Governance

FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling. 

FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world. 

FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.

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Proponents of oil-led development believe that countries lucky enough to have "black gold" can base their development on this resource. They point to the potential benefits from enhanced economic growth and the creation of jobs, increased government revenues to finance poverty alleviation, the transfer of technology, the improvement of infrastructure and the encouragement of related industries. But the experience of almost all oil-exporting countries to date illustrates few of these benefits. To the contrary, the consequences of oil-led development tend to be negative, including slower than expected growth, barriers to economic diversification, poor social welfare performance, and high levels of poverty, inequality and unemployment. Furthermore, countries dependent on oil as their major resource for development are characterized by exceptionally poor governance and high corruption, a culture of rent-seeking, often devastating economic, health and environmental consequences at the local level, and high incidences of conflict

and war. In sum, countries that depend on oil for their livelihood eventually become among the most economically troubled, the most authoritarian, and the most conflict-ridden in the world.

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CDDRL Working Papers
Authors
Terry L. Karl
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Contrary to the predictions of standard economic theory, capital market liberalization has been a mixed blessing for many countries. Liberalization of debt inflows exposes economies to the risk of crises stemming from sudden changes in investor sentiment. Equity market liberalizations, on the other hand, have promoted growth in almost every liberalizing country. Yet equity market liberalizations have not had as strong an effect as might be expected. To convince outsiders to invest, countries must put in place laws and supporting institutions to protect the rights of minority shareholders. Countries with such protections tend to have larger, more efficient, and more stable stock markets than those that do not.

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CDDRL Working Papers
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Peter Blair Henry
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Globalization involves a profound re-ordering of our world with the proliferation everywhere of rules and transnational modes of governance. This book examines how this governance is formed, changes and stabilizes. Building on a rich and varied set of empirical cases, it explores transnational rules and regulations and the organizing, discursive and monitoring activities that frame, sustain and reproduce them. Beginning from an understanding of the powerful structuring forces that embed and form the context of transnational regulatory activities, the book scrutinizes the actors involved, how they are organized, how they interact and how they transform themselves to adapt to this new regulatory landscape. A powerful analysis of the modes and logics of transnational rule-making and rule-monitoring closes the book. This authoritative resource offers ideal reading for all academic researchers and graduate students of governance and regulation.

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Cambridge University Press, in "Transnational Governance: Institutional Dynamics of Regulation"
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All over the world new ideas and models emerge on how to organize the higher education sector and its institutions. The contributions in this volume identify the most influential transnational models and investigate their origins and mechanisms of dissemination as well as the resulting consequences for national systems. Will global trends in higher education lead to homogeneity or will they result in an increased differentiation? This question is addressed by higher education researchers with very different disciplinary and national backgrounds. Contributors are, among others, Jürgen Enders, John W. Meyer, Christine Musselin and Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson.

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transcript Verlag, in "Towards a Multiversity? Universities between Global Trends and National Traditions"
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Recent world events have created a compelling need for new perspectives and realistic solutions to the problem of sovereign debt. The success of the Jubilee 2000 movement in raising public awareness of the devastating effects of debt, coupled with the highly publicized Bono/O'Neill tour of Africa, and the spectacular default and economic implosion of Argentina have helped spur a global debate over debt. A growing chorus of globalization critics, galvanized by the Catholic Church's demand for forgiveness and bolstered by recent defaults, has put debt near the top of the international agenda. Creditor governments and international financial institutions have belatedly recognized the need for more sustainable progress on debt as an inescapable step towards economic recovery in many parts of the world. This book is intended to advance the dialogue around these issues by providing a comprehensive overview of the problems raised by debt and describing new and practical approaches to overcoming them. It will be the first in more than a decade to bring together under one cover the voices of prominent members of the international debt community. It will include pieces from the most relevant constituencies: from creditors (the IMF/World Bank, government lenders, private investors) to critics (debtor representatives, activists, and academics) and analysis from economists, bankers, lawyers, social scientists, and politicians. As contributions come from such leading thinkers across a range of disciplines, this book will offer a timely guide for understanding and influencing the debt debate.

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Oxford University Press, in "Sovereign Debt at the Crossroads"
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Peter Blair Henry
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The dramatic series of protests and political events that unfolded in Ukraine in the fall of 2004--the "Orange Revolution"--were seminal both for Ukrainian history and the history of democratization. Its effects have already been felt from Kyrgyzstan to Lebanon and are likely to travel even further. Yet few anticipated such a dramatic democratic breakthrough in Ukraine. Revolution in Orange is a pioneering effort to describe and explain the events leading up to and through December 2004 from authors who had on-the-ground experience interacting with the various Ukrainian, Western, and Russian dramatis personae of the Orange Revolution. The result is a highly readable, deeply informed, and insightful volume with lasting value as an explicator of this remarkable episode in the history of Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

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Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
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Michael A. McFaul
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The modern Romanian judiciary originates in the middle of the nineteenth century. The structure of the judiciary follows both the French model (the civil matters), and the Italian one (the commercial regulations). The Ministry of Justice plays a significant role in the administration of the judiciary. Romanian is a Roman language, and Romania has had long-standing cultural ties to France that were carried over to the legal sphere.

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CDDRL
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In the former (second) Yugoslavia (1945-1991) which was a federal state, according to the constitutional provision on the federal character of the state, judicial system was organized on the level of federal units (republic and provinces) and on the federal level only consistency of the case law was provided by the revision function of the Federal Court (cassation). Furthermore the Federal Attorney prosecutes the most severe crimes against the state and political order, taking into account the ideological charters of that order.

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In this report we examine the role of internal and external factors in advancing or preventing "democratic rule of law" reforms in Turkey over the last decade. We focus particularly on the role of the EU in trying to influence domestic reforms. We underline the interaction between domestic actors and this external actor. We primarily aim to figure out why, when, where and how has the EU managed to influence rule of law reforms and where it has failed to make a real impact. In conceptualizing this influence we distinguish between direct (through government-to-government pressure etc.) and indirect (through empowering domestic reformists strengthening pro-reform civil society, or coordinating with other international organizations to maximize external pressures) impacts.

Prepared for the workshop organized by Sabanci University, Stanford University and Centre of European Excellence - University of Florence on "Europeanisation and Democratisation: The Southern European Experience and the Perspective for New Member States of the Enlarged Europe", Istanbul 10-11th December 2005.

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This is a special event within the CDDRL Taiwan Democracy Program. In this panel discussion, three leading scholars in the field of China studies will address the relationship between Taiwan and mainland China from a long-term perspective.

Ramon H. Myers, senior fellow emeritus, was curator of the Hoover Institution's East Asian Collection for nearly three decades. He now is responsible for building the Hoover Institution's Chinese Archives and Special materials. He has written numerous books and articles related to Chinese economic history, Taiwan political and economic history, Japanese imperialism, and East Asian international relations. His most recent book, co-authored with Jialin Zhang and published by Hoover Institution Press is titled The Struggle Across the Taiwan Strait: The Divided China problem (2006).

Chih-yu Shih teaches cultural studies, political psychology and China studies at National Taiwan University and National Sun Yat-sen University. His recent publication includes Autonomy, Ethnicity and Poverty in Southwestern China: The State Turned Upside Down (2007), Navigating Sovereignty: World Politics Lost in China (2004), and Negotiating Ethnicity in China: Citizenship as a Response to the State.

Jialin Zhang is a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He received his degree at the Moscow Institute of International Relations in 1960, and served as a senior fellow of the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, PRC. His academic appointments include visiting scholar at the Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, Institute of International Economics in Washington, D.C., Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, Taiwan, etc. He is author and co-author of several Hoover essays, China's Response to the Downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, An Assessment of Chinese Thinking on Trade Liberation, U.S.-China Trade Issue after the WTO and the PNTR Deal-A Chinese Perspective, Some Implications of the Turnover of Political Power in Taiwan, The Debate on China's Exchange Rate-Should or Will it be revalued?

Philippines Conference Room

Ramon Myers Senior Fellow Panelist Hoover Institution
Chih-yu Shih Professor Panelist National Taiwan University
Jialin Zhang Visiting Fellow Panelist Hoover Institution

CDDRL
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab WorldWill China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Larry Diamond Senior Fellow Moderator Hoover Institution
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