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This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

How does autocratic lobbying affect political outcomes and media coverage in democracies? This talk focuses on a dataset drawn from the public records of the US Foreign Agents Registration Act. It includes over 10,000 lobbying activities undertaken by the Chinese government between 2005 and 2019. The evidence suggests that Chinese government lobbying makes legislators at least twice as likely to sponsor legislation that is favorable to Chinese interests. Moreover, US media outlets that participated in Chinese-government sponsored trips subsequently covered China as less threatening. Coverage pivoted away from US-China military rivalry and the CCP’s persecution of religious minorities and toward US-China economic cooperation. These results suggest that autocratic lobbying poses an important challenge to democratic integrity.

Erin Baggott Carter is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. There, she is also a Co-PI at the Lab on Non-Democratic Politics. She received a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and was previously a Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Dr. Carter's research focuses on Chinese politics and propaganda. She recently completed a book on autocratic propaganda based on an original dataset of eight million articles in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish drawn from state-run newspapers in nearly 70 countries. She is currently working on a book on how domestic politics influence US-China relations. Her other work has appeared or is forthcoming in the British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and International Interactions. Her work has been featured by the New York Times, the Brookings Institution, and the Washington Post Monkeycage Blog.

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This event is co-sponsored by the Arab Studies Institute

ABSTRACT

This talk is based on the speaker's new book Cleft Capitalism: The Social Origins of Failed Market Making in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2020). Egypt has undergone significant economic liberalization under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, USAID, and the European Commission. Yet after more than four decades of economic reform, the Egyptian economy still fails to meet popular expectations for inclusive growth, better standards of living, and high-quality employment. While many analysts point to cronyism and corruption, this study finds the root causes of this stagnation in the underlying social and political conditions of economic development. It offers a new explanation for why market-based development can fail to meet expectations: small businesses in Egypt are not growing into medium and larger businesses. The practical outcome of this missing middle syndrome is the continuous erosion of the economic and social privileges once enjoyed by the middle classes and unionized labor, without creating enough winners from market making. This in turn set the stage for alienation, discontent, and, finally, revolt. With this book, Adly uncovers both an institutional explanation for Egypt's failed market making, and sheds light on the key factors of arrested economic development across the Global South.

SPEAKER BIO

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Amr Adly is an assistant professor in the department of political science at The American University in Cairo. He worked as a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center. He has also worked as a project manager at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. Adly received his Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence. He is also author of Cleft Capitalism: The Social Origins of Egypt’s Failed Market Making (Stanford University Press, 2020) and State Reform and Development in the Middle East: The Cases of Turkey and Egypt (Routledge, 2012). He has been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals, including Geo-forum, Business and Politics, Turkish Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. Adly is also a frequent contributor to print and online news sources.

This five day intensive program for a select group of mid- and high-level Indian government officials and business leaders is designed to address how government can encourage and enable the private sector to play a larger, more constructive role as a force for economic growth and development. A driving principle of this LAD-LBSNAA program is that policy reform is not like engineering or other technical fields that have discrete skills and clear, optimal solutions. Instead, successful reformers must be politically aware and weigh a broad range of factors that influence policy outcomes. This program is designed to provide participants with an analytical framework to build these leadership abilities and operate effectively under adverse conditions.