Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is proud to announce our four incoming fellows who will be joining us in the 2016-2017 academic year to develop their research, engage with faculty and tap into our diverse scholarly community. 

The pre- and postdoctoral program will provide fellows the time to focus on research and data analysis as they work to finalize and publish their dissertation research, while connecting with resident faculty and research staff at CDDRL. 

Fellows will present their research during our weekly research seminar series and an array of scholarly events and conferences.

Topics of the incoming cohort include electoral fraud in Russia, how the elite class impacts state power in China, the role of emotions in support for democracy in Zimbabwe, and market institutions in Nigeria. 

Learn more in the Q&A below.

Hometown: Tomsk, Russia

Academic Institution: Northwestern University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: Sociology, April 2017

Research Interests: authoritarianism, state capacity, social policy, civil society, trust, Russia and post-communist countries

Dissertation Title: The State that Betrays the Trust: Infrastructural State Power, Public Sector Organizations, and Authoritarian Resilience in Putin's Russia

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? I study the connection between state capacity and political regimes - the topic that is at the core of many research initiatives at CDDRL. Learning more about this work and receiving feedback for my dissertation will enrich and sharpen my analysis, while helping me to place it into a comparative context. I am looking forward to discussing my work with the faculty who study the post-Soviet region. I also will explore policy implications of my work with the help of policy experts at CDDRL.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? Besides finishing writing my dissertation, I will workshop three working papers to prepare them for publication. The first one argues that Putin's regime used the school system to administer a large-scale electoral fraud in 2012 presidential elections; the second one shows how the networks of social organizations were used by subnational autocrats to strengthen the regime; and the third one will look at the factors that make the abuse of such organizations more difficult in some regions. In addition to these papers I will continue developing my post-graduation research project exploring the relationship between social trust and distrust, institutions, political competition, and democratization.

Fun fact: I have spent 25 years of my life in Siberia, and I can tell you: Chicago winters are worse!

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Shelby Grossman

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Reading, MA

Academic Institution: Harvard University

Discipline & Graduation Date:  Government, Summer 2016

Research interests: political economy of development, private governance, market institutions, Sub-Saharan Africa, survey methods

Dissertation Title: The Politics of Order in Informal Markets: Evidence from Lagos

What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? I was attracted to CDDRL largely for its community of scholars. Affiliated faculty work on the political economy of development and medieval and modern market institutions, topics that are tied to my own interests.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? I plan to prepare a book manuscript based on my dissertation, a project that explains variation in the provision of pro-trade institutions in private market organizations through the study of physical marketplaces in Nigeria. In addition, I will continue to remotely manage an on-going project in Nigeria (with Meredith Startz) investigating whether reputation alleviates contracting frictions. I also plan to work on submitting to journals a few working papers, including one on the politics of non-compliance with polio vaccination in Nigeria (with Jonathan Phillips and Leah Rosenzweig). 

Fun fact: Contrary to popular belief, not all cheese is vegetarian. I have a website to help people determine if a cheese is vegetarian or not: IsThisCheeseVegetarian.com. 

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Daniel Mattingly

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Oakland, California

Academic Institution: University of California, Berkeley

Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science, Summer 2016

Research Interests: Governance, rule of law, state building, authoritarian politics, Chinese politics

Dissertation Title: The Social Origins of State Power: Democratic Institutions and Local Elites in China

What attracted you to CDDRL?  The Center has a fantastic community of scholars and practitioners who work on the areas that I'm interested in, including governance and the rule of law. I'm excited to learn from the CDDRL community and participate in the Center's events. The fellowship also provides me with valuable time to finish my book manuscript before I start teaching.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? While at CDDRL, I plan to prepare my book manuscript and to work on some related projects on local elites and state power in China and elsewhere. 

Fun fact: I grew up on an organic farm in Vermont.

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Lauren E. Young

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Saratoga, CA

Academic Institution: Columbia University 

Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science (Comparative Politics, Methods), May 2016 (defense), Oct 2016 (degree conferral)

Research Interests: political violence, political economy of development, autocratic persistence, democratization, protest, electoral violence

Dissertation Title: The Psychology of Repression and Dissent in Autocracy

What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? As a graduate of the CISAC honors program when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, I have seen first-hand how intellectually stimulating, collaborative, and plugged into policy CDDRL is. While at the center I will be revising my dissertation work on the political psychology of participation in pro-democracy movements in Zimbabwe for submission as a book manuscript, and moving forward new projects that similarly seek to understand how different forms of violence by non-state actors affects citizens' preferences and decision-making. Because of its deep bench of experts on autocracy, narco-trafficking, and insurgency, CDDRL will add enormous value to these projects.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL?  During my fellowship year, my primary goal is to revise my research on Zimbabwe into a book manuscript. I defended my dissertation as three stand-alone articles, including two experiments showing that emotions influence whether opposition supporters in Zimbabwe express their pro-democracy preferences and a descriptive paper showing that repression has a larger effect on the behavior of the poor. To prepare the book manuscript during my fellowship, I will bring in additional quantitative and qualitative descriptive evidence and tie the three papers together into a cohesive argument about how opposition supporters make decisions about participation in protest, why emotions have such a large effect on these decisions, and how this affects variation across individuals and the strategic choices of autocrats and activists.

Fun fact: During my fieldwork I took an overnight train from Victoria Falls to a southern city in Zimbabwe and hitch-hiked into a national park. It got a little nerve-wracking when night started to fall, but ended with  an invitation to a barbecue! 

“Americans generally think of themselves as exceptional only in a positive sense,” says Francis Fukuyama. But “other democracies around the world in recent years have actually been working better than the United States in a lot of respects.”

Thanks to a new gift by R. Bruce Mosbacher, ’76, JD ‘79, and Nancy Ditz Mosbacher, ’76, Stanford is expanding its work on issues of good governance around the world.

In spring 2016, the Mosbachers made a $5 million gift to Stanford University to endow the directorship of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). CDDRL is one of six research centers at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Stanford’s premier research institute for the study of international issues. The Mosbacher Directorship at CDDRL is the first endowed directorship among FSI’s centers.

“Democracy is facing challenging circumstances around the globe,” Mr. Mosbacher explains. “The education and training of policy-driven leaders has never been more critically needed.” Since 2002, CDDRL has collaborated with academics, policymakers, and practitioners around the world to understand how countries can overcome poverty, instability, and abusive rule to become prosperous, just, democratic, and well-governed states. 

“That [the Mosbacher Directorship] would be filled by Professor Fukuyama was a final and convincing factor in our consideration,” says Mr. Mosbacher. Prof. Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI and a world-renowned political theorist, recently published a two-volume work on political order and decay that has become, in the words of FSI senior fellow and former CDDRL director Larry Diamond, “a global phenomenon.”

Prof. Fukuyama, who describes the Mosbachers’ gift as transformative, has two priorities for his directorship: developing new ideas for effective political governance, and collaborating with practitioners to support on-the-ground implementation. His goal, he says, is “to bring actual change in improving the quality of democratic politics around the world.”

Two unique CDDRL programs will help accomplish this goal. The Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program draws mid-career professionals to Stanford from all over the developing world for a three-week program of networking and academic training, while the Leadership Academy for Development (LAD) partners with institutions in developing countries to equip public officials with the tools they need to overcome context-specific barriers to policy change.

“A lot of people who have gone through these programs have gone on to play important leadership roles in furthering democratic governance in many different countries,” says Prof. Fukuyama, who brought LAD to Stanford when he joined the faculty nearly seven years ago. For example, Laura Alonso, a 2012 Draper Hills Fellow, now leads Argentina’s anti-corruption office, while other CDDRL alums work to improve democracy in Ukraine, Georgia, and elsewhere.

Closer to home, another consideration played into the Mosbachers’ gift. Their son, Jack, ’12, is a graduate of CDDRL’s Fisher Family Undergraduate Honors Program, won the center’s outstanding thesis award, and worked closely with Prof. Diamond, his mentor, for several years as an FSI research associate. The relationship between the Mosbachers and Diamond continues to this day.

“They’re an amazingly close family,” Prof. Diamond says. “If you want a model of a truly sweet, loving family, it’s hard to look further than the Mosbachers.”

Both Prof. Diamond and Prof. Fukuyama point out that the Mosbachers’ gift is particularly helpful because it will provide long-term funding for CDDRL. The Mosbachers have consistently and discreetly supported scholarship and health care initiatives at Stanford for decades. The Mosbacher Directorship is their first public gift.

“We’ve always been private about our charitable activities,” Mrs. Mosbacher says. “While initially reluctant to make a public, or named gift, we are hoping that we might inspire others to find a special connection at Stanford to support.”

 “It's a reflection of the quality of CDDRL's scholarship that the Mosbachers have been moved to make such a generous and public gift,” says FSI Director Michael McFaul. “Their support ensures that our scholars can continue doing work that is critical to understanding and addressing the most important global problems of our time.”

The Mosbachers’ gift arrives at a perfect time. After years of building a strong and unique program, CDDRL now has, in Prof. Diamond’s words, “a lot of connections with governments, organizations, agencies, and networks that can directly affect public policy and development practice” in dozens of countries around the world.

“Our family has been blessed by our association with Stanford.  We are grateful for the opportunity to be of service and support to it,” Mr. Mosbacher says.