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 Psychology of Adolescent Poverty Under Climate Change: Evidence from Bangladesh

By Liza Goldberg (2024 Firestone Medal Winner)
Under the Advisement of Dr. Stephen Luby, Mr. Erik Jensen

Climate change has already begun deepening cycles of poverty across low- and middle-income nations, threatening decades of progress in development outcomes. The physical impacts of climate change on poor households have been well established, ranging from food insecurity to infrastructure loss. However, the impacts of chronic climate stress on the psychological health of low-income individuals in high-risk regions remain unexplored. This leaves a knowledge gap on a potentially vital clinical need among climate-vulnerable populations, but also a lack of consideration of a key potential contributor to psychological poverty traps in low-resource communities. This mixed-methods observational study investigates the effect of repeated climate threat exposure on the psychological health of low-income adolescents across Bangladesh and, in turn, how these psychological health trends influence adolescent temporal discounting trends. We administered psychological health and temporal discounting surveys to 1200 low-income adolescents in Dhaka, a moderate flood risk location, and Barisal, a very high flood risk location. We also conducted 24 semi-structured focus groups among 80 adolescents in each location to discern potential causal pathways from climate stress exposure to our quantitative outcomes. We find that high climate threat exposure is associated with significantly higher rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents and that those experiencing at least moderate anxiety and depression are significantly more likely to exhibit temporal discounting. In turn, we find that climate-driven psychological health challenges and resultant temporal discounting levels contribute substantially to modified future planning around migration and occupational planning, with climate adaptation preferences widely differing by gender. This study ultimately identifies a key emerging public health challenge with significant implications for community adaptation and poverty alleviation on our planet’s climate frontlines, demonstrating an urgent need for cross-sector intervention design.

Chemical Castration as Gender Justice: How punitive attitudes inform gender policy preferences and voting behavior among Brazilian women

By Solange Melissa Severino de Oliveira Godoy (2024 CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Award Winner)
Under the Advisement of Beatriz Magaloni-Kerpel, Ph.D. and Soledad Prillaman, Ph.D.

Currently, 19% of the women in the Brazilian Congress are part of Bolsonaro’s party, known for its anti-feminist and pro-punishment stances. At first, this fact seems to contradict expectations based on substantive representation. This concept would predict that women share similar interests and, therefore, would want to advance similar gender policies once in power. I argue that this apparent contradiction can be better explained by exploring how gender, along with punishment attitudes, interacts with voting choices, a current gap in the literature. This project aims to fill this gap. Specifically, it answers the question: “How do attitudes toward punishment impact the gender policy preferences and voting behavior of Brazilian women?”. This mixed-methods study works with a novel data set of 39 interviews and 1,194 observations from an online survey experiment. This qualitative data was coded in 2 passes, using deductive, grounded, and in vivo codes, with the support of NVivo, followed by analytic memoing. The quantitative data includes results from a conjoint experiment and a survey experiment, which were analyzed, respectively, through average marginal component effect analysis and logistic regressions. The main findings of this thesis indicate that Brazilian women mostly have progressive views on gender issues, and there is high demand for gender policy among all women. However, the content of the policies prioritized by them varies when voting, with a particular division of women across issues of gender punishment and abortion, which are mostly defined across partisan lines. This study aims to contribute to the literature on gender and punitive attitudes and substantive representation. Furthermore, through its survey gathering substantive data on policy preferences in Latin America, this project addresses a key challenge to research so far, namely the lack of data on these preferences.

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

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Extreme weather in the wake of climate change, causing wildfires, drought, and flooding, threatens to turn the American West into a region hostile to human habitation — a “Great American Desert” as early U.S. explorers once mislabeled it. Bruce Cain suggests that the unique complex of politics, technology, and logistics that once won the West must be rethought and reconfigured to win it anew in the face of these accelerating threats. These challenges are complicated by the region’s history, the deliberate fractiousness of the American political system, and the idiosyncrasies of human behavior.

Cain analyzes how, in spite of coastal flooding and spreading wildfires, people continue to move into, and even rebuild in, risky areas, how local communities are slow to take protective measures, and how individual beliefs, past adaptation practices and infrastructure, and complex governing arrangements across jurisdictions combine to flout real progress. Driving this analysis is Cain’s conviction that understanding the habits and politics that lead to procrastination and obstruction is critical to finding solutions and making necessary adaptations to the changing climate. In his new book, Under Fire and Under Water, Cain offers a detailed look at the rising stakes and urgency of the various interconnected issues. Join us in-person to hear Cain lay out the rethinking and reengineering that will allow people to live sustainably in the American West — even under the conditions caused by future global warming.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Bruce Cain is an expert in U.S. politics, particularly the politics of California and the American West. A pioneer in computer-assisted redistricting, he is a prominent scholar of elections, political regulation, and the relationships between lobbyists and elected officials. Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Cain was director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley from 1990-2007 and executive director of the UC Washington Center from 2005-2012. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and has won awards for his research (Richard F. Fenno Prize, 1988), teaching (Caltech, 1988 and UC Berkeley, 2003), and public service (Zale Award for Outstanding Achievement in Policy Research and Public Service, 2000).

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

As the climate crisis grows more urgent, so does the question of how we can encourage citizens to mitigate it. We partner with a municipal government and NGO in Lebanon to evaluate a program that tracks and inspects citizens’ waste and then sends personalized feedback on how they can improve sorting quality. Two months after the intervention, the program improved sorting quality by an average of 0.3 out of 5 stars (14%) overall and 1.1 stars (42%) among those who complied with the program. Treated households were also over three times as likely to sign up for a raffle for ‘green’ prizes four months later (5.4% vs. 1.6%) — demonstrating an impact on other environmentally-conscious behaviors. However, positive effects disappear after the program ends. We find null results on sorting quality at the 12-month mark for all but a select few households who continue complying with the program even after inspections stop. We also observe negative treatment effects on the likelihood of volunteering for other environmental initiatives, indicating fatigue. The results suggest that information combined with monitoring can boost civic behaviors — but that continuous monitoring is likely needed to unlock durable results.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Salma Mousa is a scholar of social cohesion — typically using field experiments and partnerships with local governments and NGOs to explore the question of how to build it in the Middle East and beyond. Currently an Assistant Professor at UCLA's political science department, her research has been published in Science and covered by The Economist, BBC, Der Spiegel, the Times of London, and PBS NOVA. Salma received her PhD from Stanford University's political science department in 2020 and was previously an Assistant Professor of political science at Yale University.

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

This talk will be based on Lankina's 2022 award-winning book, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia. She will discuss how tsarist social divides and the institution of sosloviye (estate) shaped social structure during communism and why the social longue durée matters for understanding post-Communist political regime trajectories.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tomila Lankina is professor of International Relations at the IR Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has worked on democracy and authoritarianism, mass protests and historical drivers of human capital and political regime change in Russia and other countries; she has also analyzed the propaganda and disinformation campaigns in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in Ukraine. Her latest research is on social structure and inequality. Her book, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (Cambridge University Press 2022), won the 2023 J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association and the 2023 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year. The book also received “Honorable Mention” for the Sartori Book Award of the American Political Science Association Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research.

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

How do regimes instrumentalize ascriptive identity to maintain political power? In this paper, I document, analyze, and seek to explain patterns of elite continuity in Kuwait. To do this, I establish the pre-oil wealth and "rootedness" of Kuwaiti families and connect this status to post-oil measures of social prestige. Next, I analyze survey data from 13,000 respondents from across the region to show that local "rootedness" positively impacts the ability of Arab Gulf nationals to obtain services from their governments. Taken together, my evidence suggests that ascriptive identity associated with one's historical family lineage impacts economic, political, and social outcomes for citizens in ways that maintain historical rank hierarchies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Lisa Blaydes is Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak's Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton University Press, 2018).

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

What drives Russia's violence in and against Ukraine from the 19th century to 2024?

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the single most important event in Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is also arguably the major global geopolitical development since 9/11. My main argument is that violence and repression are deeply rooted in the history of Russo-Ukrainian relations. Since the mid-19th century, dominating Ukraine and denying Ukrainians an independent identity, let alone a state, has been the cornerstone of Imperial, Soviet and eventually, post-Soviet Russian policies.

More specifically, I show that Russian and Soviet policies were driven by two factors: identity and security. The idea of the shared origin and fraternity of Russians and Ukrainians is a staple of Russian self-perception and historiography. The second key factor is security. Western powers often passed through Ukraine to attack Russia; Ukraine’s fertile soil was crucial to feeding and funding the Russian and Soviet Empires. Even more than geopolitics, it was regime stability that drove Moscow and St. Petersburg’s obsessive focus on Ukraine. Nothing scares a Russian autocrat more than a democratic Ukraine, because if Ukrainians can build a democracy, then the supposedly fraternal Russian people might too. Thus, combined, identity, security, and the interaction between the two drive Russia’s policies towards Ukraine since the 19th century.

Eugene Finkel is the Kenneth H. Keller Associate Professor of International Affairs, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on how institutions and individuals respond to extreme situations: mass violence, state collapse, and rapid change.

Finkel's most recent book is Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024). He is also the author of Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017), Reform and Rebellion in Weak States (Cambridge University Press, 2020, co-authored with Scott Gehlbach) and Bread and Autocracy: Food, Politics and Security in Putin’s Russia (Oxford University Press, 2023, co-authored with Janetta Azarieva and Yitzhak M. Brudny). His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, East European Politics and Societies, Slavic Review, and several other journals and edited volumes. Finkel has also published articles and op-eds in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Spectator and other outlets.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by April 11, 2024.

How do parliamentary norms break down?

How does the presence of extremist parties in parliaments modify parliamentary norms? In this talk, I draw on two recent papers to examine the responses of mainstream politicians to the disruptive strategies of extremist legislators. A first study will examine the dynamics of parliamentary erosion during the Weimar parliament. Using a novel dataset of all calls-to-order, I document the existence of a cycle of provocation-counter provocation that led to the erosion of parliamentary norms in the last years of the Weimar Republic. 

A second paper (co-authored with Qixuan Yang) studies informal interactions in the contemporary German Bundestag during the period between 2017 and 2021. Using a novel dataset of over 25,000 parliamentary speeches, we document a significant erosion of parliamentary norms, as measured by an increase in the number of verbal and nonverbal interruptions. Both legislators from mainstream and extremist parties contribute to this erosion of parliamentary norms. We argue that legislators from mainstream parties use informal attacks on legislators from non-proximate extremist parties to appeal to voters on their extremes and signal a more extreme policy position. We show that the incentives of legislators from mainstream parties to engage in these informal attacks on extremist legislators can be explained by partisan and district-level conditions.

Isabela Mares is the Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She specializes in the comparative politics of Europe. Professor Mares has written extensively on labor market and social policy reforms, the political economy of taxation, electoral clientelism, reforms limiting electoral corruption. Her current research examines the political responses to antiparliamentarism in both contemporary and historical settings.

Professor Mares is the author of five books. These include The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003), Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006), From Open Secrets to Secret Voting (New York: Cambridge University Press 2015), Conditionality and Coercion: Electoral clientelism in Eastern Europe (co-authored with Lauren Young, Oxford University Press 2018) and Protecting the Ballot: How First Wave Democracies Ended Electoral Corruption (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2022)."

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by May 16, 2024.