Dear CDDRL community,

As we begin the new year and I reflect on the Center's activities and accomplishments in 2025, I am filled with gratitude and pride for the incredible work we have accomplished together.

CDDRL continues to make significant strides in our core areas of research.

Our faculty and researchers have published dozens of articles, policy papers, and several new books that have advanced our understanding of democratic resilience and breakdown, autocracy, corruption, rule of law in the United States and elsewhere, beating poverty, means of battling inequality, and improving governance around the world. Notably, the Center launched two new programs and research initiatives this past year: the Democracy Action Lab, which produces action-oriented, cutting-edge research to understand the causes of democratic backsliding and identify effective pathways for its reversal; and the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program, a new chapter for research on modern Israel’s political, economic, and security dimensions. The program advances student, faculty, and public knowledge of Israel through cross-disciplinary education and research.

Our two established policy labs on Deliberative Democracy (DDL) and Poverty, Violence, and Governance (PovGov) are continuing to advance innovative, policy-relevant research. Over the summer, DDL brought together a representative sample of Pennsylvania registered voters in Philadelphia to deliberate on the future of their state and country in the latest edition of America in One Room, and the Lab is currently working on an industry-wide deliberative forum inviting the public to weigh in on the future of AI agents. In May, DDL Director James Fishkin was also awarded the Friendship Medal of Mongolia, and his new book, Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?, came out in the summer of 2025 from Oxford University Press. The book has already been lauded by reviewers as “A massive contribution to democratic theory and democratic practice.” In 2025, PovGov concluded data collection for a unique randomized controlled trial on H-2A visas to the United States, and the research team is now analyzing the data and preparing a paper on their findings. PovGov Lab Director and Senior Fellow Beatriz Magaloni and Senior Fellow Alberto Díaz-Cayeros published an article in Foreign Affairs based on their extensive fieldwork in El Salvador during the summer of 2025. Another paper from Magaloni and co-author Esteban Salmon — “Fabricated Justice,” for the March 2026 issue of World Development — provides causal evidence of how Mexico's 2008 criminal justice reform reduced torture but unintentionally expanded reliance on fabricated evidence, especially planted drugs and weapons.

Over the last year, Senior Fellow Anna Grzymala-Busse won the 2025 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article in the American Political Science Review (the discipline’s flagship journal) for “Tilly Goes to Church: The Religious and Medieval Roots of European State Fragmentation.” Brett Carter and Erin Carter’s 2023 book, Propaganda in Autocracies, won the William H. Riker Book Award from the American Political Science Association for the best book published on political economy in the last three years. Finally, Michael McFaul’s new book Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America and the New Global Disorder came out in October, followed by a whirlwind tour across the United States to promote it. This is just to name but a few of the many ways in which our faculty have been recognized in 2025 for their outstanding work.

To make our work more accessible to a broader audience, we launched a new series, CDDRL’s Recent Research-in-Brief, that translates big ideas into “bite-sized” pieces. Topics ranged from authoritarianism and democratic resilience, migration and political identity, governance and state capacity, social inequality and justice, to democracy in the age of new technologies.

New Faculty, Visitors, and Events

I am especially pleased to report that we added some new intellectual energy to CDDRL this year in the form of Senior Fellow Claire Adida, who joined us in July from the University of California, San Diego, where she was a Professor of Political Science. We also officially welcomed Amichai Magen, previously a Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies, as the inaugural Director of the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program and a Senior Research Scholar at CDDRL, effective January 2026.

We welcomed a number of visitors throughout the year, including Miriam Golden, who is remaining with us for the 25-26 academic year as a Visiting Scholar, as well as Oliver Kaplan, Sanjeev Khagram, and Denis Morozov, who joined us this fall. CDDRL also played host (with our sister center at FSI, the Center for International Security and Cooperation) to former Foreign Minister of Lithuania, Gabrielius Landsbergis, as our 2025 Liautaud Fellow.

Other 2025 programming highlights included the Program on Capitalism and Democracy’s inaugural conference on Global Capitalism, Trust and Accountability, which convened an international community of legal scholars, economists, political scientists, historians, business experts, journalists, and activists for two days of urgent discussion and intellectual exchange. The Jan Koum Israel Studies Program also hosted a two-day conference on urban climate resilience, examining how two dynamic and diverse cities — Los Angeles and Tel Aviv-Yafo — are responding to the climate challenge from the ground up.

Additionally, this past year, the Center hosted a panel discussion commemorating the third year since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a conversation with Nobel laureate and former President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos. Santos urged that “world leaders need to sit down and talk about how to work together to avoid nuclear war, control climate change, regulate AI, and more.” Our Program on Arab Reform and Development held a roundtable discussion with leading researchers in the field on urgent governance challenges confronting the Arab world and the imperative for new research agendas addressing these critical issues. And at the launch event for our Democracy Action Lab in October, political science scholars examined worldwide democratic backsliding and emphasized the need to strengthen pro-democracy coalitions. We closed out the year with a symposium celebrating the career and contributions of economist Marcel Fafchamps, Sartre Family Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, on the occasion of his retirement.

Training Programs

In 2025, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of our Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program. We welcomed our 2025 class of fellows, as well as a fresh cohort of Ukrainian civic and political leaders in our Strengthening Ukrainian Democracy and Development Program. Applications for both programs are open until January 15, and we have already received a record number of completed applications.

This past year, our Leadership Academy for Development (LAD) program led courses in New Delhi, Beijing, Hawaii, and Tokyo, as well as a course here at Stanford with the International Finance Corporation to educate senior leaders on infrastructure policy, governance, and public-private partnerships.

Education

Our undergraduate programming has grown increasingly active and popular, with about 120 students registering for the Center’s flagship class, PS/IR 114D, Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, taught every autumn quarter, generating lots of enthusiasm and interest in our honors, research, and internship programs.

Last June, we graduated 13 students in the Fisher Family Undergraduate Honors Program, and congratulated a record number of students on their election to the Phi Beta Kappa honors society. In September, members of our Honors Class of 2026 returned from a whirlwind tour of Washington, D.C., during Honors College just before classes began on campus. Students arrived at a historic time and gained firsthand insight into how major players in domestic and international affairs, the media, and thought leaders are strategizing and adapting to the new American political landscape. The trip sparked rich conversations about pursuing careers in democracy and development during a time of shifting paradigms.

We have a lot of important work and much to look forward to in 2026.

We have a great lineup of talks at our weekly seminar series, beginning Thursday, January 8, with the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Neil Malhotra, who will be presenting on “The Political Consequences of an Out-of-Step Supreme Court.”

In 2026, we will continue showcasing new cutting-edge research addressing the state of democracy, development, and the rule of law in the United States and around the globe. On Wednesday, January 7, at 12:00 pm PT, our new Democracy Action Lab will host a panel discussion on the situation in Venezuela, exploring post-intervention future scenarios, including democratic reconstruction, and the risks of instability or authoritarian rebalancing. The Israel Insights webinar series, hosted by the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program, also continues this quarter, beginning on January 28.

Finally, this winter quarter, we welcome some familiar faces back to the Center. Michael Albertus, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, is joining us as a Visiting Scholar through the end of the academic year. Mike was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Center during the 2011-12 academic year, and it is wonderful to have him back at CDDRL. Moulay Hicham ben Abdallah El Alaoui, who has previously served as a Visiting Scholar at CDDRL, has joined the Program in International Relations as a Visiting Lecturer for the Winter quarter, and we look forward to seeing him at CDDRL events as well.

The foregoing is only some of what we have accomplished in 2025 and can anticipate at CDDRL in 2026. 

Through interdisciplinary research, training, and policy practice, CDDRL seeks to advance healthy democracies, improve human development, and strengthen fair and responsible governance around the world. I hope you will explore our website and the links above to see how we pursue these crucial tasks.

All best,

Kathryn Stoner
Mosbacher Director, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law,
Satre Family Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution (both by courtesy)