"Ideologically, today’s autocrats are a more motley and pragmatic crew. They generally claim to be market friendly, but mainly they are crony capitalists, who, like Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, and Erdogan in Turkey, are first concerned with enriching themselves, their families, and their parties and support networks. Increasingly, they raise a common flag of cultural conservatism, denouncing the moral license and weakness of the “the liberal West” while advancing a virulent antiliberal agenda based on nationalism and religion," writes Larry Diamond. Read here.
Of all of the countries in the world attempting a transition to democracy, Francis Fukuyama thinks that Ukraine is the most promising.
“The election of [Volodymyr] Zelensky and the new parliament is just a miracle,” Fukuyama told Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) Director Michael McFaul on the World Class podcast. “Can you imagine, a country getting rid of two-thirds of its parliament and starting over with new people, many of whom are under 35 years old?”
Ukraine is at a crossroads of sorts, said Fukuyama, who is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI, and the director of both the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program. On one hand, the country could use this opportunity to transition into a successful reformist government, or its efforts could fail and the government could collapse.
It doesn’t help that Ukraine’s relationships with foreign allies are not as strong as they once were, he told McFaul.
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“The United States had been their strongest ally, but now there’s a president in the White House who doesn’t particularly like them,” he explained. “I think Germany and France are also both weakening in their support for Ukraine’s independence, so [Ukraine is] in a really tough spot.”
Before Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, Fukuyama said he actually thought the country would be among the least likely to liberalize in the way that it has. One important factor in Ukraine’s success has been the exercise of broad individual and political freedoms — for example, Ukraine’s press has stayed active throughout the years and the country boasts many investigative journalists, he said.
“In a way, it’s a very free and open society with lots of creativity,” Fukuyama noted. “You can criticize the government. I actually think [Vladimir] Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has stimulated Ukrainian nationalism — I think it made citizens realize that they actually do have something to lose.”
Fukuyama has been interested in Ukraine for a while now — he’s visited the country six times over the past five years. During his most recent trip in November 2019, he taught a crash-course in policymaking to 50 of Ukraine’s members of parliament. With an average age of 41, it’s the country’s youngest parliament ever elected, and many of the newest members have no previous political experience.
He described his time with the young Ukraianian members as inspiring, adding that they want to see a genuine democracy, and to eliminate corruption in their country.
“It does seem to me that we who live in democracies owe it to the people of Ukraine to support them,” Fukuyama said. “Because if they fail, it’s going to have repercussions way beyond Ukraine.”
Francis Fukuyama speaks onstage during “Our Tribal Nature: Tribalism, Politics, And Evolution” symposia in September 2019 in New York City. Photo: Astrid Stawiarz - Getty Images.
Why did colonial powers establish courts to address Indigenous grievances? Under which conditions did these rulers decide to rule in favor of Indigenous claimants, even at the expense of their own state agents? This paper addresses these questions by studying the legal battles between Indigenous communities, Spanish settlers, and local bureaucrats in the General Indian Court of colonial Mexico (GIC). I apply an existing framework developed in the judicial politics literature to understand how the Spanish Crown allowed, and even encouraged, the Indigenous population to raise claims against local bureaucrats. Moreover, I offer a theoretical contribution to this literature by defining the scope conditions under which autocratic regimes might also use the judicial system to constrain local elites. To further explore the decision-making process of this colonial court, I develop a model that predicts that the GIC offered favorable rulings to Indigenous claimants in a strategic way. I predict that a favorable ruling was more likely in cases that involved colonial agents, were related to land invasions or physical abuses, and originated from areas where local elite power was high and Indigenous population more vulnerable. I provide empirical evidence of the strategic use of the colonial court using a mixed-methods approach including paleographic transcriptions, human coding, and text analysis of a novel dataset of more than 30,000 judicial claims. These results have implications for our understanding of both the development of Indigenous legal autonomy in colonial history and for the more general strategic development of judicial power in autocracies. One plausible, yet controversial, implication is that Indigenous communities had more tools to resist oppression during the colonial period than following the rise of the nation-state.
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Edgar Franco Vivanco is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. He studied a PhD in political science at Stanford University. During 2018-19, he was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Edgar is a collaborator with the Poverty, Governance, and Violence Lab at Stanford University, and with the Digging Early Colonial Mexico project at the University of Lancaster. Edgar’s research agenda explores how colonial-era institutions and contemporary criminal violence shape economic under-performance, particularly within Latin America. In his book project, Strategies of Indigenous Resistance and Assimilation to Colonial Rule, he examines the role Indigenous groups have played in the state-building process of the region since colonial times.
Edgar Franco is a graduate of the Stanford Public Policy program and the Stanford School of Education, where he earned an MA in International Education Administration and Policy Analysis from Stanford University. He also holds a dual BA in Economics and Political Science from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de Mexico (ITAM). He is interested in the analysis and evaluation of social policy in general and educational policy in particular. His recent research examines the factors related to the change in standardized tests scores in Mexico; he is also conducting an evaluation of teacher incentives programs. In the Program of Poverty and Governance, Edgar studies the impacts of violence related to Mexico’s war on drugs over human capital.
Doctoral Candidate in Political Science
Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan
Community-driven development programs that decentralized administrative, fiscal, and political functions have become a popular policy tool to deliver public services. We study a large reform in the city of Delhi that decentralized the management of discretionary school budgets to elected bodies of parents. Using household surveys, non-participant observation in schools, semi-structured interviews, and administrative data we ask if decentralization has brought expenditures closer in line to the preferences of parents? We find that expenditures are heavily skewed to the preferences of more traditionally powerful actors, namely men and members of the government bureaucracy.
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Emmerich Davies specializes in education policy and politics, the political economy of development, and the politics of service provision, with a regional focus on South Asia. His work has been published in Comparative Political Studies. His book manuscript examines the growth of non-state service provision in low-income democracies, and the consequences for democratic politics. Davies earned his B.A. in Economics and Political Science with honors from Stanford University in 2007, worked for two years for the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab in Kolkata, India, and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania. He is on leave for the 2019-2020 as the W. Glenn Campbell & Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Susan Louise Dyer Peace Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Emmerich Davies
Assistant Professor of International Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
Graham Webster is a research scholar in the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He researches, writes, and teaches on technology policy in China and US-China relations.
Before bringing DigiChina to Stanford in 2019, he was its cofounder and coordinating editor at New America, where he was a China digital economy fellow. From 2012 to 2017, Webster worked for Yale Law School as a senior fellow and lecturer responsible for the Paul Tsai China Center’s Track II dialogues between the United States and China and co-taught seminars on contemporary China and Chinese law and policy. While there, he was an affiliated fellow with the Yale Information Society Project, a visiting scholar at China Foreign Affairs University, and a Transatlantic Digital Debates fellow with New America and the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. He was previously an adjunct instructor teaching East Asian politics at New York University and a Beijing-based journalist writing on the Internet in China for CNET News.
In recent years, Webster's writing has been published in MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, Slate, The Wire China, The Information, Tech Policy Press, and Foreign Policy. He has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg and spoken to NPR and BBC World Service. Webster has testified before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission and speaks regularly at universities and conferences in North America, East Asia, and Europe. His chapter, "What Is at Stake in the US–China Technological Relationship?" appears in The China Questions II (Harvard University Press, 2022).
Webster holds a bachelor's in journalism and international studies from Northwestern University and a master's in East Asian studies from Harvard University. He took doctoral coursework in political science at the University of Washington and language training at Tsinghua University, Peking University, Stanford University, and Kanda University of International Studies.
The Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award recognizes exceptional teachers who further mutual understanding between Americans and Japanese. EngageAsia administers the Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award, which is funded by the United States-Japan Foundation. The 2019 Award focused on the humanities and the 2020 Award will focus on Japanese language. It is named in honor of Elgin Heinz for his commitment to educating students about Asia as well as for the inspiration he has provided to the field of pre-collegiate education.
On December 5, 2019, SPICE’s Stanford e-Japan Instructor and Manager Waka Takahashi Brown was presented with the 2019 Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award for her teaching excellence with Stanford e-Japan, an online course that introduces U.S. society and culture and U.S.–Japan relations to high school students in Japan. Stanford e-Japan is currently supported by the Yanai Tadashi Foundation. Initial funding for Stanford e-Japan was provided by the U.S.-Japan Foundation.
“Waka walks in the footsteps of Elgin Heinz as a key leader in educating the next generation about the U.S.–Japan relationship,” stated David Janes, Chair of the Board, EngageAsia. Heinz was born in China in 1913 and taught in the San Francisco Unified School District for 40 years. Challenging Americans’ lack of knowledge about Asia was central to Elgin’s life’s work. Janes has overseen the Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award since its inception in 2001. Daniel Tani, Director of Foundation Grants at the U.S.-Japan Foundation, and Janes formally presented the award to Brown.
In addition to teaching Stanford e-Japan for the last five years, Brown previously served as instructor for SPICE’s Reischauer Scholars Program (RSP). The RSP is an online course that introduces Japanese society and culture and U.S.–Japan relations to high school students in the United States. Current RSP Instructor and Manager Naomi Funahashi is a 2017 Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award recipient.
Waka Brown, Professor Daniel Okimoto, and Miles Brown (husband of Waka)
Congratulatory comments were made by the Honorable Tomochika Uyama, Consul General of Japan in San Francisco, who underscored the importance of Brown’s efforts and the significance of Stanford e-Japan and the RSP to enhancing U.S.–Japan relations from the grassroots level. Consul General Uyama and Stanford Professor Emeritus Daniel Okimoto, who was also present at the ceremony, serve as advisors to Stanford e-Japan and the RSP. Okimoto is Brown’s former professor and longtime mentor.
Prior to joining SPICE, Brown taught Japanese language at Silver Creek High School in San Jose and served as a Coordinator for International Relations (CIR) on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. Brown obtained both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford University.
In her acceptance speech, Waka noted: “As a Japanese American growing up in Kansas in the 1970s and 80s, and then as a Japanese American woman working in Japan, I’ve felt the need and immediacy for fostering cross-cultural understanding for my entire life. I feel extremely fortunate that I am able to work toward this goal through my professional work. My students and their knowledge and passion humble me. I am constantly in awe of them and their accomplishments. It is a true honor to receive the Elgin Heinz Award, and I am grateful for the opportunity to use these funds to foster connections between the future leaders in U.S.–Japan relations.”
Through Stanford e-Japan, Brown has engaged Japanese high school students from throughout Japan in an intensive study of U.S. society and culture. Since its first session in 2015, over 200 Japanese students have successfully completed the course. Some of her students have matriculated to universities in the United States.
In a very meaningful moment of the ceremony, Ryoga Umezawa, one of Brown’s former Stanford e-Japan students and now a university student at the Minerva Schools at KGI in San Francisco, expressed his gratitude to Brown, noting that the online format of Stanford e-Japan eased his transition to the online format of his university studies and also noted that the knowledge he gained from Stanford e-Japan has been invaluable to his transition to life in the United States.
The ceremony ended with a duet by Norman Masuda, an inaugural recipient of the Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award in 2002 (Japanese language category), and Irene Nakasone, instructor of kutu (Okinawan koto). Nakasone played the kutu and Masuda, the sanshin (Okinawan shamisen). They performed “Akanma Bushi” (red horse folk song), which was symbolic to the occasion as it is a congratulatory classical piece from the Yaeyama Islands, Okinawa Prefecture.
Irene Nakasone and Norman Masuda play a duet at the 2019 Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award ceremony.
For more information on the Stanford e-Japan Program, visit stanfordejapan.org. The Spring 2020 application period is open now until January 8, 2020. To be notified when the next Stanford e-Japan application period opens, join our email list or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
As the 2020 presidential campaign begins to take shape, there is widespread distrust of the fairness and accuracy of American elections. Four factors increasing the mistrust. Voter suppression has escalated as a Republican tool aimed to depress turnout of likely Democratic voters, fueling suspicion. Pockets of incompetence in election administration, often in large cities controlled by Democrats, have created an opening to claims of unfairness. Old-fashioned and new-fangled dirty tricks, including foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns via social media, threaten electoral integrity. Inflammatory rhetoric about “stolen” elections supercharges distrust among hardcore partisans.
Taking into account how each of these threats has manifested in recent years—most notably in the 2016 and 2018 elections—this presentation concludes with concrete steps that need to be taken to restore trust in American elections before the democratic process is completely undermined.
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Professor Richard L. Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Hasen is a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, writing as well in the areas of legislation and statutory interpretation, remedies, and torts. He is co-author of leading casebooks in election law and remedies.
From 2001-2010, he served (with Dan Lowenstein) as founding co-editor of the quarterly peer-reviewed publication, Election Law Journal. He is the author of over 100 articles on election law issues, published in numerous journals including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review and Supreme Court Review. He was elected to The American Law Institute in 2009 and serves as Reporter (with Professor Douglas Laycock) on the ALI’s law reform project: Restatement (Third) of Torts: Remedies. He also is an adviser on the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Concluding Provisions.
Professor Hasen was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by The National Law Journal in 2013, and one of the Top 100 Lawyers in California in 2005 and 2016 by the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journal.
Legal compliance has gotten a bad rap in international relations research. Compliance – the state of being on the “legal” side of a legal/illegal binary – has been largely set aside as a variable of interest in empirical studies of international law in favor of more substantive measures of behavioral change. Nevertheless, efforts to frame political science inquiry in terms of law’s effects have not succeeded in sidestepping compliance. To the contrary, none of the core functions of law (guiding behavior, assessing it, attributing responsibility, or assigning remedies) is possible without an applied concept of legal compliance as an orienting point on the horizon.This paper reclaims compliance as an essential concept for the empirical study of international law—albeit in a transformed state that emphasizes its potential for contextual variability and its essentially legal-political character.
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Tonya Putnam (Ph.D., Stanford, 2005; J.D., Harvard 2002) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Her work exploresthe intersectionsof international relations and international law in relation tointernational and transnational regulationand jurisdiction, human rights, international humanitarian law, migration, international dispute resolution, institutional design, and judicial politics.Professor Putnamis the author ofCourts Without Borders:Law, Politics, and U.S. Extraterritoriality(Cambridge University Press 2016). Herresearch has appeared inInternational Organization, International Security,Human Rights Review, Journal of Physical Securityand in edited volumes.She was a Post-DoctoralFellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University and a Pre-and Post-Doctoral Fellow at CISAC.She is currently completing a second book on why and how social scientists should factor basic properties of law, such as its semantic indeterminacy, into theories and empirical models of its impact on behavior.Professor Putnam is also a member (inactive) of the California State Bar.
Resurrecting Compliance in Assessing Law's Impact on Behavior
When authoritarian-era elites return to positions of power under democracy, what are the implications for the quality of democracy? We investigate this question using an original dataset that tracks former authoritarian elites’ capture of high-level posts under democracy across Latin America from 1900 to 2015. We find that when authoritarian-era elites capture a wide range of posts across disparate government branches – spanning the executive, legislature, judiciary, military, and local elected office – such “elite dispersion” undercuts the quality of democracy. It also harms specific dimensions of democracy such as accountability, openness of competition, breadth of inclusion, and egalitarianism. These results are robust to prominent alternative explanations of the quality of democracy, and in particular, explanations that underscore the importance of formal organizations and institutions such as autonomous militaries, dominant political parties, and holdover autocratic constitutions. Elite dispersion matters for the quality of democracy even after controlling for these more visible channels of former authoritarian elite influence.
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Michael Albertus is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. His research interests include political regimes, inequality and redistribution, clientelism, and civil conflict. He has published two books, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform (2015, Cambridge University Press) and Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy (2018, Cambridge University Press), and a host of articles in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Comparative Political Studies. He also writes regularly for public audiences in outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs.
Michael Albertus is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of five books. His newest book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, was published by Basic Books in January 2025. It tells the story of how land came to be power within human societies, how it shapes power, and how its allocation determines the major social ills that societies grapple with.
Albertus studied math, electrical engineering, and political science at the University of Michigan and earned degrees in all three in 2005. He then did a PhD in political science at Stanford University, completing in 2011. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Albertus joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2012 and has since been on sabbatical twice back at Stanford, including as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences. In addition to his books, Albertus is also the author of over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles, including at flagship journals like the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and World Politics. He has taught courses to undergraduate, Masters, and PhD students on topics including inequality and redistribution, democracy and dictatorship, comparative politics, and political and economic development and policy in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.
The defining features of Albertus' work are his engagement with big questions and puzzles and the ability to join big data and cutting-edge research methods with original, deep on-the-ground fieldwork everywhere from government offices to archives and farm fields. He has conducted fieldwork throughout the Americas, southern Europe, South Africa, and elsewhere. His books and articles have won numerous awards and shifted conventional understandings of democracy, authoritarianism, and the consequences of how humans occupy and relate to the land.
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Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago
Waka Brown, Professor Daniel Okimoto, and Miles Brown (husband of Waka)
Irene Nakasone and Norman Masuda play a duet at the 2019 Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award ceremony.
