How does climate volatility alter citizen demands, change voting behavior, and affect the long-term reputation of elected (and unelected) officials? Does this effect come primarily through the economic damages caused by climate volatility or through alternative channels? Are they persistent or transitory?

As climate volatility becomes more extreme, so too will its destabilizing impact on politics. Yet we know relatively little about its effects on voting behavior, particularly in the developing world, and even less about downstream effects on the reputation of candidates and political institutions. Exploring the mechanisms behind these effects is also difficult due to a lack of data with the spatial and temporal resolution necessary for credible subnational analysis.

Here, we provide some of the first large-scale evidence on climate volatility’s effect on several measures of political accountability by combining several sources of survey data with high-resolution meteorological and climatic data. We also utilize a novel source of subnational economic data generated by combining remote sensing data with a convolutional neural network to generate annual, high-resolution estimates of growth at the 1x1km level for all of Africa. This ML-generated measure is a considerable improvement over nightlights-based alternatives and permits credible mediation analysis linking negative political outcomes to climate volatility through reductions in economic growth. We supplement our focus on Africa with companion estimates from Latin America, exploiting variation in national-level institutions to examine whether they can explain the substantial effect heterogeneity we observe in our reduced-form results.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Amanda Kennard is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She studies the politics of decarbonization and the impacts of climate change on political systems. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, an M.S. from Georgetown University, and a B.A. from New York University.

Brandon de la Cuesta is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), working primarily with Marshall Burke and other members of the Environmental Change and Human Outcomes (ECHO) lab to estimate the impact of climate change on various measures of political accountability. Brandon specializes in comparative political economy and causal inference with a strong regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Many of his current projects involve the use of remote sensing data and machine learning algorithms, particularly convolutional neural nets, to create global, high-resolution data that can be used for downstream inference tasks. A development economics application of this data was recently featured as the cover article in Nature.

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As the climate crisis grows more urgent, so does the question of how we can encourage citizens to mitigate it. We partner with a municipal government and NGO in Lebanon to evaluate a program that tracks and inspects citizens’ waste and then sends personalized feedback on how they can improve sorting quality. Two months after the intervention, the program improved sorting quality by an average of 0.3 out of 5 stars (14%) overall and 1.1 stars (42%) among those who complied with the program. Treated households were also over three times as likely to sign up for a raffle for ‘green’ prizes four months later (5.4% vs. 1.6%) — demonstrating an impact on other environmentally-conscious behaviors. However, positive effects disappear after the program ends. We find null results on sorting quality at the 12-month mark for all but a select few households who continue complying with the program even after inspections stop. We also observe negative treatment effects on the likelihood of volunteering for other environmental initiatives, indicating fatigue. The results suggest that information combined with monitoring can boost civic behaviors — but that continuous monitoring is likely needed to unlock durable results.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Salma Mousa is a scholar of social cohesion — typically using field experiments and partnerships with local governments and NGOs to explore the question of how to build it in the Middle East and beyond. Currently an Assistant Professor at UCLA's political science department, her research has been published in Science and covered by The Economist, BBC, Der Spiegel, the Times of London, and PBS NOVA. Salma received her PhD from Stanford University's political science department in 2020 and was previously an Assistant Professor of political science at Yale University.

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This talk overviews the state of governance in the Arab world and the conditions undermining governance improvement in the countries of the region, including corruption, rentier states, and social factionalism. The talk situates these realities in different conceptions and measurements of governance, including those informed by historical, governmental, economic, and sociocultural perspectives. Finally, it reflects on the prospects for a "governance renaissance" in the Arab world.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Raed H. Charafeddine was first vice-governor at Banque du Liban, Lebanon’s central bank, from April 2009 till March 2019 and served as alternate Governor for Lebanon at the International Monetary Fund. An expert in financial markets, his career spans thirty-five years in central and commercial banking. He is currently a partner and executive board director of Vita F&B Capital, a MEA-focused strategic advisory firm. Charafeddine served as a board member and advisor for several NGOs that focus on alleviating poverty, improving education, healthcare, social justice, and women's empowerment. He was also a volunteer consultant for the United Nations Development Program in Beirut on conflict transformation. He holds a BA and an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

In his recent co-edited book, The One State Reality: What is Israel/Palestine (Cornell University Press, 2023), Shibley Telhami and his colleagues have argued that what exists in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza is already a one-state reality and that the invocation of a two-state solution by American and international policymakers has, in effect, served as a smoke screen to avoid addressing this deeply unjust reality. The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli assault in Gaza have been on such a large and unprecedented scale that they are bound to impact, perhaps even transform, the existing reality. In his presentation, Telhami will assess the reality Israelis and Palestinians now face with an eye to what to expect ahead.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development, the Director of the University of Maryland’s Critical Issues Poll, and a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Before coming to the University of Maryland, he taught at several universities, including the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in political science. He has authored and edited numerous books, including one forthcoming book, Peace Derailed: Obama, Trump, Biden, and the Decline of Diplomacy on Israel/Palestine, 2011-2022 (co-authored). His most recent book is a co-edited with contributions volume, The One State Reality: What is Israel/Palestine?, published in March 2023 with Cornell University Press. He has advised every U.S. administration, from George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama. Telhami was selected by the Carnegie Corporation of New York along with the New York Times as one of the "Great Immigrants" for 2013, and Washingtonian Magazine listed him as one of the “Most Influential People on Foreign Affairs” in both 2022 and 2023. He is also the recipient of many awards, including the University of Maryland’s Distinguished Service Award and the University of Maryland’s Honors College Outstanding Faculty Award.

Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina Commons - 123 may attend in person.

Why could politicians of religious minority background assume the highest political offices in some countries soon after modern representative institutions were adopted, whereas, in other countries, almost all the national chief executives have been politicians from the religious majority background for decades, if not centuries?

I argue that the leading politicians of religious minority backgrounds in Europe potentially had three “secular” paths out of their marginality: liberalism, socialism, and nationalism. I examine these three paths that religious minority politicians pursued through the cases of Britain (liberalism), France (socialism), Hungary, and Italy (nationalism). I explain the variation in the rise of the first religious minority chief executives at the national level and the prominence of one of these three specific paths based on the religious configuration of the main actors in the constitutive conflict that established the nation-state. Finally, I examine a world-historical example of pattern change, the rise of Catholic-origin politicians to national leadership in previously Protestant-led Germany, which was due to a new constitutive conflict (World War II and the Holocaust) that radically altered the religious-national configuration. Religious minorities’ political (under-)representation constitutes a significant dimension of their (de-)securitization.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Şener Aktürk is Professor in the Department of International Relations at Koç University. He is a scholar of comparative politics, with a focus on comparative politics of ethnicity, religion, and nationalism. After completing his BA and MA at the University of Chicago and his PhD in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Government at Harvard University. His book, Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2012), received the 2013 Joseph Rothschild Book Prize from the Association for the Study of Nationalities.

His articles have been published in World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, Mediterranean Politics, Social Science Quarterly, European Journal of Sociology, Nationalities Papers, Problems of Post-Communism, Turkish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Osteuropa, Theoria, Ab Imperio, Insight Turkey, Turkish Policy Quarterly, Perceptions, and various edited books. He is the recipient of the Peter Odegard Award at UC Berkeley, the Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant, the Baki Komsuoglu Social Sciences Encouragement Award, the Kadir Has Social Sciences Prize, the TUBA Young Scientist Award, the BAGEP Science Academy Award, and the TUBİTAK Incentive Prize.

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Advocates of women's rights have long demanded greater access for women to political office, especially the national parliament, with hopes of influencing policymaking with feminist agendas. However, feminist activists’ focus on electoral politics has been mixed in autocratic and patriarchal contexts. While some research pointed to the role of critical actors in policymaking who act as feminist insiders, others warned about the futility of such intentions in undemocratic contexts. Comparing Iran and Turkey in recent decades, Dr. Tajali highlights the complexities of women’s substantive representation in autocratic contexts by mapping out various forms of feminist resistance, state backlash, and overall democratic recession. This analysis helps shed light on the conditions that led to the recent women-led protests in Iran and Turkey, such as the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprisings in Iran and the campaigns against the ruling Justice and Development Party’s unilateral decisions on women’s rights.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mona Tajali is an Associate Professor of International Relations and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Agnes Scott College and is currently a visiting scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University. Her research and teaching fall in the fields of Gender and Politics, Human Rights, and Social Movements in Muslim contexts. She is the author of Women’s Political Representation in Iran and Turkey: Demanding a Seat at the Table (Edinburgh University Press 2022) and co-author of Electoral Politics: Making Quotas Work for Women (with Homa Hoodfar), both published as open-access to facilitate their dissemination to diverse audiences and regions. Dr. Tajali is also a long-term collaborator with the transnational solidarity network Women Living Under Muslim Laws, 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 Journal, Politics & Gender, The Conversation, and The Washington Post.

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Control over patronage appointments is believed to confer an electoral advantage on the incumbent. We study the effects of the introduction of merit civil service legislation between 1900 and 2016 on reelection rates of individual legislators serving across lower houses of U.S. state legislatures. Using recently-developed statistical methods appropriate for the staggered introduction of reform legislation, results show that reelection rates significantly increase following abolition of patronage appointments to the state bureaucracy. To explain this surprising result, we study changes in the pool of politicians and document a selection effect: post-reform states see faster replacement of politicians than their unreformed counterparts. To understand this more fully, we bring in partial data on rerunning and legislator occupational backgrounds. Neither of these shows significant changes with reform. Overall, our results suggest that once rotation between elected and appointed offices was restricted by reform, more ambitious and professional legislators entered elected office. However, these traits appear unobservable.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Miriam Golden holds the Peter Mair Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute. She uses multiple research methods to investigate the political economy of governance, political representation, and corruption in countries around the world. Golden is currently engaged in a large-scale cross-national and historical study of how and when politicians secure reelection and has recently published The Puzzle of Clientelism: Political Discretion and Elections Around the World (Cambridge University Press, 2023) with Eugenia Nazrullaeva. Her articles have been published in The American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, The Annual Review of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and the British Journal of Political Science. She has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences and a recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.