Michael Bennon is a Research Scholar and program manager of CDDRL’s Global Infrastructure Policy Research Initiative. Having served as a Captain in the US Army and US Army Corps of Engineers, he now teaches Global Project Finance at Stanford University. His research focuses on infrastructure development, specifically on the importance of restructuring incentives, public-private partnerships, legal regulation, and the shifting landscape of foreign investment in infrastructure.

What inspired you to pursue research in your current field, and how did your journey lead you to CDDRL?

I used to work for the federal government as an engineer. We were constantly running into hurdles, unnecessary red tape, and misaligned incentives — I felt there had to be a better way to do infrastructure development. So, I went to graduate school at Stanford, studying under Dr. Raymond Levitt, who focused on the cross-disciplinary intersection of engineering, international relations, finance, and law. We worked to address gaps in the research world regarding infrastructure development from a project finance perspective.

After graduate school, I continued working with Dr. Levitt and began teaching about the financing of large infrastructure projects. I began collaborating with CDDRL when researching China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and international infrastructure development more broadly. The throughline of my journey, from focusing on engineering to organization management to law, has been to follow the biggest challenges in infrastructure.

How do you visualize the creation of more effective incentive structures to motivate private companies to further global development? How can the public-private partnership work more effectively?

There's a myriad of flaws in the infrastructure development sector with incentives. The basic disconnect is that in a democracy, elected officials rely on bureaucracy and various agencies to develop complex infrastructure projects, which can lead to a convoluted system. When a government infrastructure project goes over budget, the many groups involved often don’t bear the costs — taxpayers do.

However, effective public-private partnerships can help solve these broken incentives. For example, if a project is structured so that the companies building the infrastructure are also responsible for maintaining it, then they are incentivized to create projects that last.

Internationally, in the old pre-BRI paradigm of development, there were two ways for a developing country to fund its infrastructure: either by borrowing money or financing projects through foreign direct investment. For the latter, there’s a form of private-public partnership, as international investors invest directly into the project instead of through the government.
 

In a new video series, CDDRL scholars Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and Larry Diamond, FSI's Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy, examine how democracy-promotion programs are being systematically weakened under the new administration. Building on Diamond's recent essay, The Crisis of Democracy Is Here, the discussions highlight growing threats to global democratic institutions and U.S. leadership in defending them.

In the first video, Fukuyama and Diamond discuss how the new United States presidential administration’s actions go beyond policy differences to threaten democratic institutions and the rule of law. They highlight concerns over Elon Musk’s involvement in government operations, potential violations of legal procedures, and efforts to undermine checks and balances. Diamond warns that moves like firing inspectors general and withholding congressionally approved funds signal an authoritarian shift rather than legitimate governance. The conversation urges vigilance in distinguishing policy changes from power grabs that erode democracy.

In a CDDRL Research Seminar Series talk, Julia Azari, Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, explored the link between race, presidential transformation, and impeachment crises. She argued that presidents who significantly alter the racial status quo often face backlash, leading to populist successors who undermine democratic norms and ultimately face impeachment. She examined three cases — Andrew Johnson following Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon following Lyndon Johnson, and Donald Trump following Barack Obama — highlighting how racial politics shaped their presidencies and impeachment crises.

Azari’s framework situates race at the heart of presidential politics. Presidents usually maintain political stability, but transformative leaders disrupt racial hierarchies through legislation, executive action, and symbolism. This disruption sparks resistance, exploited by successors who reject transformation and undermine opposition. These backlash presidents often overreach institutionally, leading to impeachment. However, Azari argued impeachment rarely halts reactionary movements, which outlast individual leaders and shape long-term politics.

Her first case examined Lincoln’s presidency, which ended decades of compromise over slavery through the Civil War, emancipation, and constitutional amendments. His successor, Andrew Johnson, sought to reverse these changes through “presidential reconstruction,” allowing Southern states to reinstate white supremacist governance. His impeachment stemmed from both political imperatives — opposing Radical Reconstruction — and institutional overreach, violating the Tenure of Office Act. Though he survived removal, Reconstruction ultimately failed, and white supremacy prevailed.

The second case analyzed Nixon’s presidency following Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights transformation. Johnson’s passage of landmark legislation triggered a white backlash, which Nixon capitalized on with “law and order” rhetoric and the Southern Strategy. His impeachment crisis resulted from abuses of executive power, including spying on opponents and obstructing justice in the Watergate scandal. Though Nixon resigned, his realignment of the Republican Party and weakening of civil rights enforcement persisted.

The final case examined Obama’s presidency, which symbolically challenged the whiteness of the office, intensifying racial polarization. Conspiracies about his identity and accusations of favoritism toward minorities fueled Trump’s rise. Trump embraced racially charged policies, from the Muslim travel ban to attacking the 1619 Project. His two impeachments reflected this broader racialized political crisis — first for withholding Ukraine aid to pressure an investigation into Biden, and second for inciting the January 6 insurrection to overturn the 2020 election.

Azari concluded that racial transformation triggers backlash, leading to populist leaders who challenge institutional norms and face impeachment. However, impeachment alone is ineffective in stopping these movements, as they continue shaping U.S. politics. With Trump’s continued influence and the 2024 election looming, this pattern of transformation, backlash, and institutional crisis is likely to persist.

India’s once-robust democracy is in decline, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) being the only party with effective political organizing and a clear national message. FSI Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy Larry Diamond, Hoover Senior Fellow Šumit Ganguly, and Hoover Research Fellow Dinsha Mistree reflected on this reality in a CDDRL seminar series talk. The discussion built on findings from their recently released book, The Troubling State of India's Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024).

The absence of a coordinated opposition in India has continued to threaten the functioning of its democracy. The challenges confronting the Indian National Congress Party (INC) are at the heart of the problem.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the INC emerged as a healthy political party. It enjoyed a unified national vision that championed secularism and independence from the British Empire. By being inclusive towards various political and religious identities, it unified a vast coalition across India’s broad geography, utilizing effective grassroots organizing mechanisms.

Today, however, the INC is hampered by extreme personalism due to the domineering role of the Gandhi family. The party lacks the organization or national vision to compete with the BJP. This decline began under the populist prime minister Indira Gandhi, who rose to power in the late 1960s. She replaced party leaders with loyalists and sycophants, weakening critical party mechanisms. The party began to set aside ideologically-driven political priorities in favor of more personalistic sinecures.

As subsequent members of the Gandhi family continued to lead the party, the INC failed to pose as an effective alternative to the BJP. The lack of political options results in a harmful feedback loop where citizens are discouraged from engaging with the opposition at all because they perceive no other candidates as having a chance at gaining power.

The future of India’s democratic competition requires the revival of opposition parties. Local parties at the state level are unlikely to grow to match the BJP, as they are often focused on specific ethnic and regional concerns, as well as lacking the infrastructure to take on the BJP nationally. The INC, once a leading national party, is unlikely to reinvent itself effectively unless it is released from the personalist grasp of the Gandhi family. The history of coalition building among the diversity of parties at the state and regional levels may provide a potential model for democratic checks or even electoral alternation. In any case, vigorous opposition must emerge from within India's political party system if backsliding is to be countered in the world's largest democracy.

A full recording of the seminar can be viewed below:

When political parties are strong intermediaries between citizens and the government, they can effectively manage the relationship between democracy and capitalism, political scientist Didi Kuo told a Stanford audience.

But when parties become weak intermediaries, they lay the groundwork for crises in democracy, she said during a February 20 event for her new book, The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press, 2025). In her work, she challenged the narrative that parties are the problem and explained that strengthening them is actually the key to addressing current challenges to democracies.

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) hosted the panel discussion with Kuo, Center Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, and co-director of CDDRL’s Fisher Family Honors Program; Bruce Cain, professor of political science at Stanford and director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West; Jake Grumbach, associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley; and Julia Azari, professor of political science at Marquette University.

Kuo described how political parties in the last 50 years have grown weaker and more unpopular while also becoming increasingly professionalized and beholden to the private sector – trends that have resulted in a “plutocratic populism” where parties no longer exist to represent their constituents.

‘They’re often hollow’

As democracy expanded across the West in the 19th century, she said, political parties were often strong and arguably machine-like in their effectiveness. Then, after the Cold War, a neoliberal economic consensus emerged that included seismic changes to campaign finance and shifting party priorities. The effects included the weakening of the party systems of Western democracies, a ceding of governance to the private sector, and, as a result, a crisis in democracy.

“Party organizations themselves have become far more professionalized, elite, and focused exclusively on the technology and machinery of election campaigns. There's been much less role for state and local parties,” said Kuo, adding that in this “era of nationalized parties,” political parties at these lower levels have become sidelined. “They're often hollow.”

And that creates an opening for some. For example, she said, after 2010, the extreme right began to build local power in parties. “Steve Bannon did a podcast in which he recommended that people look up their local Republican Party organization. He said you’re very likely to find that it’s empty, so you can just go there with some of your friends. Sign up, become a local party chair, and then you can take over election administration. So, this was a strategy that was promulgated on his podcast prior to 2020.”