In Private Power and Democracy's Decline, a compelling, urgently important book, author Mordecai Kurz offers both a bold explanation of our democratic crisis and a major contribution to economic and political theory. The “second Gilded Age” of the last four decades has exposed democracy’s core contradiction. Democracy needs capitalism, but the unfettered, “free market” form of it generates extreme inequality and social and political polarization, which tear democracy apart. Moreover, the intrinsic tendency of unregulated capitalism toward monopoly power and wealth concentration has been turbocharged by the information and AI revolutions and globalization, which have been displacing workers, stagnating wages, and generating staggering new levels of private power. Public policy must contain monopoly power, reduce inequality, and broadly improve job prospects, skills, and economic security, or the surging system of “techno-winner-takes-all” will bring down democracy.

On Wednesday, May 13, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is pleased to welcome Matthew Levitt — an expert on counterterrorism and intelligence — to discuss the war with Iran and the aftermath in the Middle East.

The Global Islamic Revival represents one of the most significant sociopolitical transformations of the past half-century – marked by exceptional religiosity, support for sharia, and gender segregation. Yet existing theories cannot explain its particular timing or global spread across diverse economies, geographies, and political systems. Why did this movement gain traction from the 1970s onward, transforming societies from Egypt to Indonesia to Britain? This review synthesizes cross-regional evidence to assess competing explanations: deep historical roots, contingent shocks, and economic modernization. I then offer a novel theory. First, I argue that there was a crucial transformation in Muslim identity: from locally-based syncretism to state-attempted secular modernization to a reinvigoration of a transnational Muslim identity. Second, I propose the Prestige-Piety Feedback Loop:  modernization paradoxically amplified strengthened adherence to jurisprudential Islam and deference to credentialed religious authorities. As Muslims gained unprecedented access to jurisprudential knowledge, piety and gender segregation became primary markers of status, with profound consequences for women’s status. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Alice Evans is a Senior Lecturer in the Social Science of Development at King's College London. She has also been a Faculty Associate at Harvard Center for International Development and has held previous appointments at Cambridge University and the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on social norms and why they change; the drivers of support for gender equality; and workers' rights in global supply chains.

Dr. Evans is writing a book, The Great Gender Divergence (forthcoming with Princeton University Press). It will explain why the world has become more gender equal, and why some countries are more gender equal than others.

Democracy and security coexist uneasily. Security asserts priority over democracy during emergencies, when democratic processes seem luxuries. Yet deference paid to security can sow the seeds of democracy’s destruction. This prospect is magnified now, as both popular and elite usages of security in the United States have reached their highest levels in history. A short list of recent threats to national security alleged by our leaders includes unions of government workers, wind turbines, Chinese automobiles, Chinese garlic, America’s lack of sovereignty over Greenland, and America’s declining birth rate.

Why is security discourse so pervasive now, and what does this mean for democracy? This talk addresses these questions through examining security's history, focusing on three problematic features — ambiguity, immeasurability, and amorality — and their implications for contemporary democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Professor by Courtesy of Political Science, and Director of Stanford's Program in International Relations. He joined Stanford in 1997, initially at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, before moving to the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) in 2010. Previously, he taught at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Washington University in St. Louis.

Professor Stedman has led three major global commissions examining critical aspects of international security and democracy. From 2003-2004, he served as Research Director for the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, and in 2005 as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. This work produced the landmark report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (2004) and led to significant institutional innovations, including the UN peacebuilding architecture (commission, support office, and fund), the mediation support office, a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy, adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, and streamlined decision-making processes for the Secretary General. From 2010 to 2012, he directed the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, which published Deepening Democracy: A Strategy for Improving the Integrity of Elections Worldwide (2012). From 2018 to 2020, he served as Secretary General of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age, which examined how social media and the internet affect democratic processes, resulting in Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age (2020).

Professor Stedman's research spans mediation, civil war termination, international institutions, American foreign policy, and democracy. His work has appeared in leading journals, including The Lancet, International Security, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Democracy, International Affairs, International Studies Review, and Boston Review. His co-authored book Power and Responsibility (Brookings, 2009) drew praise from Brent Scowcroft, who wrote that "the vision, ideas, and solutions the authors put forward…have the potential to redeem American foreign policy."

A dedicated teacher, Professor Stedman has directed the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL since 2015 and received Stanford's Dinkelspiel Award in 2018 for outstanding contributions to undergraduate education. 

The competence of elected officials affects state performance and economic growth, yet it is often difficult to find high human capital, representative citizens willing to put themselves forward as political candidates. We analyze an intervention designed to address this challenge that combines structured community nominations, private screening of technocratic skills, and information provision to political parties in advance of local elections in Sierra Leone.  Estimates show that this successfully identifies individuals who are higher quality and enjoy broader local support than incumbents and status quo candidates.  While new to elected politics, these individuals remain elite, drawn from traditional chiefly families. One quarter of top nominees formally enter politics, positively self-selected on quality and boosted by an encouragement nudge.  Their entry improves the maximum quality observed in the potential candidate pool and among those selected onto the parties’ lists. These results provide proof of concept that there are better people out there willing to run.  

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Katherine Casey is a professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business and the faculty director of the King Center on Global Development. Her research explores the interactions between economic and political forces in lower-income countries, with particular interest in the role of information in enhancing political accountability, the influence of foreign aid on economic development, and the provision of local public infrastructure. Her regional focus is Sub-Saharan Africa.

Electoral autocracies have become one of the most prevalent forms of authoritarian rule. In these regimes, incumbents use state resources to shape electoral competition and bias outcomes in their favor. Existing research highlights media control, clientelism, and opposition harassment as central strategies. This paper identifies a distinct mechanism: the manipulation of electoral infrastructure as a tool of dispersed political engineering. We study this mechanism in Venezuela, an archetypal case of contemporary electoral autocracy, where the number of voting centers has nearly doubled over the last two decades. Using a novel panel dataset of geocoded polling centers covering 2000–2024, we examine the determinants of new center creation. We show that new voting centers are significantly more likely to be established in areas that previously exhibited stronger support for the incumbent. This relationship holds after accounting for population dynamics and spatial factors. The effect is particularly pronounced in urban areas and among centers that can be identified as politically motivated additions to the electoral infrastructure. We also find evidence that local pro-government organizations contribute to this process by generating bottom-up demand for new centers. These findings highlight how incumbents in electoral autocracies can manipulate the organization of elections to maintain political advantage.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michael Albertus is a CDDRL Visiting Scholar and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research examines democracy and dictatorship, inequality and redistribution, property rights, and civil conflict. He has authored five books and over thirty peer-reviewed articles. His most recent book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, published by Basic Books in 2025, examines how land became power, how it shapes power, and how who holds that power determines the fundamental social problems that societies grapple with. Albertus' work has also been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Development Economics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and elsewhere.