How does climate volatility alter citizen demands, change voting behavior, and affect the long-term reputation of elected (and unelected) officials? Does this effect come primarily through the economic damages caused by climate volatility or through alternative channels? Are they persistent or transitory?

As climate volatility becomes more extreme, so too will its destabilizing impact on politics. Yet we know relatively little about its effects on voting behavior, particularly in the developing world, and even less about downstream effects on the reputation of candidates and political institutions. Exploring the mechanisms behind these effects is also difficult due to a lack of data with the spatial and temporal resolution necessary for credible subnational analysis.

Here, we provide some of the first large-scale evidence on climate volatility’s effect on several measures of political accountability by combining several sources of survey data with high-resolution meteorological and climatic data. We also utilize a novel source of subnational economic data generated by combining remote sensing data with a convolutional neural network to generate annual, high-resolution estimates of growth at the 1x1km level for all of Africa. This ML-generated measure is a considerable improvement over nightlights-based alternatives and permits credible mediation analysis linking negative political outcomes to climate volatility through reductions in economic growth. We supplement our focus on Africa with companion estimates from Latin America, exploiting variation in national-level institutions to examine whether they can explain the substantial effect heterogeneity we observe in our reduced-form results.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Amanda Kennard is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She studies the politics of decarbonization and the impacts of climate change on political systems. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, an M.S. from Georgetown University, and a B.A. from New York University.

Brandon de la Cuesta is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), working primarily with Marshall Burke and other members of the Environmental Change and Human Outcomes (ECHO) lab to estimate the impact of climate change on various measures of political accountability. Brandon specializes in comparative political economy and causal inference with a strong regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Many of his current projects involve the use of remote sensing data and machine learning algorithms, particularly convolutional neural nets, to create global, high-resolution data that can be used for downstream inference tasks. A development economics application of this data was recently featured as the cover article in Nature.

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

Join the Cyber Policy Center on March 19th from Noon–1PM Pacific for a unique opportunity to meet with Mr. Mikael Tofvesson, Deputy Head of the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency (MPF), and Head of Operations, tasked to identify, analyze and counter malign information influence directed towards Sweden from foreign adversaries. The MPF began operations January 1 2022. From the agency’s inception, Sweden faced intensive disinformation campaigns, the invasion of Ukraine and its own national election later that same year. Given the current security situation in Europe and beyond, the many elections taking place globally, the rapid changes in the digital information environments as well as the war in Ukraine and Gaza, much is at stake. Mr. Tofvesson will explain the Swedish concept for psychological defence, present the threat situation to Sweden regarding foreign malign influence and share some lessons identified from the ongoing information war in Ukraine.

This event will take place in Encina Hall, Philippines Room (C330), 3rd Floor Central Wing. This is a change from our usual room.

About the Speaker

Mr. Mikael Tofvesson is Deputy Head of the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency (MPF), and Head of Operations. He was previously head of the Counter Information Influence Section at the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) Mr. Tofvesson has been responsible for MSB activities to counter foreign interference since 2009, including as head of Global Monitoring and Analysis Section, where he also was responsible for the crisis management center with duty officers, operational analysis function and the international operations’ field security unit. He also headed three task forces to protect the national general elections in 2018, 2022 and the European Parliament election in 2019, against foreign malign information influence. Between 1989 and 2009, Mr. Tofvesson held various positions within the Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Directorate.

Why do some parties in power commit to democracy while others do not? Sebnem Gumuscu will explain why by relying on her extensive field research in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia. Islamist parties rose to power in free and fair elections in all three countries, yet only in Tunisia remained committed to pluralism and liberal democratic norms. In Turkey and Egypt, in contrast, the AKP and the Muslim Brotherhood subverted democracy by committing to righteous majoritarianism. Gumuscu will explore the different trajectories of these Islamist parties and unpack the role of party factions in charting their democratic course.

This event is co-sponsored by CDDRL's Program on Turkey, the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sebnem Gumuscu is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College. Her research interests include political Islam, dominant parties, democratization and democratic backsliding, and Middle Eastern and North African politics. Her articles appeared in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Democracy, Government and Opposition, Third World Quarterly, South European Society and Politics, and Middle Eastern Studies.

Her first book, Democracy, Identity, and Foreign Policy in Turkey: Hegemony through Transformation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), co-authored with E. Fuat Keyman, examines Turkey's transformation under the Justice and Development Party since 2002 within the broader context of Turkish modernization.

Her new book, Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia (Cambridge University Press) focuses on Islamist parties and their democratic commitments in power. Relying on extensive fieldwork in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia, she unpacks intra-party dynamics to explain divergent trajectories of Islamist governments.

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.