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.

The Evolution of Autocracy

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Abstract:

Globalization, shifting great power dynamics, and the growing accessibility of Internet and communication technology has changed the environment within which autocrats operate. Many analysts have noted these changes and concluded that the masses now hold the upper hand and that dictators’ days are surely numbered. It may be true that 21st century autocrats face more and increasingly complex challenges to their rule. But current accounts of dictatorship seriously underestimate the adaptability of authoritarian systems. Since the end of the Cold War, dictators have evolved to survive and even thrive amid changes in their domestic and international environments. In this presentation, I examine the evolution of authoritarianism since the end of the Cold War. Since 1991 there have been substantial changes in the ways that dictators assume power, in the tactics they use to maintain power, and in the ways in which they lose power. Each of these changes has significant implications for the political dynamics in today’s autocracies.

Speaker Bio:

andrea kendall taylor

Andrea Kendall-Taylor works at the National Intelligence Council, where she is a deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. During her seven years in the U.S. government, she has focused her research and analysis on the political dynamics of authoritarian regimes, political stability, democratization, and civil society, with a particular focus on Russia and Eurasia. Dr. Kendall-Taylor is also a non-resident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the Human Rights Initiative and an adjunct professor in political science at Georgetown and American Universities. Her work has been published in numerous political science journals, including the Journal of Peace Research, Democratization, and Journal of Democracy, as well as a number of policy outlets such as Foreign Affairs, the Washington Quarterly, and Foreign Policy. Dr. Kendall-Taylor received her B.A. in politics from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor Deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia
Seminars

Making Politics Work for Development

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Abstract:

Synthesizing the vanguard of economics research on the functioning of political markets, the World Bank’s Policy Research Report, Making Politics Work for Development, distils implications for policy and future research. It shows how political engagement—the processes through which citizens select and sanction the leaders who wield power in government—is fundamental to understanding and solving government failures to pursue good public policies. The confluence of political engagement with transparency can be a driving force for countries to transition toward better-functioning public sector institutions, starting from their own initial and contextual conditions. But good outcomes are far from guaranteed, with many risks of unhealthy political engagement by citizens and repressive responses by leaders. To harness the potential of these forces, the report offers ideas for policy actors to target transparency to improve citizens’ ability to hold leaders accountable for the public goods needed for development.

 

Speaker Bio:

stuti khemani
STUTI KHEMANI is a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. She joined through the Young Professionals Program after obtaining a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her area of research is the political economy of public policy choices, and institutional reforms for development. Her work is published in economics and political science journals, such as the American Economic Journal, Journal of Development Economics and American Political Science Review. She has studied the impact of electoral politics on fiscal policy and intergovernmental fiscal relations; drawn policy implications for the design of institutions to promote fiscal responsibility; and analyzed political constraints to efficient allocation of resources for health and education services. She is currently examining the role of mass media and local elections in building effective public sector institutions. She is also the lead author of the Policy Research Report Making Politics Work for Development: Harnessing Transparency and Citizen Engagement. Her research and advisory work spans a diverse range of countries, including Benin, China, India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda.

Stuti Khemani Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank
Seminars

Whither Parties?

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Abstract:

Scholars of comparative politics have long examined political parties as organized vehicles of mass mobilization, interest mediation, and policy formation. But with mounting evidence that parties in the twenty-first century serve different purposes, how are we to understand the role of traditional, mainstream parties today? This talk examines factors driving a decline in traditional party organization, which includes an erosion of social and intermediary groups, insufficient state capacity, delegation of party functions to private interests, and ideological convergence between the mainstream parties. It argues for more rigorous conceptualization of the role parties serve in representative democracies, and greater theoretical examination of the link between parties and governance outcomes.

 

Speaker Bio:

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

Dictatorship and Information

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Abstract:

How do autocracies collect information on popular discontent? The existing literature has not provided a systematic answer to this question despite its fundamental importance for understanding the logic of authoritarian rule. This talk offers a theory of information gathering in single-party communist autocracies, which are the most durable subtype of authoritarian regime to emerge since World War I. It argues that the unusual longevity of communist regimes allows us to develop and test a theory of the emergence, evolution, and eventual demise of non-electoral institutions for information gathering in autocracies. The talk uses the East European communist regimes that existed prior to 1989 to generate a theory of information and the case of post-1949 China (where institutional evolution is still ongoing) as a provisional test of the theory. The talk is based on archival sources and regime-generated materials collected in China and several East European countries.

 

Speaker Bio:

martin dimitrov
Martin K. Dimitrov is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. His books include Piracy and the State: The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights in China (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Why Communism Did Not Collapse: Understanding Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Asia and Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and The Politics of Socialist Consumption (Sofia: Ciela Publishers, 2017). He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Dictatorship and Information: Autocratic Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China and two edited volumes: China-Cuba: Trajectories of Post-Revolutionary Governance and Popular Authoritarianism: The Quest for Regime Durability. After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2004, he taught at Dartmouth and held residential fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, Notre Dame, the University of Helsinki, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has conducted fieldwork in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Russia, Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Cuba.

Martin K. Dimitrov Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University
Seminars

Afghanistan: U.S. Policy Options Fifteen Years after 9/11

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Abstract:

Fifteen years after the American-led international military intervention, Afghanistan faces mounting security, governance, and economic challenges.  The Afghan Army and police remain highly dependent on U.S. combat power and the provision of significant amounts of technical and financial assistance.  Early during its first term, the Trump Administration will need to decide on its long-term policy toward Afghanistan and Central-South Asia.  Karl Eikenberry, former U.S. Ambassador and Coalition Commander in Afghanistan, and Erik Jensen, the faculty director of the Afghanistan Legal Education Project at the Stanford Law School, will provide their assessments of the situation in Afghanistan and discuss U.S. strategic options. 

 

Speaker(s) Bio:

Karl Eikenberry
Karl Eikenberry is the Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow and Director of the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center, and a Stanford University Professor of Practice. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from May 2009 until July 2011 and had a 35-year career in the United States Army, retiring with the rank of lieutenant general. His military assignments included postings with mechanized, light, airborne, and ranger infantry units in the continental United States, Hawaii, Korea, Italy, and Afghanistan as the Commander of the American-led Coalition forces from 2005–2007. He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, earned master’s degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and Stanford University in Political Science, was awarded an Interpreter’s Certificate in Mandarin Chinese from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and has an advanced degree in Chinese History from Nanjing University. He is also the recipient of the George F. Kennan Award for Distinguished Public Service and Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Centennial Medal. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters Degree from North Carolina State University in December 2015. Ambassador Eikenberry is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a board member of The Asia Foundation and council member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. His articles and essays on U.S. and international security issues have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Washington Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, American Interest, New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and Financial Times.

 

erik jensen
Erik Jensen holds joint appointments at Stanford Law School and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. He is Professor of the Practice, Director of the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School, an Affiliated Core Faculty at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and Senior Advisor for Governance and Law at The Asia Foundation. Jensen began his international career as a Fulbright Scholar. He has taught and practiced in the field of law and development for 30 years and has carried out fieldwork in 35 developing countries.  He lived in Asia for 14 years. He has led or advised research teams on governance and the rule of law at the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank. 

Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow and Director of the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center

Erik Jensen

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C144
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-4287 (650) 725-0253
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Lecturer in Law, Stanford Law School
jensen-1.jpg JD

Erik Jensen holds joint appointments at Stanford Law School and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. He is Lecturer in Law, Director of the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School, an Affiliated Core Faculty at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and Senior Advisor for Governance and Law at The Asia Foundation. Jensen began his international career as a Fulbright Scholar. He has taught and practiced in the field of law and development for 35 years and has carried out fieldwork in approximately 40 developing countries. He lived in Asia for 14 years. He has led or advised research teams on governance and the rule of law at the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank. Among his numerous publications, Jensen co-edited with Thomas Heller Beyond Common Knowledge: Empirical Approaches to the Rule of Law (Stanford University Press: 2003).

At Stanford, he teaches courses related to state building, development, global poverty and the rule of law. Jensen’s scholarship and fieldwork focuses on bridging theory and practice, and examines connections between law, economy, politics and society. Much of his teaching focuses on experiential learning. In recent years, he has committed considerable effort as faculty director to three student driven projects: the Afghanistan Legal Education Project (ALEP) which started and has developed a law degree-granting programs at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), an institution where he also sits on the Board of Trustees; the Iraq Legal Education Initiative at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani (AUIS); and the Rwanda Law and Development Project at the University of Rwanda. He has also directed projects in Bhutan, Cambodia and Timor Leste. With Paul Brest, he is co-leading the Rule of Non-Law Project, a research project launched in 2015 and funded by the Global Development and Poverty Fund at the Stanford King Center on Global Development. The project examines the use of various work-arounds to the formal legal system by economic actors in developing countries. Eight law faculty members as well as scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute are participating in the Rule of Non-Law Project.

Director of the Rule of Law Program, Stanford Law School
CDDRL Affiliated Faculty
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Stanford Law School and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Seminars

Reassessing the Quality of Government in China

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How should the quality of government be measured across disparate national contexts? This study develops a new approach using an original survey of Chinese civil servants and a comparison to the United States. We surveyed over 2,500 Chinese municipal officials on three organizational features of their bureaucracies: meritocracy, individual autonomy, and morale. They report greater meritocracy than U.S. federal employees in almost all American agencies. China's edge is smaller in autonomy and markedly smaller in morale. Differences between the U.S. and China lessen, but do not disappear, after adjusting for respondent demographics and excluding respondents most likely to be influenced by social desirability biases. Our findings contrast with numerous indices of good government that rank the U.S. far above China. They suggest that incorporating the opinions of political insiders into quality of government indices may challenge the foundations of a large body of cross-national governance research. 

 

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Francis Fukuyama
Margaret Boittin

The Politics of Order in Informal Markets: Evidence from Lagos

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Abstract:

Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in much of the world they are not publicly provided. Private market organizations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from the group’s members. Under what circumstances will private organizations provide a stable environment for economic activity? Using survey data collected from 1,878 randomly sampled traders across 269 markets, 68 market leaders, and 55 government revenue collectors in Lagos, I find that strong markets maintain institutions to support trade not in the absence of government, but rather as a response to active interference. I argue that organizations develop pro-trade institutions when threatened by politicians they perceive as predatory, and when the organization can respond with threats of its own. Under this balance of power, the organization will not extort because it needs trader support to keep threats credible.

 

Speaker Bio:

shelby embedded
Shelby Grossman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Her primary research interests are in comparative politics and political economy. Her book manuscript explores the politics of property rights in informal markets in Nigeria. Other research projects include a study on the political economy of diversified business groups, a project on casual inter-group interactions in the informal economy, and a paper on the politics of non-compliance with polio vaccination in northern Nigeria. Shelby received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2016.

Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL.
Seminars

US-PRC-Taiwan Relations under the Trump Administration

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Co-sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and the China Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC)

 

Abstract

As President Trump assumes office, it is timely to consider the state of US-People's Republic of China (PRC)-Taiwan relations and how they might evolve in the coming years. Uncertainty regarding US-PRC-Taiwan relations is running high—it is far greater than eight years ago when Barack Obama assumed office. Trump’s phone call with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen shortly after winning the election and his subsequent suggestion that Taiwan could be used as a bargaining chip to extract trade concessions from China have alarmed Beijing and created anxiety in Taipei. In Washington, Trump’s actions and statements have fueled policy debates about whether to abandon the “one China” policy which has been a mainstay of US policy for 37 years.  How the Trump administration will adjust relations with Beijing and Taipei is unknown. In the months ahead, a new dynamic may be created in the US-PRC-Taiwan triangular relationship in which the source of instability is neither China nor Taiwan, but rather is the United States. 

 

Biography

Bonnie S. Glaser is a senior adviser for Asia and the director of the China Power Project at CSIS, where she works on issues related to Chinese foreign and security policy. She is concomitantly a non-resident fellow with the Lowy Institute in Sydney, a senior associate with CSIS Pacific Forum and a consultant for the U.S. government on East Asia. From 2008 – mid-2015 Ms. Glaser was a Senior Adviser with the Freeman Chair in China Studies, and from 2003 to 2008, she was a senior associate in the CSIS International Security Program. Prior to joining CSIS, she served as a consultant for various U.S. government offices, including the Departments of Defense and State.

Ms. Glaser has written extensively on various aspects of Chinese foreign policy, including Sino-U.S. relations, U.S.-China military ties, cross-Strait relations, China’s relations with Japan and Korea, and Chinese perspectives on missile defense and multilateral security in Asia. Her writings have been published in the Washington Quarterly, China Quarterly, Asian Survey, International Security, Problems of Communism, Contemporary Southeast Asia, American Foreign Policy Interests, Far Eastern Economic Review, Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, New York Times, and International Herald Tribune, as well as various edited volumes on Asian security. Ms. Glaser is a regular contributor to the Pacific Forum quarterly Web journal Comparative Connections. She is currently a board member of the U.S. Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, and a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Institute of International Strategic Studies. She served as a member of the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board China Panel in 1997. Ms. Glaser received her B.A. in political science from Boston University and her M.A. with concentrations in international economics and Chinese studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

 

Philippines Conference Room

Encina Hall, 3rd Floor

Bonnie Glaser Director of the China Power Project and Senior Advisor for Asia Center for Strategic and International Studies
Lectures

How the Mexican Drug War Affects Kids and Schools? Evidence on Effects and Mechanisms

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In this paper published by the International Journal of Educational Development, we investigate the impact of drug-related violence in Mexico on academic achievement. We use panel of elementary and lower secondary schools and locality-level firearm homicides from 2006 to 2011. We rely on school fixed-effects models to estimate the impact on math test scores of turf war exposure and turf war persistence (e.g. months of exposure) during the academic year. According to the results, both exposure and persistence of criminal violence reduces math test scores. The analysis of heterogeneous effects shows that schools located in poor urban settings experience the largest negative effects. Further, we find stronger negative effects of drug-related violence exposure in lower secondary schools with street gang presence nearby. Finally, we further examine potential mechanisms driving the effects of criminal violence on test scores. Our findings indicate that turf war exposure and persistence are associated with a loss of instructional time due to higher teacher absenteeism and turnover, as well as student absenteeism, tardiness, and propensity to leave school days early.

 

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International Journal of Educational Development
Authors
Brenda Jarillo Rabling
Beatriz Magaloni
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