Stanford University

Environment

FSI scholars approach their research on the environment from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Center on Food Security and the Environment weighs the connection between climate change and agriculture; the impact of biofuel expansion on land and food supply; how to increase crop yields without expanding agricultural lands; and the trends in aquaculture. FSE’s research spans the globe – from the potential of smallholder irrigation to reduce hunger and improve development in sub-Saharan Africa to the devastation of drought on Iowa farms. David Lobell, a senior fellow at FSI and a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, has looked at the impacts of increasing wheat and corn crops in Africa, South Asia, Mexico and the United States; and has studied the effects of extreme heat on the world’s staple crops.

Solving Public Problems

-

About the Seminar: In this time of great challenges, our democracies urgently need to produce citizens who can move from demanding change to making it. But the skills for doing so are not innate, they are learned. In this talk, Beth Simone Noveck will discuss how both citizens and governments can take advantage of digital technology, data, and the collective wisdom of our communities to design and deliver powerful solutions to contemporary problems. Drawing on the latest methods from data and social sciences, including original survey data from around the world, she proposes a practical set of methods for public servants, community leaders, students, activists, and anyone who wants to be a catalyst for positive social change.

 

Register Now

 

Beth Simone Noveck Headshot
About the Speaker: Beth Simone Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Family Center for Global Impact and its partner project, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance. The author of Solving Public Problems: How to Fix Our Government and Change Our World (Yale Press 2021) (named a Best Book of 2021 by Stanford Social Innovation Review), she is also Core Faculty at the Institute for Experiential AI (IEAI) at Northeastern. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy appointed her as the state’s first Chief Innovation Officer and Chancellor Angela Merkel named her to her Digital Council in 2018. Previously, Beth served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative under President Obama. UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her senior advisor for Open Government.

In addition to Solving Public Problems, Beth is the author of Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing (Harvard Univ Press 2015) and Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings 2009) and co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press, 2005).

Online, via Zoom.

Beth Simone Noveck Director | The GovLab
Seminars

America in One Room Climate and Energy: Discussion Results from a National Deliberative Poll

-

America in One Room: Climate and Energy, a Helena project, is the largest controlled experiment with "in-depth deliberation" ever held in the U.S.  It addressed this question: What would the American public really think about our climate and energy challenges if it had the chance to deliberate about them in-depth, with good and balanced information?
 
If the American people—or in this case, a representative sample of them—could consider the pros and cons of our different energy options, which would they support? Which would they cut back on? What possible paths to Net Zero would seem plausible to them? Which proposals would they resist? Can the public arrive at solutions to our climate and energy dilemmas that transcend our great divisions, especially our deep partisan differences? Can they also find common ground across differences in age, race, and region?
 
These and other questions will be discussed on Wednesday, December 1, 2021, 12:30-2:00 pm PST
 

Register Now

Panelists will include:

  • Nicole Ardoin, Director, Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER), Associate Professor of Education and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University
  • Rep. John Curtis, United States House of Representative, (R-UT)
  • Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University
  • Noah Diffenbaugh, Kara J Foundation Professor and Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University
  • Chris Field, Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Stanford University
  • James Fishkin, the Janet M. Peck Professor of International Communication and Director, Center for Deliberative Democracy, Stanford University
  • Rep. Ro Khanna, United States House of Representatives (D-CA)
  • Alice Siu, Associate Director, Center for Deliberative Democracy, Stanford University
  • Peter Weber, Co-Chair Emeritus, California Forward


This webinar is hosted by:
Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Stanford Center for Deliberative Democracy
Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team
California Forward
Other sponsors of America in One Room: Climate and Energy are listed here

Online via Zoom

Panel Discussions
CDDRL Special Events

Together For Our Planet: Americans are More Aligned on Taking Action on Climate Change than Expected

Authors
Nora Sulots
News Type
Q&As
Date
Paragraphs

A quick look on the internet and social media seems to confirm that America’s political divide is alive and well when it comes to talking about climate change and policies to address the urgent climate crisis.

Researchers Larry Diamond, James Fishkin and Alice Siu recently put that assumption to the test. Using the framework of the America in One Room initiative, 962 participants were brought together to deliberate amongst themselves in a thoughtful, civil, and substantive fashion on 72 questions about climate change and climate policy. The participants were selected to accurately represent the American electorate, reflecting regional, cultural and political diversity. The exercise was overseen by the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, while NORC at the University of Chicago selected the samples and conducted the surveys.

The results are stunning. On 66 of the 72 issue propositions in the survey, the participants shifted significantly over the course of the deliberation toward wanting to do more to combat climate change. These shifts were generally in the same direction across party and demographic divides.

As policymakers meet at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Fishkin, the director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy (CDD); Diamond, FSI senior fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL); and Siu, the associate director at CDD, reflected on their findings and what the results indicate about the path forward in addressing the global climate crisis.


What prompted you to apply the deliberative polling method of the America in One Room initiative to the issue of climate change and energy?

James Fishkin: Climate change and energy pose issues that are of great importance for our future, but are very complex. In many cases the public is not well-informed about the details, and are often subjected to partisan polarization. All of these factors make these issues suitable for Deliberative Polling.

Larry Diamond: Put simply, climate change is the most existentially important issue confronting the human species. But it is hard to see how the world will summon the political will and coordination to make the transition to Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions with the speed needed unless the U.S. takes a leading role, and in the U.S., our policymaking on climate and energy is stuck in the same polarizing deadlock that almost everything else is mired in. So, my passion is to see whether and how we can identify policies that will enable the United States to help lead the world expeditiously in a transition away from fossil fuels.

Alice Siu: The CDD has been conducting deliberations on climate and environment issues for many years, but this is the first national U.S. project. And, especially during COP26, the voices from the Deliberative Polling event need to be further amplified.

When people engage in deliberations with diverse others, they understand in a firsthand way that being in a democracy means listening to each other.
Alice Siu
Associate Director at CDD

Were you surprised by the results you saw?

Fishkin: I was gratified to see so many significant changes of opinion, mostly in the direction of people arriving at shared solutions once they discussed the issues and became more informed.

Diamond: I was surprised at the extent of movement among Republicans in two directions: toward greater recognition that climate change is an urgent and transcendent problem, and toward support for policies to accelerate the transition to renewable energy sources. I was also intrigued to find so much support, and then increased support, for a new generation of nuclear power plants. I don’t think we can get off our addiction to fossil fuels rapidly enough without nuclear power in the mix, and I was surprised that so many Democrats and in the end Republicans, too, understood that.

Siu: Indeed, there were some quite dramatic shifts in opinions. On top of the changes in survey results, the small group discussions themselves were extremely rich, with many people learning from those very different from themselves. Many participants came out of the event understanding that listening to each other is necessary to make any changes happen.

What is the path forward? How can this information be used at a policymaking level to create actionable change?

Fishkin: As in other Deliberative Polls around the world, these results need to be shared in detail with policy makers and with the media. They provide a route to responsible advocacy. They represent the considered judgments of the public once they really discuss and get their questions answered. In a democracy that helps contribute to the “will of the people.”

Diamond: Yes, I agree with Jim. It is vital that the results get publicized and considered in the policy debate. This is the only indication we have of what the American public as a whole would favor doing to combat climate change and transform our energy mix if everyone had access to objective and balanced information and the chance to weigh it together with one another.

Siu: In a webinar last week, Senators Lindsey Graham and Jeanne Shaheen spoke about the importance of this Deliberative Polling event and shared some ideas for paths forward to have actionable change. With everyone’s help, we can further amplify the results from this event and make it known that Americans believe that change can happen.

Climate change is the most existentially important issue confronting the human species. But it is hard to see how the world will summon the political will and coordination to make these transitions unless the U.S. takes a leading role.
Larry Diamond
FSI Senior Fellow at CDDRL

The COP26 climate change summit is currently underway in Glasgow, Scotland. Are policymakers and the public reaching a tipping point where we might see more substantive support for actions on climate change at the international level?

Diamond: Unfortunately, I don’t see signs of the necessary resolve to act with the urgency that is imperative.  We are moving in the right direction, toward publics around the world understanding that climate change is a threat to the well-being of all societies, and to the survival of some countries, and toward understanding that we must transition away from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy, while also ending other practices that contribute to the problem, such as deforestation.  But we aren’t moving nearly fast enough. I am not a climate scientist, but I feel like we are at least ten years behind where we need to be, and a decade of difference in meeting goals could well be the difference between effective adaptation and calamity.  The one truly hopeful sign is that a growing number of conservatives in the U.S. are beginning to publicly acknowledge the magnitude of the danger and the urgent need for an energy transition. I hope they can mobilize their Congressional colleagues around an ambitious policy agenda, because we are running out of time to avert a global catastrophe, and the U.S. won’t get to where we need to be without a bipartisan approach.

Can the model of deliberative polling exercises be scaled to enable similar conversations with broader audiences?

Fishkin: These deliberations were conducted with the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform—a joint effort of the Crowdsourced Democracy Team here at Stanford (led by Professor Ashish Goel in Management Science and Engineering) and the Center for Deliberative Democracy (CDD). In theory, any number of these small groups can be convened, and we hope to use it for deliberative scaling to much larger numbers just as we have used it for Deliberative Polling with scientific samples. So, the answer is yes, and that is a direction we want to move in.

Diamond: I agree with Jim.  There are very exciting frontiers ahead for this. I also think there is room to implement deliberation in person in the schools and between schools in different neighborhoods. The lesson we are finding over and over is that there is great value for democracy, societal health, and policy effectiveness when people of diverse backgrounds engage one another in thoughtful, moderated, mutually respectful conversations. And we have growing evidence that the automated moderator—developed through this amazing partnership of engineers and social scientists at Stanford—can effectively moderate a small group discussion, even on very polarized issues.

Siu: Yes, absolutely. Our platform is designed with this in mind. We want to scale deliberation to the masses, so that anyone who wants to can experience deliberation for themselves. When people engage in deliberations with diverse others, they understand in a firsthand way that being in a democracy means listening to each other.

Read More

Hero Image
Climate change activists march down a street carrying banners and signs. Unsplash
All News button
1
Subtitle

New data from the Center for Deliberative Democracy suggests that when given the opportunity to discuss climate change in a substantive way, the majority of Americans are open to taking proactive measures to address the global climate crisis.

Is Deliberation an Antidote to Extreme Partisan Polarization? Reflections on “America in One Room”

Paragraphs

This paper is positioned at the intersection of two literatures: partisan polarization and deliberative democracy. It analyzes results from a national field experiment in which more than 500 registered voters were brought together from around the country to deliberate in depth over a long weekend on five major issues facing the country. A pre–post control group was also asked the same questions. The deliberators showed large, depolarizing changes in their policy attitudes and large decreases in affective polarization. The paper develops the rationale for hypotheses explaining these decreases and contrasts them with a literature that would have expected the opposite. The paper briefly concludes with a discussion of how elements of this “antidote” can be scaled.

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
American Political Science Review
Authors
James S. Fishkin
Alice Siu
Larry Diamond
Number
pp. 1 - 18

Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program Information Session AY 22-23

-

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors on who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department.  The application period opens on January 10, 2022 and runs through February 11, 2022.   For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.

Join us online via Zoom on Friday, January 21st at 12:00pm (PST) to learn more! 

REGISTER NOW

CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.

 

Online via zoom. REGISTER HERE.

Stephen J. Stedman

CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-2705 (650) 724-2996
0
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
Stedman_Steve.jpg PhD

Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.

In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.

In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.

In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.

His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).

Director, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law
Director, Program in International Relations
Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label

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.

Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label

Accomplishment – Book Talk with Sir Michael Barber

-

Book cover of Accomplishment by Sir Michael Barber
There is no secret formula for success. But what if there were a pattern you could follow? A way of mapping the route and navigating the obstacles that arise?

Michael Barber has spent many years advising governments, businesses and major sporting teams around the world on how to achieve ambitious goals on time. In this book, he applies the wisdom he has gained from dealing with large, complex organizations and elite athletes to help anyone tackle their most challenging goals.

Drawing on the stories of historic visionaries and modern heroes – from Galileo to Rosa Parks, Gareth Southgate to Justin Trudeau – Accomplishment blends personal anecdote and proven strategy to trace a blueprint that can be applied to any area of life.

At the book’s core is the need to remember the ethical basis for what you have set out to do. Doing the right thing for the right reason is the reward that will see you through the criticism and setbacks. So whatever it is that you aspire to do – run a marathon, transform a school or run a public service for millions – this book will inspire you to get going and to bridge the gap between vision and reality.

Click here to purchase the book.

 

Register Now

 

Sir Michael Barber
About the Author: Sir Michael Barber is a global expert on the implementation of ambitious change in large, complicated systems. He has advised governments on every continent and worked with major private sector organizations, schools and universities in Britain and the US. In addition, Barber has advised Team Sky, the elite cycling team and, since 2016, he has been a member of the Football Association's Technical Advisory Board, which helps the FA prepare England's teams, both men and women, for major tournaments.

 

 

Online, via Zoom.

Sir Michael Barber Chairman and Founder, Delivery Associates
Seminars
CDDRL Special Events

2021 CDDRL Fisher Family Honors Program Award Winner Presentations

-

The CDDRL Spring seminar series will be open to the Stanford community via Zoom

and will be recorded for the general public to watch later.

 

 

Audrey Bloom
Audrey Bloom - Firestone Award Winner

Major: Human Biology
Advisor: Terry Moe

Thesis Title: How Doctors Influence the Price of Healthcare in the United States and Japan: The Critical Role of Interest Group Politics in America’s Healthcare Cost Crisis

 

 

Hiroto Saito

 
Hiroto Saito - CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Winner 
 

Major: International Relations

Advisor: Dr. Gil-li Vardi, Dr. Stephen Stedman

Thesis Title: Colombia after the FARC: Has Peace Really Arrived?

Online, via Zoom:  REGISTER

Seminars

The Global Infrastructure Gap: Potential, Perils, and a Framework for Distinction

-

About the Event:  Poor countries lack infrastructure services: 1.2 billion people have no electricity, and 1 billion live more than 2 kilometers from an all-weather road. In 2015, the World Bank initiated a surge of interest in financing this need when it claimed that rich-country private capital could close the infrastructure services gap, make money, and achieve the sustainable development goals by moving from “billions to trillions” in infrastructure investment in poor countries. This paper assesses and challenges the prevailing gap thinking by introducing an equilibrium framework that distinguishes those poor countries in which the Bank’s three-fold claim is tenable from those where it is not.

 

Peter Blair Henry
About the Speaker:  Peter Blair Henry is Dean Emeritus of New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The youngest person to hold the position, he assumed the Deanship in January 2010 and joined the NYU Stern Faculty as the William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Finance. Henry joined NYU Stern from Stanford University, where he was the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics, the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Faculty Scholar, and Associate Director of the Center for Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Henry currently serves as a director of the boards of Citigroup and Nike, as Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and is a member of the advisory boards of Protiviti, a global consulting firm, and Biospring Partners, a growth-stage firm that invests in life sciences technology.  He is also Principal investigator of the PhD Excellence Initiative, a Sloan Foundation-funded fellowship program for minority scholars seeking admission to economic doctoral programs.  In 2015, Henry was awarded the Foreign Policy Association Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the organization.

 

 

The Global Infrastructure Gap: Potential, Perils, and a Framework for Distinction
Download pdf

Online, via Zoom: REGISTER

Peter Blair Henry Dean Emeritus of New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business
Seminars
CDDRL Special Events

American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective

-

 

About this Event:  American political observers express increasing concern about affective polarization (i.e., partisans’ resentment toward political opponents). We advance debates about America’s partisan divisions by comparing affective polarization in the USA over the past twenty-five years with affective polarization in nineteen other Western publics. We conclude that American affective polarization is not extreme in comparative perspective, although Americans’ dislike of partisan opponents has increased more rapidly since the mid 1990s than in most other Western publics. We then show that affective polarization is more intense when unemployment and inequality are high; when political elites clash over cultural issues such as immigration and national identity; and in countries with majoritarian electoral institutions. Our findings situate American partisan resentment and hostility in comparative perspective and illuminate correlates of affective polarization that are difficult to detect when examining the American case in isolation.

 

About the Speaker: 

Noam Gidron
Noam Gidron is an assistant professor (lecturer) at the Department of Political Science and the Joint Program in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  His research interests lie at the intersection of political behavior and political economy. 

Online, via Zoom:  REGISTER

Noam Gidron Assistant professor (lecturer) at the Department of Political Science and the Joint Program in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Seminars

Understanding Radical American Partisanship

-

About the Event: 

Political violence is rising in the United States, alarming citizens and leaders alike. How many Americans endorse partisan violence and other forms of extreme hostility? What are its deep social, political, historical, and psychological roots? What can be done about it? And what does it mean for democracy? 

In this talk, Drs. Mason and Kalmoe make sense of our contentious politics with a groundbreaking study of radicalism among ordinary American partisans. Their individual-level studies utilize more than a dozen new nationally representative surveys and experiments to trace recent trends since 2017, reactions to elections and violent events, broader conditions that spur support for violence, links from violence attitudes to aggressive behavior, and the role of leaders in enflaming or pacifying their followers.

The results reshape the study of modern American political behavior by showing that ordinary partisanship is far more volatile than scholars have recognized in the past century of study.  

 

About the Speaker(s)

Nathan Kalmoe
Dr. Nathan P. Kalmoe is an associate professor of political communication at Louisiana State University in the Manship School of Mass Communication and Department of Political Science. He is the author of With Ballots & Bullets: Partisanship & Violence in the American Civil War and co-author of Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public. He has also written essays for The Washington Post and Politico, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Vox, among other popular outlets.

 

 

 

 

Lillilana Mason
Lilliana Mason is associate professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (University of Chicago Press). Her research on partisan identity, partisan bias, social sorting, and American social polarization has been published in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Behavior, and featured in media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and National Public Radio.

 

 

 

Online, via Zoom:  REGISTER

Dr. Nathan P. Kalmoe Associate Professor of Political Communication, Louisiana State University
Lilliana Mason Associate professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park
Seminars
Subscribe to Environment