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.

Globalization, International Norms and Capacity Building

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Abstract:

At any given moment there are hundreds of international negotiations being undertaken in numerous institutions and forums, touching upon every legal and social aspect, including cyber, trade, terrorism, telecommunications, environment and human rights, just to name a few. International investigation and monitoring groups, and international committees and specialized bodies, are routinely created, subjecting states to investigations and reviews. States are subject to strict reporting requirements, having to submit hundreds of detailed reports a year to different institutions. International courts and over 160 international dispute settlement mechanisms are at work in their respective areas– creating new bodies of law, and thousands of professional committees whether in economic blocs, international institutions, or other forums, are revising and creating new international norms. Black lists are being formed, alliances changing, and new actors, including multinational corporations, are now an integral player of the international arena.

The challenges states are facing in building capacity and training personnel to deal with this vast and evolving international scene are formidable, requiring substantial funds, human capital, leadership, strategic planning, specialized education, and extensive inter ministerial cooperation, just to name a few. Ramifications for a state for lack of capacity may be huge.

This talk will seek to take a birds eye view of the evolving international arena, and focus on some of the challenges states, particularly developing countries, have in building their capacity to enable effective navigation in this sphere. The talk will showcase the International Rule Making Project, which seeks to assist in the development of global tools and policies. The talk will also address the increasing participation of China, who openly seeks to reshape global governance, as a strong player in the international space, and the possible interconnections between all of these issues.

 

 

Speaker Bio:

shavit matias
Dr. Shavit Matias was Deputy Attorney General of Israel in charge of international issues. She and the teams she led formed and implemented a strategic plan for Israel to deal with globalization and the numerous international institutions and forums. She formed and headed the Department for International Agreements and International Litigation, which deals with policy and law, globalization, international institutions, negotiations of bilateral and multilateral international agreements, joining international organizations, international investigations, and international litigation and arbitration in international forums. She spearheaded changes in inter-ministerial cooperation, training, and decision-making processes throughout government.

Dr. Matias regularly advised Prime Ministers and the Government on policy and law regarding international matters. She was a member of Israeli National Security Council teams on a range of national security challenges, national strategy building, international law, Middle East policy, counter-terrorism, and international conflicts. She headed inter ministerial committees, and worked with colleagues from around the world to develop international mechanisms, international tools, and law.

Matias represented the State of Israel in United Nations committees, international investigations of Israel, international and foreign courts, and co-headed Israel’s inter ministerial task force on matters relating to universal jurisdiction and issues relating to the laws of war. She represented the state in numerous bilateral and multilateral negotiations, including complex trade matters with the EU, joining the OECD, permanent-status issues with the Palestinians, and as a member of Israeli-Palestinian joint committees. She was also a member of Israeli government teams working with the international donor community on matters of Palestinian institution and capacity building, and a member of numerous policy teams.

Since 2014 she heads the Global Affairs and Conflict Resolution program at the Lauder School of Government IDC, and teaches courses on globalization, diplomacy, law, and conflict resolution. She is also on the Professional Advisory Board of the International Institute for Counter Terrorism. She is a recipient of the 2008 Award from Georgetown University Law Center for Outstanding Achievements in the Profession, and in 2017-2018 served on the President of Israel’s Committee for Doctoral Grants for Academic Excellence and Scientific Innovation.

Between 2013-2018 she was a fellow at the Hoover Institution and since 2018 is a visiting scholar at CDDRL heading the International Rule Making Project geared at developing global international tools enhancing good governance, rule of law, capacity building, and economic growth particularly in developing countries and areas of conflict.

Matias is a member of the Israeli bar and the New York bar. She clerked at the Supreme Court of Israel, received her LLB from Tel-Aviv University, her LLM from Georgetown University, and her Doctorate in International Law (S.J.D.) from George Washington University under the supervision of Judge Thomas Buergenthal.

 

CDDRL Visiting Scholar
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Can American Democracy Survive the 2020 Elections?

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Abstract:

As the 2020 presidential campaign begins to take shape, there is widespread distrust of the fairness and accuracy of American elections. Four factors increasing the mistrust. Voter suppression has escalated as a Republican tool aimed to depress turnout of likely Democratic voters, fueling suspicion. Pockets of incompetence in election administration, often in large cities controlled by Democrats, have created an opening to claims of unfairness. Old-fashioned and new-fangled dirty tricks, including foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns via social media, threaten electoral integrity. Inflammatory rhetoric about “stolen” elections supercharges distrust among hardcore partisans.
 
Taking into account how each of these threats has manifested in recent years—most notably in the 2016 and 2018 elections—this presentation concludes with concrete steps that need to be taken to restore trust in American elections before the democratic process is completely undermined.

 

Speaker Bio:

richard hasen
Professor Richard L. Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Hasen is a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, writing as well in the areas of legislation and statutory interpretation, remedies, and torts. He is co-author of leading casebooks in election law and remedies.

From 2001-2010, he served (with Dan Lowenstein) as founding co-editor of the quarterly peer-reviewed publication, Election Law Journal. He is the author of over 100 articles on election law issues, published in numerous journals including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review and Supreme Court Review. He was elected to The American Law Institute in 2009 and serves as Reporter (with Professor Douglas Laycock) on the ALI’s law reform project: Restatement (Third) of Torts: Remedies. He also is an adviser on the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Concluding Provisions.

Professor Hasen was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by The National Law Journal in 2013, and one of the Top 100 Lawyers in California in 2005 and 2016 by the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journal.

His op-eds and commentaries have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and Slate. Hasen also writes the often-quoted Election Law Blog, which the ABA Journal named to its “Blawg 100 Hall of Fame” in 2015. The Green Bag recognized his 2018 book, The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption, for exemplary legal writing, and his 2016 book, Plutocrats United, received a Scribes Book Award Honorable Mention. His newest book, Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy will be published by Yale University Press in 2020.

Richard Hasen Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine
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UC Santa Cruz Scholars Discuss the Origins and Implications of Algeria’s Uprising [VIDEO]

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In a talk dated May 31, 2019, UC Santa Cruz scholars Muriam Haleh Davis and Thomas Serres examined Algeria’s recent uprising, which led to the resignation of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. The talk shed light on the protests, analyzing them both in a historical lens while also addressing the future prospects for democratic change and their implications for regional geopolitics. The speakers explored the role of the war of independence (1954-1962) and civil war (1992-1999) in political contestation, questions of language and national identity, and the landscape of the current political opposition.

 

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Georgetown Scholar Analyzes Tunisia's "Vital Election" [VIDEO]

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In a talk dated October 7, 2019, Georgetown University Associate Professor of Government Daniel Brumberg analyzed the outcome of Tunisia’s legislative election and its implications for democratic consolidation in the country. Brumberg argued that the election provides a vital although not an easy opportunity to move beyond the power sharing, consensus-based political pact negotiated in 2014, to a more consolidated democracy.

 

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Resurrecting Compliance in Assessing Law’s Impact on Behavior

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Legal compliance has gotten a bad rap in international relations research. Compliance – the state of being on the “legal” side of a legal/illegal binary – has been largely set aside as a variable of interest in empirical studies of international law in favor of more substantive measures of behavioral change. Nevertheless, efforts to frame political science inquiry in terms of law’s effects have not succeeded in sidestepping compliance. To the contrary, none of the core functions of law (guiding behavior, assessing it, attributing responsibility, or assigning remedies) is possible without an applied concept of legal compliance as an orienting point on the horizon. This paper reclaims compliance as an essential concept for the empirical study of international law—albeit in a transformed state that emphasizes its potential for contextual variability and its essentially legal-political character.

 

Speaker Bio:

putnam
Tonya Putnam (Ph.D., Stanford, 2005; J.D., Harvard 2002) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Her work exploresthe intersectionsof international relations and international law in relation tointernational and transnational regulationand jurisdiction, human rights, international humanitarian law, migration, international dispute resolution, institutional design, and judicial politics.Professor Putnamis the author ofCourts Without Borders:Law, Politics, and U.S. Extraterritoriality(Cambridge University Press 2016). Herresearch has appeared inInternational Organization, International Security,Human Rights Review, Journal of Physical Securityand in edited volumes.She was a Post-DoctoralFellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University and a Pre-and Post-Doctoral Fellow at CISAC.She is currently completing a second book on why and how social scientists should factor basic properties of law, such as its semantic indeterminacy, into theories and empirical models of its impact on behavior.Professor Putnam is also a member (inactive) of the California State Bar.

Resurrecting Compliance in Assessing Law's Impact on Behavior
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Tonya Putnam Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University
Seminars

Trajectories and Consequences of Authoritarian Elite Persistence Under Democracy

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When authoritarian-era elites return to positions of power under democracy, what are the implications for the quality of democracy? We investigate this question using an original dataset that tracks former authoritarian elites’ capture of high-level posts under democracy across Latin America from 1900 to 2015. We find that when authoritarian-era elites capture a wide range of posts across disparate government branches – spanning the executive, legislature, judiciary, military, and local elected office – such “elite dispersion” undercuts the quality of democracy. It also harms specific dimensions of democracy such as accountability, openness of competition, breadth of inclusion, and egalitarianism. These results are robust to prominent alternative explanations of the quality of democracy, and in particular, explanations that underscore the importance of formal organizations and institutions such as autonomous militaries, dominant political parties, and holdover autocratic constitutions. Elite dispersion matters for the quality of democracy even after controlling for these more visible channels of former authoritarian elite influence.

 
 
Speaker Bio:

albertus casbs
Michael Albertus is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. His research interests include political regimes, inequality and redistribution, clientelism, and civil conflict. He has published two books, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform (2015, Cambridge University Press) and Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy (2018, Cambridge University Press), and a host of articles in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Comparative Political Studies. He also writes regularly for public audiences in outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs.

Michael Albertus

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CDDRL Visiting Scholar, Winter-Spring 2026
CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow, 2011-2012
albertus_2024_-_mike_albertus.jpeg PhD

Michael Albertus is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of five books. His newest book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, was published by Basic Books in January 2025. It tells the story of how land came to be power within human societies, how it shapes power, and how its allocation determines the major social ills that societies grapple with.

Albertus studied math, electrical engineering, and political science at the University of Michigan and earned degrees in all three in 2005. He then did a PhD in political science at Stanford University, completing in 2011. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Albertus joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2012 and has since been on sabbatical twice back at Stanford, including as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences. In addition to his books, Albertus is also the author of over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles, including at flagship journals like the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and World Politics. He has taught courses to undergraduate, Masters, and PhD students on topics including inequality and redistribution, democracy and dictatorship, comparative politics, and political and economic development and policy in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.

The defining features of Albertus' work are his engagement with big questions and puzzles and the ability to join big data and cutting-edge research methods with original, deep on-the-ground fieldwork everywhere from government offices to archives and farm fields. He has conducted fieldwork throughout the Americas, southern Europe, South Africa, and elsewhere. His books and articles have won numerous awards and shifted conventional understandings of democracy, authoritarianism, and the consequences of how humans occupy and relate to the land.

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Movement Resilience in Sudan’s Popular Uprising

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What explains sustained mobilization — social movement resilience — in the face of severe autocratic repression? This question is especially relevant given the recent uptick in protest movements across the world. We examine this question through the case of Sudan’s popular uprising, which lasted from December 2018 until the country began a formal transition to democracy in July 2019. Drawing on in-depth field research during and after the uprising, we look at the role of organizational legitimacy, elite unity, and the evolution of repression evasion tactics. We find that the movement’s organizational form and mobilization tactics coevolved with the actions of the security apparatus. 

 

Speaker Bio:

 

mai hassan
Mai Hassan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and a current visiting fellow at CASBS. Her work has been published in various outlets, including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Democracy, and the Journal of Politics. She received her PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2014.

 

 

 

 

Mai Hassan Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan
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The Modernization of Rural East Asia

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Kristen Looney will be discussing her forthcoming work, Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia (Cornell U. Press 2020). This book tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia’s political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s), the research shows that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. Looney argues that rural modernization campaigns played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian studies, the book enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change.



Speaker Bio:

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Kristen Looney is an assistant professor of Asian Studies and Government at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on Chinese and Comparative Politics. Her research is on rural development and governance and has previously appeared in The China Quarterly, The China Journal, and Current History. Her first book is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in spring 2020.

Kristen Looney Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Government at Georgetown University
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Incentives for Police Professionalization in Mexico

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In the face of mounting challenges from criminal activity and citizen demands for improved public safety, Mexico has undertaken significant efforts at police reform. Those efforts would presumably enhance the capacity of police forces to fight and deter crime. This paper explores the quantity and quality of police in Mexico, a federation where multi-tier government makes incentives for police professionalization more challenging than in unitary systems. The paper calculates, the true size of police forces, comparing them to all legal specialists in the use of violence, including private security guards at homes and businesses. It then estimates the implicit wage incentives given to experience and human capital formation in the different types of police corporations during the Calderón and Peña Nieto presidential administrations. Finally, we use a municipal cross section to gain further insight into the effects of police professionalization on interpersonal violence, as measured by homicide rates. The overall findings suggest that improving policing in Mexico is not merely a question of adding manpower or spending more budgetary resources, but of changing career incentives for greater professionalization.

 

Speaker Bio:

alberto diaz
Alberto Diaz-Cayeros joined the FSI faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as the director of the Center for US-Mexico studies at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C. in Mexico from 1997-1999. His work has focused on federalism, poverty and violence in Latin America, and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English. His book Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 (reprinted 2016). His latest book (with Federico Estevez and Beatriz Magaloni) is: The Political Logic of Poverty Relief Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. His work has primarily focused on federalism, poverty and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular, with more recent work addressing crime and violence, youth-at-risk, and police professionalization. 

 

 

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros

Encina Hall, C149
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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
alberto_diaz-cayeros_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and co-director of the Democracy Action Lab (DAL), based at FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL). His research interests include federalism, poverty relief, indigenous governance, political economy of health, violence, and citizen security in Mexico and Latin America.

He is the author of Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America (Cambridge, reedited 2016), coauthored with Federico Estévez and Beatriz Magaloni, of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief (Cambridge, 2016), and of numerous journal articles and book chapters.

He is currently working on a project on cartography and the developmental legacies of colonial rule and governance in indigenous communities in Mexico.

From 2016 to 2023, he was the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University, and from 2009 to 2013, Director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UCSD, the University of California, San Diego.

Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
Director of the Center for Latin American Studies (2016 - 2023)
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The Impeachment Conundrum

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The Democrats are facing a dilemma: If they defend democratic norms by acting to remove President Trump from office, they risk getting dragged into a polarizing style of politics that works to his political advantage. Read here.

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