Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/5c8Un2Y9-sw

Abstract: Over the last fifteen years, the Russian government has invested significantly in improving Russia’s education and health care systems and in reversing the health and demographic catastrophes of the 1990s. This discussion will assess the extent to which those investments have paid off and the continued challenges Putin faces in aligning Russia’s human capital resources with his political, economic, and foreign policy ambitions. It will also examine the ways that health and social policy have been used as political tools – not always successfully – by the Putin regime.

Speaker Biography: Judy Twigg is a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University; senior associate (non-resident) with the Center for Strategic and International Studies; consultant for the evaluation units of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank; and adjunct professor at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Twigg’s work focuses on issues of health, human capital, and health systems reform in Eurasia, as well as evaluations of human development and public sector management assistance projects globally. She has been a consultant for John Snow, Inc., UNICEF, USAID, the Eurasia Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Twigg was a 2005 recipient of the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award. She holds a B.S. in physics from Carnegie Mellon University, an M.A. in political science and Soviet studies from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Ph.D. in political science and security studies from MIT.

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Authoritarian governments around the world are developing increasingly sophisticated technologies for controlling information. In the digital age, many see these efforts as futile, as they are easily thwarted by savvy Internet users who quickly find ways to evade and circumvent them. In this talk, Professor Roberts demonstrates that even censorship that is easy to circumvent is enormously effective. Censorship acts like a tax on information, requiring those seeking information to spend more time and money if they want access. By creating small inconveniences that are easy to explain away, censorship powerfully influences the spread of information and, in turn, what people know about politics. Through analysis of Chinese social media data, online experiments, nationally representative surveys, and leaks from China’s Propaganda Department, Professor Roberts find that when Internet users notice blatant censorship they are willing to compensate for better access.  But subtler censorship, such as burying search results or introducing distracting information on the web, is more effective because users are less aware of it. Roberts challenges the conventional wisdom that online censorship is undermined when it is incomplete and shows instead how censorship’s porous nature is used strategically to divide the public and target influencers. 

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Advisory on Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19)

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In 2015, Beijing issued a set of Guiding Opinions as part of a program to reform China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The new policy requires SOEs to amend their corporate charters to formalize and elevate the leadership role of the Chinese Communist Party in their corporate governance. To better grasp the contours of political conformity in Chinese corporate governance, Curtis Milhaupt will empirically examine the patterns of “party-building” (dangjian) charter amendments adopted in response to this policy by all listed nonfinancial Chinese firms in the four-year period from 2015-2018. He will also analyze the wide, substantive variation in the adoption of this dangjian policy within and across firm types, including privately-owned enterprises.

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This event is co-sponsored by the Program in History and Philosophy of Science; Program in Science, Technology, and Society; and Stanford Center for Law and History.

Livestream: This event will not be live-streamed or recorded

Abstract: How have national practices of nuclear security produced local conditions of insecurity? After World War II, the United States’ nuclear testing program transformed the Marshall Islands into an experimental site for testing both new weapons and forms of territorial governance. During the same period, the Hunters Point Shipyard in southeast San Francisco became the launching point and return site for ships, scientists, and military personnel circulating between the mainland and the Pacific tests. These activities not only incorporated the Marshall Islands and Hunters Point into networks of militarization and scientific knowledge production, but also resulted in widespread radiological contamination. Professors Mary Mitchell and Helen Kang will discuss the entangled legal, environmental, and social legacies of radiological contamination at these two sites, shedding light on the consequential damages of the Cold War and ongoing efforts to demand accountability from the United States government.

Helen Kang Biography: Helen H. Kang is Professor of Law at Golden Gate University School of Law and Director of the school’s Environmental Law and Justice Clinic, which has received recognition for its work from the American Bar Association and the Clinical Legal Education Association, among others. She has devoted most of her legal career to environmental protection, first as Trial Attorney with the Environmental Enforcement Section of the U.S. Department of Justice. Since joining the clinic in 2000, she and her students have successfully represented community and environmental groups, prevailing against agencies such as U.S. EPA and large sources of pollution, including power plants. The clinic’s work has contributed to developments in environmental law, reducing pollution in communities most affected by pollution in California and beyond, and improving public participation and regulatory accountability. Helen’s achievements include successfully arguing in the California Supreme Court to defend the California Environmental Quality Act from federal preemption and compelling California, after decades of abdication, to meaningfully regulate agricultural pollution. She graduated from Berkeley Law, University of California at Berkeley, and Yale University.

Mary Mitchell Biography: Mary X. Mitchell is an Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University where she works on issues at the intersection of environmental inequality and law. During the spring of 2020, Mitchell will be a faculty fellow at Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center. She earned her PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and was an Atkinson Fellow in Sustainability at Cornell University from 2016-2018. Previously, she practiced law in Pennsylvania and served as a law clerk to Judge Anthony J. Scirica of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

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While the Internet has revolutionized many aspects of our lives, there are still no online alternatives for making democratic decisions at large scale as a society. In this talk, we will describe algorithmic and market-inspired approaches towards large scale decision making that our research group is exploring. We will start with a model of opinion dynamics that can potentially lead to polarization, and relate that to commonly used recommendation algorithms. We will then describe the algorithms behind Stanford's participatory budgeting platform, and the lessons that we learnt from deploying this platform in over 70 civic elections. We will use this to motivate the need for a modern theory of social choice that goes beyond voting on candidates. We will then describe ongoing practical work on an automated moderator bot for civic deliberation (in collaboration with Jim Fishkin's group), and ongoing theoretical work on deliberative approaches to decision making. We will conclude with a summary of open directions, focusing in particular on fair advertising. 

Ashish Goel Bio