H.R. 1, the For the People Act, is a sweeping bill that aims to strengthen American democracy. Included in the bill are reforms to election administration, campaign finance, gerrymandering, and voting rights. H.R. 1 passed the House in 2019, and is likely to be brought up in Congress again this year.  

What exactly is included in H.R. 1 and what are the arguments of its supporters and detractors? Join us for a deep dive into four components of this historic legislation. Each panel brings together advocates, critics, and academics to describe the specific reforms under consideration.   

These panels are co-sponsored by the Stanford University Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.

For more on H.R. 1, please visit our resource page here. 

Slides from the Brennan Center on the For the People Act can be found here.

Monday, Feb 1, 12:00 - 1:15 PM (PACIFIC): Election Administration 

H.R. 1 creates federal standards for the administration of elections, eases voter registration rules, expands ballot access through early and mail voting, and strengthens voting system security.  

Session Moderators: 

Nate Persily, Co-Director of the Program on Democracy and Internet at Stanford PACS and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project 
Didi Kuo, Associate Director for Research, Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University  
 

Session Speakers:

Leigh Chapman, Senior Director of Voting Rights Program, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights 
Nick Penniman, Founder and CEO, Issue One  
Wendy Weiser, Vice President for Democracy, Brennan Center for Justice  
Charles Stewart III, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, Co-Director of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project 
David Becker, Executive Director and Founder, Center for Election Innovation & Research

Tuesday, Feb 2, 12 - 1:15 PM (PACIFIC): Voting Rights

H.R. 1 recommits to the protections of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, restores felony voting rights, creates safeguards against purges of voting rolls, and requires voter-verified paper ballots.

Session Moderators: 

Nate Persily, Co-Director of the Program on Democracy and Internet at Stanford PACS and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project 
Didi Kuo, Associate Director for Research, Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University 

Session Speakers:

Dale Ho, Director, ACLU Voting Rights Project  
Myrna Perez, Director, Brennan Center's Voting Rights and Elections Program  
Janai Nelson, Associate Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF)  
Guy-Uriel Charles, Edward and Ellen Schwarzman Professor of Law, Duke Law School

Monday, Feb 8, 12 - 1:15 PM (PACIFIC): Gerrymandering

H.R. 1 bans partisan gerrymandering, establishes uniform rules for the drawing of districts, and requires independent redistricting commissions for congressional redistricting.

Session Moderators: 

Nate Persily, Co-Director of the Program on Democracy and Internet at Stanford PACS and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project 
Didi Kuo, Associate Director for Research, Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University 

Session Speakers:

Ben Ginsberg, Lecturer, Stanford Law School  
Ruth Greenwood, Co-Director of Voting Rights and Redistricting, Campaign Legal Center 
Michael Li, Senior Counsel, Brennan Center’s Democracy Program  
Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Tuesday, Feb 9, 12 - 1:15 PM (PACIFIC): Campaign Finance

H.R.1 includes several changes related to disclosure of certain campaign finance activities, regulation of on-line campaigning, and enforcement through the Federal Election Commission.

Session Moderators: 

Nate Persily, Co-Director of the Program on Democracy and Internet at Stanford PACS and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project 
Didi Kuo, Associate Director for Research, Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University 

Session Speakers: 

Bradley Smith, Josiah H. Blackmore II/Shirley M. Nault Professor of Law, Capital University Law School  
Richard Pildes, Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law, New York University School of Law 
Meredith McGehee, Executive Director, Issue One  
Alex Kaplan, Vice President of Policy & Campaigns, RepresentUs  
Adav Noti, Senior Director, Trial Litigation & Chief of Staff, Campaign Legal Center

About the Event: Do programmatic policies always yield electoral rewards? A growing body of research attributes the adoption of programmatic policies in African states to increased electoral competition. However, these works seldom explore how the specifics of policy implementation condition voters’ electoral responses to programmatic policies over time, or changes in electoral effects throughout policy cycles. We analyze the electoral effects of both the promise and implementation of a programmatic policy designed to increase secondary school enrollment in Tanzania over three election cycles. We find that the incumbent party benefited from a campaign promise to increase access to secondary schooling, but incurred an electoral penalty following implementation of the policy. We do not find any significant electoral effects by the third electoral cycle. Our findings illuminate temporal dynamics of policy feedback, the conditional electoral effects of programmatic policies, and the need for more studies of entire policy cycles over multiple electoral periods.

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About the Event:  In the wake of the racial unrest of 1968, the federal government  embarked on a series of social programs designed to  respond to the cries of Black communities demanding an end to police brutality, access to quality housing, and economic investment in schools and jobs.  Often, these cries were not fully heeded, and the marketplace became a terrain on which corporate America and the state argued that Black lives could be improved.  In this presentation on her most recent book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, historian Marcia Chatelain links the rise of black capitalism with the fracturing of the mid-century civil rights struggle and eclipsing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of economic justice.  In lieu of policies that could enhance the quality of life in America’s cities, many Black neighborhoods were offered fast food outlets, low-wage work, and an enmeshed relationship with corporate benevolence.

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About the Speaker:  Marcia Chatelain is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Georgetown University. The author of books, South Side Girls and Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Her work has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, and The Washington Post.

This event is open to Stanford undergraduate students only. 

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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 11, 2021 and runs through February 12, 2021.   CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.

For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.

**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the Event:

On November 3, in the midst of a pandemic, America elects its next President. CDDRL scholars will discuss the election results (or election challenges), Trump and Biden, key Congressional races, and what to expect between November and Inauguration Day. Join Bruce Cain, Nate Persily, Hakeem Jefferson, and Didi Kuo.

About the Speakers:

Bruce E. Cain is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. He received a BA from Bowdoin College (1970), a B Phil. from Oxford University (1972) as a Rhodes Scholar, and a Ph D from Harvard University (1976). He taught at Caltech (1976-89) and UC Berkeley (1989-2012) before coming to Stanford. Professor Cain was Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley from 1990-2007 and Executive Director of the UC Washington Center from 2005-2012. His areas of expertise include political regulation, applied democratic theory, representation and state politics.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, and New York, and as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform.

Hakeem Jefferson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His research interests move at the intersection of American politics and social psychology. In particular, his current work examines the conditions under which members of stigmatized groups punish group members who transgress social norms. Moving beyond a study of identity that centers largely on the attitudes and predilections of dominant social groups, his work explores the psychological and instrumental considerations stigmatized individuals bring to bear in response to “bad” (negatively stereotyped) behavior from within their own group. Using African-Americans as the test case, this work builds on scholarship about the politics of respectability and in-group policing to inform conversations about Blacks’ attitudes toward punitive social policies.

Didi Kuo is the Associate Director for Research and Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law 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. Her recent work examines changes to party organization, and the impact these changes have on the ability of governments to address challenges posed by global capitalism. She is the author of Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which examines the role of business against clientelism and the development of modern political parties in the nineteenth-century.

**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the Event:

Please join CDDRL as we kick off our 2020-21 seminar series with a panel on American democracy and the 2020 elections. Julia Azari (Marquette University), Ted Johnson (Brennan Center), and David Brady (Hoover Institute) will discuss the critical issues heading in to the Presidential elections this November.

About the Speakers:

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Nancy Okail is a visiting scholar at CDDRL. She has 20 years of experience working on issues of democracy, rule of law, human rights, governance and security in the Middle East and North Africa region. She analyzes these issues and advocates in favor of human rights through testimony to legislative bodies, providing policy recommendations to senior government officials in the U.S. and Europe. She is currently the president of the board of advisors of The Tahrir Institue for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), previously she was the Institute’s executive director since its foundation. Dr. Okail was the director of Freedom House’s Egypt program. She has also worked with the Egyptian government as a senior evaluation officer of foreign aid and managed programs for several international organizations. Dr. Okail was one of the 43 nongovernmental organization workers convicted and sentenced to prison in a widely publicized 2012 case for allegedly using foreign funds to foment unrest in Egypt. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in the UK; her doctoral research focused on the power relations of foreign aid. 

Abstract:
Kristen Looney will be discussing her forthcoming work, Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia (Cornell U. Press 2020). This book tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia’s political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s), the research shows that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. Looney argues that rural modernization campaigns played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian studies, the book enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change.

Speaker Bio:

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Abstract:

In the face of mounting challenges from criminal activity and citizen demands for improved public safety, Mexico has undertaken significant efforts at police reform. Those efforts would presumably enhance the capacity of police forces to fight and deter crime. This paper explores the quantity and quality of police in Mexico, a federation where multi-tier government makes incentives for police professionalization more challenging than in unitary systems. The paper calculates, the true size of police forces, comparing them to all legal specialists in the use of violence, including private security guards at homes and businesses. It then estimates the implicit wage incentives given to experience and human capital formation in the different types of police corporations during the Calderón and Peña Nieto presidential administrations. Finally, we use a municipal cross section to gain further insight into the effects of police professionalization on interpersonal violence, as measured by homicide rates. The overall findings suggest that improving policing in Mexico is not merely a question of adding manpower or spending more budgetary resources, but of changing career incentives for greater professionalization.

Speaker Bio:

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