Technology Reduces Electoral Fraud in Fragile Democracies”
• Discussant: Miriam Golden, UCLA

10:30-10:45 am Break

10:45-12:10 pm—Panel 2: Electoral Fraud, Integrity, and Violence (2) 

• Isabela Mares, Columbia University: “The supply of electoral intimidation: Evidence from Imperial Germany”
• Eric Kramon and Miriam Golden: “Electoral Violence and Fraud in the 2012 Ghanaian Elections: Polling Station Results”
• Discussant: James Fearon, Stanford University 

12:10-2:00 pm Lunch

2:00-3:25 pm—Panel 3: Electoral Fraud, Integrity, and Violence (3)

• George Ofosu, UCLA: “Transitional Multiparty Elections: Do Military Regimes Perform Better at Promoting Fair Elections?”
• Joseph Asunka, UCLA: “Electoral investment through formal institutions”
• Discussant: Beatriz Magaloni, Stanford University

3:25-3:40 pm Break

3:40-5:00 pm—Panel 4: Clientelism 

• Mike Callen, UCSD, and Saad Gulzar, NYU: “Clientelism and Health Worker Absence: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Pakistan”
• Nahomi Ichino, Harvard: “Crossing the Line: Local Ethnic Geography and Voting in Ghana”
• Discussant: Barbara Geddes

Day Two: April 13, 2013

9:00-9:30 am Breakfast

9:30-11:00 am—Panel 5: Clientelism and Vote Buying 

• Sarah Brierley, UCLA: “Buying votes or buying time? Gift giving as an extension of the political party network in Ghana”
• Simeon Nichter, UCSD: “Voter Buying: Shaping the Electorate through Clientelism”
• Discussant: Fred Finan, University of California, Berkeley 

11:00-11:15 am Break

11:15-11:45 am—Concluding Session and Discussion