Violent non-state actors frequently intervene in democratic politics, producing waves of political violence against voters, candidates, and elected officials. How do we understand these interventions? I argue that armed actors confront a tradeoff between two impulses: to discredit democracy as a political project or to bend elections and the policymaking process to their political agenda. How groups navigate that tradeoff is a function of how compatible their goals are with the democratic process and how much coercive power they can muster to compel voters and elected officials to meet their demands. I evaluate this theory through a paired comparison of two leftist insurgent groups: Sendero Luminoso in Peru and the FARC in Colombia. Archival evidence and computational content analysis illustrate the ideological divergence between the two groups. Leveraging variation in local military capacity caused by exogenous shifts in coca cultivation income, I demonstrate the effects of ideology and coercive capacity on violence and election outcomes. These results have implications for theories of political violence and democratic accountability.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Andres Uribe is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2023. His book project, "Coercion and Capture in Democratic Politics," examines how armed non-state groups seek to influence the democratic process. Through quantitative, computational, and archival analysis of rebel, paramilitary, and criminal groups in Latin America, he identifies the conditions that lead these actors to intervene in electoral politics, the structural forces that determine whether they succeed or fail, and the consequences of these interventions for democratic institutions and policy outcomes. Other projects explore processes of modern state-building, governance by non-state actors, and the political strategies of anti-democratic politicians.

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In its 2023 "Freedom in the World" report, Freedom House detected signs of a possible "turning point" away from the steady trend of receding freedom over the past decade and a half. For the first time since 2006, about as many countries gained in freedom as declined, and the egregious mistakes of authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, Venezuela, and Iran exposed "the limits of [these] authoritarian models." Illiberal populists suffered electoral defeats in several European Countries, including the Czech Republic earlier this year, showing that this model can be beaten at the polls. Yet press freedom and civil liberties continue to recede in India, Erdogan has been "reelected" in Turkey, and democracy is under significant pressure from populist and other authoritarian forces in Latin America and Africa. How should we interpret these diverse trends? Is the world still in a "democratic recession"?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford. He leads the Hoover Institution’s programs on China’s Global Sharp Power and on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region. At FSI, he leads the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, based at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for more than six years. He also co-leads with (Eileen Donahoe) the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as senior consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around the world and on policies and reforms to defend and advance democracy. His latest edited book (with Orville Schell), China's Influence and American Interests (Hoover Press, 2019), urges a posture of constructive vigilance toward China’s global projection of “sharp power,” which it sees as a rising threat to democratic norms and institutions. He offers a massive open online course (MOOC) on Comparative Democratic Development through the edX platform and is now writing a textbook to accompany it.

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The world’s dictators are no longer content with shoring up control over their own populations—they are now exploiting the openness of the free world to spread disinformation, sow discord, and suppress dissent. In Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power, editors William J. Dobson, Tarek Masoud, and Christopher Walker bring together leading analysts to explain how the world’s authoritarians are attempting to erode the pillars of democratic societies—and what we can do about it. Far from offering a counsel of despair, the international contributors in this collection identify the considerable resources that democracy provides for blunting sharp power’s edge.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Christopher Walker is Vice President for Studies and Analysis at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. In this capacity, he oversees the department responsible for NED’s multifaceted analytical work. He has a particular focus on authoritarian regimes and has been at the forefront of the discussion of how authoritarian powers exert influence on open systems, including in the context of sharp power. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and the Journal of Democracy. Walker is co-editor (with Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner) of Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) and co-editor (with William J. Dobson and Tarek Masoud) of Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power (2023, Johns Hopkins University Press).

William J. Dobson is the coeditor of the Journal of Democracy. Prior to assuming this position, he was the Chief International Editor at NPR, where he led the network’s award-winning international coverage and oversaw a team of editors and correspondents in 17 overseas bureaus and Washington, DC. Dobson is the author of The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy, which examines the struggle between authoritarian regimes and the people who challenge them. It was selected as one of the “best books of 2012” by Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, The Telegraph, and Prospect, and it has been translated into many languages, including Chinese, German, Japanese, and Portuguese. Dobson has published widely on international relations, democracy, and authoritarianism. His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Newsweek, and elsewhere. He has provided commentary and analysis on international politics for NPR, ABC, CNN, CBS, and MSNBC.

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Over the past decade, several European Union member states have experienced a significant decline in their rule of law. This is especially so in Hungary and Poland that have been at the forefront of discussions revolving around the decline of the rule of law in Europe and the rise of populism and illiberal democracies. One question raised by this decline of rule of law is whether it has an economic impact. Theory and empirical research on the rule of law and economic growth have established a positive relationship between them. Implicit in that is the expectation that a rule of law decline would result in negative economic effects. However, if political regimes responsible for the erosion of the rule of law do not experience negative economic consequences to such conduct, they can be economically sustainable and, thus, more likely to politically sustain themselves as well. This study provides empirical evidence on the economic effects of rule of law decline.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Janka Deli is the Gerhard Casper Fellow in Rule of Law at CDDRL and a JSD Candidate at Stanford Law School. Prior to becoming a Fellow, she was a Data Science Scholar at Stanford Data Science for three years.

Janka conducts rule of law impact studies with a novel approach. Her current projects investigate how much the rule of law matters for firm value and international trade in the European Union, leveraging quantitative methods. Her knowledge in political science, economics, causal inference, and data science complements her comprehensive legal training.

Janka’s research has been generously supported by Stanford Data Science, the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education, László Sólyom former Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court and former President of Hungary, the Rosztoczy Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Hungary Initiatives Foundation, as well as the Dr. Elemér and Éva Kiss Scholarship Fund. As an acknowledgement of her outstanding academic performance at Stanford, she has received the Gerald J. Lieberman Fellowship and the Gerald Gunther Prize.

Janka received a JD degree along with a Certificate in Finance and Entrepreneurship from Pázmány Péter Catholic University in 2017 and obtained her JSM degree at Stanford in 2019.

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Can data science improve the functioning of courts, and unlock the positive effects of institutions on development? In a nationwide experiment in Kenya, we use algorithms to identify the greatest sources of court delay for each court and recommend actions. We randomly assign courts to receive no information, information, or an information and accountability intervention. Information and accountability reduces case duration by 22%. Using continuous household surveys, we find that in regions with treated courts, workers were more likely to have formal contracts and higher wages, especially in contract-intensive industries. These results demonstrate a causal relationship between judicial institutions and economic development.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Daniel Li Chen is Director of Research at the CNRS and Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics. He is also a Senior Fellow at the IAST and the founder of oTree Open Source Research Foundation and Data Science Justice Collaboratory. Chen was previously Chair of Law and Economics and co-founder of Law and Economics Center at ETH; he was a tenure-track assistant professor in Law (primary), Economics, and Public Policy at Duke University.    

He received his BA (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and MS from Harvard University in Applied Mathematics and Economics; completed his Economics PhD from MIT; and obtained a JD from Harvard Law School.    

Chen uses his extensive empirical training to tackle longstanding legal questions previously difficult to empirically analyze. He has attained prominence through the development of open source tools to study human behavior and through large-scale empirical studies — data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning — on the relationship between law, social norms, and the enforcement of legal norms, and on judicial systems.

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