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.

PDI Seminar series - Free Speech, Democracy, and the Internet

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Note: This seminar series is open only to Stanford faculty and scholars.

The Project on Democracy and the Internet’s Fall Seminar Series on Free Speech, Democracy, and the Internet is hosted by Nate Persily, James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford, and Monika Bickert, Head of Global Policy Management at Facebook, every Tuesday, from September 25 to November 27 (excluding holidays).

The goal of this seminar series is to encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing as we address the impact of the internet on democracy and build this new field of study. Guest speakers from academia and the technology sector will cover topics including disinformation, polarization, hate speech, political advertising, media transformation, election integrity, and legal regulation of internet platforms in the U.S. and abroad. Please RSVP for the first 5 sessions above. Future sessions will be announced at a later date.

Room 280, Crown Law Building, Stanford Law School

Nathaniel Persily

Stanford Law School Neukom Building, Room N230 Stanford, CA 94305
650-725-9875
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James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute
Professor, by courtesy, Political Science
Professor, by courtesy, Communication
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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, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.   

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James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford
Monica Bickert Head of Global Policy Management at Facebook
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CDDRL Special Events

The Midterm Elections

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Two days after the midterm elections, join a panel of Stanford experts to discuss the election outcomes. What do they mean for Congress, for the Republican and Democratic parties, and for Trump? How many Americans voted, who were they, and what issues mattered to their votes? The panel will contextualize the election results within broader trends in American democracy. Watch here.

 

Traitel Bldg. Hauck Auditorium

 

Nathaniel Persily

Stanford Law School Neukom Building, Room N230 Stanford, CA 94305
650-725-9875
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James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute
Professor, by courtesy, Political Science
Professor, by courtesy, Communication
headshot_3.jpg

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, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.   

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Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Doug Rivers Senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of political science at Stanford University
Morris Fiorina Wendt Family Professor and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution

Francis Fukuyama

Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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Academic Research & Program Manager, Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective
Panel Discussions

American Democracy and the Mid-Term Elections

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What’s at stake in this year’s midterm elections? After months of contentious primary races, the 2018 midterms will determine which party controls Congress this January. Join us for a panel discussion featuring Bruce Cain, Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University, and Mirya Holman, Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. We will discuss the important campaign issues, the diversity of candidates running, and the role gender issues are playing across the House and Senate races.

Bruce E. Cain

Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki
Environment & Energy Building
473 Via Ortega, First Floor
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-4225

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Charles Louis Ducommun Professor, Humanities and Sciences
Director, Bill Lane Center for the American West
Professor, Political Science
CDDRL Affiliated Faculty
bruce_cain.jpg

Bruce E. Cain is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. He received a BA from Bowdoin College (1970), a B Phil. from Oxford University (1972) as a Rhodes Scholar, and a Ph D from Harvard University (1976). He taught at Caltech (1976-89) and UC Berkeley (1989-2012) before coming to Stanford. Professor Cain was Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley from 1990-2007 and Executive Director of the UC Washington Center from 2005-2012. He was elected the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and has won awards for his research (Richard F. Fenno Prize, 1988), teaching (Caltech 1988 and UC Berkeley 2003) and public service (Zale Award for Outstanding Achievement in Policy Research and Public Service, 2000). His areas of expertise include political regulation, applied democratic theory, representation and state politics. Some of Professor Cain’s most recent publications include “Malleable Constitutions: Reflections on State Constitutional Design,” coauthored with Roger Noll in University of Texas Law Review, volume 2, 2009; “More or Less: Searching for Regulatory Balance,” in Race, Reform and the Political Process, edited by Heather Gerken, Guy Charles and Michael Kang, CUP, 2011; and “Redistricting Commissions: A Better Political Buffer?” in The Yale Law Journal, volume 121, 2012. He is currently working on a book about political reform in the US.

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Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University
Mirya Holman Associate Professor of Political Science , Tulane University

Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

0
Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
didi_kuo_2023.jpg

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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The Demise of the Islamist Utopia: What’s Next?

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

ABSTRACT

Islamist movements have dominated popular discussions of opposition and change within Arab politics for the past three decades. Uniquely positioned during the Arab Spring, some have since directly governed, while others have been co-opted or absorbed into existing political structures. Yet outside Tunisia, no Islamist group has been able to deliver upon its promise of political transformation. The reality is that Islamism is not the solution to the problem of authoritarian rule in the Arab world. It is burdened with ideological contradictions, fixated upon principles of doctrinal purity, and beholden to political strategies that have backfired. Islamists have therefore become disconnected from the youth generation that will mobilize the next wave of regional change. The question remains as to how the popular need for religiosity and religious meaning will be taken up by political actors.

 

SPEAKER BIO

hicham alaoui

Hicham Alaoui is a Research Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, specializing in issues of comparative democratization. He is completing his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, where he focuses upon the relationship between religion and politics in the contemporary Middle East. Through his research foundation, he is overseeing two new research projects on the political economy of educational reform and the politics of governance and local development in the Arab world. He was previously a board member of various research and advocacy organizations, such as the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University and the MENA Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch. He has also served with the Carter Center and UN for overseas elections monitoring and peacekeeping missions. He has published in academic journals such as Politique Internationale, Le Debat, Pouvoirs, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Journal of Democracy. He has also contributed to periodicals such as The New York Times, Le Monde, La Nouvelle Observateur, El Pais, and Al-Quds. He holds degrees from Princeton and Stanford Universities. His memoir, Journal d'un Prince Banni, was published in 2014 by Éditions Grasset, and has since been translated into several languages.

 

Philippines Conference Room 
Encina Hall, 3rd Floor 
616 Serra Street, Stanford, CA 94305

Hicham Alaoui Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Seminars
Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

Indigenous Identity in Latin America

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Abstract:

Today, nearly 9% of people in Latin America identify as Indigenous, ranging from 2% in Argentina to 30% in Guatemala with high within-country variation. Levels of Indigenous self-identification have also increased in the last decades in the region. Using a multi-method approach that combines surveys, archival research, text analysis, and machine learning, I study how different institutional frameworks have shaped the persistence of language, Indigenous last-names, and local governance from the colonial times to the 21st century. I also provide a novel theoretical framework to understand Indigenous agency and their capacity to resist, survive and adapt to colonial rule.

 

Speaker Bio:

I am

edgar vivanco
a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford University with an interest in the political economy of development and comparative politics. I was born and raised in Mexico City where I also attended college at ITAM, majoring in Economics and Political Science. After graduating college, I worked for two years at a policy think-tank in Mexico City. Before starting the PhD I completed a masters at Stanford in educational policy and public policy.

 

PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford University
Seminars

Chonira Aturupane

Encina Hall, 10D MIP Suite, 616 Jane Stanford Way Stanford, CA 94305
(650) 723-7818
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chonira_aturupane.jpg

Dr. Chonira Aturupane is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and Senior Associate Director, Academic and Student Affairs, at the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy (MIP) program at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI), Stanford University. She teaches the MIP courses, The Global Economy, Trade and Development, and Economics of Corruption. Her research interests include economic growth, international trade, international finance, and corruption. Prior to coming to Stanford in 2004, she was an Economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington D.C., where she focused on IMF policy and review, and participated in IMF missions to Azerbaijan, Mongolia, and Samoa. She was also an external consultant to the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) on international trade policy. Additionally, she served on the FSI Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (REDI) Task Force in 2020-2021. She received a BA in Economics summa cum laude (with highest honors in Economics) from Smith College, Massachusetts, and an MA and Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.

Senior Associate Director, Academic and Student Affairs at the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Senior Research Scholar, Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
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The Political Geography of Electoral Autocracies

Abstract:

In electoral autocracies, why do some citizens view the state as autocratic, while others see it as democratic and legitimate? Traditionally, indicators such as income and education have been the most important factors to explaining why different types of citizens understand politics. This paper argues that in electoral autocracies, we must also take into account the role of political geography. Opposition parties are often one of the only actors that provide information about the authoritarian nature of the regime, but their message tends to get quarantined within their strongholds. I argue that regardless of income, education, ethnicity, or access to government spending, citizens living in opposition strongholds should be far more likely to view the state as autocratic and illegitimate than citizens living in ruling party strongholds. I find evidence for this theory using Afrobarometer survey data paired with hand-coded constituency-level electoral returns from five electoral autocracies in sub-Saharan Africa.

 

Speaker Bio:

natalie letsa 1
Natalie Wenzell Letsa is a political scientist and the Wick Cary Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the Department of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her work focuses on public opinion and political behavior in authoritarian regimes, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. She is also interested in macro-issues of regime stability and legitimization in non-democratic and transitioning regimes. Her work has appeared in Comparative Politics, The Journal of Modern African Studies, and Democratization.

Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the Department of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma
Seminars

Taiwan should ‘play for time,’ Larry Diamond says

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Larry Diamond discussed the DPP government’s pursuit of transitional justice and its approach to cross-strait ties in an interview with ‘Taipei Times’ reporter Sean Lin in Taipei, arguing for a more arbitrational approach to party assets while warning against action that might provoke China. Read here. 

 
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Political Identities in Colonial and Post-Independence Tunisia

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Abstract:

What explains variation in secular and Islamist political identity and behavior? I argue that local variation in colonial settlement encouraged the development of distinct Tunisian political identities across localities. Using data on political mobilization at the moment of independence, I find that differential colonial investments in local land and schools produced divergent secular and Islamist political identities. This relationship operates through two mechanisms; first, high local land expropriation by the French weakened the religious land tenure system (the waqf system) and traditional Islamic schools in those areas. Second, the increased presence of agricultural colonial settlers is also correlated with a greater presence of local French schools and higher enrollment of native Tunisians in French primary education. This variation in colonial experience also informs contemporary patterns of partisanship and social cleavages in Tunisia.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Alexandra Blackman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science Department at Stanford University and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
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