Why could politicians of religious minority background assume the highest political offices in some countries soon after modern representative institutions were adopted, whereas, in other countries, almost all the national chief executives have been politicians from the religious majority background for decades, if not centuries?

I argue that the leading politicians of religious minority backgrounds in Europe potentially had three “secular” paths out of their marginality: liberalism, socialism, and nationalism. I examine these three paths that religious minority politicians pursued through the cases of Britain (liberalism), France (socialism), Hungary, and Italy (nationalism). I explain the variation in the rise of the first religious minority chief executives at the national level and the prominence of one of these three specific paths based on the religious configuration of the main actors in the constitutive conflict that established the nation-state. Finally, I examine a world-historical example of pattern change, the rise of Catholic-origin politicians to national leadership in previously Protestant-led Germany, which was due to a new constitutive conflict (World War II and the Holocaust) that radically altered the religious-national configuration. Religious minorities’ political (under-)representation constitutes a significant dimension of their (de-)securitization.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Şener Aktürk is Professor in the Department of International Relations at Koç University. He is a scholar of comparative politics, with a focus on comparative politics of ethnicity, religion, and nationalism. After completing his BA and MA at the University of Chicago and his PhD in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Government at Harvard University. His book, Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2012), received the 2013 Joseph Rothschild Book Prize from the Association for the Study of Nationalities.

His articles have been published in World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, Mediterranean Politics, Social Science Quarterly, European Journal of Sociology, Nationalities Papers, Problems of Post-Communism, Turkish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Osteuropa, Theoria, Ab Imperio, Insight Turkey, Turkish Policy Quarterly, Perceptions, and various edited books. He is the recipient of the Peter Odegard Award at UC Berkeley, the Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant, the Baki Komsuoglu Social Sciences Encouragement Award, the Kadir Has Social Sciences Prize, the TUBA Young Scientist Award, the BAGEP Science Academy Award, and the TUBİTAK Incentive Prize.

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

What are the longer-term implications of Russia’s renewed aggression in Ukraine for relations with its Eurasian neighbors it has often referred to as the “near abroad?”

A recent and growing literature suggests that domestic public opinion will play a decisive role in their future foreign policy choices. Based on an original mass survey with an embedded experiment, this talk examines the changes in Kazakhstani public opinion toward maintaining economic and security relations with Russia through international alliances such as the Collective Treaty Security Organization (CSTO). These changes should be viewed in light of both Russia’s war against Ukraine in February 2022 and the Russian-led CSTO’s intervention in the mass protests in Kazakhstan in January 2022. It argues that Kazakhstani public opinion has changed in significant ways — especially across ethnic lines — and that these changes are likely to impact Kazakhstan-Russian relations in general and the future of the CSTO in particular.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Pauline Jones is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan (UM) and the Edie N. Goldenberg Endowed Director for the Michigan in Washington Program. She is also Founder and Director of the Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC). Previously, she served as the Director of UM’s Islamic Studies Program (2011-14) and International Institute (2014-20). Her past work has contributed broadly to the study of institutional origin, change, and impact in Central Asia. She is currently engaged in multiple research projects: exploring how state regulation of Islam in Muslim-majority states affects citizens’ political attitudes and behavior; identifying the factors that affect compliance with health mitigation policies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic; examining the influence that evoking historical memory has on public support for foreign assistance; and developing a toolkit to assess the impact of mass protest and state narratives on domestic and foreign policy change in authoritarian regimes. She has published articles in several leading academic and policy journals, including the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Current History, and Foreign Affairs. She is author (or co-author) of five books, most recently The Oxford Handbook on Politics in Muslim Societies (Oxford 2021).

Advocates of women's rights have long demanded greater access for women to political office, especially the national parliament, with hopes of influencing policymaking with feminist agendas. However, feminist activists’ focus on electoral politics has been mixed in autocratic and patriarchal contexts. While some research pointed to the role of critical actors in policymaking who act as feminist insiders, others warned about the futility of such intentions in undemocratic contexts. Comparing Iran and Turkey in recent decades, Dr. Tajali highlights the complexities of women’s substantive representation in autocratic contexts by mapping out various forms of feminist resistance, state backlash, and overall democratic recession. This analysis helps shed light on the conditions that led to the recent women-led protests in Iran and Turkey, such as the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprisings in Iran and the campaigns against the ruling Justice and Development Party’s unilateral decisions on women’s rights.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mona Tajali is an Associate Professor of International Relations and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Agnes Scott College and is currently a visiting scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University. Her research and teaching fall in the fields of Gender and Politics, Human Rights, and Social Movements in Muslim contexts. She is the author of Women’s Political Representation in Iran and Turkey: Demanding a Seat at the Table (Edinburgh University Press 2022) and co-author of Electoral Politics: Making Quotas Work for Women (with Homa Hoodfar), both published as open-access to facilitate their dissemination to diverse audiences and regions. Dr. Tajali is also a long-term collaborator with the transnational solidarity network Women Living Under Muslim Laws, and, since 2019, has served as a member of its executive board. She is published in both academic and popular outlets, among them the Middle East Journal, Politics & Gender, The Conversation, and The Washington Post.

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

Control over patronage appointments is believed to confer an electoral advantage on the incumbent. We study the effects of the introduction of merit civil service legislation between 1900 and 2016 on reelection rates of individual legislators serving across lower houses of U.S. state legislatures. Using recently-developed statistical methods appropriate for the staggered introduction of reform legislation, results show that reelection rates significantly increase following abolition of patronage appointments to the state bureaucracy. To explain this surprising result, we study changes in the pool of politicians and document a selection effect: post-reform states see faster replacement of politicians than their unreformed counterparts. To understand this more fully, we bring in partial data on rerunning and legislator occupational backgrounds. Neither of these shows significant changes with reform. Overall, our results suggest that once rotation between elected and appointed offices was restricted by reform, more ambitious and professional legislators entered elected office. However, these traits appear unobservable.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Miriam Golden holds the Peter Mair Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute. She uses multiple research methods to investigate the political economy of governance, political representation, and corruption in countries around the world. Golden is currently engaged in a large-scale cross-national and historical study of how and when politicians secure reelection and has recently published The Puzzle of Clientelism: Political Discretion and Elections Around the World (Cambridge University Press, 2023) with Eugenia Nazrullaeva. Her articles have been published in The American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, The Annual Review of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and the British Journal of Political Science. She has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences and a recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

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

This talk centers around the forthcoming book, Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability, to be published by Oxford University Press in March 2024. Collisions provides historical context for the war that began with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It weaves together the origins of this war in Russian, Ukrainian, European, and U.S. politics and policy. With an eye to global context, it assesses the many forms of disruption and instability that the war has caused. Two years after the start of this war, Collisions offers a way of taking stock and trying to understand the big-picture implications of this war.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michael C. Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America and a senior non-resident associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is the author of The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Harvard University Press, 2009), and The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (Basic Books, 2020). From 2014 to 2016, Kimmage served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State. He writes regularly on international affairs for Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

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

In a synthesis of political theory, historical narrative, and practical advice, Brook Manville and Josiah Ober trace the evolution towards self-government through political bargaining in Athens, Rome, Great Britain, and the United States. Democratic self-government means having no boss other than ourselves. Democracy arises when citizens strike a civic bargain: an always imperfect agreement for how they will govern themselves. For democracy to survive, citizens must agree that security and welfare are common interests; they must set the bounds of citizenship and agree on core institutions. They must be willing to negotiate in good faith and must treat one another as civic friends, not political enemies. They must invest in civic education. Democracy survives when the civic bargain evolves adaptively in the face of new challenges.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Josiah Ober is Constantine Mitsotakis Professor in the School of Humanities and Science, Professor of Political Science and Classics, and Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution. He is the founder and current faculty director of the Stanford Civics Initiative. He joined the Stanford faculty in 2006, having previously taught at Princeton and Montana State Universities. His scholarship focuses on historical institutionalism and political theory, especially democratic theory and the contemporary relevance of the political thought and practice of the ancient Greeks. He is the author of The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason (2022), Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism (2017), The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015), and a number of other books. He has published about 100 articles and chapters, including recent articles in American Political Science Review, Philosophical Studies, Polis, and Public Choice. His new book, The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives (with Brook Manville), was published in September by Princeton University Press.

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

Infrastructure is at the heart of contemporary development strategies. Yet short time horizons are thought to impede infrastructure provision in democracies. Why do elected politicians invest in infrastructure projects that will not be completed during their time in office? The answer depends on understanding what infrastructure is and does in politics.

I argue that the political rewards from infrastructure projects come from the associated contracts. Like many goods and services, infrastructure investments are neither fully privatized, in the sense of transferring ownership to the private sector, nor fully public, in that the state directly builds projects. Governments instead contract out to the private sector. Politicians use their discretion in the contracting process to secure campaign donations, as well as personal rents. They also manipulate contracts — and particularly the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) — to hide project costs, shift liabilities to future administrations, and move project decisions away from legislatures. Detailed evidence from 1,000 large infrastructure contracts, judicial investigations, leaked financial documents, and qualitative interviews with politicians and bureaucrats in Latin America demonstrate why politicians invest in infrastructure and why projects often fail to produce the economic development and social welfare gains promised.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alisha Holland is an Associate Professor in the Government Department at Harvard University. Before joining the Harvard faculty, she was an Assistant Professor in the Politics Department at Princeton University and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her first book, Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics), looks at the politics of enforcement against property law violations by the poor. She is writing a new book on large infrastructure projects in Latin America.

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 Tuesday, November 28th from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for Devices, DMs and D**k Pics: Youth Experiences of Cyberflashing and Missing Safety Nets , a conversation with Stephanie M Reich, professor at UC Irvine's School of Education. The session will be moderated by Jeff Hancock, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a series spanning October through December, 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 Commons, Moghadam Conference Room #119, 615 Crothers Way.

Adolescence is a period of increasing autonomy, identity exploration, and desires for physical and emotional intimacy. It is also when almost all youth have access to both a personal mobile device and social media accounts. One way such digital connectivity intersects with adolescent development is the high use of digital methods of communications, including the sending and receiving of sexual images, videos, or text, known as sexting. Extant research finds that sexting, at least for some, is part of normative sexual development (e.g., sharing with close friends or romantic partners, exploring, questioning), but it can also increase image-based sexual abuse (IBSA: e.g., cyberflashing, sextortion, cyberbullying). This study describes two exploratory studies – of adolescents’ (11-18 years) experiences of sexting and IBSA and of pediatric emergency providers’, as first responders, familiarity and comfort with identify and supporting IBSA in their practice. The talk concludes with recommendations for much-needed structures for supporting adolescents’ safety and wellbeing in a digital age.

About the Speaker:

Stephanie M. Reich earned her Ph.D. in Community Psychology from the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.

Dr. Reich's research is focuses on understanding and improving the social context of children’s lives. As such, her empirical investigations center on two contributors to children’s socialization: parents and peers. The bulk of her interest examines parent and peer interactions in early childhood with additional research investigating peer interactions in adolescence. Her professional goal is to illuminate how parents and peers affect children’s socio-emotional, cognitive, and physical development with the aim of creating interventions to promote physical and mental health and academic success.

The bulk of Dr. Reich's work explores direct and indirect influences (i.e., transactions) on the child, specifically through the family, online, and school environment. Her research on the family has focused on parenting behaviors and the direct and moderational influences of maternal knowledge, efficacy, support, and home and community environment on development. Dr. Reich has also been involved in peer research where she has been examining the role of individual behaviors (e.g., aggression, emotional regulation, prosocial behavior) and peer interactions (e.g., in-person and on-line) on range of child outcomes.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on Tuesday, November 14th from 12 Noon–1 PM Pacific, for Does Social Media Support or Worsen Mental Well-Being? What Quasi-Experimental Studies Can Tell Us, a conversation with Munmun De Choudhury, Associate Professor of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. The session will be moderated by Jeff Hancock, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a series spanning October through December, 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 Commons, Moghadam Conference Room #119, 615 Crothers Way.

Social media platforms continue to accrue important roles in our lives. Popular discourse has discussed the impact of social media on a variety of outcomes, from political polarization to issues of social justice. Is social media good or bad when it comes to mental well-being? This talk seeks to answer this question through a series of quasi-experimental observational studies, looking to a population that stands to both benefit as well as be harmed online -- those who struggle with mental illnesses. First, through propensity score modeling of language change online, De Choudhury will situate how social support can help to reduce suicidal thoughts. In contrast, a second study will employ an interrupted time series and difference-in-differences approach to reveal the alarming ways online harassment can aggravate mental health outcomes.

Adopting a human-centered lens, De Choudhury will discuss the complex role of social media in patients' social reintegration efforts following a major psychiatric episode. Online social technologies are here to stay, but there are pragmatic paths forward that can amplify its positive uses while mitigating harms for those marginalized by mental illness.

About the Speaker:

Munmun De Choudhury is an Associate Professor of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Dr. De Choudhury is best known for laying the foundation of a new line of research that develops computational approaches to understand how social media can inform us of varied mental health outcomes. As an interdisciplinary researcher, this work combines social computing, machine learning, and natural language analysis with insights and theories from the social, behavioral, and health sciences. Dr. De Choudhury has been recognized with the 2023 SIGCHI Societal Impact Award, the 2023 AAAI ICWSM and the 2022 Web Science Trust Test-of-Time Awards, the 2021 ACM-W Rising Star Award, the 2019 Complex Systems Society – Junior Scientific Award, and over a dozen best paper and honorable mention awards from the ACM and AAAI. Her work has been featured in popular press like the New York Times, the NPR, and the BBC. Dr. De Choudhury serves on the Board of Directors of the International Society for Computational Social Science. She has contributed to the Office of U.S. Surgeon General's recent Advisory on The Healing Effects of Social Connection.