Abstract:

It has long been recognized that corruption and clientelism feed upon each other. However, how public malfeasance affects citizens' willingness to engage in patron-client relations remains unexplored. This article shows that perceptions, experiences, and information about political corruption influence a citizen's likelihood to sell his or her vote, and the types of gifts, favors, or public services he or she is willing to trade for it. The context of the article is Mexico's presidential and local elections. To circumvent methodological challenges posed by social desirability bias and reverse causation, the article presents evidence from a list experiment embedded in a national representative survey conducted close to the 2012 presidential election, and evidence from a field experiment conducted close to the 2009 municipal elections. I conclude that, given favorable circumstances, governmental corruption breeds forms of political behavior that are detrimental to the proper functioning of democracy, such as vote buying.

About the Speaker:

Ana L. De La O is assistant professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is affiliated with the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Institution of Social and Policy Studies, and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Her research relates to the political economy of poverty alleviation, clientelism and the provision of public goods. She recently completed a book manuscript that explores the causes and political consequences of the proliferation of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. She earned her PhD in Political Science from M.I.T.

This is co-sponsered with Stanford's Center for Africa Studies

Abstract:

Rural dwellers in the former homeland areas of South Africa are now increasingly defined as rightless subjects, as a result of the undemocratic rule of traditional leadership institutions, and despite the existence of South Africa's progressive post-apartheid Constitution adopted in 1996. Indeed, customary law and traditional institutions are recognised by the Constitution and are meaningful and of practical importance for many rural dwellers. Many rural dwellers have dexterously combined the idiom of custom and the discourse of the Constitution, rather than pitting the Constitution against custom. However, post-1994 traditional leadership laws are not built on such evolutionary hybridisation of the Constitution and custom. These laws stealthily vest significant powers in traditional leadership institutions in ways that potentially undermine rights and create tensions with the constitutionally recognised system and tiers of governance.

About the speaker:

Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara a 2012 Social Entrepreneurs-in-Residence at Stanford and a research associate at UCT Law, Race and Gender Research Unit examines the future of the underdeveloped rural areas in the former homelands, which are increasingly shaped by various conflicts and contradictions: between the Constitution and the official version of customary law; between custom and rights; between traditional councils and municipalities; between rural dwellers and tribal authorities; between rural women and patriarchal tribal institutions; and between imposed tribal institutions and local experiments with community-based systems.

When the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, the independent Republic of Kazakhstan was left with the world’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal and a huge nuclear infrastructure, including lots of fissile materials, several nuclear reactors, the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, and the enormous Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site. The return of the nuclear weapons to Russia (thanks to former Secretary of Defense William Perry), the transport of vulnerable highly-enriched uranium to the U.S. (Project Sapphire), the disposition of the fast reactor fuel, and upgrading of security and safeguards at its research reactors have been the subject of numerous reports. The story of what has been done with what the Soviets left behind at the test site and the dangers it presented will be the main topic of my presentation. It is a great story of how scientists from three countries worked together effectively among themselves and with their governments to deal with one of the greatest nuclear dangers in the post-Cold War era.

About the speaker: Siegfried S. Hecker is co-director of the Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Professor (Research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering. He also served as Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986-1997. Dr. Hecker’s research interests include plutonium science, nuclear weapon policy and international security, nuclear security (including nonproliferation and counter terrorism), and cooperative nuclear threat reduction. Over the past 20 years, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. His current interests include the challenges of nuclear India, Pakistan, North Korea, the nuclear aspirations of Iran and the peaceful spread of nuclear energy in Central Asia and South Korea. Dr. Hecker has visited North Korea seven times since 2004, reporting back to U.S. government officials on North Korea’s nuclear progress and testifying in front of the U.S. Congress. He is a fellow of numerous professional societies and received the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award.

The more a country depends on aid, the more distorted are its incentives to manage its own development in sustainably beneficial ways. Cambodia, a post-conflict state that cannot refuse aid, is rife with trial-and-error donor experiments and their unintended results, including bad governance—a major impediment to rational economic growth. Massive intervention by the UN in the early 1990s did help to end the Cambodian civil war and to prepare for more representative rule. Yet the country’s social indicators, the integrity of its political institutions, and its ability to manage its own development soon deteriorated. Based on a comparison of how more and less aid-dependent sectors have performed, Prof. Ear will highlight the complicity of foreign assistance in helping to degrade Cambodia’s political economy. Copies of his just-published book, Aid Dependence in Cambodia, will be available for sale. The book intertwines events in 1990s and 2000s Cambodia with the story of his own family’s life (and death) under the Khmer Rouge, escape to Vietnam in 1976, asylum in France in 1978, and immigration to America in 1985.

Sophal Ear was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011 and a TED Fellow in 2009. His next book—The Hungry Dragon: How China’s Resources Quest is Reshaping the World, co-authored with Sigfrido Burgos Cáceres—will appear in February 2013. Prof. Ear is vice-president of the Diagnostic Microbiology Development Program, advises the University of Phnom Penh’s master’s program in development studies, and serves on the international advisory board of the International Public Management Journal. He wrote and narrated “The End/Beginning: Cambodia,” an award-winning documentary about his family’s escape from the Khmer Rouge. He has a PhD in political science, two master’s degrees from the University of California-Berkeley, and a third master’s from Princeton University.

The advent of ubiquitous networking and computation and deepening globalization since the 1990s has eroded traditional international security architectures by multiplying conflict surfaces and empowering new actors. This talk describes research in the context of track 1.5 dialogues with Russia and China that aims to develop shared frameworks for understanding escalatory models of cyber conflict, sources of instability, and feasible approaches for risk mitigation. It will argue that cyber has made deterrence much more complex, and now, increased information assurance and new legal or normative constraints on state behavior are likely necessary for effective cross-sectoral deterrence. Finally, it suggests three tasks for cyber norms or confidence and security building measures to attenuate instability.

John Mallery is a research scientist at the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is concerned with cyber policy and has been developing advanced architectural concepts for cyber security and transformational computing for the past decade. Since 2006, he organized a series of national workshops on technical and policy aspects of cyber.

As part of The Europe Center's ongoing lecture series "Europe Now", Stanford professor Margaret Cohen will bring to light documentary narratives by dive pioneers of the 1920s-1950's (Beebe, Hass, Taillez, Diolé), and why these documentarians turn to a poetic imagery of marvels and enchantments to express aspects of human perception. 

Professor Cohen is Professor of Comparative Literature

Co-sponsored by The Stanford Humanities Center

The U.S.-Japan relationship is not much in the headlines these days—and when it is the stories seem to focus on issues, such as Okinawa and beef, that have bedeviled ties seemingly for decades. But, in the midst of seismic shifts in Asia-Pacific security and global economic relations, shouldn’t the two countries be talking about something else?

Many in American industry have thought so and in 2009 the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan released a white paper calling for a new set of discussions with Japan directed at capturing the innovation and growth potential of the emerging global Internet economy. Accompanying the call were a set of over 70 specific recommendations for discussion in areas ranging from privacy, security, intellectual property, spectrum management, cyber security to competition—an agenda for the future not the past.

The paper found resonance with the new Democratic Party government in Japan and the Obama administration that were searching for a new direction and vocabulary for U.S.-Japan economic relations and were mindful that partnership with Japan in this area strengthened the U.S. hand in dealing with preemptive attempts elsewhere to define rule of the road for the Internet and “cloud computing.” 

The Dialogue was formally launched in the fall of 2010 and its third plenary session is taking place in Washington, D.C. October 16 to 19, 2012. Professor Jim Foster is participating in the Dialogue as a leading member of the U.S. private sector delegation to the talks. He will be coming to Stanford immediately following the joint industry-government meeting on October 18 (the governments will continue in closed-door session through the 19th) and will offer his analysis and insight into the discussions in Washington and their implications for future cooperation between Japan and the U.S. industry in the cloud computing field and for the two governments on challenging issues of broader Internet governance.

Jim Foster is currently a professor in the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University, where he teaches and researches on U.S. foreign policy issues and global Internet policy. He is the co-director of Keio’s Internet and Society Institute. Foster worked as a U.S. diplomat from 1981 to 2006, serving in Japan, Korea, the Philippines and at the U.S. Mission to the EU. He was director for corporate affairs at Microsoft Japan from 2006 to 2011. He is a former vice president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan and a co-author of the ACCJ White Paper on the Internet Economy.