Nearly every day for the last three years, Russian missiles, drones, and artillery fire have struck Ukraine, killing thousands of people and damaging power plants, schools, hospitals, and homes in what has become the largest conflict in Europe since World War II.

“You live in constant fear for your loved ones,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk, founder of the Center for Civil Liberties and a participant in a February 24 virtual panel discussion with Ukrainian leaders in Kyiv on the war’s impact on daily life, the global democratic order, and Ukraine’s path ahead. The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted the event on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“It's very difficult to be in a large-scale war for three years. You live in total uncertainty,” Matviichuk said.
 

In a CDDRL Research Seminar Series talk, Julia Azari, Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, explored the link between race, presidential transformation, and impeachment crises. She argued that presidents who significantly alter the racial status quo often face backlash, leading to populist successors who undermine democratic norms and ultimately face impeachment. She examined three cases — Andrew Johnson following Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon following Lyndon Johnson, and Donald Trump following Barack Obama — highlighting how racial politics shaped their presidencies and impeachment crises.

Azari’s framework situates race at the heart of presidential politics. Presidents usually maintain political stability, but transformative leaders disrupt racial hierarchies through legislation, executive action, and symbolism. This disruption sparks resistance, exploited by successors who reject transformation and undermine opposition. These backlash presidents often overreach institutionally, leading to impeachment. However, Azari argued impeachment rarely halts reactionary movements, which outlast individual leaders and shape long-term politics.

Her first case examined Lincoln’s presidency, which ended decades of compromise over slavery through the Civil War, emancipation, and constitutional amendments. His successor, Andrew Johnson, sought to reverse these changes through “presidential reconstruction,” allowing Southern states to reinstate white supremacist governance. His impeachment stemmed from both political imperatives — opposing Radical Reconstruction — and institutional overreach, violating the Tenure of Office Act. Though he survived removal, Reconstruction ultimately failed, and white supremacy prevailed.

The second case analyzed Nixon’s presidency following Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights transformation. Johnson’s passage of landmark legislation triggered a white backlash, which Nixon capitalized on with “law and order” rhetoric and the Southern Strategy. His impeachment crisis resulted from abuses of executive power, including spying on opponents and obstructing justice in the Watergate scandal. Though Nixon resigned, his realignment of the Republican Party and weakening of civil rights enforcement persisted.

The final case examined Obama’s presidency, which symbolically challenged the whiteness of the office, intensifying racial polarization. Conspiracies about his identity and accusations of favoritism toward minorities fueled Trump’s rise. Trump embraced racially charged policies, from the Muslim travel ban to attacking the 1619 Project. His two impeachments reflected this broader racialized political crisis — first for withholding Ukraine aid to pressure an investigation into Biden, and second for inciting the January 6 insurrection to overturn the 2020 election.

Azari concluded that racial transformation triggers backlash, leading to populist leaders who challenge institutional norms and face impeachment. However, impeachment alone is ineffective in stopping these movements, as they continue shaping U.S. politics. With Trump’s continued influence and the 2024 election looming, this pattern of transformation, backlash, and institutional crisis is likely to persist.

India’s once-robust democracy is in decline, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) being the only party with effective political organizing and a clear national message. FSI Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy Larry Diamond, Hoover Senior Fellow Šumit Ganguly, and Hoover Research Fellow Dinsha Mistree reflected on this reality in a CDDRL seminar series talk. The discussion built on findings from their recently released book, The Troubling State of India's Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024).

The absence of a coordinated opposition in India has continued to threaten the functioning of its democracy. The challenges confronting the Indian National Congress Party (INC) are at the heart of the problem.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the INC emerged as a healthy political party. It enjoyed a unified national vision that championed secularism and independence from the British Empire. By being inclusive towards various political and religious identities, it unified a vast coalition across India’s broad geography, utilizing effective grassroots organizing mechanisms.

Today, however, the INC is hampered by extreme personalism due to the domineering role of the Gandhi family. The party lacks the organization or national vision to compete with the BJP. This decline began under the populist prime minister Indira Gandhi, who rose to power in the late 1960s. She replaced party leaders with loyalists and sycophants, weakening critical party mechanisms. The party began to set aside ideologically-driven political priorities in favor of more personalistic sinecures.

As subsequent members of the Gandhi family continued to lead the party, the INC failed to pose as an effective alternative to the BJP. The lack of political options results in a harmful feedback loop where citizens are discouraged from engaging with the opposition at all because they perceive no other candidates as having a chance at gaining power.

The future of India’s democratic competition requires the revival of opposition parties. Local parties at the state level are unlikely to grow to match the BJP, as they are often focused on specific ethnic and regional concerns, as well as lacking the infrastructure to take on the BJP nationally. The INC, once a leading national party, is unlikely to reinvent itself effectively unless it is released from the personalist grasp of the Gandhi family. The history of coalition building among the diversity of parties at the state and regional levels may provide a potential model for democratic checks or even electoral alternation. In any case, vigorous opposition must emerge from within India's political party system if backsliding is to be countered in the world's largest democracy.

A full recording of the seminar can be viewed below:

When political parties are strong intermediaries between citizens and the government, they can effectively manage the relationship between democracy and capitalism, political scientist Didi Kuo told a Stanford audience.

But when parties become weak intermediaries, they lay the groundwork for crises in democracy, she said during a February 20 event for her new book, The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press, 2025). In her work, she challenged the narrative that parties are the problem and explained that strengthening them is actually the key to addressing current challenges to democracies.

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) hosted the panel discussion with Kuo, Center Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, and co-director of CDDRL’s Fisher Family Honors Program; Bruce Cain, professor of political science at Stanford and director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West; Jake Grumbach, associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley; and Julia Azari, professor of political science at Marquette University.

Kuo described how political parties in the last 50 years have grown weaker and more unpopular while also becoming increasingly professionalized and beholden to the private sector – trends that have resulted in a “plutocratic populism” where parties no longer exist to represent their constituents.

‘They’re often hollow’

As democracy expanded across the West in the 19th century, she said, political parties were often strong and arguably machine-like in their effectiveness. Then, after the Cold War, a neoliberal economic consensus emerged that included seismic changes to campaign finance and shifting party priorities. The effects included the weakening of the party systems of Western democracies, a ceding of governance to the private sector, and, as a result, a crisis in democracy.

“Party organizations themselves have become far more professionalized, elite, and focused exclusively on the technology and machinery of election campaigns. There's been much less role for state and local parties,” said Kuo, adding that in this “era of nationalized parties,” political parties at these lower levels have become sidelined. “They're often hollow.”

And that creates an opening for some. For example, she said, after 2010, the extreme right began to build local power in parties. “Steve Bannon did a podcast in which he recommended that people look up their local Republican Party organization. He said you’re very likely to find that it’s empty, so you can just go there with some of your friends. Sign up, become a local party chair, and then you can take over election administration. So, this was a strategy that was promulgated on his podcast prior to 2020.”
 

Alice Siu, the Associate Director of CDDRL’s Deliberative Democracy Lab (DDL), presented her work at a CDDRL research seminar on the effect of deliberation on how people think about political issues, particularly in the current polarized context.

DDL and its partners organized discussions on contentious issues, ranging from climate change to institutional democratic reforms, among hundreds of participants from wide-ranging demographic and political backgrounds. For a total of 12 hours, participants discussed topics through an AI-assisted deliberation platform. They were polled before and after deliberation and compared to a control group who did not engage in the discussions. 

The results showed a consistent and significant opinion change among participants following deliberation, with movement towards consensus across party affiliations. Satisfaction with democracy dramatically improved, especially among Republicans, who shifted from 18.9% to 50.1% satisfaction. Evidence showed an increase in participants’ trust and empathy toward individuals with opposing opinions.

The effects of these conversations persisted after the intervention. Three months after deliberation, participants continued to feel more positively about those they disagreed with. Results show that 41.7% agreed that those with opposing viewpoints “have good reasons; there are just better ones on the other side,” compared to 31% before deliberation and 33% immediately after. These long-term effects manifested in the participants’ political participation as well. One year after a climate-focused deliberation, participation in discussions was correlated with stronger support for a Democratic-controlled congress before the 2022 midterm elections.

These results demonstrate that democracy can be strengthened through deliberation. However, for a substantial, long-lasting impact, deliberation must be scaled significantly. To do so, technology must be leveraged. For example, using an AI instead of a human moderator may improve affordable access to deliberation platforms. Furthermore, deliberation should occur in educational settings from the middle school to the graduate level. Investing in youth’s communication skills and civic engagement affords them tools to uphold our democracy for generations. Challenging but empathic conversations with those from differing viewpoints must be encouraged. While this research offers reasons for optimism, a more scalable model must be developed to ensure large-scale participation in robust discourse; at DDL, Siu is leading this effort to bring deliberation to entire societies through the AI-assisted Stanford Online Deliberation Platform.

Ali Çarkoğlu, a political scientist specializing in elections, voting behavior, and Turkish politics, presented an analysis of Turkey's electoral dynamics from 1990 to 2023 at a CDDRL research seminar. His study focused on the interplay between social cleavages, democratic backsliding, and their impact on political competition and voter behavior. Using data from the World Values Survey and Turkish Election Studies, Çarkoğlu explored the rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the enduring influence of cultural divides on Turkey’s political landscape.

Central to his analysis was the "alla Turca kulturkampf," a concept describing the deep-rooted center-periphery divide in Turkish politics. This cleavage reflects a cultural conflict between two contrasting societal visions: the Kemalist ideal of secularism, gender equality, and scientific rationalism versus the pro-Islamist focus on tradition, religion, and family values. Despite the AKP’s success in bringing peripheral groups into the state’s institutional core, these cultural divides persist as a primary source of polarization. Çarkoğlu argued that this polarization has entrenched partisan loyalty and overshadowed other factors in shaping voter behavior.

A key theme of the presentation was Turkey's democratic backsliding, characterized by the erosion of democratic institutions, curtailment of civil liberties, and electoral manipulation. Çarkoğlu noted that Turkey ranks 148th on the liberal democracy index, illustrating its significant democratic decline. He linked these trends to heightened polarization, which weakens opposition forces and reduces the influence of traditional electoral cleavages. Instead of fostering competitive elections, the political landscape is increasingly dominated by entrenched party loyalties and identity-driven politics.

The presentation also highlighted the significant social and economic changes Turkey has undergone since 1990. Urbanization surged from 61% in 1992 to 78% in 2024, while agriculture’s share of employment dropped from 45% to 17%. Economic growth has raised per capita income from $2,000 to $10,000, but inequality remains pervasive, and safety nets are inadequate. Women’s labor force participation remains low at 35%, and educational disparities persist. Household sizes have decreased, and the dependency ratio has dropped from 65 to 47 over 30 years. However, these societal shifts have had limited political consequences, as electoral dynamics remain anchored in longstanding cultural cleavages.

Çarkoğlu’s findings indicated that Turkey’s party system has remained "frozen" for the past three decades. While socio-demographic factors play a declining role in explaining voter behavior, attitudinal variables such as group identity and cultural values have gained prominence. This shift reflects how polarization has solidified, with partisan loyalty reinforcing competitive authoritarianism.

Çarkoğlu emphasized that the weakening of electoral cleavages has facilitated democratic backsliding by reducing opposition effectiveness and enabling strategic manipulation. Despite rapid social change, entrenched cultural divides and polarization have prevented political transformation. His research underscores the importance of addressing institutional decline, polarization, and social inequality to combat democratic erosion. Turkey’s experience offers critical lessons for other unconsolidated democracies facing similar challenges.

Dr. Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and co-director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program. Her research focuses on democratization, political reform, corruption, and the evolution of political parties. She is the author of Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and the forthcoming The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press, 2025). Dr. Kuo has been 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.

What inspired you to pursue research in your current field, and how did your journey lead you to CDDRL?

I first became interested in politics growing up in the American South during the early stages of today’s polarized era. Living in a deeply conservative area during the rise of partisan media and in Newt Gingrich’s congressional district sparked my curiosity about politics and its broader implications.

In college, my interest expanded beyond American democracy. Post-Cold War debates on democratization and the U.S.’s role in promoting democracy, particularly during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, shaped my desire to explore democracy, governance, and international policy—questions that remain critical today.

I majored in political science, pursued graduate studies in the UK, and worked at think tanks where I saw PhDs bridging research and policy. This inspired me to pursue a doctorate. After earning my PhD, I was fortunate to join CDDRL as a postdoctoral fellow, where I’ve found the ideal environment to explore these issues and contribute to broader discussions on democracy and development.

What is the most exciting or impactful finding from your research, and why do you think it matters for democracy?

I don’t tend to think of my findings as particularly “exciting” in the traditional sense, as they often reaffirm long-standing conventional wisdom. However, one key insight that my research reinforces is that stable and thriving democratic societies require not just strong democratic institutions but also robust intermediary organizations.

My new book focuses on political parties, which are a prime example of these intermediary organizations. Much of my research highlights the importance of understanding not just what governments and institutions look like, but how they link to society. How do they connect with citizens? How do they convince citizens that government actions are meaningful and worthwhile? These are critical questions for democracy.

I believe you cannot fully grasp concepts like governance, democracy, or even state capacity without understanding the role of these intermediaries. They play a vital role in bridging the gap between institutions and the public, ensuring that democracy is not just about structures but about meaningful engagement with citizens. This finding matters because, without these linkages, even the strongest institutions risk losing public trust and legitimacy.