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.

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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.

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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.

Abstract:

While numerous studies examine the relationship between social media and political behavior, scholars continue to debate its effects on political polarization. To inform this debate, we measure the effect of social media echo chambers on public opinion by evaluating 40,000 tweets around major breaking news stories, and comparing pre-and post-event policy positions amongst far and moderate right, and far and moderate left groups on Twitter. Our research improves on current approaches of measuring polarization by combining network analysis with supervised machine learning to examine what sampled individuals within different social media networks actually say about political topics. We find that individuals’ opinions on a variety of political issues converge on the modal opinion of media elites within their echo chamber following large-scale media events. We use this evidence to argue that people become more ideologically sorted—rather than more ideologically polarized—vis-à-vis social media echo chambers.  

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Laura Jakli is a Predoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation draws on digital survey and ad experiments, machine learning, and qualitative fieldwork to examine the relationship between digital politics and political radicalization. Her related research examines how digital networks shape migration patterns and refugee behavior. Her research appears in International Studies Quarterly and the Virginia Journal of International Law. Her co-authored book chapter is forthcoming in Democratization (Oxford University Press).
 
 
 

Abstract:

Please join Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) on Sept. 27 for the launch of Francis Fukuyama's latest book, "Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment." Fukuyama, the Mosbacher Director of CDDRL, will be joined in conversation with Michael McFaul, the director and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Affairs. The event will begin promptly at 4:00 pm and be followed by a light reception and book signing from 5:30-6:30 pm. 

Please note that there is only 1 ticket permitted per person. 

In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to the people, who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole. Demand for recognition of one's identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today.

The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious identity liberalism of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.

Abstract:

The Islamization of universities has been the cornerstone of the Iranian regime’s higher educational policy since its ascent to power in 1979. Since the victory of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) has relentlessly attempted to control and suppress dissident students and professors in an effort to train a new generation of ideologically driven students. Although the Islamic Republic was successful in co-opting a group of university students by means of ideological and materialistic incentives, a majority of students became less ideological and more critical of both the regime and its staple ideologies. These continuous struggles between the state and universities have given rise to several important questions: Why and how has the Islamic Republic Islamized and controlled universities? To what extent have these strategies succeeded or failed? Why and how have students responded to state domination?

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Saeid Golkar is a visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Service at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and concurrently, a non-resident Senior Fellow on Middle East Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA). His research focuses on international and comparative politics of authoritarian regimes with an emphasis on the Middle East. His book, Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control in Post-revolutionary Iran (Columbia University Press, 2015), was awarded the Washington Institute silver medal prize.

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Ilya Zaslavskiy is a member of the Advisory Board at the Hudson Institute's Kleptocracy Initiative for which he wrote a report How Non-State Actors Export Kleptocratic Norms to the West. He is also Head of Research at Washington-based non-profit Free Russia Foundation and head of Underminers.info, a research project exposing kleptocrats from Eurasia in the West. Ilya is an Academy Associate at Chatham House where he was a Fellow and also continues as an energy consultant for western companies working in developing countries. In September 2018 Council on Foreign Relations will publish Ilya's report on Energy Reform in Ukraine.