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.

Affirmative action improves the representation of women and minorities, but critics worry that it is at odds with meritocracy. We argue that quotas can improve quality under conditions of discrimination, as quota recipients are held to a higher standard despite facing structural inequalities that make meeting these standards difficult. The net effect of quotas on observable proxies for quality -- qualifications -- therefore depends on the degrees of selection and structural discrimination. We test our argument by examining the effects of electoral quotas on politicians' education and quality in India. Using two censuses covering more than 40 million residents and 13 states, we show that randomly and quasi-randomly assigned quota politicians have lower average education than non-quota politicians but the same or higher quality. We further provide evidence of both voter and structural discrimination. Our results show that quotas can both enhance the representativeness and quality of politicians.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Soledad Artiz Prillaman is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. Her research lies at the intersections of comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus in South Asia. She investigates the political consequences of development; the political behavior and representation of minorities, specifically women; inequalities in political engagement; and the translation of voter demands. She is the faculty director of the Inclusive Democracy and Development Lab and recently published a book with Cambridge University Press titled "The Patriarchal Political Order: The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India."

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.

Delegation of authority is central to the functioning of bureaucracies and, indeed, to political institutions as a whole. It is today at the center of the contemporary assault on the "administrative state," and its importance is widely misunderstood. In this seminar, Francis Fukuyama will discuss how a well-functioning government needs to provide bureaucrats with sufficient authority and that this is something that the US has failed to do.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy Program, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book,  Liberalism and Its Discontents, was published in the spring of 2022.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.  

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), and the Pardee Rand Graduate School. He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

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.

Join the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program for lunch on Wednesday, February 26, as former ambassador to the EU Stewart Eizenstat, who has been actively involved in Holocaust restitution negotiations, U.S.-Israel relations, and Middle East peace policy discussions, discusses his new book, The Art of Diplomacy: How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements that Changed the World.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Stuart E. Eizenstat served as chief White House domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter; in the Clinton administration, he served as U.S. ambassador to the European Union, undersecretary of commerce, undersecretary of state, and deputy secretary of the treasury. He was also special representative of the president and secretary of state on Holocaust issues, with continuing responsibilities on Holocaust issues, in the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. He is the author of President Carter: The White House Years (2018), The Future of the Jews: How Global Forces Are Impacting the Jewish People, Israel, and Its Relationship with the United States (2012), and Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II (2003). He is an international lawyer in Washington, DC, with Covington & Burling, LLP, and serves as chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council, appointed by President Joe Biden. He received the “Great Negotiator” award from Harvard Law School. This book is written in his personal capacity.