Stanford University

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.

Governance Failures and Alternatives to Sovereignty

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Bad governance in weak states threatens not only the well being of citizens within these states but also the material interests of more powerful countries. The policy instruments currently available to repair deteriorated or collapsed domestic authority structures are inadequate for both failed and failing states and those that have been militarily occupied. The problems generated by inadequate governance cannot be adequately addressed within the confines of conventional sovereignty which stipulates that all states should enjoy both autonomy and international recognition. Alternative institutional arrangements, need to be developed including de facto if not de jure trusteeships and shared sovereignty arrangements that engage external actors in specific aspects of domestic governance on a quasi permanent basis.

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Publication Type
Working Papers
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
CDDRL Working Papers
Authors
Stephen D. Krasner

David Brady

Hoover Memorial Bldg, Room 350
Stanford, California, 94305-6010

(650) 723-9702 (650) 723-1687
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Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor in Public Policy, Bowen H. & Janice Arthur McCoy Professor in Leadership Values, Professor of Political Science
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David Brady is deputy director and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor of Political Science and Ethics in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and professor of political science in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the university.

Brady is an expert on the U.S. Congress and congressional decision making. His current research focuses on the political history of the U.S. Congress, the history of U.S. election results, and public policy processes in general.

His recent publications include, with John Cogan, "Out of Step, Out of Office," American Political Science Review, March 2001; with John Cogan and Morris Fiorina, Change and Continuity in House Elections (Stanford University Press, 2000); Revolving Gridlock: Politics and Policy from Carter to Clinton (Westview Press, 1999); with John Cogan and Doug Rivers, How the Republicans Captured the House: An Assessment of the 1994 Midterm Elections (Hoover Essays in Public Policy, 1995); and The 1996 House Elections: Reaffirming the Conservative Trend (Hoover Essays in Public Policy, 1997). Brady is also author of Congressional Voting in a Partisan Era (University of Kansas Press, 1973) and Critical Elections in the U.S. House of Representatives (Stanford University Press, 1988).

Brady has been on continuing appointment at Stanford University since 1987. He was associate dean from 1997 to 2001 at Stanford University; a fellow at the center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1985 to 1986 and again in 2001-2; the Autrey Professor at Rice University, 1980-87; and an associate professor and professor at the University of Houston, 1972-79.

In 1995 and 2000 he received the Congressional Quarterly Prize for the "best paper on a legislative topic." In 1992 he received the Dinkelspiel Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from Stanford University, and in 1993 he received the Phi Beta Kappa Award for best teacher at Stanford University.

Brady taught previously at Rice University, where he was honored with the George Brown Award for Superior Teaching. He also received the Richard F. Fenno Award of the American Political Science Association for the "best book on legislative studies" published in 1988-89.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Brady received a B.S. degree from Western Illinois University and an M.A. in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1970 from the University of Iowa. He was a C.I.C. scholar at the University of Michigan from 1964 to 1965.

Enforcing the Peace: There Aren't Enough Canadians

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Kimberly Marten is a tenured associate professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University, and also teaches at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).

She earned her Ph.D. at Stanford in 1991, and held both pre-doc and post-doc fellowships at CISAC. She has written three books: Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past (Columbia Univ. Press, 2004), Weapons, Culture, and Self-Interest: Soviet Defense Managers in the New Russia (Columbia University Press, 1997), and Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation (Princeton University Press, 1993), which received the Marshall Shulman Prize. Her numerous book chapters and journal articles include a Washington Quarterly piece in Winter 2002-3, "Defending against Anarchy: From War to Peacekeeping in Afghanistan," as well as op-eds in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune.

In May 2004 she was embedded for a week with the Canadian Forces then leading the ISAF peace mission in Kabul. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Program on New Approaches to Russian Security (PONARS). Her current research asks whether warlords and gangs can be changed from potential spoilers to stakeholders in state-building processes.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall

Kimberly Marten Associate Professor of Political Science Barnard College
Seminars

Putin Gambles Big--and Loses

Authors
Michael A. McFaul
News Type
Commentary
Date
Paragraphs
Michael A. McFaul argues that Russia's President Vladimir Putin has made a grave error in backing a loser in the recent Ukrainian Presidential Elections. McFaul notes that the damage to Putin's reputation has been severe and that his actions should "call into question the Bush administration's embrace of the Kremlin leader."
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Forms of Property Rights: Oligarchic Versus Democratic Societies

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Daron Acemoglu is Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Economic Growth program of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. He is also affiliated with the National Bureau Economic Research, Center for Economic Performance, and Center for Economic Policy Research.

His work has been published in leading scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal Economics and Review of Economic Studies to name a few. Daron Acemoglu's research covers a wide range of areas within economics, including political economy, economic development and growth, human capital theory, growth theory, technical change, and search theory. Acemoglu is also the editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics, and associate editor of the Journal of Economic Growth.

Abstract of paper presented in this research seminar

This paper develops a model where there is a trade-off between the enforcement of the property rights of different groups. An "oligarchic" society, where political power is in the hands of major producers, protects their property rights, but also tends to erect significant entry barriers, violating the property rights of future producers. Democracy, where political power is more widely diffused, imposes redistributive taxes on the producers, but tends to avoid entry barriers. When taxes in democracy are high and the distortions caused by entry barriers are low, an oligarchic society achieves greater efficiency. Nevertheless, because comparative advantage in entrepreneurship shifts away from the incumbents, the inefficiency created by entry barriers in oligarchy deteriorates over time. The typical pattern is therefore one of the rise and decline of oligarchic societies: of two otherwise identical societies, the one with an oligarchic organization will first become richer, but later fall behind the democratic society. I also discuss how democratic societies may be better able to take advantage of new technologies, how an oligarchic society might transition to democracy because of within-elite conflict, and how the unequal distribution of income in oligarchy supports the oligarchic institutions and may keep them in place even when they become significantly costly to society.

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Encina Basement Conference Room

Daron Acemoglu Professor of Economics MIT
Seminars

Escaping the Resource Curse? A Look at Nigeria

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Professor Tom Heller of Stanford University Law School and CDDRL's Program on Rule of Law will speak on his current research.

Encina Basement Conference Room

Thomas C. Heller

Crown Quad rm 329
Stanford, California 94305-8610

(650) 723-7650 (650) 725-0253
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Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies, Emeritus
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An expert in international law and legal institutions, Thomas C. Heller has focused his research on the rule of law, international climate control, global energy use, and the interaction of government and nongovernmental organizations in establishing legal structures in the developing world. He has created innovative courses on the role of law in transitional and developing economies, as well as the comparative study of law in developed economies. He co-directs the law school’s Rule of Law Program, as well as the Stanford Program in International Law. Professor Heller has been a visiting professor at the European University Institute, Catholic University of Louvain, and Hong Kong University, and has served as the deputy director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, where he is now a senior fellow.

Professor Heller is also a senior fellow (by courtesy) at the Woods Institute for the Environment. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1979, he was a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School and an attorney-advisor to the governments of Chile and Colombia.

FSI Senior Fellow and Woods Institute Senior Fellow by courtesy
Thomas C. Heller Professor Stanford Law School and CDDRL
Seminars

Reconstituting Iraq: Making the Interim Constitution

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Feisal Istrabadi is the Deputy Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations, and one of Iraq's most important constitutional thinkers. He was one of the principal legal drafters of Iraq's interim constitution (adopted on March 8 of 2004) and the lead author of its Bill of Fundamental Rights. During 2002-2003 he was a member of the Democratic Principles Working Group and the Transitional Justice Working Group of the Future of Iraq project. A native of Iraq, he was schooled in the United States and practiced law in the central United States for fifteen years, with extensive trial and appellate court experience. He holds Bachelor's of Science and Doctor of Jurisprudence degrees from Indiana University, and has been a senior fellow at the International Human Rights Law Institute, College of Law, DePaul University, Chicago.

Oksenberg Conference Room

Feisal Istrabadi Deputy Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations
Lectures

The Natural State and the Political-Economy of Non-Development.

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Barry Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He served as chair of the Political Science Department from 1996 to 2001. He is also a professor of economics, by courtesy, at Stanford.Weingast is an expert in political economy and public policy, the political foundation of markets and economic reform, U.S. politics, and regulation. Weingast authored (with Robert Bates, Avner Grief, Margaret Levi, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal) Analytic Narratives, published in 1998. Weingast is editor, with Kenneth A. Shepsle, of Positive Theories of Congressional Institutions (University of Michigan Press, 1995). His current research focuses on the political determinants of public policymaking and the political foundations of markets and democracy.

Douglass C. North was the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics. He is currently the Hoover Institution's Bartlett Burnap Senior Fellow. His 1990 Cambridge University Press Book, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, is a staple in graduate courses in political economy around the world. North's current research activities include research on property rights, transaction costs, economic organization in history, a theory of the state, the free rider problem, ideology, growth of government, economic and social change, and a theory of institutional change.

John Wallis is a Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. He is the author of American Economic Growth and Standards of Living Before the Civil War, with Robert Gallman, NBER, University of Chicago Press, 1992, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on American economic history.

Encina Hall Basement Conference Room

Barry Weingast Professor of Political Science Stanford University
Douglass North Hoover Senior Fellow Stanford University
John Wallis Professor of Economics University of Maryland
Seminars

Reflections on Iraq's Political Transition

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Feisal Istrabadi is the Deputy Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations, and one of Iraq's most important constitutional thinkers. He was one of the principal legal drafters of Iraq's interim constitution (adopted on March 8 of 2004) and the lead author of its Bill of Fundamental Rights. During 2002-2003 he was a member of the Democratic Principles Working Group and the Transitional Justice Working Group of the Future of Iraq project. A native of Iraq, he was schooled in the United States and practiced law in the central United States for fifteen years, with extensive trial and appellate court experience. He holds Bachelor's of Science and Doctor of Jurisprudence degrees from Indiana University, and has been a senior fellow at the International Human Rights Law Institute, College of Law, DePaul University, Chicago.

He will be speaking about his experiences in drafting the Iraqi interim constitution as well as the current political situation in Iraq.

Encina Basement Conference Room

Feisal Istrabadi Deputy Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations
Seminars
Program on Democracy - Completed
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