Political scientist Anna Grzymala-Busse finds that authoritarians face a choice in the face of change: try to cling to power, exit governing or reinvent themselves as democrats. It’s those who reinvent themselves as newly minted democrats who fare the worst in the long run.

In the years since World War II, as the global geopolitical map was drawn and redrawn along ideological lines, the world witnessed ascension of many authoritarians. They often ruled for long stretches, but eventually most faced a political reckoning. The people they governed no longer accepted their authority and demanded change.

Ironically, Grzymala-Busse found that the best choice for authoritarians is simply to cling to power “counting on a loyal if unhappy electorate,” even if it means ceding much of their once-monopolistic grip on power to democratic reforms.

81 governments studied

For her study, Grzymala-Busse examined and quantified the resulting political denouements of 81 authoritarian governments spanning the period from 1945 to 2015. Countries studied include the former Soviet Bloc, China, Cuba, several in Southeast Asia, many African nations and Mexico. The governing systems ranged from the communism of the Soviet Bloc and socialism to secular state-building and rule for the sake of national security.

The success of the reinventors can be rapid and remarkable, but so too can be the demise. Grzymala-Busse noted that the Hungarian Socialist Party won 43 percent of the vote and 49 percent of the seats in 2006, only to succumb to allegations of deception, mismanagement and fraud soon afterward. In Poland, the Democratic and Left Alliance (SLD), which won 41 percent of the vote in 2001, watched as its power steeply declined in the subsequent decade until the party dissolved entirely in 2011.

“Those who reinvented shone more brightly for a brief time, but burned out. Those who chose orthodoxy never enjoyed the great success of the reinventors, but they survived,” she said.

And what of those authoritarians who choose neither to remain nor to reinvent? Grzymala said that they simply dissolve back into society where former members often capitalize on their connections to become captains of industry.

“Some become oligarchs,” she said, “retaining power by other means.”

Lessons on change

The takeaway of her study for at-risk authoritarians, Grzymala-Busse said, is that reinvention alone is not enough to carry the party. New parties cannot survive as the remnants of their former selves. They must become entirely new organizations with viable programmatic approaches. Likewise, she said, when newly minted democrats hail competence as a competitive advantage, they must make good on the promise. If they fall short, they face exceptionally harsh outcomes at the polls.

“The irony is, without real change, the parties that built democracy by supporting free elections fall victim to those same democratic forces they championed.”

Anna Grzymala-Busse is the Kevin and Michelle Douglas Professor of International Studies and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

The study was made possible by financial support from the Carnegie Foundation.

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies is proud to congratulate Stanford’s 2018 Rhodes and Schwarzman Scholars. In today’s climate, our scholarly work on foreign policy and international issues can feel ominous, so FSI is especially pleased to share the good news that four of the Rhodes and three of the Schwarzman Scholars studied with us.

Among the newly-appointed Rhodes scholars are Jelani Munroe, Alexis Kallen and Qitong “Tom” Cao, all current or former honors students in the Fisher Family Undergraduate Honors Program at FSI’s Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Madeleine Chang, co-president of the FSI-sponsored American Middle Eastern Network for Dialogue at Stanford (AMENDS), joins them as well. The Rhodes Scholarships provide all expenses for study at Oxford University; all four will commence in October 2018.

The Schwarzman Scholarships fund one-year master's degrees in global affairs at Beijing’s distinguished Tsinghua University. Scholars include Claire Colberg and Daniel Kilimnik, alumni of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) Honors Program, and Lucienne “Lucy” Oyer, a current Fisher Family honors student at CDDRL. They will begin study in August 2018.

“We are very proud of these terrific students in the FSI family and our exceptional faculty who have mentored them,” said FSI Director Michael McFaul. “These seven have exhibited extraordinary ideas and leadership here at FSI, and we look forward to seeing the great contributions they will make in their fields.”

While working on his honors thesis on the role of the armed forces in German security policy, Daniel Kilimnik relied on an FSI research grant that enabled him to interview legislators, government officials and academics in Berlin. Once he heads to Beijing, Kilimnik will investigate relationships between China, the U.S. and Europe.

“I can't imagine my undergraduate experience without the professors, mentors, friends and peers I got to know through FSI,” he said. “Without support from CISAC and FSI, I would not have been able to write my thesis.”

One CISAC mentor is Donald Emmerson, an emeritus senior fellow at FSI. As honors student Claire Colberg explored Vietnam’s policies toward China, Emmerson advised her to challenge conventional wisdom.

“All I did for Claire was to encourage her to be intellectually less respectful and more creative,” he said. “I would like to believe that merely by giving her free rein, I helped her develop her own voice.”

Madeleine Chang found her voice by embracing creative problem-solving. With help from FSI Student Programs, Chang was able to do the seemingly impossible: work around President Trump’s travel ban to hold a conference with undergraduates from all over the world, including students affected by the ban.

“The irony of being an American-Middle Eastern group unable to meet in America itself spoke to why we needed to meet: to remind ourselves and others of the incredible potential of young people connecting across borders,” Chang told Stanford News.

Unable to bring all students to the United States, Chang looked across the pond and was able to hold the AMENDS conference at Oxford. FSI senior fellow Larry Diamond and academic program manager Gina Gonzales provided support on- and off-the-ground to keep things moving, even outside the Stanford realm.

“It was incredible to see Maddie leverage her connections at Oxford to turn the challenge of overcoming the travel ban into a fantastic opportunity,” said Gonzales.

Diamond believes interactions with international students are particularly valuable to the academic community. He has advised several Rhodes-bound students who grew up outside the United States.

“It is always a particular joy working with foreign students,” he said. “They teach us so much about their countries, the development challenges they face, and how other parts of the world view the United States.

“You know when you are teaching students like Qitong and Jelani that you are engaging, in some way, future leaders in their fields.”

Family planning programs in developing countries that offer contraceptives and reproductive health advice apparently do more than prevent pregnancies — they can keep girls in primary school for up to a year longer, even before the youngsters start to think about marriage and babies.

New research by Stanford Health Policy’s Grant Miller and Kim Singer Babiarz indicates that the availability of modern contraceptives alone can keep young girls in the classroom longer, likely because their parents develop greater expectations for their daughters’ long-term health outcomes and economic opportunities.

“What we find is that family planning exposure at a young age is linked to greater opportunities later in life – including economic empowerment,” said Babiarz, an SHP research scholar with a PhD in agricultural economics who focuses on women and children in development. “The fertility effects were modest; the most striking findings were the incentives created to keep girls in school and improvements in the types of jobs women have later in life.”

Babiarz and Miller, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director of the Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development, unveiled their study at the annual meeting of the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 7.

They conducted research with Christine Valente, an associate professor in the department of economics at the University of Bristol and Tey Nai Peng, the principal investigator for the Malaysia Family Life Survey. The Southeast Asia nation was one of the first low-income countries to provide modern contraceptives on a large scale, first in 1954 and then establishing a National Family Planning Board in 1966.

The government then scaled up its national program between 1966 and 1974 and conducted robust surveys with retrospective life histories and detailed community-level information about the timing of family planning availability. The use of contraceptives such as the pill, condoms and IUDs, went from 3 percent in 1961 to 39 percent in 1975. The country also experienced a decrease in the fertility rate of 6.2 children to 4.3 during the same period.

The researchers were able to compare what happened to Malaysian girls who were very young when contraceptives became available in their communities to those who were adolescents when they first gained access to modern contraception. They were not surprised by the effects on fertility; that has generally been the case in countries that adopt large-scale family planning programs.

But they also found unintended incentives: that girls in communities with family planning clinics stayed in school six months longer, increasing to more than an additional year for the girls who were born after the family planning programs began. And it didn’t matter if the girls had fewer younger siblings at home.

Other benefits later in life included better jobs when they became adults. When the Malaysian girls were grown, they were more likely to take in their own elderly parents (relative to their husbands’ parents), a signal of increased status in their households. In fact, they found that the incentives for investing in girls created by family planning may actually outweigh its direct effects, which work through reductions in fertility and changes in birth timing.

“The existence of family planning and contraceptives may lead parents to believe their daughters can participate in the labor force and that more schooling will therefore benefit them,” Miller said. “In other words, it can change their expectations about the world their daughter will live in one day.”

Few studies explicitly distinguish the incentive effects of family planning on women’s education from its direct effects on fertility. Miller said he hoped the new findings might lead policymakers to consider the broader beneficial consequences of family planning beyond those that work directly through changes in pregnancy and fertility.

“A central contribution of this working paper is that it studies the possible incentive effects of family planning programs for human capital investment in girls,” the authors wrote,” which could then translate into improvements in women’s economic status throughout their lives.”

The U.S.-Japan Council’s TOMODACHI Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) identifies, cultivates, and empowers a new generation of Japanese American leaders. A new cohort of Emerging Leaders is selected annually to attend USJC’s Annual Conference, participate in leadership education, and join program alumni in bridging the future of the U.S.–Japan relationship.

SPICE’s Rylan Sekiguchi, Manager of Curriculum and Instructional Design, recently returned from Washington, DC, where he participated in the U.S.-Japan Council’s annual conference as a member of the 2017 TOMODACHI Emerging Leaders Program (ELP). USJC was conceptualized by the late Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii and Irene Hirano Inouye, President of USJC.

Sekiguchi was born and raised in Honolulu, and from as far back as he can remember, Senator Inouye was a role model and iconic figure in Hawaii, serving as the state’s U.S. Senator from 1963 to 2012 and as President pro tempore of the Senate from 2010 until his death in 2012. Sekiguchi graduated from Roosevelt High School and chose Stanford University over Harvard and Yale—to avoid the snowy winters—for his undergraduate studies. He joined SPICE in 2005 shortly after graduation.

“I feel honored to participate in USJC and the ELP specifically,” reflects Sekiguchi. “The ELP is such an incredible program, and knowing that USJC was conceptualized by my home state’s late Senator Inouye makes the experience even more meaningful to me. The 2017 ELP cohort has five members who are originally from Hawaii, and I hope that we and the others in my cohort will help realize Senator Inouye’s vision of empowering a new generation of leaders in the U.S.–Japan relationship.”

Sekiguchi is one of 12 delegates of the eighth ELP cohort. “Acceptance into the ELP is highly competitive,” notes Kaz Maniwa, Senior Vice President of  USJC, who has directed the ELP since its inception. Maniwa closed his law practice in San Francisco after 36 years to dedicate himself to the Council and the empowerment of youth specifically through the ELP. “It’s exciting to be able to work with the next generation of leaders of our community and in U.S.–Japan relations. The ELP delegates are smart, compassionate, ambitious in a good way, forward-thinking and supportive of each other. They come from across the United States and Japan and have developed into a broad network of future leaders.”

Rylan Sekiguchi at the 2017 U.S.-Japan Council conference in Washington, DC

Besides receiving leadership training and networking with program alumni, the 2017 ELP delegates attended the U.S.-Japan Council’s annual conference and met with leaders in the business, nonprofit, and government sectors. This year’s conference theme was “Unity in Diversity: Shaping the Future Together,” and its panelists and keynote speakers spanned a wide range of backgrounds, expertise, and politics, and included two current members of the U.S. Cabinet. Delegates considered changes that have arisen under the new White House administration and how Japan and the United States can continue to work together toward mutually beneficial goals.

Sekiguchi and his fellow ELP delegates have already seeded ideas to help strengthen U.S.–Japan relations. Some of the ideas lie in the area of education. For example, Sekiguchi shared his current SPICE work with the Mineta Legacy Project, which focuses on the life of former Secretary Norman Y. Mineta, Vice Chair of USJC’s Board of Councilors. Secretary Mineta served as President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce and President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Transportation. The Mineta Legacy Project will include a documentary being developed by USJC Council Leaders Dianne Fukami and Debra Nakatomi and an educational curriculum that is being developed by Sekiguchi.

The U.S.-Japan Council’s 2018 conference will take place in Tokyo in November, and plans are already underway for the eighth ELP cohort’s first reunion.

Find more information on the TOMODACHI Emerging Leaders Program online
http://www.usjapancouncil.org/tomodachi_emerging_leaders_program

Find more information on the U.S.-Japan Council online
http://www.usjapancouncil.org

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The Japan Program hosted the Abe Fellows Global Forum, “Confronting Climate Change: What Can the U.S. and Japan Contribute to Creating Sustainable Societies?” at Bechtel Conference Center at Stanford University on October 20, 2017. The event was co-organized with the Social Science Research Council, in collaboration with the Center for Global Partnership of the Japan Foundation, which funds the Abe Fellowship Program.

The conference opened with a remark by George P. Shultz, Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow, Hoover Institution at Stanford University and former US Secretary of State and US Secretary of Treasury followed by a keynote by Michael Armacost, Shorenstein APARC Fellow at Stanford University and former ambassador to Japan and the Philippines, who addressed questions on strategies for reducing energy consumption and possibilities for future international cooperation between Japan and the United States on climate change.

Following the keynote speech, experts from Japan and the United States engaged in a panel discussion and shared some of the lessons that have been learned from Asia’s experience.  Toshi Arimura, Professor, Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University, presented the experience of carbon pricing in the U.S. and Japan and the successful experience in both countries.  Janelle Knox-Hayes, Lister Brothers Associate Professor of Economic Geography and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pointed out the importance of the socio-political context in various countries for creating well-functioning markets for carbon emission.  Philip Lipscy, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Thomas Rohlen Center Fellow at FSI, Stanford University, discussed how the political context has been influencing Japan’s energy policies.  Dana Buntrock, Chair, Center for Japanese Studies and Professor of Architecture, UC Berkeley, presented how specific contexts in Japan and the U.s. have shaped the energy policies in two countries.

The conference was followed by a reception in the Oksenberg Conference Room.

There is plenty of research on how the rapid warming of the planet is going to have growing adverse impacts on global economies, health, food supplies and natural disasters.

A new study now suggests that as temperatures continue to rise — particularly with more and more 90-plus-degree days — more fetuses and infants will experience economic loss by age 30.

“There is a growing body of evidence that finds that shocks to the fetus and young child — whether nutritional, environmental, economic or stress-related — have long-term consequences on health, education and economic outcomes throughout the life cycle,” said Maya Rossin-Slater, an assistant professor of health research and policy at Stanford Medicine and a faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Rossin-Slater published her study Dec. 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicating early-life exposure to extreme temperatures is linked to potential losses in human capital. Her co-authors are Adam Isen, an economist with the U.S. Department of Treasury, and Reed Walker, an assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley.

The researchers used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamic Files, which contain information on adult labor market outcomes linked to county and exact date of birth. They looked at weather in counties in 24 states on any given day, and then measured how many days with average temperatures above 90 degrees a child born on that day in that county would have experienced during gestation and during the first year of life. They then compared the earnings of individuals who were exposed to different numbers of such hot days, but who were of the same race and gender, and born in the same county and on the same day of the year (but in different years).

Each day a fetus or infant experiences 90-plus-degree temperatures, Rossin-Slater and her co-authors found that he made $30 less a year on average, or $430 over the course of his lifetime. While that may not seem like a huge loss of income, the authors point out that their study is best understood from a population-level perspective rather than from an individual one.

“There is a lot of research already showing that extreme heat has immediate effects on labor market productivity and GDP,” she said. “What we are saying is that there is another wrinkle to this — that there can be consequences many years later, on cohorts who are still in the womb.”

Most Americans today only experience one day a year that is 90 degrees or hotter. But the Climate Impact Lab has indicated that if countries continue to take only moderate action on climate change, by the end of this century there will be about 43 such days a year.

So, if you multiple a $30 annual loss a day by 43 days, you come up with an average $1,290 a year — and compounded in large populations of pregnant women in hot climates.

“Prior research shows that exposure to extreme heat in utero leads to lower birth weight and increases infant mortality,” said Rossin-Slater, who is also a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy. She said poor fetal and infant health could impact adult earnings in three ways: cognitive impairment, poor health that causes people to miss school or work, and less non-cognitive skill development such as self-control.

“With regard to exposure to heat specifically, fetuses and infants are especially sensitive because their thermoregulatory systems are not fully developed and they have less capacity to self-regulate when their bodies are exposed to extreme temperatures,” Rossin-Slater said.

Hot Zones and Air Conditioners

The obvious questions that arise from such research: What happens to the babies of women who already live in very high temperatures? And why not just ensure that all pregnant women have air conditioners, at least in the developed world where it would be more affordable?

Women in warm zones such as parts of Africa and South Asia, as well as U.S. cities like Phoenix and Washington, D.C., shouldn’t worry too much. The loss of income is relatively little and people living in hot climates may actually adapt over time to exposure to extreme heat.

“Our study is not saying that individual people should be doing something differently to avoid exposure to extreme heat,” Rossin-Slater said. “Instead, we think we are providing additional evidence for the possible population-level consequences of climate change and the projected increase in the number of days with extreme temperatures.”

And what about those air conditioners? The cohorts in the study are actually born in the 1970s, during a period of rapid expansion in air conditioning across American households. The researchers found the earning losses went away in areas where most people got air conditioners installed.

“If we think that there is something biological going on as a result of the fetus being overheated, then it makes sense that AC, which prevents the overheating, can mitigate this negative effect,” Rossin-Slater said.

But it’s important to recognize, she said, that air conditioners come with costs, both financial from the perspective of individuals and households who can and can’t afford such systems, and environmental from the perspective of the country or planet as a whole.

“So this is not a `free’ solution and any cost-benefit calculations related to climate change should take into account this adaption response,” Rossin-Slater said. “But we ought to think about what these results imply at the global level — in many countries that are much hotter than the United States and still don’t have AC. So if we are trying to understand global inequality and the impacts of climate change on developing countries, our results suggest that climate change could play a role in perpetuating global inequality across generations.”

"The problems with our democracy—ever-deepening polarization, incivility, gridlock, dysfunction, conflicts of interest, and disregard for democratic norms—are not just problems of political culture and behavior. Politicians are driven by incentives, especially the desire to get re-elected. Institutions heavily shape these incentives, and our institutions are in need of reform. Unless we reform our democracy, we will be increasingly hard-pressed to improve the health of democracy globally." Listen to Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, explains in this podcast what are the options from here, by Hoover Institution. 

The Lee Shau Kee World Leaders Forum on “US and the Asia Pacific” was held on November 13^th, 2017. This event that brought 250 participants to the Center also marked the 5^th anniversary of the Stanford Center at Peking University’s (SCPKU) anniversary and 10^th anniversary of the Stanford China Program.  Stanford Political Science Professor and SCPKU Director Jean Oi welcomed the audience with remarks highlighting Stanford’s initiative to build China studies at the home campus with the creation of the China Program and in China with the construction of SCPKU -- Stanford’s “Bridge Across the Pacific.”   Professor Michael McFaul, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, opened the forum with a stimulating keynote address on “The Historical Origins and Contemporary Consequences of President Trump’s Worldview.” In his talk, Prof. McFaul examined the President’s views and characterized them as fitting within but standing on the extreme end of long-standing foreign policy traditions.  Combining his scholarly expertise with his experience in the Obama administration, Prof. McFaul offered the audience a sharp, wide-ranging but balanced overview of the continuities between Obama’s and Trump’s policies and the stark difference in rhetoric between these two Presidents. He used dynamic representations of isolationists versus internationalists, and realists versus liberals to explain that foreign policy differences exist within political parties rather than between them. Prof. McFaul took the audience around the globe, with timely accounts of the continuities, the positive changes and the adverse changes in US foreign policy under President Trump in, for example, the Middle East, Europe and Asia.  Overall, he argued that democratic institutions in the US are open to evolution and renewal; that the structures of American leadership are still robust; and pointed to different historical periods (as during the inter-war period in the 1930’s; the rise of communism in the 1950’s; the rise of the Soviet Union in the 1970’s and Japan’s rapid ascendance in the 1980’s) when pundits declared America’s demise only to be proven wrong. Prof. McFaul asserted that current “predictions of permanent American decline is premature.”  Prof. McFaul, however, did point to North Korea as a major point of worry, which segued into the panel discussion that followed.

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Professor Michael McFaul, Director of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies,
keynotes SCPKU's Lee Shau Kee World Leaders Forum.
Courtesy of Stanford University.

What will happen with North Korea was a focus of the lively high-level panel discussion chaired by Professor Jean C. Oi on “The US, China and Asia Pacific” with Karl Eikenberry, Former US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Director of US-Asia Security Initiative at Stanford; Kathleen Stephens, Former US Ambassador to the Republic of Korea and William J. Perry Fellow at Shorenstein APARC of Stanford; Thomas Fingar, Former chairman, National Intelligence Council; Former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research; Shorenstein APARC Fellow; Yu Tiejun, Associate Professor and Vice President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University; and Zhu Feng, Executive Director, China Center for Collaborative Studies of the South China Sea and Director, Institute of International Studies at Nanjing University.

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SCPKU World Leaders Forum panelists discuss future of US-Asia Pacific relations.
Courtesy of Stanford University

Prof. Fingar started the discussion on US-China relations, flatly rejecting the realist theory of conflict between rising and declining powers and the notion that “two tigers cannot get along.” He pointed out that interdependencies between the US and China have grown and that the US and China have more in common than ever before. Yet, with growing interdependence, chances for friction have also increased; thus, “having more issues,” he stated, “does not necessarily mean that the relationship is more fragile – perhaps the opposite [is true].” He also stated that China faces enormous challenges domestically and internationally, and that the US will be reacting to China rather than the other way around.

Amb. Stephens, Prof. Yu and Prof. Zhu all turned the discussion more squarely towards the intensifying North Korea missile crisis. The panelists all characterized this as a critical moment not only on the Korean peninsula but in all of Northeast Asia.  Amb. Stephens stressed how important this is in the working relationship of the US and China as they strive to manage future crises and issues. While everyone found agreement on one common point – i.e., the implausible prospects of a “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization” of North Korea -- each gave unique perspectives on what might happen on the Korean peninsula as the situation unfolds. Prof. Yu outlined three possible scenarios of (i) accepting North Korea as a nuclear power de facto; (ii) imposing increasingly draconian sanctions; and (iii) turning towards the military option against North Kore. But he did not express much optimism that any of these options would, in the end, provide good outcomes. Amb. Stephens, on the other hand, emphasized the strength and resilience of the US-ROK relationship stating “I wouldn’t underestimate [the US’] commitment to the ROK.” She also foresaw a future in which the US will conduct more military exercises, and install more anti-missile defense systems across Northeast Asia as a result of the North Korean threat – a prospect which, she surmised, the PRC would not welcome.

Prof. Zhu, on the other hand, offered a more optimistic perspective on the North Korean nuclear standoff by pointing to the increasing cooperation between the US and China. Asking the listeners to “please take the report that China is actively opposing North Korea seriously” he held out the hope that North Korea might return to the negotiating table once it saw that China was supporting the United States.

Amb. Eikenberry, as the final panelist to share his remarks, took the discussion to the broader Asia Pacific level and drew distinctions on “Asia Pacific” and “Indo Pacific,” as the latter description better reflects maritime flows, the geographical layout as well trade flows more accurately. He invited panelists to depict what would happen in different possible scenarios and outcomes relating to military crisis in the region. The panelists shared their views on action options involving sanctions and multilateral agreements, and agreed that countries should focus on achieving shared goals.