Adam Bonica is an Associate Professor of Political Science. His research is at the intersection of data science and politics, with interests in money in politics, campaigns and elections, the courts, and political methodology. His research has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, and JAMA Internal Medicine. His book, The Judicial Tug of War: How Lawyers, Politicians, and Ideological Incentives Shape the American Judiciary (with Maya Sen), examines the politicization of the American judiciary. 

I am a teaching fellow in Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) at Stanford University. I teach courses focused on democracy, citizenship, and the politics of development. My research focuses on party systems, ideology, nostalgia, and corruption during transitions from authoritarian rule, especially in North Africa. My book manuscript focuses on the question of why democratization in Tunisia failed to address the social and economic grievances that precipitated it. My work has appeared in the Journal of Democracy, MERIP Middle East Report Online, and Washington Post Monkey Cage. 

I received my PhD in political science (with specialties in comparative politics, quantitative methods, and political economy) from Yale University in December 2020. I have a BA in international relations from Tufts University, an MS in applied economics from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA and MPhil in political science from Yale. I have spent more than three years living in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia. My CV is available here.

Tesalia Rizzo holds a Ph.D. in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research focuses on the demand and supply side of political mediation. Specifically, on how political (formal, informal or clientelist) intermediaries shape citizens’ attitudes and political engagement. She also works with non-governmental practitioners in Mexico to develop and test policies that disincentivize citizen reliance on clientelist and corrupt avenues of engaging with government and strengthen citizen demand for accountability. Her work with Mexican practitioners was awarded the 2017 Innovation in Transparency Award given by the Mexican National Institute for Access to Information (INAI). She is also a Research Fellow at MIT GOV/LAB and the Political Methodology Lab, at MIT. She is a graduate of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City. Prior to arriving at Stanford, she was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at University of California, San Diego and will join the Political Science Faculty at the University of California, Merced in 2020.

Jamie O’Connell is a Lecturer in Residence at Stanford Law School. He teaches and writes on political and legal development and has particular expertise in law and development, transitional justice, democratization, post-conflict reconstruction, and business and human rights. Until 2018, he was a Senior Fellow of the Honorable G. William and Ariadna Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, as well as a Lecturer in Residence, teaching both law and undergraduate students.

O’Connell has worked on human rights and development in over a dozen countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, under the auspices of the United Nations, local and international non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions. He co-founded International Professional Partnerships for Sierra Leone, a non-governmental organization that worked with the government of Sierra Leone to enhance the performance of its agencies and civil servants. Earlier in his career, O’Connell studied international business as a researcher at Harvard Business School, publishing numerous case studies. He has directed the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Sierra Leone and taught as a visitor at Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School. O’Connell clerked for the Honorable James R. Browning on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and is admitted to practice in California (inactive status) and New York. In 2016-17, he was a visiting professor and Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Valencia (Spain) Faculty of Law.

O’Connell’s scholarship includes “Representation, Paternalism, and Exclusion: The Divergent Impacts of the AKP’s Populism on Human Rights In Turkey” in Human Rights in a Time of Populism: Challenges and Responses (2020); “When Prosecution Is Not Enough: How the International Criminal Court Can Prevent Atrocity and Advance Accountability by Emulating Regional Human Rights Institutions” (with James L. Cavallaro, Yale Journal of International Law, 2020); “Common Interests, Closer Allies: How Democracy in Arab States Can Benefit the West” (Stanford Journal of International Law, 2012); “Empowering the Disadvantaged after Dictatorship and Conflict: Legal Empowerment, Transitions and Transitional Justice,” in Legal Empowerment: Practitioners’ Perspectives (2010); “East Timor 1999,” in The Responsibility to Protect: Moving the Campaign Forward (2007); “Gambling with the Psyche: Does Prosecuting Human Rights Violators Console Their Victims?” (Harvard International Law Journal, 2005); “Here Interest Meets Humanity: How to End the War and Support Reconstruction in Liberia, and the Case for Modest American Leadership” (Harvard Human Rights Journal, 2004); and Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Special Court: A Citizen’s Handbook (with Paul James-Allen and Sheku B.S. Lahai, 2003).

My research centers on topics in comparative politics and the political economy of development. I focus on the micro-foundations of political behavior to gain leverage on macro-political questions. How do autocrats survive? How can citizen-state relations be improved and government accountability strengthened? Can shared identities mitigate out-group animosity? Adopting a multi-method approach, I use lab-in-the-field and online experiments, surveys, and in-depth field research to examine these questions in sub-Saharan Africa and the US. My current book project reexamines the role of elections in authoritarian endurance and explains why citizens vote in elections with foregone conclusions in Tanzania and Uganda. Moving beyond conventional paradigms, my theory describes how a social norm of voting and accompanying social sanctions from peers contribute to high turnout in semi-authoritarian elections. In other ongoing projects, I study how national and pan-African identification stimulated through national sports games influence attitudes toward refugees, the relationship between identity, emotions, and belief in fake news, and how researchers can use Facebook as a tool for social science research.

Along with being a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Saumitra Jha is an associate professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab. 

Jha’s research has been published in leading journals in economics and political science, including Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Development Economics, and he serves on a number of editorial boards. His research on ethnic tolerance has been recognized with the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in Political Economy from the American Political Science Association in 2014 and his co-authored research on heroes with the Oliver Williamson Award for best paper by the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics in 2020. Jha was honored to receive the Teacher of the Year Award, voted by the students of the Stanford MSx Program in 2020.

Saum holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to rejoining Stanford as a faculty member, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a fellow of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Jha has consulted on economic and political risk issues for the United Nations/WTO, the World Bank, government agencies, and for private firms.