**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the event: Governments in sub-Saharan Africa face tough choices in COVID-19 policy response. They have scarce resources but are under intense pressure to balance pandemic control with ensuring people have basic necessities -- while also staving off violence and political instability among distrustful publics. Until a vaccine is widely available, the primary way to combat COVID-19 is encouraging cooperation with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Our research provides African governments with evidence on how to increase voluntary cooperation with NPIs. I will present preliminary results from ongoing data collection efforts designed to provide policy-relevant information for government decision makers in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. Evidence from endorsement, list, and vignette experiments offer insights into citizen compliance with health policies, the gap between individual attitudes and perceptions of peers' behavior, and the dangers of COVID-related misinformation.

About the speaker: Leah is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Graduate School of Business in the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her research centers on topics in comparative politics and the political economy of development. Her focus on the micro-foundations of political behavior to gain leverage on macro-political questions. How do autocrats survive? How can citizen-state relations be improved and government accountability strengthened? Can shared identities mitigate out-group animosity? Adopting a multi-method approach, use lab-in-the-field and online experiments, surveys, and in-depth field research to examine these questions in sub-Saharan Africa and the US. Her current book project reexamines the role of elections in authoritarian endurance and explains why citizens vote in elections with foregone conclusions in Tanzania and Uganda. Moving beyond conventional paradigms, her theory describes how a social norm of voting and accompanying social sanctions from peers contribute to high turnout in semi-authoritarian elections. In other ongoing projects, Her study is how national and pan-African identification stimulated through national sports games influence attitudes toward refugees, the relationship between identity, emotions, and belief in fake news, and how researchers can use Facebook as a tool for social science research.

**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the Event:  American democracy has been more prone to crisis than we commonly recognize. Comparative studies of democracy suggest that four threats imperil democracy: political polarization, conflict over who belongs as a full member of society, high and rising economic inequality, and excessive executive power. We survey five periods of American history in which these threats have appeared in different configurations, posing recurring challenges to American democracy. When even one threat was present – as in the 1790s, the 1930s, or the 1970s – the nation risked backsliding. Twice – in the 1850s and again in the 1890s – three threats converged, leading to civil war and then precipitating the disenfranchisement of millions of African American men. Today, all four threats are present for the first time, presenting unprecedented danger to the American experiment.

About the Speaker:  Robert C. Lieberman is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of several award-winning books on American politics and previous served as provost of Johns Hopkins and dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

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Suzanne Mettler is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell. She is the author five previous books, including, most recently, The Government-Citizen Disconnect and Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream. She was recently awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship and a Guggenheim Award, and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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This event will take place on Zoom. Registration is required: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NzD-GVYjRY-vSxHkLmSzdQ

At a time when protests in the United States and around the world are bringing attention to systemic abuses committed by the police, many are asking important questions about what works in police reform. While significant scholarly attention has focused on how increases in police spending impact crime, far less attention has been paid to the efficacy of institutional reforms that reshape who joins the police, how police are trained, and rules and procedures that govern police-citizen relations. Drawing on comparative evidence from their own micro-level studies of police reform in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Beatriz Magaloni and Jeremy Weinstein will explore the evidence base for prominent reforms now on the policy agenda including: community policing, external oversight, and the use of new technologies (e.g. body-worn cameras). Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, will offer welcome remarks.

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.

ABSTRACT

This talk examines the multiple crises manifesting in Lebanon today and their impact on the fate of the uprising that began in October 2019. While the currency, fiscal, and infrastructural crises were central to the making of Lebanon’s uprising, the novel strategic innovations that the protesters made were key to shaping its trajectory relative to past protests. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has both exacerbated existing dynamics while also providing respite to the government and some of the traditional political parties. The presentation therefore engages these complexities to take stock of the current status of popular mobilizations, elite efforts to contain them, and the economic structures that undergird both.

SPEAKER BIO

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