On December 4, 2025, Nate Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, spoke about election administration in the United States during a CDDRL research seminar. Persily discussed revelations from the 2024 election and how the 2024 election can forecast the upcoming 2026 midterm election cycle. 

Persily started his talk by sharing the “Election Administrator’s Prayer”— "Oh God, whatever happens, please don't let it be close" — as close elections expose the “fragile underbelly” of the election administration system, like the 2024 election. Roughly 230,000 votes in key swing states ultimately determined Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory of 312 votes to Kamala Harris’ 226. 

Persily situated the 2024 results within the broader political trends. Traditional political science predictors — public evaluations of the incumbent administration and economic perceptions — pointed toward a Trump victory. At the same time, public confidence in the electoral system shifted. Republicans’ confidence in the national vote increased markedly compared to 2020, while Democrats’ confidence declined — a reversal Persily described as a “sore-loser” pattern, but a decline that saw greater change with Democrats than in past years. 

Persily narrowed in on the act of voting itself, and firstly covered vote-by-mail. He emphasized that vote-by-mail has a smaller partisan gap than might be assumed: states as ideologically diverse as Utah, California, and Washington rely heavily on all-mail voting. Nationwide, only about 34 percent of voters cast ballots on Election Day, reflecting a long-term move toward early in-person and mail voting. Persily emphasized that these categories themselves are increasingly fluid — voters may receive a mail ballot but choose to drop it off in person, complicating simple partisan narratives about “mail voters” versus “in-person voters.”

In 2024, states sent 67 million ballots to voters, and 72 percent were returned. About 1.2 million mail ballots were rejected, primarily due to missing or mismatched signatures — an issue concentrated among younger voters with inconsistent signatures and older voters experiencing age-related variation. Persily identified signature verification as a potential spot for further controversy, given its susceptibility to litigation, partisan pressure, and administrative inconsistency. In-person voting, by contrast, saw few changes from 2020. Approximately 1.7 million provisional ballots were cast, with 74 percent ultimately counted. 

Notably, several anticipated threats to the 2024 election did not materialize. Despite widespread discussion about AI-generated disinformation, deepfakes largely appeared in satirical contexts with little evidence of voter confusion. Fears of widespread voter suppression, election-related violence, and breakdowns in certification procedures were also less present than expected.

Persily highlighted several emerging risks that might impact the 2026 election cycle. Firstly, efforts to target overseas ballots for active military and overseas citizens (UOCAVA), particularly in Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, have increased, as have general efforts to review and purge voter rolls, signaling a growing interest in using administrative disputes to challenge ballot eligibility. 

Another concern was the over 227 bomb threats made against polling places and election offices, which led a few polling places to temporarily close or extend hours. The concern here is not necessarily the explosives themselves, as no explosives were found. Rather, Persily warned that voters might not go to the polls for fear of violence.

Other challenges included wide variation in county-level rules for curing mail ballots, particularly in Pennsylvania, where some counties offer robust curing opportunities, and others offer none — raising equal-protection concerns reminiscent of Bush v. Gore. Persistent state-level differences in counting speed, with California as the slowest, create openings for misinformation about “late-counted” ballots. Election-official turnover continues to rise, leaving many jurisdictions with less experienced administrators heading into 2026.

Persily then turned to new sources of pressure. A recent executive order requiring documentary proof of citizenship — paired with DHS review of state voter lists — could impose significant burdens, as many U.S. citizens lack passports or have name discrepancies with their documentation. On Truth Social, President Trump has also floated eliminating mail voting entirely and even ending the use of voting machines. Since May 2024, the Department of Justice has requested voter-registration databases from at least 21 states, heightening tensions over data privacy and federal authority. Persily raised concerns about the potential deployment of federal troops or ICE at polling places, noting that such actions are illegal but still feared. 

Persily lastly outlined what he called a “nuclear option.” A constitutional loophole allows Congress’s ability to refuse to seat duly elected members on the basis of qualifications, which then proceeds to a vote to seat a new member. This loophole, if used, could result in back-and-forth objections where no one is able to claim their seat. 

Persily emphasized the need for states to commit resources to speeding up mail-ballot counting, for courts to resolve executive-order challenges before the 2026 cycle begins, for early in-person voting to be encouraged, and for the House to articulate rules about objections to member seating well before November 2026. Ultimately, Persily argued that although most Americans will experience the 2026 elections as the same as elections in past years, states with competitive congressional districts may feel the strain. 

Persily ended by saying the present tension in our voting systems does not favor centralization, and perhaps, federalism is our friend at this current moment. 

In a recent REDS (Rethinking European Security and Development) seminar co-hosted by Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and The Europe Center (TEC), Professor Kim Lane Scheppele offered a clear and urgent account of a growing crisis inside the European Union (EU): the erosion of democracy within some of its own member states. Her central claim was that the EU now faces two different democracy deficits. The first is the traditional, institutional problem — often described as the EU being “too technocratic” and “too distant” from voters. The second, and far more dangerous, is the rise of internal democratic backsliding, where member states that were once consolidated democracies begin to dismantle their own checks and balances.

Scheppele began by explaining the older, familiar form of the democracy deficit. Many key EU institutions — the European Commission, the Council, and the European Court of Justice — are not directly elected. The EU historically justified this by assuming that democratic legitimacy flowed upward from its member states. As long as all national governments were democratically elected and accountable at home, the EU’s supranational structure remained legitimate.

But this assumption has collapsed. Over the past decade, some member states, most notably Hungary, and, until recently, Poland, have shifted away from liberal democracy while still enjoying full voting rights and benefits inside the Union. Scheppele emphasized that the EU’s treaties never anticipated a scenario in which a member might stop being a democracy yet continue to shape EU policies, budgets, and laws.

The heart of the talk outlined how Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gradually transformed into what scholars call an “electoral authoritarian” regime — a system that holds elections but systematically tilts the playing field. Scheppele detailed how Orbán’s government captured the Constitutional Court, restricted judicial independence, took control of public media, pressured private media owners, rewrote electoral laws, weakened civil society, and used EU development funds to reward loyalists. Despite this, Hungary still nominates a European Commissioner, sends Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) elected under unfair conditions, and holds veto power in the Council of the EU.

Scheppele explained why the EU’s main disciplinary tool, Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union, proved ineffective. Article 7 is designed to sanction members that violate EU values, but the final step requires the unanimous consent of all other member states. Hungary and Poland protected each other for years, making sanctions impossible.

A major turning point came when the EU created three financial conditionality systems: the Rule-of-Law Conditionality Regulation, the Recovery and Resilience Fund, and the Common Provisions Regulation. Unlike Article 7, these tools allow the EU to freeze funds when a member state violates rule-of-law standards. Scheppele noted that these mechanisms froze €137 billion for Poland and €36 billion for Hungary — pressures that contributed to Poland’s democratic opening in 2023 and helped fuel a new political challenge to Orbán.

Still, problems remain. In late 2023, the European Commission released €10.2 billion to Hungary for geopolitical reasons, despite rule-of-law violations. Scheppele warned that such political bargaining undermines the credibility of the new system.

She ended on a cautiously optimistic note: recent EU court decisions suggest that democracy itself, not just technical legal standards, may soon become an enforceable EU obligation. Yet the ultimate question remains one of political will. The EU now has tools to defend democracy from within — but must decide whether it will use them.

In a CDDRL research seminar held on November 20, 2025, Gerhard Casper Postdoctoral Fellow Ana Paula Pellegrino presented her research on the emergence of police-led armed illicit groups (PLAIGs) in Brazil. Pellegrino defines them as illicit organizations with coercive capacity led by active-duty police officers. Her seminar explored what makes these groups distinctive, why they form, and the conditions that allow them to take shape.

As discussed by Pellegrino, unlike ordinary corruption, informal protection rackets, or gangs that employ off-duty police as security, PLAIGs are fully organized and independently governed armed groups that operate illicitly, possess their own coercive capacity, and are led by active-duty police officers who remain part of the state. Because of this unique position inside the public safety apparatus, these groups can draw on the authority and resources of the state, becoming spoilers of efforts to monopolize violence.

To better understand how these groups arise, Pellegrino examines both the motivations behind their formation and the conditions that enable them. She argues that officers create these groups primarily as a rent-extraction strategy when they perceive the costs of policing to be rising, typically in response to a growing armed threat. As violence escalates, both politicians and the police feel pressure: politicians face public demands for safety, while officers face greater personal danger on the ground. This imbalance produces frustration within the police ranks and motivates some officers to exploit their coercive capacity for profit. 

However, motivation alone is not enough, as the opportunity to form PLAIGs depends on two enabling conditions. First, police must have greater coercive capacity than the threat they face, allowing them to compete with or expel armed groups. Second, they must have sufficient discretion to use their capacity outside of official duties. Pellegrino emphasizes that this autonomy is shaped by the degree of political control over police. When oversight is strong, officers cannot use state resources to build private organizations. When oversight is weak, however, officers have both the means and the opportunity to organize. Pellegrino refers to this dynamic as the Warrior’s Paradox: the increased investment in police capacity meant to combat disorder also creates the conditions for police to generate disorder themselves.

To test her argument, Pellegrino draws on extensive process tracing and three years of fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Despite similar histories of police violence, only Rio developed PLAIGs. Pellegrino shows that Rio consistently expanded police coercive power while failing to impose meaningful oversight, creating the conditions for PLAIGs to flourish after the rise of the Red Command and the Third Command of the Capital, prison gangs turned drug trade organizations. São Paulo, by contrast, implemented institutional reforms in the 1990s and early 2000s that tightened accountability, standardized use-of-force rules, and constrained police discretion, even after the rise of the First Command of the Capital, an equally powerful drug trade organization. As a result, officers in São Paulo lacked the autonomy and impunity necessary to form armed organizations.

Pellegrino closed by emphasizing that PLAIGs emerge not from state weakness but from well-equipped police forces operating with insufficient oversight, enabling officers to convert state authority into private coercive power. This, she claims, illustrates how police can become actors who undermine, rather than protect, the state’s monopoly of violence.

On November 13, 2025, Hanna Folsz, a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, presented her research on “Economic Retaliation and the Decline of Opposition Quality.” This CDDRL research seminar built on Folsz’s focus on authoritarianism and democratic backsliding. 

Hungary has experienced significant democratic decline, spurred by Fidesz Party leader Viktor Orbán’s rise to power in 2010. Since then, armed with a parliamentary supermajority, the Fidesz Party has taken several democratic-eroding actions: rewriting electoral rules, capturing the courts and media, and repressing independent civil society. Prior to these actions, Hungary had close elections. But after 2010 and the Fidesz Party’s changes, elections are no longer close. Illiberal populists worldwide — like Trump, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, and Erdoğan — look to Orban’s agenda as a template on how to dismantle democracy, and how to maintain voter support while doing so. In Hungary, opposition politicians, candidates, advocates, and voters do not face violence or arrests for their political views. However, Folsz argues that there exists a pervasive fear in opposition circles stemming from the potential for economic retaliation. Folsz recalls examples of this from interviews she conducted in Hungary.

In Miskolc, a city in Northeastern Hungary, the local head of the socialist party recalled a story from 201,9 when the party was able to convince a well-respected businessman to run for a seat. However, after agreeing to become a candidate, the candidate’s wife said, “Are you out of your mind? Don’t you think about your daughter? She will lose her job if you do this!” The couple’s daughter worked at a local passport office, a state-dependent job. The candidate withdrew his candidacy. His replacement was an elderly woman who was unable to campaign. The socialist party lost the race.

Another interviewee, Tibor Zaveczki, ran as an opposition candidate. He was fired from a state-owned company for doing so. Zaveczki took the case to court, armed with secret recordings of his firing. The recording included a conversation between Zaveczki and his manager, in which his manager said: “The city leadership decided not to continue working with you in our company.” Zaveczki asked, “So, to put it plainly, was my mistake that I openly declared I was in the opposition?” His manager responded, “Of course, that matters. That’s obvious. You’re not stupid.”

Folsz identified that existing literature on democratic backsliding often focuses on the incumbent's strategy to dismantle democratic institutions and on why voters tolerate these actions. However, the role of opposition parties is rarely addressed. Folsz went into her research asking the question: Why do opposition parties struggle to challenge aspiring autocrats in elections? Folsz asserts that the main reason is that opposition parties have a growing political talent deficit in democratic declines, driven by an authoritarian strategy that Folsz calls elite economic coercion. This entails a credible threat of economic retaliation for opposition candidacy that discourages opposition political entry, reduces opposition candidate quality, and weakens opposition parties.

Folsz outlines two types of economic retaliation. The first is employment-oriented, where state-sector employees might face fear of dismissal from their job, demotions, or lack of promotions if they or a family member runs for office with the opposition party. The second is enterprise-oriented, where business owners might face a credible threat in the form of tax audits, the cancellation of state contracts, or the denial of grants, or even be blacklisted by suppliers or clients. Folsz outlines the effects of elite economic coercion, stating that the coercion leads to a higher cost of candidacy, which then leads to deterrence of political entry. This results in a lower opposition candidate quality and ultimately weakens opposition parties.

Folsz then empirically tested these three steps of the theory: retaliation, deterrence, and endogenous entry. Using tax enforcement as a proxy for economic retaliation, Folsz found a significant increase in tax enforcement in firms that had links to opposition candidates, and found the effect stronger with opposition-owned firms. Folsz also found that these firms were less likely to stay in business and decreased in their number of employees and profit compared to incumbent party-linked firms after the firm owner’s or director’s political entry. State dependence is a very central deterrent of candidacy– a survey experiment shows that state dependents are about 13 percent less likely to join opposition politics as candidates. Folsz used data on candidate background to show that the quality of opposition candidates declined compared to the incumbent Fidesz Party candidates during Hungary’s democratic decline.

Folsz concluded by stressing that the weakening of opposition parties is key to authorization, and candidate recruitment is a central challenge for opposition parties during democratic decline.

At a CDDRL seminar held on November 7, 2025, Georgetown political scientist Killian Clarke presented new research on why some revolutions consolidate into lasting political change while others are reversed through counterrevolution. His central claim is that unarmed, democratic revolutions are uniquely vulnerable to reversal, not because they lack legitimacy or popular support, but because of the kinds of power resources they rely on and later abandon. Drawing on a global dataset of 114 revolutions since 1900, Clarke showed that nearly one in three democratic revolutions is later overthrown, a rate dramatically higher than that of leftist or ethno-nationalist revolutions. Still, two-thirds of democratic revolutions do survive, raising questions about how so many of them manage to resist counterrevolution despite their weaknesses.

Clarke defines counterrevolution as the restoration of a version of the old regime after a successful revolution, whether through coups, elite realignments, or mass-backed reversals. His explanation centers on the resource asymmetries that distinguish unarmed, democratic revolutions from their violent counterparts. Whereas Marxist, nationalist, or armed uprisings build coercive capacity, external alliances, and strong organizational hierarchies, democratic revolutions typically succeed through broad, decentralized, and nonviolent mass mobilization. This allows them to topple entrenched autocrats, but leaves them without reliable security forces or disciplined party structures once in power. The feature that makes them strong during the uprising — large numbers in the streets — becomes a source of fragility once governing begins.

The mechanism Clarke traces is one of post-revolutionary demobilization. After seizing power, new democratic leaders often pivot toward institutional governance, suppressing further street mobilization in the name of stability. But this demobilization fragments the revolutionary coalition and removes the only leverage it holds over old-regime actors — societal pressure. When the coalition fractures, counterrevolutionary elites can reenter the arena with support from military, foreign patrons, or disillusioned factions of the original movement.

Egypt’s 2011 revolution illustrates this pattern. The mass uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak briefly held the military at bay through continued mobilization. But once elected, President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood tried to govern by appeasing the military and old regime elites, sidelining secular allies, and discouraging protest. But popular mobilization never really declined; instead, it transformed, and eventually came to be directed not in defense of the revolution but against the Morsi government, ultimately enabling the 2013 coup. Clarke emphasized that Egypt did not fall because counterrevolutionaries grew powerful, but because revolutionaries abandoned the mobilizational strategy that had given them power in the first place.

Clarke then compared Egypt's counterrevolutionary outcome to Venezuela's 1958 revolution, another unarmed, democratic revolution against a military government. By contrast, Venezuela’s 1958 democratic transition succeeded because revolutionary leaders remobilized supporters when a military countercoup emerged, bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets and forcing the generals to retreat. In Clarke’s view, Venezuela shows that democratic revolutions can survive, but only when leaders treat post-revolutionary politics as a continuation of the struggle against the old regime.

Clarke concluded by noting a long-term decline in successful counterrevolutions during the late 20th century, followed by a possible uptick in the 2010s. The return of multipolar geopolitical backing for authoritarian restoration — and the global spread of unarmed, democratic revolutions — may be recreating the conditions under which counterrevolutions thrive.

In a CDDRL research seminar held on October 30, 2025, Einstein-Moos Postdoctoral Fellow Oren Samet presented his research on how opposition parties engage internationally to challenge authoritarian regimes, focusing on the costs and benefits of a phenomenon he terms “opposition diplomacy.” This CDDRL research seminar highlighted Samet’s book project, which explores how opposition actors shape international politics and what their strategies reveal about the global landscape of democracy. 

Samet defines opposition diplomacy as the explicit efforts by political actors in the opposition to engage with international policymakers, promote their own priorities, and influence the foreign policies of external states. His research focuses on opposition diplomacy directed at Western governments in the post-Cold War era, undertaken by parties and politicians seeking to gain power through elections. 

As Samet highlighted, opposition diplomacy can take several forms, including direct lobbying, international networking, diaspora mobilization, and public relations. These efforts can shape foreign policy decisions by building coalitions of international allies with overlapping goals and with influence within foreign policy establishments, as well as by persuading policymakers that opposition parties are credible partners. This, in turn, can be beneficial, as it draws attention to repression, strengthens advocacy for democratic reform, and helps motivate external pressure, including through public statements of solidarity and specific policies such as sanctions. 

To study how these relationships operate, Samet analyzes data from party internationals – formal networks that connect political parties across countries – and their links with ideological groups represented within the European Parliament. He shows that when an opposition party from a country belonged to a party international with such links, members of the associated group in the European Parliament were more likely to raise issues about that country’s democratic deficits, indicating that these ties can increase visibility and solidarity abroad.

Samet further highlights this dynamic through the case of Cambodia, where opposition leaders have long appealed to Western governments and mobilized diaspora networks to pressure the prevailing autocratic regime. Their outreach helped bring international attention to Cambodia’s democratic backsliding and contributed to the imposition of European Union sanctions by increasing the visibility of regime abuses and helping to legitimize calls for stronger international action. 

However, Samet emphasized that the costs of opposition diplomacy can often outweigh its benefits. International engagement can expose politicians to repression or legal risks, divert financial and human resources from domestic mobilization, and enable ruling regimes to portray opposition parties as agents of foreign influence. In Cambodia, for example, opposition figures who engaged in international outreach faced arrests, restrictions, and bans on political participation, showing how consequential such engagement can be. Additionally, as Samet discussed, opposition diplomacy can sometimes produce unintended effects by giving regimes further justification to tighten control or discredit opposition leaders in the eyes of the public. Ultimately, due to these risks, opposition diplomacy is most common when domestic opportunities are scarce, leaving opposition parties with few alternatives. 

Samet closed by noting that these tradeoffs reveal the complex nature of opposition diplomacy. While opposition politicians can be influential global actors, their impact depends on how they weigh the risks and rewards of engaging abroad. Hence, the international environment for democratization is shaped not only by governments but also by the strategic choices of opposition actors themselves.

On October 16, 2025, UC Davis political scientist Lauren Young delivered a talk on the politics of electoral repression in post–Cold War autocracies. Her talk examined why authoritarian incumbents use electoral repression in some elections and not others, why they often outsource it, and why it is often not targeted at the most strategically valuable districts. She argued that cohesion in the ruling coalition shapes its organization, targeting, and effectiveness. Electoral repression refers to the use of coercive violence by ruling elites to weaken opposition forces and tilt electoral competition in their favor while still holding elections. It is a common tool of authoritarian control, with opposition harassment present in roughly one in five elections since 1990. Yet incumbents do not always rely on repression, and when they do, they frequently delegate it to paramilitary groups rather than state security forces.

Young argued that repression is both valuable and politically risky, which explains why it is sometimes but not always used. Authoritarian elites face two key problems. First, there is a control problem: the effects of repression on political behavior are unpredictable. While violence may intimidate some citizens, it can also backfire, provoking outrage or mobilization. Second, there is a power-sharing problem: delegating repression to coercive actors — police, military, or militias — can empower these groups and threaten regime stability. These risks push rulers toward patronage, propaganda, and performance, turning to repression only when these strategies fail.

The problem of authoritarian control is shaped by the fact that citizen reactions to repression are driven by psychological factors that are hard for elites to observe. These include self-efficacy — the belief in one’s ability to overcome obstacles — and risk aversion, or preference for certainty. Individuals with high self-efficacy and lower risk aversion are less likely to be deterred, increasing the uncertainty of repression’s effects. 

The talk’s focus was on elite cohesion and how it structures electoral repression. When ruling coalitions are cohesive, regimes rely on state security forces, making violence more organized and strategically targeted at competitive “swing” districts. When coalitions are fragmented, elites are more threatened by the risk that politicized state security forces will turn on them and instead outsource violence to militias, including violent interest groups, criminal organizations, and loosely organized bands of party supporters. This produces poorly targeted repression, often concentrated in strongholds, less lethal, and more prone to backfire. Internal power dynamics thus shape how electoral repression unfolds.

To illustrate this, Young drew on more than 5,000 incidents of electoral violence in Zimbabwe between 2000 and 2023. Periods of high elite cohesion, such as the 2002 presidential election, saw repression directed by state security forces in competitive districts. Periods of low cohesion, such as the 2000 legislative election and the 2008 runoff, saw militia-led violence concentrated in party strongholds, where it was less strategic and more likely to generate backlash.

By linking elite politics with these dynamics, Young’s work shows why electoral repression remains widespread but unevenly effective, and why even carefully planned repression can backfire.

On October 9, 2025, FSI Senior Fellow Saumitra Jha presented his team’s research on how exposure to financial markets — meaning individuals’ exposure to tailored opportunities to directly engage with investment platforms and decision-making — can increase support for action on climate change. This CDDRL research seminar expanded on Jha’s earlier research on the effects of financial exposure and literacy as tools for reducing political polarization, including studies conducted in Israel, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.

During the seminar, Jha highlighted the study's relevance in an era of democratic backsliding, rising populism on both the right and the left, and increasing economic uncertainty. Jha emphasized that basic financial literacy — the ability to understand and practically apply financial concepts such as saving, investing, and diversifying risks— is essential for citizens navigating this environment. Jha’s team designed interventions that empower citizens, both in rich and poor countries, to build financial knowledge and, by focusing on common investments and the common good, ultimately mitigate political polarization and conflict.

The study focused on the partisan issue of climate change in the United States. Participants were oversampled from states either disproportionately affected by climate change or central to the green-energy transition — Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Arizona, Ohio, South Carolina, and Kentucky. Each participant in the treatment group initially received an investment portfolio that tracked stocks from either green energy companies (firms at the forefront of the transition, engaged in renewable energy like solar and wind) or brown energy companies (firms earlier in the transition, engaged in the extraction of fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas). Subjects had $50–$100 of real money or a virtual portfolio of funds to invest.

For five weeks, participants used a Robinhood-style investment platform (a simple online interface for buying and selling stocks) to trade their stocks. Midway through the study, they were able to trade across both green and brown stocks. At this point, they received additional financial disclosures (basic company performance data) and had access to climate-impact disclosures (data on companies' greenhouse gas emissions and how they affect or are affected by climate change). However, this is currently a central policy debate; very few participants actually chose to review climate disclosures, which Jha identified as a research question for a companion paper. The research team then evaluated results in four categories: (1) beliefs about human agency and tradeoffs with the green energy transition, (2) policy preferences, (3) political attitudes, and (4) personal behaviors.

The data demonstrated that this financial exposure treatment — i.e., hands-on stock trading experience — had a significant, meaningful, and lasting influence on participants’ beliefs. Relative to control, treated participants were 9% more likely to agree or strongly agree that human activity is a significant contributor to climate change. They further became more supportive of both government and corporate action to mitigate climate change, and came to view the green-energy transition as potentially economically beneficial. 

Further, the intervention was empowering, raising the financial literacy of participants and increasing their ongoing consumption of financial news outlets, rather than social media or Fox News. These effects were observable even eight months after the study. 

Further, these changes were not preaching to the choir — instead, the effects were observed across the political spectrum, particularly among those who were ex ante climate change skeptics. However, while treated participants were more likely to donate to climate causes and to consider climate when investing and working, they did not report an overall increased willingness to change their daily lives. For example, while reporting an increased willingness to reuse recyclable bags, most did not report an increased willingness to change ingrained daily habits, such as eating less meat or changing commute patterns.

Jha also previewed new results from a companion paper based on a long-term survey conducted 8 months after treatment. To examine how the treatment changes how participants preferred climate action to be implemented, the research team gauged support for two approaches: the “Abundance approach”, popularized by Ezra Klein, and the “Conservation and Regulation approach.” The Abundance approach emphasizes expanding investments in clean energy infrastructure, sustainable housing, and economic growth as solutions to climate change. By contrast, the Conservation and Regulation approach focuses on reducing energy use through government regulation, strong local autonomy, and personal restraint. The financial exposure treatment significantly raised the share of subjects supporting the Abundance approach.

Although the impact of foreign aid on governance and development has been widely debated, its effect on bureaucracies remains underexplored. This is significant as bureaucracies play a vital role in key functions of the state and can affect development and growth. CDDRL postdoctoral scholar Maria Nagawa addressed this gap in a recent research seminar examining how project aid impacts the incentives and efforts of bureaucrats in aid-receiving countries.

Aid projects have predetermined objectives, activities, timelines, and budgets that rely heavily on bureaucrats for implementation. Consequently, they can lead to a reallocation of bureaucrats’ time and effort away from core government duties. To explore these dynamics, it is important to consider bureaucrats’ preferences for work and how they allocate effort. In the context of aid, these preferences can relate to specific projects and organizational characteristics. Project preferences may include financial incentives, ownership over priorities, and discretion in implementation, while organizational preferences include exposure to donor funding, pay inequities, and coordination with peers. With these factors in mind, Nagawa conducted her study in Uganda, one of the top foreign aid recipients in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The study takes a mixed-methods approach, utilizing interviews, surveys, and survey experiments. Because data on bureaucrats who work on aid projects is virtually non-existent, primary data collection was vital to generating evidence on how aid reshapes bureaucracies. Nagawa conducted 64 semi-structured interviews across 14 central government ministries and agencies, finding that although bureaucrats are pro-socially motivated when they join government, donor-funded projects amplify the importance of financial incentives. These projects provide attractive allowances and other benefits, and while such rewards can drive bureaucrats’ effort on projects, they also create tensions among colleagues to the point of eroding collaboration within departments. This is in part because projects are selectively allocated under unclear criteria. Bureaucrats also highlighted how donor priorities often took precedence, making it harder for them to advance contextually appropriate policies.

Results from the survey of 559 mid-level bureaucrats across six ministries reinforced these findings. Nearly 70 percent of bureaucrats had worked on aid projects, and many observed that such projects increased inequalities in pay and opportunity within ministries. To further explore these dynamics, Nagawa conducted conjoint survey experiments, which confirmed that monetary gain was the strongest driver of effort on projects. Although bureaucrats had strong preferences for ownership and discretion, these factors did not influence their willingness to increase effort on projects.

Nagawa’s findings highlight how aid projects reshape bureaucrats’ incentives in ways that can negatively impact state capacity. Many civil servants value government service and prefer the autonomy of government funding, but the structure of project aid often pushes them to prioritize donor-funded projects over their governmental duties. This weakens the internal cohesion and collaboration necessary to maintain a robust government.

Nagawa underscored the need for increased donor coordination to reduce bureaucratic burden, alignment of aid with the budget cycle to ensure synergy between aid projects and government work, and focusing funding on scaling local priorities. The findings from this research provide an important roadmap for how to reform aid delivery and ensure aid supports rather than undermines government effectiveness as international development assistance undergoes unprecedented changes. 

On September 25, 2025, FSI Senior Fellow Claire Adida presented her team’s research at a CDDRL Research Seminar Series talk under the title, “Overcoming Barriers to Women’s Political Participation: Evidence from Nigeria.” The seminar addressed a central paradox in global politics: although women’s legal formal right to vote is nearly universal, deep gender gaps remain in informal forms of political participation, such as contacting a local government official or attending a community meeting. This lack of engagement means women’s voices are underrepresented in governance and policies are less likely to reflect their priorities. This is particularly salient in hybrid democracies, where informal political participation may matter more than casting a vote.

Adida situated the study in the context of Nigeria, a large and diverse democracy that remains heavily patriarchal. Surveys highlight these disparities starkly: nearly half of Nigerian men believe men make better leaders than women; two in five women report never discussing politics with friends or family; and women are consistently less likely than men to attend meetings or contact community leaders. Against this backdrop, the project tested interventions designed to reduce barriers that discourage women’s participation.

The research team identified three categories of constraints: resource-based (a lack of time, skills, or information), norms-based (social expectations that women should remain outside the public sphere), and psychological (feelings of disempowerment and doubt about one’s capacity to create change). The study focused on the last two. To explore these, the team partnered with ActionAid Nigeria to conduct a randomized control trial (RCT) across 450 rural wards in three southwestern states. Local leaders identified groups of economically active women, aged 21 to 50, who were permitted by their spouses to join.

All communities began with an informational session on local governance. Beyond that, two types of training were introduced. The first, targeted at women, consisted of five sessions over five months designed to build leadership, organizing, and advocacy skills. These emphasized group-based learning and aimed to foster collective efficacy — the belief that a group can act together to achieve change. The second, targeted at men, encouraged husbands to act as allies in supporting women’s participation. After the initial informational session, communities were randomly assigned to no longer receive further training, to receive the 5 sessions of women’s training, or to receive the 5 sessions of women’s training and the 5 sessions of men’s training.

The findings were striking. Women’s trainings had clear positive effects: participants were more likely to engage in politics, attend meetings, and contact local leaders. The quality of their participation also improved, suggesting greater confidence and effectiveness. There was also evidence that these women’s trainings activated collective and self-efficacy, lending credence to the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA), a framework explaining how a sense of shared identity, group-based injustice, and group efficacy build political engagement. By contrast, men’s trainings produced modest results. They did not increase women’s participation beyond the women’s trainings and, in some cases, had small negative effects, such as on grant applications. Still, men’s trainings reduced opposition to women’s involvement, improved beliefs about women in leadership, and increased perceptions of more permissive community norms, even if they did not translate into an increase in women’s political participation.

Adida noted that these limited effects may reflect “ceiling effects” — many men in the sample were already relatively supportive compared to national averages, or lower attendance rates. It is also possible that changes in men’s attitudes take longer to manifest in behavior. The seminar concluded that advocacy trainings for women show strong promise in boosting participation, while efforts to reshape patriarchal norms among men may require longer-term strategies.