Erin A. Snider joins ARD to discuss her recently released book, Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Aid in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

For nearly two decades, the United States devoted more than $2 billion towards democracy promotion in the Middle East with seemingly little impact. To understand the limited impact of this aid and the decision of authoritarian regimes to allow democracy programs whose ultimate aim is to challenge the power of such regimes, Marketing Democracy examines the construction and practice of democracy aid in Washington DC and in Egypt and Morocco, two of the highest recipients of US democracy aid in the region.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork, novel new data on the professional histories of democracy promoters, archival research and recently declassified government documents, Erin A. Snider focuses on the voices and practices of those engaged in democracy work over the last three decades to offer a new framework for understanding the political economy of democracy aid. Her research shows how democracy aid can work to strengthen rather than challenge authoritarian regimes. Marketing Democracy fundamentally challenges scholars to rethink how we study democracy aid and how the ideas of democracy that underlie democracy programs come to reflect the views of donors and recipient regimes rather than indigenous demand. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER 

Erin A. Snider is an assistant professor at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service. Her research and teaching focus on the political economy of aid, democracy, and development in the Middle East. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, a Fulbright scholar in Egypt, a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, and a Carnegie Fellow with the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. Her first book, Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Aid in the Middle East was published with Cambridge University Press. Other research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Middle East Policy, among other outlets. She holds a PhD in politics from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in Middle East Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

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

Today’s headlines are filled with arguments over restrictions on the right to vote and attempts to expand it. But what if we leapt over the current argument, and made a commitment to a ‘100% Democracy’, an election process where every citizen has the right to vote and full opportunities to do so—but also the duty to vote, a requirement to participate in our national choices?

In 100% Democracy:  The Case for Universal Voting, co-authors E.J. Dionne and Miles Rapoport argue for just that, and it’s not as far out as it sounds at first hearing.  Twenty-six countries around the world require participation in elections including Australia, which has required citizens to cast a ballot since 1924 and had over 90% voter turnout in their last major election. The U.S. on the other hand lags behind other democracies, with only 66.8% of eligible voters participating in the record-turnout election of 2020. If Americans are required to pay taxes and serve on juries, why not ask—or require—every American to vote?

Join us on Tuesday, April 5, for a conversation with Dionne and Rapoport about 100% Democracy, universal voting, and how it might be implemented. Is it time for the United States to take a major leap forward and recognize voting as both a fundamental civil right and a solemn civic duty?

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

E.J. Dionne is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post, a professor at Georgetown University, and visiting professor at Harvard University. He is the author of Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country.
 

Miles Rapoport is the Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. He formerly served in the Connecticut state legislature and as Connecticut’s secretary of the state. He also served as president of Demos and of Common Cause.

How does a country move from a low information-low accountability political equilibrium to one where voters are informed and politicians feel pressure to perform well? This paper explores two broad aspects of this equilibrium shift in the context of a national scale-up of a political information campaign in Sierra Leone. The first looks at the fundamentals of supply and demand for information, measuring i) politician willingness to participate in initiatives that inform voters and how it responds to the introduction of a guaranteed dissemination platform; and ii) voter willingness to pay for information and its compatibility with for-profit private sector dissemination models. The second captures general constraints in scaling a controlled demonstration pilot to serve a much broader population, including displacement effects, spillovers, distributional effects, piloting bias, and the ability to maintain impact while extending reach and lowering cost.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Katherine Casey is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her research explores the interactions between economic and political forces in developing countries, with a particular interest in the role of information in enhancing political accountability and the influence of foreign aid on economic development. Her work has appeared in the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics, among others. She teaches a course in the MBA program focused on firm strategy vis a vis government in emerging markets.

 

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

Too often, the debate over NATO enlargement avoids a discussion of the alternative policies and the pros and cons of each. Even if take a NATO-centric approach to the question of European security after the Cold War, there were three major alternatives to the policy chosen: pursuing Partnership for Peace and setting aside enlargement; opting for including some but not all of the countries that joined NATO after 1999; and inviting Russia to join. Each of these options had its proponents within the US government. This seminar will compare and contrast the costs and benefits of the policy chosen against its alternatives in order to evaluate NATO enlargement.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

James Goldgeier is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a Professor of International Relations at the School of International Service at American University, where he served as Dean from 2011-17. He is a past president of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs. He is a senior adviser to the Bridging the Gap initiative, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Raymond Frankel Foundation, and he serves as co-editor of the Bridging the Gap book series at Oxford University Press. He has authored or co-authored four books.

 

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

Democratic backsliders attack not just institutions but the culture of democracy – the public’s beliefs about the quality and value of their democracies. They try to convince the public that (opposing) politicians are corrupt, judges are partisan, bureaucrats are hacks, newspapers purposely lie – in sum, that the public sphere is shabby and not much is lost if they attack it. But this trash-talking of democracy is unevenly successful. Why does it sometimes fail, and what do its failures suggest about effective resistance to democratic backsliding? Susan Stokes will explore these questions with evidence from the US, Turkey, Mexico, and several other countries.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Susan Stokes is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. She is also a founding member of Bright Line Watch. Her current research projects are on mechanisms of direct democracy, and on democratic erosion.

 

 

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

Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Why is Ukraine strategically important to Russia and the West? What are the broader global implications of this attack? Join Stanford scholars from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies for a discussion of the military invasion of Ukraine and the policy choices facing the United States, NATO, and their allies.

Panelists include Kathryn Stoner, the Mosbacher Director of the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Steve Pifer, the William J. Perry Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Rose Gottemoeller, the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at CISAC and a former deputy secretary-general of NATO, and Andriy Kohut, Director of the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine and visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Scott Sagan, co-director of CISAC, senior fellow at FSI, and the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science will moderate.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).

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.