Stanford University

Building resilient infrastructure? The most critical component is the people

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Abstract: From programing firmware for IoT devices to misoperations in the field and control room, humans have the potential to offer creative, collaborative, and highly efficient solutions to some of society’s greatest challenges. However, human errors can lead to software vulnerabilities, blackouts, and loss of public trust. As we strive to make infrastructures more robust and lives safer, paradoxically, we often put humans at increased risk of distraction and error. Growing system and market speeds, interconnectivities between critical infrastructures, fear of compliance violations, and public scrutiny create challenges for operators, increase risks and costs, and prevent the system from deriving the greatest benefit from its people. Organizations are complex sociotechnical systems with complex political hierarchies; techniques such as root cause analysis demonstrate how intertwined our people and organizations are with technical system outcomes. Michael Legatt will highlight his work as a human factors engineer, from an emergency operations center during the 2003 blackout, to ten years at ERCOT (the grid operator for most of Texas), to founder of a company focused on improving human-computer and human-organizational interfaces for critical infrastructure management.
 
About the Speaker: Michael Legatt is the CEO and Founder of ResilientGrid. He has been a programmer for over 20 years in the energy, financial, medical, neuroscience research, and educational sectors. He has a Ph.D. in Clinical Health Psychology/Neuropsychology, a Ph.D. in Energy Systems Engineering, and is a Certified Performance Technologist.
 
As an amateur radio operator, he received a commendation for helping to provide emergency communications during the 2003 blackout in the northeastern United States, which sparked his interest in the psychology of critical infrastructure management.
 
Prior to founding ResilientGrid, Michael spent a decade as Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ Principal Human Factors Engineer. There, his development of the Macomber Map® was featured in several news outlets, and was credited as being instrumental in helping ERCOT operators maintain grid reliability through severe weather and record-setting wind generation. He also works on the behavioral aspects of consumer electric use, electric vehicle to grid integration, behavioral aspects of conservation and consumer awareness in grid management, and the cybersecurity, behavioral, and reliability issues that arise with integrating new technologies across layers of the grid.

Encina Hall, 2nd floor

Michael Legatt CEO and Founder ResilientGrid
Seminars

The Art of Authoritarian Control in China

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Abstract:

When villages in China began to introduce local elections in the 1980s it was, for many, a moment of great optimism about the prospects for local democracy in the Peoples' Republic. Yet village self-government has not curbed the power of local officials in China to confiscate the wealth from the rural poor. Following the introduction of village elections, over 60 million villagers have had their land seized by their local governments. These land seizures amount to a redistribution of trillions of dollars of wealth from smallholders to the government. In this talk, I argue that local self-government in China is a strikingly effective tool for top-down authoritarian control. I focus on the consequences of including communal elites, like the leaders of lineages or religious groups, in village institutions of self-government. The view that local democracy nurtures accountability would suggest that the inclusion of communal elites in village government would strengthen villagers' land rights. After all, these communal elites face strong social expectations that they cooperate with their group and enact policies that benefit them. Drawing on case studies and a new dataset, I show that when communal elites join local institutions of self-government, the state is instead able to expropriate more land than when these elites remain outside of government. I argue that these communal elites are important intermediaries that help China's authoritarian state control and extract from their groups.

 

Speaker Bio:

daniel embedded
Daniel Mattingly is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. Starting in summer 2017, he will join the department of political science at Yale as an assistant professor. Dan’s dissertation focuses on the sources of state power in China, and shows how the ruling party uses democratic institutions to strengthen its political control over rural China. More broadly he is interested in local governance, state-building, authoritarian rule, and political accountability. His work appears in Comparative Political Studies and World Politics.

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow, 2016-17
Seminars

1984 or the Brave New World? Evidence from China

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Abstract:

Media censorship is considered as the hallmark of authoritarian regimes. Why don’t citizens acquire uncensored info despite the low cost availability? What does it take to expose citizens to uncensored information, and how does exposure affect their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? We conduct a field experiment directly varying the supply of uncensored information (by providing free access to uncensored internet to university students in China), and students’ demand for information (by providing informational and monetary incentives) over the course of 18 months. We measure and trace students’ media consumption, beliefs and attitudes regarding media, as well as a broad range of economic and political attitudes and behaviors. We find that censorship successfully prevents information consumption due to the combination of restricted supply of and low demand for uncensored information. The low demand is primarily driven by students’ skeptical beliefs regarding uncensored media outlets, and such beliefs can be persistently changed after a period of exposure. Having exposed to uncensored information makes students more knowledgeable, more pessimistic of the Chinese economy, more critical of the government, and more likely to plan on leaving China in the near future.

 

Speaker Bio:

david yang
David Y. Yang is a PhD candidate in Economics at Stanford University. He received B.A. in statistics and B.S. in business administration from University of California, Berkeley. His research interests center on political economy, behavioral and experimental economics, and economic history. In particular, he is interested in the causes and consequences of political beliefs, attitudes, and preferences.

David Y. Yang PhD candidate in Economics at Stanford University
Seminars

The Evolution of Autocracy

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Abstract:

Globalization, shifting great power dynamics, and the growing accessibility of Internet and communication technology has changed the environment within which autocrats operate. Many analysts have noted these changes and concluded that the masses now hold the upper hand and that dictators’ days are surely numbered. It may be true that 21st century autocrats face more and increasingly complex challenges to their rule. But current accounts of dictatorship seriously underestimate the adaptability of authoritarian systems. Since the end of the Cold War, dictators have evolved to survive and even thrive amid changes in their domestic and international environments. In this presentation, I examine the evolution of authoritarianism since the end of the Cold War. Since 1991 there have been substantial changes in the ways that dictators assume power, in the tactics they use to maintain power, and in the ways in which they lose power. Each of these changes has significant implications for the political dynamics in today’s autocracies.

Speaker Bio:

andrea kendall taylor

Andrea Kendall-Taylor works at the National Intelligence Council, where she is a deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. During her seven years in the U.S. government, she has focused her research and analysis on the political dynamics of authoritarian regimes, political stability, democratization, and civil society, with a particular focus on Russia and Eurasia. Dr. Kendall-Taylor is also a non-resident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the Human Rights Initiative and an adjunct professor in political science at Georgetown and American Universities. Her work has been published in numerous political science journals, including the Journal of Peace Research, Democratization, and Journal of Democracy, as well as a number of policy outlets such as Foreign Affairs, the Washington Quarterly, and Foreign Policy. Dr. Kendall-Taylor received her B.A. in politics from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor Deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia
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Making Politics Work for Development

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Abstract:

Synthesizing the vanguard of economics research on the functioning of political markets, the World Bank’s Policy Research Report, Making Politics Work for Development, distils implications for policy and future research. It shows how political engagement—the processes through which citizens select and sanction the leaders who wield power in government—is fundamental to understanding and solving government failures to pursue good public policies. The confluence of political engagement with transparency can be a driving force for countries to transition toward better-functioning public sector institutions, starting from their own initial and contextual conditions. But good outcomes are far from guaranteed, with many risks of unhealthy political engagement by citizens and repressive responses by leaders. To harness the potential of these forces, the report offers ideas for policy actors to target transparency to improve citizens’ ability to hold leaders accountable for the public goods needed for development.

 

Speaker Bio:

stuti khemani
STUTI KHEMANI is a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. She joined through the Young Professionals Program after obtaining a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her area of research is the political economy of public policy choices, and institutional reforms for development. Her work is published in economics and political science journals, such as the American Economic Journal, Journal of Development Economics and American Political Science Review. She has studied the impact of electoral politics on fiscal policy and intergovernmental fiscal relations; drawn policy implications for the design of institutions to promote fiscal responsibility; and analyzed political constraints to efficient allocation of resources for health and education services. She is currently examining the role of mass media and local elections in building effective public sector institutions. She is also the lead author of the Policy Research Report Making Politics Work for Development: Harnessing Transparency and Citizen Engagement. Her research and advisory work spans a diverse range of countries, including Benin, China, India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda.

Stuti Khemani Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank
Seminars

Whither Parties?

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Abstract:

Scholars of comparative politics have long examined political parties as organized vehicles of mass mobilization, interest mediation, and policy formation. But with mounting evidence that parties in the twenty-first century serve different purposes, how are we to understand the role of traditional, mainstream parties today? This talk examines factors driving a decline in traditional party organization, which includes an erosion of social and intermediary groups, insufficient state capacity, delegation of party functions to private interests, and ideological convergence between the mainstream parties. It argues for more rigorous conceptualization of the role parties serve in representative democracies, and greater theoretical examination of the link between parties and governance outcomes.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
didi_kuo_2023.jpg

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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Academic Research & Program Manager, Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective
Seminars

Dictatorship and Information

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Abstract:

How do autocracies collect information on popular discontent? The existing literature has not provided a systematic answer to this question despite its fundamental importance for understanding the logic of authoritarian rule. This talk offers a theory of information gathering in single-party communist autocracies, which are the most durable subtype of authoritarian regime to emerge since World War I. It argues that the unusual longevity of communist regimes allows us to develop and test a theory of the emergence, evolution, and eventual demise of non-electoral institutions for information gathering in autocracies. The talk uses the East European communist regimes that existed prior to 1989 to generate a theory of information and the case of post-1949 China (where institutional evolution is still ongoing) as a provisional test of the theory. The talk is based on archival sources and regime-generated materials collected in China and several East European countries.

 

Speaker Bio:

martin dimitrov
Martin K. Dimitrov is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. His books include Piracy and the State: The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights in China (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Why Communism Did Not Collapse: Understanding Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Asia and Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and The Politics of Socialist Consumption (Sofia: Ciela Publishers, 2017). He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Dictatorship and Information: Autocratic Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China and two edited volumes: China-Cuba: Trajectories of Post-Revolutionary Governance and Popular Authoritarianism: The Quest for Regime Durability. After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2004, he taught at Dartmouth and held residential fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, Notre Dame, the University of Helsinki, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has conducted fieldwork in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Russia, Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Cuba.

Martin K. Dimitrov Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University
Seminars

Afghanistan: U.S. Policy Options Fifteen Years after 9/11

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Abstract:

Fifteen years after the American-led international military intervention, Afghanistan faces mounting security, governance, and economic challenges.  The Afghan Army and police remain highly dependent on U.S. combat power and the provision of significant amounts of technical and financial assistance.  Early during its first term, the Trump Administration will need to decide on its long-term policy toward Afghanistan and Central-South Asia.  Karl Eikenberry, former U.S. Ambassador and Coalition Commander in Afghanistan, and Erik Jensen, the faculty director of the Afghanistan Legal Education Project at the Stanford Law School, will provide their assessments of the situation in Afghanistan and discuss U.S. strategic options. 

 

Speaker(s) Bio:

Karl Eikenberry
Karl Eikenberry is the Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow and Director of the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center, and a Stanford University Professor of Practice. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from May 2009 until July 2011 and had a 35-year career in the United States Army, retiring with the rank of lieutenant general. His military assignments included postings with mechanized, light, airborne, and ranger infantry units in the continental United States, Hawaii, Korea, Italy, and Afghanistan as the Commander of the American-led Coalition forces from 2005–2007. He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, earned master’s degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and Stanford University in Political Science, was awarded an Interpreter’s Certificate in Mandarin Chinese from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and has an advanced degree in Chinese History from Nanjing University. He is also the recipient of the George F. Kennan Award for Distinguished Public Service and Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Centennial Medal. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters Degree from North Carolina State University in December 2015. Ambassador Eikenberry is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a board member of The Asia Foundation and council member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. His articles and essays on U.S. and international security issues have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Washington Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, American Interest, New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and Financial Times.

 

erik jensen
Erik Jensen holds joint appointments at Stanford Law School and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. He is Professor of the Practice, Director of the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School, an Affiliated Core Faculty at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and Senior Advisor for Governance and Law at The Asia Foundation. Jensen began his international career as a Fulbright Scholar. He has taught and practiced in the field of law and development for 30 years and has carried out fieldwork in 35 developing countries.  He lived in Asia for 14 years. He has led or advised research teams on governance and the rule of law at the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank. 

Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow and Director of the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center

Erik Jensen

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C144
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-4287 (650) 725-0253
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Lecturer in Law, Stanford Law School
jensen-1.jpg JD

Erik Jensen holds joint appointments at Stanford Law School and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. He is Lecturer in Law, Director of the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School, an Affiliated Core Faculty at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and Senior Advisor for Governance and Law at The Asia Foundation. Jensen began his international career as a Fulbright Scholar. He has taught and practiced in the field of law and development for 35 years and has carried out fieldwork in approximately 40 developing countries. He lived in Asia for 14 years. He has led or advised research teams on governance and the rule of law at the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank. Among his numerous publications, Jensen co-edited with Thomas Heller Beyond Common Knowledge: Empirical Approaches to the Rule of Law (Stanford University Press: 2003).

At Stanford, he teaches courses related to state building, development, global poverty and the rule of law. Jensen’s scholarship and fieldwork focuses on bridging theory and practice, and examines connections between law, economy, politics and society. Much of his teaching focuses on experiential learning. In recent years, he has committed considerable effort as faculty director to three student driven projects: the Afghanistan Legal Education Project (ALEP) which started and has developed a law degree-granting programs at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), an institution where he also sits on the Board of Trustees; the Iraq Legal Education Initiative at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani (AUIS); and the Rwanda Law and Development Project at the University of Rwanda. He has also directed projects in Bhutan, Cambodia and Timor Leste. With Paul Brest, he is co-leading the Rule of Non-Law Project, a research project launched in 2015 and funded by the Global Development and Poverty Fund at the Stanford King Center on Global Development. The project examines the use of various work-arounds to the formal legal system by economic actors in developing countries. Eight law faculty members as well as scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute are participating in the Rule of Non-Law Project.

Director of the Rule of Law Program, Stanford Law School
CDDRL Affiliated Faculty
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Stanford Law School and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Seminars

The Politics of Order in Informal Markets: Evidence from Lagos

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Abstract:

Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in much of the world they are not publicly provided. Private market organizations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from the group’s members. Under what circumstances will private organizations provide a stable environment for economic activity? Using survey data collected from 1,878 randomly sampled traders across 269 markets, 68 market leaders, and 55 government revenue collectors in Lagos, I find that strong markets maintain institutions to support trade not in the absence of government, but rather as a response to active interference. I argue that organizations develop pro-trade institutions when threatened by politicians they perceive as predatory, and when the organization can respond with threats of its own. Under this balance of power, the organization will not extort because it needs trader support to keep threats credible.

 

Speaker Bio:

shelby embedded
Shelby Grossman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Her primary research interests are in comparative politics and political economy. Her book manuscript explores the politics of property rights in informal markets in Nigeria. Other research projects include a study on the political economy of diversified business groups, a project on casual inter-group interactions in the informal economy, and a paper on the politics of non-compliance with polio vaccination in northern Nigeria. Shelby received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2016.

Shelby Grossman

Encina Hall, C433 616 Jane Stanford Way Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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shelby_grossman.jpg PhD

Shelby Grossman was a research scholar at the Cyber Policy Center. Her research focuses on online safety. Shelby's research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, PNAS Nexus, Political Communication, The Journal of Politics, World Development, and World Politics. Her book, "The Politics of Order in Informal Markets," was published by Cambridge University Press. She is co-editor of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, and teaches classes at Stanford on open source investigation and online trust and safety issues. 

Shelby was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Memphis from 2017-2019, and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law from 2016-17. She earned her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2016.

Research Scholar
CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow, 2016-17
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Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL.
Seminars

Resolve in International Politics

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Abstract: Why do some actors in international politics display remarkable persistence in wartime, while others “cut and run” at the first sign of trouble? IR scholars tend to explain this variation by positing that some leaders and publics are more resolved — or less sensitive to the costs of war — than others, and thus more willing to continue to fight. Yet although resolve is one of the most commonly used independent variables in IR, we have relatively little conceptual sense of what it is, or where it comes from. I offer a behavioral theory of resolve, suggesting that variation in time preferences, risk preferences, honor orientation, and trait self-control can help explain why some actors display more resolve than others. In this portion of the project, I test the theory experimentally in the context of public opinion about military interventions. The results not only help explain why certain types of costs of war loom larger for certain types of actors, but also shed light onto some of the contributions of the "behavioral revolution" in the international relations more broadly.
 
About the Speaker: Joshua D. Kertzer is an Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University, and a Visiting Associate Research Scholar at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Global Governance at Princeton University. His research explores the intersection of international security, foreign policy, political psychology, and experimental methods.  He is the author of Resolve in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 2016) along articles appearing in a variety of outlets, including the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and World Politics. He is the recipient of the American Political Science Association’s Helen Dwight Reid and Kenneth N. Waltz awards, as well as recognitions from the Peace Science Society, International Society of Political Psychology, and Council of Graduate Schools.

 

Encina Hall, 2nd floor

Joshua D. Kertzer Assistant Professor of Government Harvard University
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