When backsliding occurs at the hands of populist presidents who were elected in landslide elections, producing dominant executives with few institutional checks and weak opposition parties, should we blame the decline in democracy on their populist ideology, their presidential powers, or their parties’ dominance in the legislature? The literature on democratic backsliding has mostly arrived at a consensus on what backsliding entails and collectively has revealed its growing prevalence around the globe. Yet, scholars have not settled on causal explanations for this phenomenon. We assess the evidence for recent ideology-centered arguments for democratic backsliding relative to previous institutional arguments among all democratically elected executives serving in all regions of the world since 1970. We use newly available datasets on populist leaders and parties to evaluate the danger of populists in government, and we employ matching methods to distinguish the effects of populist executives, popularly-elected presidents, and dominant executives on the extent of decline in liberal democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Marisa Kellam is associate professor of political science at Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan). Her research focuses on the quality of democracy in Latin America. In her work, she links institutional analysis to governance outcomes within three lines of inquiry: (1) political parties and coalitional politics, (2) media freedom and democratic accountability, and (3) populism and democratic backsliding. She has published her research in peer-reviewed journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Party Politics, Electoral Studies, and Political Communication. After earning a Ph.D. in political science from UCLA, she spent several years as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. Since 2013, Marisa Kellam has been teaching international and Japanese students in the English-based degree programs of Waseda University’s School of Political Science & Economics.

At this time, in-person attendance is limited to Stanford affiliates only. We continue to welcome our greater community to join virtually via Zoom.

Studies of group-based conflict typically focus on the group as the unit of analysis. But group attributes often mask individual-level variation. Why do some individuals within groups identify more strongly with the group, feel greater hostility toward out-groups, and participate in conflict more than others?

We argue that a key ingredient in explaining who within a group feels more aggrieved, more attached, and more hostile to others is the legacy of violence. Violence itself creates and amplifies group identities that then persist across generations within families. It also forges a sense of victimhood, an identity that implies moral status and out-group threat. We test this argument using multigenerational surveys we fielded in Guatemala and Cambodia in 2017 and 2018.

We find that individuals whose ancestors were exposed to more violence during prior periods of conflict identify more strongly with their group, identify as victims, and distrust the rival out-group. We find that the effect of these identities on political participation depends on the political context, both during and after the conflict, and how it shapes blame attribution and the meaning of political participation.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Noam Lupu is Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of LAPOP Lab at Vanderbilt University. He studies comparative political behavior, partisanship and political parties, class and inequality, representation, and legacies of violence. He is the author of Party Brands in Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and coeditor (with Virginia Oliveros and Luis Schiumerini) of Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies (University of Michigan Press, 2019).

This event is co-sponsored by CDDRL and the Center for Latin American Studies.

This talk by Mukulika Banerjee will present an anthropological study of democracy in India. It will draw on deep ethnographic engagement with the people and social life in two villages in India over a period of 15 years, both during elections and in the time in between them, to show how these two temporalities connect. The ethnographic microscope on a single paddy growing setting allows us to examine how the various social institutions of kinship, economy, and religion are critical sites for the continual civic cultivation of cooperation, vigilance, redistribution, inviolate commitment, and hope—values that are essential for democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mukulika Banerjee was inaugural Director of the LSE South Asia Centre from 2015-2020 and is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She studied in Delhi and Oxford universities and taught at Oxford and UCL before joining LSE. Her books include Why India Votes? (2014), The Pathan Unarmed (2001) and The Sari (2003). She is also the editor of Muslim Portraits (2007). Her monograph Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India was published by OUP (New York) in 2021.

At this time, in-person attendance is limited to Stanford affiliates only. We continue to welcome our greater community to join virtually via Zoom.

2022 S.T. LEE LECTURE

In the 1990s and early 2000s, most West African nations embarked on transitions to democratic governance. In the ensuing decade, the sub-region enjoyed relative peace and material progress. Unfortunately, these gains in democratization are being eroded. The lecture contends that democratic reforms at the turn of the 21st century were key drivers of the subsequent sanguine political, social, and economic conditions in the ECOWAS group; that popular attitudes in today’s West African societies are largely anti-autocratic; and that therefore the unfolding retreat from democratic governance in nations across the sub-region portends ill for their overall stability and material prosperity in the 2020s and beyond. The lecture proposes measures to arrest the democratic recession in West African nations to prevent economic decline, social unrest, and political implosion.

The S.T. Lee Lectureship is named for Seng Tee Lee, a business executive and noted philanthropist. Dr. Lee is the director of the Lee group of companies in Singapore and of the Lee Foundation.

Dr. Lee endowed the annual lectureship at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in order to raise public understanding of the complex policy issues facing the global community today and to increase support for informed international cooperation. The S.T. Lee Distinguished Lecturer is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader in international political, economic, social, and health issues and strategic policy-making concerns.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

E. Gyimah-Boadi is co-founder and board chair of Afrobarometer, the pan-African survey research network and global reference point for high-quality data on African democracy, governance, and quality of life. He is also co-founder and former executive director of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, a leading independent democracy and good-governance think tank. A former professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Ghana, he has also held faculty positions at several universities in the United States, including the American University’s School of International Service, as well as fellowships at Queen Mary University; the Center for Democracy, Rule of Law and Development at Stanford University; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy.

A graduate of the University of California (Davis) and University of Ghana (Legon), Gyimah-Boadi is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) and the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. For his contributions to research and policy advocacy on democracy, accountable governance, and human rights, he has won a myriad of awards, including the Distinguished Africanist of the Year Award of the African Studies Association (2018); the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Peace and Social Justice (2017); and one of the Republic of Ghana’s highest honors, the Order of Volta (2008). He was named one of New African Magazine’s “100 Most Influential Africans of 2021.”

Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world. It is “the great experiment” of our time.

Why is it so hard to build diverse democracies? Would principles and policies do we need to adopt to maximize the chances of making them work? And how good are the chances of success? The project of building thriving diverse democracies may well fail. But the chances of success, this talk argues, are better than the pessimism which is now dominant suggests.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Yascha Mounk is a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Founder of Persuasion. The host of The Good Fight podcast, his latest book is The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.

 

 

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

The Trump presidency generated concern about democratic backsliding and renewed interest in measuring the national democratic performance of the United States. However, the U.S. has a decentralized form of federalism that administers democratic institutions at the state level.

Using 51 indicators of electoral democracy from 2000 to 2018, we develop a measure of subnational democratic performance, the State Democracy Index. We then test theories of democratic expansion and backsliding based in party competition, polarization, demographic change, and the group interests of national party coalitions. Difference-in-differences results suggest a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states' democratic performance during this period. This result calls into question theories focused on changes within states. The racial, geographic, and economic incentives of groups in national party coalitions may instead determine the health of democracy in the states.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jacob M. Grumbach is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington and a Faculty Associate with the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. Grumbach’s research focuses broadly on the political economy of the United States, with an emphasis on public policy, racial and economic inequality, American federalism, and statistical methods.

 

At this time, in-person attendance is limited to Stanford affiliates only. We continue to welcome our greater community to join virtually via Zoom.

Francis Fukuyama’s new book is about the challenges to liberalism from the right and the left.
 

Classical liberalism is in a state of crisis. Developed in the wake of Europe’s wars over religion and nationalism, liberalism is a system for governing diverse societies, which is grounded in fundamental principles of equality and the rule of law. It emphasizes the rights of individuals to pursue their own forms of happiness free from encroachment by government.

It's no secret that liberalism didn't always live up to its own ideals. In America, many people were denied equality before the law. Who counted as full human beings worthy of universal rights was contested for centuries, and only recently has this circle expanded to include women, racial and ethnic minorities, and others. Conservatives complain that liberalism empties the common life of meaning.

As the renowned political philosopher Francis Fukuyama shows in Liberalism and Its Discontents, the principles of liberalism have also, in recent decades, been pushed to new extremes by both the right and the left: neoliberals made a cult of economic freedom, and progressives focused on identity over human universality as central to their political vision. The result, Fukuyama argues, has been a fracturing of our civil society and an increasing peril to our democracy.

In this short, clear account of our current political discontents, Fukuyama offers an essential defense of a revitalized liberalism for the twenty-first century.

Books will be available for sale at the event, or you can order one online.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Francis Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, was published in September 2018. His next book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, will be published in the spring of 2022.

Dr. Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), and the Pardee Rand Graduate School. He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and at the Center for Global Development. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Governors of the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and the Volcker Alliance. He is a member of the American Political Science Association and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

MEDIA: Please contact Nora Sulots or Kathy Welsh.

Khalid Mustafa Medani joins ARD to discuss his recently released book, Black Markets and Militants Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Understanding the political and socio-economic factors which give rise to youth recruitment into militant organizations is at the heart of grasping some of the most important issues that affect the contemporary Middle East and Africa. In this book, Medani explains why youth are attracted to militant organizations, examining the specific role economic globalization, in the form of outmigration and expatriate remittance inflows, plays in determining how and why militant activists emerge. The study challenges existing accounts that rely primarily on ideology to explain militant recruitment.

Based on extensive fieldwork, Medani offers an in-depth analysis of the impact of globalization, neoliberal reforms, and informal economic networks as a conduit for the rise and evolution of moderate and militant Islamist movements and as an avenue central to the often violent enterprise of state-building and state formation. In an original contribution to the study of Islamist and ethnic politics more broadly, he thereby shows the importance of understanding when and under what conditions religious rather than other forms of identity become politically salient in the context of changes in local conditions.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER 

Dr. Khalid Mustafa Medani is currently associate professor of political science and Islamic Studies at McGill University, and he has also taught at Oberlin College and Stanford University. Dr. Medani received a B.A. in Development Studies from Brown University, an M.A. in Development Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the political economy of Islamic and Ethnic Politics in Africa and the Middle East.

Dr. Medani is the author of Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and he is presently completing another book manuscript on the causes and consequences of Sudan’s 2018 popular uprising and the prospects and obstacles for Democracy in that country. In addition, he has published extensively on civil conflict with a special focus on the armed conflicts in Sudan and Somalia. His work has appeared in Political Science and Politics (PS), the Journal of Democracy, the Journal of North African Studies, Current History, Middle East Report, Review of African Political Economy, Arab Studies Quarterly, and the UCLA Journal of Islamic Law.

Dr. Medani is a previous recipient of a Carnegie Scholar on Islam award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (2007-2009) and in 2020-2021 he received a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to conduct research on his current book manuscript on the democratic transition in Sudan.

This event is co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Center for African Studies at Stanford University.