Stanford University

Health and Medicine

FSI’s researchers assess health and medicine through the lenses of economics, nutrition and politics. They’re studying and influencing public health policies of local and national governments and the roles that corporations and nongovernmental organizations play in providing health care around the world. Scholars look at how governance affects citizens’ health, how children’s health care access affects the aging process and how to improve children’s health in Guatemala and rural China. They want to know what it will take for people to cook more safely and breathe more easily in developing countries.

FSI professors investigate how lifestyles affect health. What good does gardening do for older Americans? What are the benefits of eating organic food or growing genetically modified rice in China? They study cost-effectiveness by examining programs like those aimed at preventing the spread of tuberculosis in Russian prisons. Policies that impact obesity and undernutrition are examined; as are the public health implications of limiting salt in processed foods and the role of smoking among men who work in Chinese factories. FSI health research looks at sweeping domestic policies like the Affordable Care Act and the role of foreign aid in affecting the price of HIV drugs in Africa.

Governance and Public Goods in Indigenous Mexico

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We exploit a unique institutional feature in the state of Oaxaca,  Mexico,  where municipalities were allowed to choose between a form of autonomy called “usos y costumbres” or delegating decisions to “modern” forms of representative government. Using a geographic discontinuity approach to identify causal effects,  we find strong evidence that political autonomy enhances development outcomes for indigenous communities. To explore plausible mechanisms,  we collected a household survey in over 90 villages. In autonomous villages,  direct participatory democracy practices lead to a more egalitarian distribution of services with a less notable anti-poor bias.

CISAC Conference Room

Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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Beatriz Magaloni Associate Professor of Political Science, FSI Senior Fellow, Director of Program on Poverty and Governance Speaker
Seminars

Bilal Siddiqi

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow (ESOC Project)
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Bilal Siddiqi is a postdoctoral scholar affiliated with the Empirical Studies of Conflict project (esoc.princeton.edu). His research focuses on micro-institutions, formal and informal legal systems, peace-building and state accountability in post-conflict settings. He is currently involved in several field experiments in Sierra Leone and Liberia, including a randomized controlled trial of two non-financial incentive mechanisms in Sierra Leone’s public health sector; experimental evaluations of community-based paralegal programs in Liberia and Sierra Leone; and a randomized controlled trial of a community reconciliation program in Sierra Leone.

Bilal received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to Stanford, he was based at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm as a Marie Curie / AMID Scholar; and has also spent time at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, where he worked on aid effectiveness in global health. He holds a B.Sc. (Hons) from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan.

Christopher MacLennan

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Fulbright Visiting Scholar 2012-13
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Christopher MacLennan is currently the Director General of Thematic and Sectoral Policy at the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).  He is responsible for leading the Agency’s policy development related to various sectors of international development programming including democracy promotion, food security, economic growth, governance and human rights.  Dr. MacLennan led the team that built the policy framework for the G8 Muskoka Initiative on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health in 2010 and represented Canada’s contribution to the 2012 G8 New Alliance on Food and Nutrition Security at Camp David.  Previous to working at CIDA, Christopher has held various positions in the Government of Canada, including at the Privy Council Office, the arm of the Canadian government that directly supports the Prime Minister and Cabinet.  Research interests include donor approaches to democratic assistance, international human rights development and federalism in multinational states.  Dr. MacLennan holds a Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario specializing in constitutional development and international human rights and has numerous publications including Toward the Charter:  Canadians and the Demand for a National Bill of Rights, 1929-1960.

Health, Human Rights and Why We Should Care

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Health is a product of biological and behavioral factors, and humanitarian law and human rights approaches have a long record of assisting the medical community to identify vulnerable people and groups at risk. But the human rights approach also takes into
consideration that health is the product of social relations and distributive justice. It recognizes the critical role of governments in ensuring access to health and a fair distribution of the social determinants of health. A human rights approach also addresses
issues of human dignity, human agency, and the ethics of collaborative decision-making between professional service providers and the people they serve.

This multi-disciplinary workshop will explore and expand the understanding of the right to health, one that includes the provision of reproductive, maternal and child health as well as
prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases. Vital aspects of this examine the role of governments, the medical and public health sector, and international agencies.

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Lucas Conference Center, the Landau Building - Stanford University

Workshops

Indigenous Peoples Rights

This project seeks to promote the collaboration between the Center for Latin American Studies and the Program on Human Rights in conducting an interdisciplinary faculty/graduate student research that seeks to better understand the human rights situation of indigenous peoples in Latin America.

Stanford study shows no evidence that international health aid is wasted

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Retraction: In June 2012, Stanford researchers Rajaie Batniji and Eran Bendavid retracted the research findings explained in the following article. Their findings, presented in the essay, "Does development assistance for health really displace government health spending? Reassessing the evidence," contained errors in statistical model choice and reporting. The essay was published May 8, 2012, by the journal PLoS Medicine. The researchers erroneously concluded that there was no significant displacement of foreign aid. When they discovered their mistake, they informed editors at PLoS Medicine and moved to correct the record. The editors agreed with the need for the retraction and accepted the authors’ explanation of their error. The retraction can be read at www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001214.

When a 2010 study concluded that about half the money given to international governments for providing health care services isn’t used as intended, skeptics who argued that foreign aid is largely wasted were handed a powerful piece of data to bolster their claims.

But Stanford researchers Rajaie S. Batniji and Eran Bendavid say those findings are flawed. In an article featured in the May 8th edition of PLoS Medicine, Batniji and Bendavid say the two-year-old study by researchers at the University of Washington should not be used to guide decisions about how much money to give and who should get it.

“We can’t say that there’s absolutely no displacement of foreign aid, but these earlier findings are too tenuous for the basis of policy,” said Batniji, an affiliate of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Batniji and Bendavid, an affiliate of FSI’s Stanford Health Policy and an assistant professor of medicine, are taking on the 2010 study – which appeared in the Lancet – at a critical time for foreign assistance programs.

The United States, which gives about half of all the world’s health aid, plans to chop its $10 billion budget by about 4 percent in the coming fiscal year. That’s the first cut in more than a decade. And officials have shown no signs of switching their preference of bypassing national governments as recipients of health aid, funneling more than half of U.S. support to non-governmental organizations instead.

Batniji and Bendavid decided to re-analyze the data used by the University of Washington researchers after meeting with policymakers who pointed to the study as a cautionary tale of foreign governments that waste and mismanage money earmarked for health programs.

“People were citing the Lancet piece, saying this was starting to shape how they thought about giving money,” said Batniji, who is also a resident physician at Stanford Medical Center. “But when we started asking questions about what the actual displacement looks like, the answers didn’t seem very compelling or reasonable.”

Taking a fresh look at the same numbers used for the 2010 study – public financing data culled from the World Health Organization and the International Monetary Fund – the researchers saw a different story emerge about the use of foreign aid in the health sector.

Once Batniji and Bendavid excluded conflicting and outlying data, such as huge discrepancies between WHO and IMF estimates and information about countries that were getting very small amounts of money from other countries, “there was no significant displacement of foreign aid,” Bendavid said.

The Stanford researchers’ findings are poised to influence a debate among policymakers and donors over whether it’s more efficient to give international assistance slated for health spending to government agencies or NGOs.

“We want to free donors of feeling that if they give money directly to governments, the money will be offset and used for an unintended purpose,” Batniji said. “The concern about displacement really amplifies the demands we make on governments for how they use the money. And that is at odds with a recent movement to let foreign governments set their own agendas for how to spend money.”

The research conducted by Batniji and Bendavid was supported by FSI’s Global Underdevelopment Action Fund and the Dr. George Rosenkranz Prize awarded to Bendavid in 2010.

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