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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.

Lunch Seminar Series | Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age: The Report of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

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Join Stephen Stedman, Nathaniel Persily, the Cyber Policy Center, and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) in an enlightening exploration of the recent report, Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age, put out by the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age. Moderated by Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Center.

More on the report:

 

Abstract:

New information and communication technologies (ICTs) pose difficult challenges for electoral integrity. In recent years foreign governments have used social media and the Internet to interfere in elections around the globe. Disinformation has been weaponized to discredit democratic institutions, sow societal distrust, and attack political candidates. Social media has proved a useful tool for extremist groups to send messages of hate and to incite violence. Democratic governments strain to respond to a revolution in political advertising brought about by ICTs. Electoral integrity has been at risk from attacks on the electoral process, and on the quality of democratic deliberation.

The relationship between the Internet, social media, elections, and democracy is complex, systemic, and unfolding. Our ability to assess some of the most important claims about social media is constrained by the unwillingness of the major platforms to share data with researchers. Nonetheless, we are confident about several important findings.

About the Speakers

Stephen Stedman
Stephen Stedman is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, professor, by courtesy, of political science, and deputy director of the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law. Professor Stedman currently serves as the Secretary General of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age, and is the principal drafter of the Commission’s report, “Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age.”

Professor Stedman served as a special adviser and assistant secretary general of the United Nations, where he helped to create the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, the UN’s Peacebuilding Support Office, the UN’s Mediation Support Office, the Secretary’s General’s Policy Committee, and the UN’s counterterrorism strategy. During 2005 his office successfully negotiated General Assembly approval of the Responsibility to Protect. From 2010 to 2012, he directed the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, an international body mandated to promote and protect the integrity of elections worldwide.  Professor Stedman served as Chair of the Stanford Faculty Senate in 2018-2019. He and his wife Corinne Thomas are the Resident Fellows in Crothers, Stanford’s academic theme house for Global Citizenship. In 2018, Professor Stedman was awarded the Lloyd B. Dinkelspiel Award for outstanding service to undergraduate education at Stanford.

Nathaniel Persily

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, and New York, and as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

Also among the commissioners of the report were FSI's Alex Stamos, and Toomas Ilves. 

 

 

Stephen Stedman

The Rise of Women in Muslim Political Parties

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This event is co-sponsored with The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

ABSTRACT

Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Roza Otunbayva in Kyrgystan, Megawati Sukarno Putri in Indonesia: female Muslim leaders are seen as pioneers at the forefront of the empowerment of women in Muslim-majority countries and more generally the empowerment of women on a global scale. The younger generation of women Muslim leaders have forged their political struggle and discourse in the post-9/11 context. More recently, they have surfed the wave of hope and disillusion of the Spring revolution(s). A major difference with the first generation of female Muslim leaders is that the younger generation’s political identity is strongly grounded in Islamic references. They are (or have labelled themselves) as Islamists, Islamist democrats or Muslim democrats that propose an alternative to the exclusive secular discourse.

Through the experience of Sayida Ounissi, we explore the genuine and challenging role of a new generation of female leaders, in Muslim democrats or Islamist parties. This discussion goes beyond the common assumptions and clichés of the veil oppressed Muslim women, the question of the compatibility between Islam and democracy or Islam and feminism. It rather looks at the rise of young women Muslim democrats in Islamist or Muslim parties in a way to grasp the feminine, and sometimes feminist, re-definition of the Islamic tradition and Islamist or Muslim democrats discourse. It explores the modes of transmission of political struggle and ideologies, from fathers to daughters, and from mothers, whether passive or active Islamists, to daughters. Finally, it examines the challenges posed to their ascensions within their parties and society by analysing how these women are re-appropriating conservative Islamic codes, other cultural or religious practices, and the social and political concepts inherent to their respective local and global context, in order to secure legitimate ascension in their parties and societies.

SPEAKRER BIO

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Sayida Ounissi is a member of the Tunisian Assembly of People’s Representatives and Minister for Employment and Vocational Training.  She represents Tunisians living in the North of France for the Ennahdha Party and was first elected in October 2014 and reelected in October 2019.  In 1993, her family fled the dictatorship of Ben-Ali for France where she completed all of her schooling. In 2005, she joined the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne for a double degree in History and Political Science. She obtained her Masters at the Institute for the Study of Economic and Social Development, and completed her studies with an internship at the African Development Bank in Tunis. In 2016, she was recruited by Prime Minister Youssef Chahed to join his Cabinet as Secretary of State in the Ministry of Employment and Vocational Training, charged with vocational training and private initiative. In 2018, she was promoted as the Minister for Employment and Vocational Training, becoming the youngest minister in Tunisia.

MODERATOR BIO

Portrait of Sophie Lemiere
Sophie Lemiere is a Political Anthropologist and FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor, 2019-20, at Stanford University. She is a former Fellow for the Democracy in Hard Places Initiative at the Ash Center for Democracy, Harvard University. In 2014, she received her PhD from Sciences-Po, France. Her thesis was the first study on the political role of gangs through umbrella NGOs in Malaysia. In 2019-2020, Sophie has been awarded the Visiting Fellowship at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University and the Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellowship at the International Forum for Democratic Studies (National Endowment for Democracy-NED), in Washington, D.C.

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Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age | The Report of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

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Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age | The Report of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

New information and communication technologies (ICTs) pose difficult challenges for electoral integrity. In recent years foreign governments have used social media and the Internet to interfere in elections around the globe. Disinformation has been weaponized to discredit democratic institutions, sow societal distrust, and attack political candidates. Social media has proved a useful tool for extremist groups to send messages of hate and to incite violence. Democratic governments strain to respond to a revolution in political advertising brought about by ICTs. Electoral integrity has been at risk from attacks on the electoral process, and on the quality of democratic deliberation.

The relationship between the Internet, social media, elections, and democracy is complex, systemic, and unfolding. Our ability to assess some of the most important claims about social media is constrained by the unwillingness of the major platforms to share data with researchers. Nonetheless, we are confident about several important findings.

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Nathaniel Persily
Stephen J. Stedman

Engaging, Empowering, and Enabling Youth to Lead Social Action in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro

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This study is the result of over four years of active collaboration between the Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab (PovGov) and the Rio-based NGO Agency for Youth Networks (hereafter, Agency). What began in 2012 as an informal conversation between PovGov researchers and the program’s founder and director, Marcus Faustini, led to a solid partnership that has produced not only this research but also opportunities for engagement through events both in California and in Rio de Janeiro. A central objective of PovGov’s research agenda is to assess and disseminate knowledge about initiatives and policies seeking to benefit socially vulnerable populations throughout Latin America. Agency’s target population – namely, young people from the favelas and peripheries of Rio de Janeiro who often find themselves unemployed, out of school, and exposed to high levels of violence – being of great relevance to PovGov’s work. 

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Beatriz Magaloni
Veriene Melo

Public Good Provision and Traditional Governance in Indigenous Communities in Oaxaca, Mexico

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Can ethnically distinct communities ruled through “traditional” assemblies provide public goods and services better, than when they are ruled by leaders elected through “modern” multiparty elections? We exploit a unique institutional feature in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, where municipalities are ruled by traditional governance institutions, to explore the effect of these forms of governance on the provision of public goods. Using locality-level census data, we study the provision of local public goods through a geographic discontinuity approach. We demonstrate that communities ruled by traditional governance practices offer more effective provision of local public goods than equally poor communities ruled by political parties. Relying on qualitative fieldwork and household surveys, we argue that the significant differences in the provision of public goods according to governance regime derive from community practices that solve collective action problems, enhance citizen participation in public decisions, and restrain elite capture.

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Beatriz Magaloni
Alberto Díaz-Cayeros

Ayça Alemdaroğlu

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Ayça Alemdaroğlu is the Associate Director of the Program on Turkey and a Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She is also a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). As a political sociologist, Ayça explores social and political inequalities and changes in Turkey and the Middle East.

Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the Associate Director of the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program at Northwestern University. 

She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Cambridge, her MA in political science from Bilkent University, and her BSc. degrees in political science and sociology from the Middle East Technical University. 

She serves on the editorial committee of the Middle East Report. 

Associate Director, Program on Turkey
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Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency

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Ill Winds book cover

Larry Diamond has made it his life’s work to secure democracy’s future by understanding its past and by advising dissidents fighting autocracy around the world. Deeply attuned to the cycles of democratic expansion and decay that determine the fates of nations, he watched with mounting unease as illiberal rulers rose in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, the Philippines, and beyond, while China and Russia grew increasingly bold and bullying. Then, with Trump’s election at home, the global retreat from freedom spread from democracy’s margins to its heart.

Ill Winds’ core argument is stark: the defense and advancement of democratic ideals relies on U.S. global leadership. If we do not reclaim our traditional place as the keystone of democracy, today’s authoritarian swell could become a tsunami, providing an opening for Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and their admirers to turn the twenty-first century into a dark time of despotism.

We are at a hinge in history, between a new era of tyranny and an age of democratic renewal. Free governments can defend their values; free citizens can exercise their rights. We can make the internet safe for liberal democracy, exploit the soft, kleptocratic underbelly of dictatorships, and revive America’s degraded democracy. Ill Winds offers concrete, deeply informed suggestions to fight polarization, reduce the influence of money in politics, and make every vote count.

In 2019, freedom’s last line of defense still remains “We the people.”

Learn More about Ill Winds
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From America’s leading scholar of democracy, a personal, passionate call to action against the rising authoritarianism that challenges our world order—and the very value of liberty.
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Larry Diamond
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A Season of Caesars

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"Ideologically, today’s autocrats are a more motley and pragmatic crew. They generally claim to be market friendly, but mainly they are crony capitalists, who, like Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, and Erdogan in Turkey, are first concerned with enriching themselves, their families, and their parties and support networks. Increasingly, they raise a common flag of cultural conservatism, denouncing the moral license and weakness of the “the liberal West” while advancing a virulent antiliberal agenda based on nationalism and religion," writes Larry Diamond. Read here. 

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Justice as Checks and Balances: Indigenous Claims in the Courts of Colonial Mexico

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Abstract:

Why did colonial powers establish courts to address Indigenous grievances? Under which conditions did these rulers decide to rule in favor of Indigenous claimants, even at the expense of their own state agents? This paper addresses these questions by studying the legal battles between Indigenous communities, Spanish settlers, and local bureaucrats in the General Indian Court of colonial Mexico (GIC). I apply an existing framework developed in the judicial politics literature to understand how the Spanish Crown allowed, and even encouraged, the Indigenous population to raise claims against local bureaucrats. Moreover, I offer a theoretical contribution to this literature by defining the scope conditions under which autocratic regimes might also use the judicial system to constrain local elites. To further explore the decision-making process of this colonial court, I develop a model that predicts that the GIC offered favorable rulings to Indigenous claimants in a strategic way. I predict that a favorable ruling was more likely in cases that involved colonial agents, were related to land invasions or physical abuses, and originated from areas where local elite power was high and Indigenous population more vulnerable. I provide empirical evidence of the strategic use of the colonial court using a mixed-methods approach including paleographic transcriptions, human coding, and text analysis of a novel dataset of more than 30,000 judicial claims. These results have implications for our understanding of both the development of Indigenous legal autonomy in colonial history and for the more general strategic development of judicial power in autocracies. One plausible, yet controversial, implication is that Indigenous communities had more tools to resist oppression during the colonial period than following the rise of the nation-state.

 

Speaker Bio:

edgar vivanco
Edgar Franco Vivanco is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. He studied a PhD in political science at Stanford University. During 2018-19, he was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Edgar is a collaborator with the Poverty, Governance, and Violence Lab at Stanford University, and with the Digging Early Colonial Mexico project at the University of Lancaster. Edgar’s research agenda explores how colonial-era institutions and contemporary criminal violence shape economic under-performance, particularly within Latin America. In his book project, Strategies of Indigenous Resistance and Assimilation to Colonial Rule, he examines the role Indigenous groups have played in the state-building process of the region since colonial times. 
Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan
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CANCELLED - Power to the Parents?

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Abstract:

Community-driven development programs that decentralized administrative, fiscal, and political functions have become a popular policy tool to deliver public services.  We study a large reform in the city of Delhi that decentralized the management of discretionary school budgets to elected bodies of parents.  Using household surveys, non-participant observation in schools, semi-structured interviews, and administrative data we ask if decentralization has brought expenditures closer in line to the preferences of parents?  We find that expenditures are heavily skewed to the preferences of more traditionally powerful actors, namely men and members of the government bureaucracy.

 

Speaker Bio:

emmerich davies
Emmerich Davies specializes in education policy and politics, the political economy of development, and the politics of service provision, with a regional focus on South Asia.  His work has been published in Comparative Political Studies.  His book manuscript examines the growth of non-state service provision in low-income democracies, and the consequences for democratic politics. Davies earned his B.A. in Economics and Political Science with honors from Stanford University in 2007, worked for two years for the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab in Kolkata, India, and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania.  He is on leave for the 2019-2020 as the W. Glenn Campbell & Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Susan Louise Dyer Peace Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Emmerich Davies Assistant Professor of International Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
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