Do citizens' perceptions of parties' multidimensional issue positions shape partisanship? Dassonneville, Fournier and Somer-Topcu use survey data from 11 countries to study this question.

There is a growing consensus in the field of party politics that new political fault lines are emerging and scholars increasingly characterize party competition as multidimensional. However, the level and nature of change differ widely between countries, resulting in variation in the extent to which new ideological dimensions structure oppositions between parties, and important differences in the extent to which new fault lines cross-cut existing ideological oppositions. It has been argued that such differences are important, because the cross-cuttingness of parties’ positions on different ideological dimensions determines the clarity of parties’ brands and in this way shapes party attachments (Dassonneville, Fournier and Somer-Topcu 2022). 

Most of what we know about the connection between parties’ position, brand clarity and partisanship relies on expert- or manifesto-based estimates of the positions that parties take, forcing scholars to assume that voters are perfectly informed about parties’ positions on multiple dimensions and about the oppositions between parties. To address this limitation, we rely on an original data collection of surveys in 11 countries in which we asked respondents to position parties on six different issues, capturing economic, social, and cultural divisions. Our design allows connecting citizens’ perceptions of the space of party competition in their country to their views about the clarity of parties’ ideological brands and measures of partisanship. Using this novel dataset, we provide unique individual-level insights into the ways in which party positions and the restructuring of party competition shape party attachments.

Ruth Dassonneville is an Associate Professor in the political science department at the Université de Montréal, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Electoral Democracy.

Her research interests include electoral behaviour, dealignment, economic voting, compulsory voting, and women and politics. Her work on these topics has been published in, amongst others, the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research and the Journal of Politics. In 2023, she published Voters Under Pressure with Oxford University Press.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by February 29, 2024.

Do citizens' perceptions of parties' multidimensional issue positions shape partisanship? Dassonneville, Fournier and Somer-Topcu use survey data from 11 countries to study this question.

Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish turn, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, kosher vodka, and festivals of Jewish culture have become popular, while new museums, memorials, Jewish studies programs, and Holocaust research centers reflect soul-searching about Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. Poland's Jewish community is also undergoing a significant revival. Geneviève Zubrzycki examines these processes and asks what it means to try to bring Jewish culture back to life in a country where 3 million Jews were murdered and where only 10,000 now live. 

Drawing on a decade of participant-observation in Jewish and Jewish-related organizations in Poland, a Birthright trip to Israel with young Jewish Poles, and more than a hundred interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish Poles engaged in the Jewish turn, Zubrzycki's book Resurrecting the Jew presents an in-depth look at Jewish life in Poland today. She shows how the revival has been spurred by progressive Poles who want to break the association between Polishness and Catholicism and promote the idea of a multicultural Poland, exploring the limits of performative solidarity and empathetic forms of cultural appropriation.

Geneviève Zubrzycki is the William H. Sewell Jr. Collegiate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia, and the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies. A historical and cultural sociologist, she has published widely on nationalism and religion; collective memory, national mythology and the politics of commemoration; and visual culture and materiality. 

Geneviève is the author of the award-winning monographs The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago 2006), Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec (Chicago 2016), and Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism and Poland’s Jewish Revival (Princeton 2022), and the editor of National Matters: Materiality, Culture and Nationalism (Stanford 2017). In 2021 Zubrzycki was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and was awarded the Bronisław Malinowski Prize in the Social Sciences from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by February 8, 2024.

What explains education-based political divides? Jonne Kamphorst discusses how decreased interactions between higher and lower-educated citizens has widened the political divide between them

Across advanced democracies, education levels are predictive of immigration attitudes and voting for new left or far right parties. What explains education-based political divides? Existing scholarship holds that education causes progressive attitudes, or proposes that being higher educated and holding progressive attitudes can both be explained by socialization during someone’s childhood. This article puts forward an additional explanation. 

We argue that decreased interactions and relationship formation between higher and lower-educated citizens has widened the political divide between them. Using panel and survey data of strong ties, we demonstrate that higher (lower) educated ties make individuals more progressive (conservative). Education divides citizens by providing a distinct worldview for the higher-educated, which is reinforced in increasingly homogeneous education-based networks. Our findings suggest the further crystallization of a cleavage based on education, and highlight the importance of studying networks to understand political behavior.

Jonne Kamphorst is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence and a Senior Research Fellow at the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University. He completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the EUI in 2023. Before starting his Doctoral Degree, Jonne was a Master’s student in Politics and Sociology at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and obtained his Bachelor’s in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam. 

His research, positioned at the intersection between comparative politics and political behavior, explores the roots of political divides in advanced democracies and proposes strategies to bridge them. Two questions define his research agenda: 1) What are the origins of political divisions? And 2) how can democracy be strengthened by re-engaging citizens and building new coalitions of voters that bridge political divides? Jonne answers these questions leveraging quantitative scientific methods. His methodological expertise is in the design, conduct, and analysis of randomized field and survey experiments which he often employs in collaboration with political candidates and parties. He also uses quasi-experimental methods for causal inference. Jonne’s research has been accepted at or been revised and resubmitted to the Journal of Politics, American Political Science Review, and Comparative Political Studies, among other outlets.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by January 25, 2024.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, March 12th from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for How Internet and Social Media Adoption Relate to Global Well-Being in the Digital Age, with Andrew K. Przybylski, Professor of Human Behaviour and Technology at the University of Oxford. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March 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. This session will take place in Encina Hall, on the 3rd floor in the Oksenberg Conference Room.

This talk will provide a historic and empirical perspective on how we might understand the links that might link the adoption and use of the internet, mobile broadband, and social media to longer-term trends in mental health and psychological well-being. Starting with a review as to why this question is important and ways this question has been asked over time it will cover how we have understood and tested the idea. The heart of the talk is a review of three global studies examining technology and wellness across the last two decades with a special emphasis on methodology and representativeness. The talk closes with a reflection on what these kinds of studies can and cannot show us as well as cautions about the perils of oversimplifying a complex global phenomenon. Avenues for future research, the formidable challenges ahead, as well as the value of transparent, reproducible, and diverse research will be explored.

About the Speaker

Andrew K. Przybylski is the Professor of Human Behaviour and Technology at the University of Oxford. Professor Przybylski investigates how online social media and video games platforms shape human motivation and influence the health and well-being of their users.  

Professor Przybylski has published more than 100 peer reviewed academic and conference papers which have been cited more than 20,000 times in the past decade. He is a frequent commentator on the effects of internet-based technology on our lives and works closely with national and global policymakers to empower users and independent scientists to address the most pressing questions of health and human development in the digital age.  

Professor Przybylski’s research, commentary, and contributions are regularly featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, Wired Magazine, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Week, and international outlets including the BBC World Service and PRI’s The World.   

In acknowledgment of his scientific and policy achievements he was recently appointed as an Honorary Professor at The Educational University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Psychosocial Health where he is working to build mutually beneficial relationships between the students and faculty of both institutions.  

His undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral degrees were earned at the University of Rochester in the United States.  

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, February 20th from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for a conversation with Chinmayi Sharma, Associate Professor at Fordham Law School. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March 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. This session will take place in Encina Hall, on the 3rd floor in the Oksenberg Conference Room.

Diagnosing diseases, creating artwork, offering companionship, analyzing data, and securing our infrastructure—artificial intelligence (AI) does it all. But it does not always do it well. AI can be wrong, biased, and manipulative. In her most recent article, Chinmayi Sharma argues that the heart of the problem is not the technology but its creators: AI engineers who either don’t know how to, or are told not to, build better systems. She proposes a novel solution to the AI problem: professionalizing AI engineering. Require AI engineers to obtain licenses to build commercial AI products, push them to collaborate on scientifically-supported, domain-specific technical standards, and charge them with policing themselves. In doing so, she seeks to shift the discourse on AI away from an emphasis on light-touch, ex post solutions that address already-created products to a greater focus on ex ante controls that precede AI development. Society has used this playbook before in fields requiring a high level of expertise where a duty to the public welfare must trump business motivations. What if, like doctors, AI engineers also vowed to do no harm?

About the Speaker

Chinmayi Sharma is an Associate Professor at Fordham Law School. Her research and teaching focus on open internet governance, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, computer crime, and torts.

She is a Cybersecurity and Technology Fellow at the Strauss Center, a Non-Resident Fellow with the Center for Democracy and Technology and is affiliated with the Atlantic Council, the Transatlantic Cyber Forum, Foreign Policy for America (FP4A), and the Internet Law and Policy Foundry.

Her scholarship has been included in the Hague's International Cyber Security Bibliography. She has written extensively for Lawfare and has been quoted by NPR, ProPublica, the New York Times, News12, and Schneier on Security. Before joining academia, Chinmayi worked at Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis LLP, a telecommunications law firm in Washington, D.C., clerked for Chief Judge Michael F. Urbanski of the Western District of Virginia, and co-founded a software development company.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, February 6th from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for Anticipating Racial Harms to Democracy from AI, a conversation with Spencer Overton, Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law at George Washington Law School. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March 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. This session will take place in Encina Hall, on the 3rd floor in the Oksenberg Conference Room.

The talk will focus on Professor Overton’s current work-in-progress, Anticipating Racial Harms to Democracy from Artificial Intelligence.

By the year 2045, demographers predict there will be no majority ethnic group in the United States, and generative artificial intelligence technologies have the potential to facilitate our transition to a democracy that protects the political liberties of individuals of all racial backgrounds. AI could empower a diverse array of candidates and community organizations by lowering the costs of and increasing access to data analysis, microtargeting, content creation, voter mobilization, monitoring policy debates, research and policy analysis, and civic mobilization.

Demography, however, is not destiny. While AI has many beneficial applications for a racially-inclusive democracy, if left unchecked it will also facilitate many harms. Political demagogues and foreign governments will utilize AI to target disinformation campaigns, stoke racial resentment and polarization, and deploy cyberattacks on election software and equipment in localities that serve large populations of voters of color. Entrenched politicians could use AI to more effectively identify voting restrictions and gerrymandering schemes that contain the influence of emerging communities of color. Even absent intentional discrimination, foundation models used to create content, moderate content, detect deepfakes, maintain voter rolls, verify mail-in ballot signatures, provide language assistance, and perform other tasks could replicate disadvantage and embed racial, language, and cultural hierarchy in elections and policymaking well into the future. The homogeneity of those who develop the tools and govern tech companies and the failure to prioritize the unique ways in which many communities of color experience AI technologies only compound the anti-democratic nature of the harms. 

Even though anticipating harm is an emerging AI principle and race is the most significant demographic factor in shaping U.S. voting patterns, others have not comprehensively anticipated the racial harms to democracy from AI. Recognizing the growing significance of AI in elections, demographic change, cultural anxiety, antidemocratic sentiment, and a U.S. Supreme Court increasingly hostile to traditional voting rights protections, anticipating the racial harms of AI is the essential first step in developing legal structures that will secure representative democracy for future generations in the United States.

About the Speaker

Spencer Overton is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor at GW Law and writes and teaches on democracy and race.  He is the author of State Power to Regulate Social Media Companies to Prevent Voter Suppression and has testified before Congress (June 2020, October 2020, March 2023, and November 2023) on policies to stop online disinformation.  He also directs GW’s Multiracial Democracy Project, which is currently researching harms to multiracial democracy posed by: 1) artificial intelligence; and 2) continued challenges to the Voting Rights Act. 

From 2014-2023, Professor Overton served as the President of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies—America’s Black think tank—where he restored the organization’s fiscal health, established several program areas (including tech policy), and worked closely with civil rights groups, the Congressional Black Caucus, and various other policymakers to increase diversity among top political appointees and to devise and advance racially-equitable policies. Under his leadership the Joint Center became an early partner of the Partnership on AI, reframed national discussions on the future of work to include a racial analysis, proposed a civil rights carve out for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that was included in federal legislation introduced by Senator Mark Warner and Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, and proposed several solutions to expand access to broadband in the Black Rural South that were enacted into law in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2022. 

Professor Overton also held several senior leadership roles during the Obama campaign, transition, and Administration. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he led over 140 experts as chair of the campaign’s Government Reform Policy committee. On the transition, he chaired the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Agency Review Team and helped write the Administration’s ethics guidelines while serving in the office of the General Counsel. During the Administration, he was appointed as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice, and partnered with other senior officials in leading the Administration’s democracy policy efforts related to the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act, the National Voter Registration Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Administration’s response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow unlimited corporate spending in federal elections.

Professor Overton’s work on the Jimmy Carter-James Baker Commission laid the groundwork for modern arguments against unnecessary voting restrictions. As a member of the DNC Presidential Nomination Scheduling Commission, he led an effort that resulted in Iowa restoring voting rights to over 80,000 returning citizens. He was also part of a group of commissioners that worked to successfully move more diverse states like South Carolina and Nevada to the beginning of the modern Democratic presidential primary process, which would later have significant implications in selecting the Democratic nominee in 2008 (Barack Obama) and 2020 (Joseph Biden).   

Professor Overton currently serves on the board of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights Education Fund, and has also served on the national boards of the American Constitution Society, the Center for Responsive Politics (Open Secrets), Common Cause, and Demos. 

Prior to joining the academy, Overton practiced law at the firm Debevoise & Plimpton, clerked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Damon J. Keith, and graduated with honors from both Hampton University and Harvard Law School. 

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, January 30th from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for The Embodied Web: How will physical and digital data meet in the next iteration of the internet? with technology and human rights expert, Brittan Heller. The seminar will focus on how spatial computing–or the embodied web–will bring up novel issues for privacy, human rights, and security. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March 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. This session will take place in Encina Hall, on the 3rd floor in the Oksenberg Conference Room.

About the Speaker

Brittan Heller works at the intersection of technology, human rights and the law. She is currently a lecturer at Stanford University and a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, examining XR's connection to society, human rights, privacy, and security. Heller is on the steering committee for the World Economic Forum's Metaverse Governance initiative and studied content moderation in XR as an inaugural AI and Tech Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights. She is a visiting fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, a Senior Non-Residential Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, and an affiliate at the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet. Heller has been awarded a 2024 Bellagio Residency to write about the intersection of spatial computing and AI.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, January 23rd from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output, a conversation with Eugene Volokh, UCLA Law School professor. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March 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. This session will take place in Encina Hall, on the 3rd floor in the Oksenberg Conference Room.

Volokh will speak about his article on the topic of large libel models and liability, exploring the question, if ChatGPT, Google Bard, or Bing Copilot say false and damaging things about you, can you successfully sue their creators for libel?

About the Speaker

Eugene Volokh teaches First Amendment law and a First Amendment amicus brief clinic at UCLA School of Law, where he has also often taught copyright law, criminal law, tort law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy. He is the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA and a Visiting Fellow (Senior Fellow starting May 2024) at the Hoover Institution. Before his role at UCLA, he clerked for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Judge Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.