The final class will pose nine questions, each question digging into
each of the nine topics covered over the quarter. Pizza at 6pm!
Bechtel Conference Center, EncinaHall
*Please note that the seminar begins with a reception at 4:00pm where you can meet and talk with Mr. Githongo, followed by a lecture at 5:00pm in Paul Brest Hall at Stanford University.*
John Githongo
This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.
Paul Brest Hall
555 Salvatierra Walk
Stanford, CA
Dr. Marcella Alsan argues that the tsetse fly contributed to Africa's historically low population density.
What explains the variation in legislative strength in African states since the early 1990s? Strong legislatures are central to democratic consolidation and the emergence of limited representative government. Yet we know very little about contemporary legislative development, especially among countries that democratized over the last two decades. With novel data and qualitative analysis from sub-Saharan Africa, this paper investigates the sources of observed variation in legislative strength and capacity in Africa, and the policy implications of varying levels of legislative institutionalization. The findings show that strong states with elite party systems produce strong legislatures. These findings highlight the tension between political institutionalization and populist democratic representative government. The paper concludes with policy recommendations for ongoing legislative strengthening programs around the world.
Ken Opalo is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His research interests include the political economy of institutional development, natural resource management, elections and governance. His dissertation explains the observed variation in political strength, organizational capacity and general levels of institutionalization of African legislatures since 1990. Ken argues that strategies of political domination employed by ruling elites during the period of one party rule explain much of the variation in legislative development in Africa. Specifically, countries that had strong mass parties (as opposed to elite parties) were more likely to have weaker parliaments after the re-introduction of multiparty politics. In his research, Ken uses a mixed methods approach – including detailed case studies of Kenya and Zambia; a regression discontinuity design; and natural experiments to identify the causal mechanisms implied by his theory of endogenous institutional change.
Ken has done research and/or visited 10 different African countries in Eastern, West and Southern Africa. He is a former research consultant with the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a project of the Kofi Annan Foundation. Ken is currently a short-term consultant with the World Bank on the political economy of regional infrastructure development in East and West Africa. He maintains a blog at www.kenopalo.com and has written for and/or appeared on the BBC, Al Jazeera, the African Development Bank, and Foreign Policy Magazine.
Karen Del Biondo
Postdoctoral Scholar at CDDRL, 2012-2013;
Postdoctoral Fellow, KFG Transformative Power of Europe,
Free University of Berlin, 2013-2014
This paper investigates under which conditions the EU and the US take a political or developmental approach to democracy assistance. It aims to find out whether the approach differs among the relevant sources of democracy assistance: the European Development Fund (EDF), European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR), Instrument for Stability (IfS), US Agency for International Development (USAID), National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). Based on the combination of interests and institutions, it is predicted that a developmental approach is more likely in the case of strategically important countries, but only for USAID, the EIDHR, the EDF and the IfS which are subject to political control. In this case, USAID is expected to be more developmental than the EDF, given the strong political control of the State Department. Based on the combination of ideas and institutions, USAID and the EDF are expected to be more developmental as their main objective is development. In comparison to USAID, the EDF is expected to be more developmental, as the EDF is co-decided with the government. Empirically, the paper analyzes democracy assistance in Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Ethiopia since 2005. Ethiopia and Kenya are strategically important, and thus we expect a more developmental approach than in Rwanda and Zimbabwe. An analysis of democracy assistance disconfirmed the importance of interests and institutions. Transatlantic differences can better be explained by ideas and institutions, particularly the fact that the EDF is co-decided by the government. Two explanations are put forward for the relative unimportance of interests and institutions. First, it is believed that the openness of the government defines the approach to democracy assistance. Second, people in the field may still maintain some autonomy regarding the approach to democracy assistance.
This event has been cancelled. We will update our website once the new date has been determined.
Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.
Dr. 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 book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.
Francis 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. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.
Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.
(October 2025)
To predict how agriculture will be affected by future climate change, scientists often rely on a single crop model – a computer simulation of how a specific crop’s yield responds to temperature changes. By combining 30 such models into a single study, and comparing each model against data from existing experimental wheat fields around the world, a team of researchers including Stanford professor David Lobell have developed a more powerful and accurate way to predict future wheat yields.
In a new analysis published in Nature Climate Change, the team’s results support previous work suggesting that wheat yields around the world are sensitive to rising temperatures. Using the new method of analysis, the team estimates an average six percent future yield loss for every one degree Celsius rise in global mean temperature.
“Combining 30 models gives us a much greater ability to predict future impacts and understand past impacts,” said Lobell. “This is a clear step forward.”
Lobell is professor of environmental earth system science in the School of Earth Science at Stanford and the deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
The estimated six percent yield loss for every degree increase is equivalent to about a quarter of the current volume of wheat traded globally in 2013. Yields at some sites, notably those in Mexico, Brazil, India and Sudan, show simulated wheat yield losses of more than 20 percent - in Sudan’s case, more than 50 percent - under a scenario in which global mean temperature rises by two degrees Celsius.
With higher temperatures also comes an increase in the variability of wheat yields, both by location and between years. More fluctuation in wheat yields could mean greater global price volatility for the staple crop.
Approximately 70 percent of the wheat produced today is grown either on irrigated plots or in rainy regions. The research team accounted for this factor by focusing its simulations on multiple regional-specific varieties of wheat that are commonly grown under these conditions.
The new paper includes several suggestions for avoiding some of the predicted yield losses. For example, some varieties of wheat are more heat tolerant than others, and farmers in the places hardest hit by rising temperatures could switch varieties to capitalize on this heat resistance. The effects of rising temperatures could also be managed, in part, by adjusting sowing and harvesting dates, or changing the way fertilizers are applied to crops.
Contact: David Lobell, dlobell@stanford.edu
