The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) economies are not catching up with the rest of the world. The region’s average per capita income has increased by just 62 percent over the last 50 years. In comparison, over the same period, the increase was fourfold in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) and twofold in advanced ones. Only a few developing MENA economies have avoided diverging further from the richest countries’ living standards (what economists call the frontier), and those where conflicts erupted have accelerated in the wrong direction. In this presentation, Roberta Gatti will discuss the factors that shape MENA’s long-term growth potential, with special attention to the role of the state in the economy, the persistent effects of conflict, and the boost that closing the gender gap in the labor force can deliver in terms of growth.

This event is co-sponsored by the Program on Arab Reform and Development and the Program on Capitalism and Democracy, as well as the Middle Eastern Studies Forum.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Roberta Gatti is the Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region at the World Bank, where she oversees the analytical agenda of the region and the publication of the semi-annual MENA Economic Updates. She is the founder of the MENA Central Banks Regional Research Network. In her prior capacity as Chief Economist for the Human Development Practice Group, Roberta co-led the conceptualization and launch of the World Bank Human Capital Index and the scale up of the Service Delivery Indicators data initiative.

Roberta joined the World Bank as a Young Professional in the Macro unit of the Development Research Group, and she has since led and overseen both operational and analytical work in her roles of Manager and of Global Lead for Labor Policies.

Roberta’s research, spanning a broad set of topics such as growth, firm productivity, the economics of corruption, gender equity, and labor markets, has been published in lead field journals such as the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, and the Journal of Development Economics. She is also the lead author of a number of flagship reports, including Jobs for Shared Prosperity: Time for Action in the Middle East and North Africa; Striving for Better Jobs: The Challenge of Informality in Middle East and North Africa; The Human Capital Index 2020 Update: Human Capital in the Time of COVID-19; and Service Delivery in Education and Health across Africa.

Roberta has taught courses at the undergraduate, masters, and Ph.D. Level at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities. She is a frequent lecturer on development economics, most recently at Dartmouth College, Princeton University, and Cornell University. Roberta holds a B.A. from Università Bocconi and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on February 18 from 1PM–2PM Pacific for a seminar with Robb Willer, Director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab and Co-Director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 12:40 PM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  

About the Seminar

Advances in large language models (LLMs) now enable simulation of human behavior for application to social science research. In this talk, I present two interrelated lines of work. First, we use GPT-4 to simulate responses of experimental participants, predicting observed experimental effects with accuracy comparable to—or better than—human forecasters, even for unpublished studies. Second, we introduce a generative agent architecture that replicates the responses and behaviors of over 1,000 individuals, approaching the accuracy of repeated self-assessment and largely mitigating gaps in predictive accuracy for different demographic groups. I conclude by highlighting the promise and challenges of leveraging LLMs to augment social science research and inform policy.

About the Speaker

CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program trains students from any academic department at Stanford to prepare them to write a policy-relevant research thesis with global impact on a subject touching on democracy, development, and the rule of law. Please join us for this seminar to hear our Honors Program award winners present their research.

The Limits of Payout Politics: How Biden-Harris Federal Spending Shaped (and Didn't Shape) the 2024 Presidential Vote

By Charles Sheiner (2025 Firestone Medal Winner)
Under the advisement of Larry Diamond and Jonathan Rodden

This thesis examines whether the Biden-Harris administration’s signature spending programs — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS Act — yielded electoral rewards in the 2024 presidential election. Using an original dataset of over 40,000 geocoded federal projects representing $227 billion in county-level investments, I find no statistically significant association between per-capita spending and Democratic vote margin shifts, even when accounting for partisan context and project visibility. Through interviews with federal and local officials, I identify three explanatory mechanisms: implementation lags prevented most projects from reaching completion before Election Day, administrative and policy bottlenecks systematically delayed development, and Republican messaging successfully reframed spending as inflationary. These findings suggest that retrospective voting operates primarily through immediate, visible benefits rather than campaign promises or announced investments, with significant implications for how policy initiatives must be designed to deliver outcomes within electoral cycles.

The Gavel and the Gun: Post-War Trials and State-Building Politics in Yugoslavia (1945-1949)

By Adrian Feinberg (2025 CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Award Winner)
Under the advisement of Aron Rodrigue

This thesis explores how Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) authorities used the post-World War II justice process to consolidate power from 1945 to 1949. Drawing on trial transcripts, newspapers, and other archival materials, the study argues that the Yugoslav state instrumentalized judicial structures in three distinct stages: first, using honor courts to assert basic state capacity; second, conducting public-facing war crimes trials to promote the state’s ideological legitimacy; and third, orchestrating espionage trials to suppress dissent and entrench single-party rule. While affirming that the KPJ often subordinated judicial integrity to its state-building project, the thesis complicates conventional narratives by attending to the moral ambiguities, partial truths, and undeniable moments of justice present in even the most politicized of trials. In doing so, it offers broader insights into the fraught intersection of law, memory, and power in postwar societies.

Philoxenia: Local Responses to Immigration in Calabria, Italy

By Adelaide Madary (2025 CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Award Winner)
Under the advisement of Vasiliki Fouka, Ph.D.

Over recent decades, many nations across Europe and the Americas have responded to mass migration movements across the globe with hostile policies, xenophobic sentiment, and poorly managed immigration systems. At the same time, several municipalities in Calabria, Italy that struggle with severe depopulation and economic hardship have experienced positive transformations upon opening refugee reception centers, including reversals to declining population trends, job creation and the continuation of important public goods, such as elementary schools—but not all towns that have a demand for immigration respond in the same way. Many Calabrian municipalities have not opened refugee resettlement centers, and others have become a breeding ground for labor exploitation among migrant workers. This thesis employs a mixed-methods approach to consider how structure, agency, and culture account for the variation in local responses to migrants and refugees throughout the relatively homogenous region of Calabria. A systematic analysis of quantitative municipal-level data paired with four granular case studies suggests that a municipality’s structural characteristics alone do not explain the variance in local responses to immigration. Rather, the presence of an entrepreneurial local actor, such as a mayor or non-profit leader with strong humanitarian commitments, is necessary to recognize and actualize the aligned interests between locals and newcomers and bring about cultures of hospitality. While much of the literature on local responses to immigration has focused on urban settings, this thesis aims to widen academic discussions to include more rural contexts and contributes to the underdeveloped literature on hospitality, rather than hostility, toward newcomers.

Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

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Why are some authoritarian regimes highly competitive and others highly unified? Do they function differently? And what does it mean for our understanding of democracy and democratization? The Social Roots of Authoritarianism unpacks the grassroots mechanisms maintaining unity-based and division-based authoritarianisms. They develop in societies with opposite visions: the state as team leader or the state as outsider. Depending on which vision of the state is dominant in society, autocrats must use different tools to consolidate their regimes or risk pushback. The book demonstrates the grassroots mechanisms of authoritarian power comparing four Russian regions with opposite patterns of electoral performance—the Rostov region, the Kemerovo region, the Republic of Tatarstan, and the Republic of Altai. The theory of unity- and division-based authoritarianisms developed in the book implies that these types of authoritarian regimes miss the opposite elements of democracy, and that democratization depends on cultivating these missing institutions over time.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Natalia Forrat is a social scientist studying democracy, authoritarianism, state power, and civil society. She obtained her PhD from Northwestern University and held academic appointments at Stanford University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Michigan. Currently, she is a lecturer at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Michigan.  

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Room E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

The American constitutional order is in a crisis, squeezed by the emergence of nationalized polarization that it is not equipped to handle on the one hand and by the rising political influence of plutocrats on the other.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Paul Pierson is the John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He also serves as Director of the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative. Pierson is author or co-author of seven books, most recently Partisan Nation (with Eric Schickler).

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Room E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

We assemble a comprehensive database of historical electoral results for the US House, Senate and presidential contests, from the 19th century until today. We analyze long run trends in election vote margins and party seat margins. Seat margins declined in the recent period, so the margins of control of the House, Senate, and Electoral College by either party have become smaller. However, this was not accompanied by a decline in the margins of victory at the constituency level. We interpret these facts in the context of a simple model of electoral competition where seat margins and vote margins depend on the availability of information about voter preferences, as well as the ability of political candidates to tailor their platforms locally. We argue that the gradual increase in politicians' information about voter preferences, as well as the growing nationalization of politics can explain the long-run decrease in seat margins and the concurrent stability in vote margins.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Clemence Tricaud is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is also a research affiliate of the NBER and CEPR. She received her Ph.D in Economics from Ecole Polytechnique and CREST in 2020. Her research lies at the intersection of political economy and public economics. Her work combines quasi-experimental designs with administrative data to better understand the determinants and consequences of citizen and policymaker behaviors. The first part of her research studies the factors affecting voters' and candidates' behavior during elections and the consequences of their choices on electoral outcomes. The second part of her work explores how the identity of policymakers and the level of governance affect the design of local public policies and the provision of public goods.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Room E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

We examine the impact of ethics and integrity training on police officers in Ghana through a randomized field experiment. The program, informed by theoretical work on the role of identity and motivation in organizations, aimed to re-activate intrinsic motivations to serve the public, and to create a new shared identity of "Agent of Change." Data generated by an endline survey conducted 20 months post training, show that the program positively affected officers' values and beliefs regarding on-the-job unethical behavior and improved their attitudes toward citizens. The training also lowered officers' propensity to behave unethically, as measured by an incentivized cheating game conducted at endline. District-level administrative data for a subsample of districts are consistent with a significant impact of the program on officers' field behavior in the short-run.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Danila Serra is Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford. She is an applied behavioral economist employing experimental methods to address policy-relevant questions in political economy, development, education, and gender economics. Her work has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the World Bank, the IZA G²LM|LIC program, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) and the Arnold Foundation. In 2017, she was the inaugural recipient of the Vernon Smith Ascending Scholar Prize, given by the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics (IFREE) to an exceptional scholar using experiments in economics research.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

This talk examines the current status of the Russo-Ukraine War. There was a huge surge in discussions about a possible “peace deal” in the early months of 2025. As a candidate, U.S. President Donald Trump had promised to end the war in 24 hours, and U.S. policy towards the war shifted drastically. Is an end to the Russo-Ukraine War imminent? This talk will examine Russian and Ukrainian positions regarding a possible peace settlement and discuss the future of the conflict.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Brian Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. His research is focused on Russian elite politics and the development of the Russian state, with particular attention to state coercive organizations, such as the military, law enforcement, and the security services. He is the author of four books on Russian politics: Russian Politics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2024); The Code of Putinism (Oxford University Press, 2018); State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion After Communism (Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).  

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.