Georgia's president, Salome Zourabichvili, vetoed the Parliament's contentious anti-foreign agent law, but called her act "symbolic," as the majority Georgian Dream party promised to override the veto at their next session. This talk explores Georgia's democratic aspirations within the context of the law, dissecting its potential ramifications for civil society, political freedoms, and Georgia's European integration ambitions.

Professor Kathryn Stoner, who was awarded an honorary doctorate from Iliad State University, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia in 2016, will discuss the politics and complexities of the recent law and its implications for Georgia's future.

Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford and she teaches in the Department of Political Science, and in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford in 2004, she was on the faculty at Princeton University for nine years, jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the Princeton School for International and Public Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School). At Princeton she received the Ralph O. Glendinning Preceptorship awarded to outstanding junior faculty. She also served as a Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at McGill University. She has held fellowships at Harvard University as well as the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

In addition to many articles and book chapters on contemporary Russia, she is the author or co-editor of six books: "Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective," written and edited with Michael A. McFaul (Johns Hopkins 2013);  "Autocracy and Democracy in the Post-Communist World," co-edited with Valerie Bunce and Michael A. McFaul (Cambridge, 2010);  "Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia" (Cambridge, 2006); "After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions" (Cambridge, 2004), coedited with Michael McFaul; and "Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional" Governance (Princeton, 1997); and "Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order" (Oxford University Press, 2021).

She received a BA (1988) and MA (1989) in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University (1995). In 2016 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Iliad State University, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on May 28th from Noon–1PM Pacific with speaker David Broockman, Associate Professor at the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, for Ideology, Idiosyncrasy, and Instability in the American Electorate. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the Spring Seminar Series, a series spanning April through June hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and streamed via YouTube, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. Sessions will take place in Encina Commons, Moghadam Room 123, 615 Crothers Way on Stanford Campus.

Scholars have debated to what extent Americans’ views on issues are stable, moderate, and ideological. These questions are crucial for understanding polarization and representation, such as to what extent swing voters hold centrist views on issues or are instead cross-pressured across issues; and to what extent the public supports extreme policies. We illustrate why these questions are linked and the need to address them simultaneously. To address these questions, we present a statistical model which estimates the share of individuals’ expressed views which can be explained by ideology, idiosyncrasy, and instability. In pilot data, we find that these explain roughly similar shares of the variation in Americans’ views, but that these shares vary meaningfully across people. We find that ideology is tightly linked to political knowledge, while idiosyncrasy – not instability – is most linked with expressing extreme views. Finally, we find that few voters who prior work characterizes as moderate have centrist views across most issues, but that they are rather largely cross-pressured, agreeing with each party---and sometimes being more extreme than either party---on different issues.

About the Speaker

David Broockman is an Associate Professor at the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Broockman earned his BA from Yale University in 2011 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. He previously served as an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Broockman is the author of over three dozen peer-reviewed scholarly essays focusing on American politics. Broockman's research has overturned conventional wisdom regarding the nature, extent, and consequences of political polarization in the American public; how political campaigns and organizations can more effectively persuade voters; and how to have productive conversations to bridge divides and reduce prejudice. He has received a number of scholarly awards, including a Carnegie Fellowship, the American Political Science Association Public Opinion and Voting Behavior Section’s Emerging Scholar Award, the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Research in the Public Interest, the Joseph L. Bernd Award for the best paper published in the Journal of Politics, and the Leamer-Rosenthal Award for Open Social Science. He recently delivered a Centennial Lecture for the Social Science Research Council on political polarization. His research has changed how political campaigns, think tanks, activist organizations, and politicians understand and attempt to persuade the electorate, and has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, and Vox, and on NPR’s This American Life.

In 2022, Russia initiated an unprovoked attack on Ukraine, marking the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. Despite initial gains, Putin was unable to change the political landscape in Kyiv, and approximately half of the territories initially seized by Russian forces were later reclaimed by Ukraine. However, the war is far from over. The war has also tested American leadership, particularly as China and France have expanded their international influence. The upcoming U.S. presidential election further escalates the uncertainty, as continued American support for Ukraine is critical. A Ukrainian victory is pivotal not only for regional stability but also for the security of American citizens.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sergiy Leshchenko is formerly a journalist with Ukrainska Pravda and a member of the Ukrainian Parliament (2014-2019). He first rose to political prominence during Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Revolution and has continued to serve in government and civil society since. He is an advisor to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief-of-staff and the initiator of the Working Group on Sanctions Against Russia, co-led by Michael McFaul. Mr. Leshchenko is an alumnus of the 2013 cohort of the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program (now the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program) at FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on May 21st from Noon–1PM Pacific with speaker Dr. J. Nathan Matias founder of the Citizens and Technology Lab and assistant professor in the Cornell University Department of Communication, for Breaking Through Barriers to Usable Science on Tech and AI Policy. The session will be moderated by Jeff Hancock co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the Spring Seminar Series, a series spanning April through June hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and streamed via YouTube, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. Sessions will take place in Encina Commons, Moghadam Room 123, 615 Crothers Way on Stanford Campus.

From online safety to AI discrimination, debates in tech policy often hinge on evidence about cause, effect, harms, and remedies. In theory, reliable evidence could inform substantive improvements in people’s lives and effective interventions from tech companies or governments. Yet despite technology platforms enabling unprecedented levels of social data collection and experimentation, science has not been able to deliver a commensurate amount of reliable, repeatable, actionable evidence for the common good.

In this talk, which will focus on the problem of  gender based violence and discrimination by AI and social platforms, Matias will summarize leading barriers to a usable science of tech policy. These include perverse incentives for tech firms to resist science, historical biases in science itself, incomplete pathways for the use of evidence, and challenges in scientific theory and methods. Through a series of case studies and field experiments conducted in collaboration with communities of tens of millions of people, Matias will argue that scientific progress on tech policy depends on pathways for the public to exercise leadership in the development, implementation, and use of scientific evidence about our digital lives.

Optional readings:

• Matias, J.N. (2023) Humans and algorithms work together — so study them together. Nature.
• Matias, J.N. (2023) To Hold Tech Accountable, Look to Public Health. WIRED

Nathan is founder of the Citizens and Technology Lab and an assistant professor in the Cornell University Department of Communication. CAT Lab has worked with communities of tens of millions of people on reddit, Wikipedia, and Twitter to test ideas for preventing harassment, broadening gender diversity on social media, responding to human/algorithmic misinformation, managing political conflict, and auditing social technologies. His research has been published in Nature, PNAS, Nature Human Behavior, FACCT, CHI, CSCW, and many other venues in computer science and the social sciences.

Nathan is also a pioneer in industry-independent evaluations on the impact of social technologies and artificial intelligence in society. Toward this end, he co-founded the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, a nonprofit that supports and defends independent research on technology and society.Nathan has also held positions at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, and the MIT Center for Civic Media. Nathan has received numerous honors in academia, industry, journalism, and nonprofits. In 2023, he was awarded the Mozilla Rise25 award for research and policy work for a fairer, more ethical Internet. He is recipient of the Nelson Award from the Association for Computer Machinery and the Linda Tischler Award from FastCompany. His public-interest journalism has been published in The Atlantic, PBS, the Guardian, FiveThirtyEight, Global Voices, Boston Magazine, Adventure Cyclist, and other international media. His work is regularly covered by international media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR All Things Considered, WIRED, The Atlantic.