How much and in what form do politicians accept economic inequality? The talk explores the attenuated response of governments to rising economic inequality in Europe and North America. Political interventions in the economy depend on how elected representatives learn and reason about various forms of inequality and, ultimately, and how they decide when political action is required. Regardless of actual changes in inequality, legislators with leftist identity perceive inequality as rising and unfair, while rightist politicians hold the opposite views. When legislators then think about public demand for redistribution, they rely on their own redistributive preferences as a heuristic: the more supportive politicians are about redistribution, the higher their estimation of support for redistributive policies. Politicians thereby display a false consensus effect in their assessment.

Surveys and interviews with over 800 politicians in five democracies—Belgium, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland—elicit politicians' perceptions of economic inequality, their redistributive preferences as well as their estimates of public support among citizens. Politicians belonging to conservative parties perceive inequality to be smaller than those on the left. They also attribute less unfairness to inequality. Similarly, politicians who strongly oppose a redistributive policy do not believe that a majority of citizens favor it; however, when politicians are supportive of the measure by themselves, they believe that over 60% of citizens prefer a redistributive policy. These perceptions have behavioral consequences: legislators who believe that inequality is rising and unfair raise this issue in their parliamentary speeches. The talk probes into the intentions of elected representatives when dealing with economic inequality, unequal representation and economic policymaking in European democracies.

Christian Breunig is Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics & Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Before coming to Konstanz, he was associate professor in political science at the University of Toronto and held a post-doc position at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. He received my doctorate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington in Seattle. His research concentrates on representation and public policy in advanced democracies and has been published in the leading journals of political science. He is a PI at the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality" and directs the German Policy Agendas project which is part of the Comparative Agendas Project. In 2022-23, he is fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by April 20, 2023.

Join the Cyber Policy Center, together with the Program on Democracy and the Internet on Tuesday, February 28, from Noon–1 PM Pacific, for Cross-Partisan Interaction in Online Discussion Groups, a discussion with Talia Stroud. The session will moderated by Nate Persily, Co-Director of the CPC and James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.

Levels of polarization in the United States have increased, leading some to worry about the future of productive cross-partisan interactions that are critical for democracy. This concern is based on whether people have the opportunity to interact with those who do not share their views and whether, if given the opportunity, the outcomes are positive. Two streams of research provide hope. First, cross-partisan interactions happen in non-political spaces, such as online discussion groups. Second, intergroup contact theory proposes that interactions between opposing groups can reduce prejudice, particularly when group members bond over shared identities. Yet, whether and when cross-partisan exposure in online discussion groups results in depolarization requires additional research. This talk will share the results of a three-week long study of cross-partisan parents on Reddit (n = 323) who were randomly assigned to subreddits that focused on one of three topics: (1) politics, (2) parenting, or (3) parenting with some politics inserted nearly two weeks into the study period. Findings indicate that the addition of political commentary into the parenting group resulted in more negative group experiences, suggesting limitations on the hopes that cross-partisan interaction in non-political online spaces can generate more favorable attitudes toward the political opposition. We extend these findings by analyzing Reddit data to see what happens when politics comes up in parenting subreddits.

This session is part of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March, hosted at the Cyber Policy Center with the Program on Democracy and the Internet. Sessions are in-person and virtual, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance.

In person attendance is available to Stanford affiliates and virtual attendance via zoom is open to the public; registration is required.

About the Speaker

Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud, Ph.D., is the E. M. "Ted" Dealey Professor of the Business of Journalism and is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the School of Journalism and Media, as well as the founding and current Director of the Center for Media Engagement (mediaengagement.org) in the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. She helped to found New _Public, an organization working to improve digital public space and she serves as one of the academic research co-leads on the U.S. 2020 Facebook & Instagram Election Study. Stroud’s research on the media’s role in a democracy has received numerous national and international awards, including the International Communication Association (ICA)'s prestigious Outstanding Book Award for her book Niche News: The Politics of News Choice, and the inaugural Journalism Studies Public Engagement Award.

Join the Cyber Policy Center, together with the Program on Democracy and the Internet on Tuesday, February 14, from Noon–1 PM Pacific, for a discussion with Dr. Marie-Elisabeth Paté-Cornell. The session will moderated by Andrew Grotto who directs the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance.

Paté-Cornell will present a warning systems model in which early-stage cyber threat signals are generated using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. The risk management team is hybrid: a "robot" and a human technician who can take over when the uncertainties or the consequences of failure are too large. Active cyber security is most often, in practice, reactive. Based on the manual forensics of machine-generated data by humans, security efforts only begin after a loss has taken place but the current security paradigm can be significantly improved. Cyber-threat behaviors can be modeled as a set of discrete, observable steps called a ‘kill chain.’ Data produced from observing early kill-chain steps can support the automation of manual defensive responses before an attack causes losses. Using the concept of  a system gate set, a model of access control decisions, cyber security experts can effectively conduct risk assessments of their systems, which can inform effective policies. This approach unifies core concepts from decision analysis and machine learning by combining machine learning and decision risk attitudes. An early warning system using these techniques has the potential to avoid more sever downstream consequences as it can disrupt threats of an attack at the beginning of the kill chain.

This session is part of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March, hosted at the Cyber Policy Center with the Program on Democracy and the Internet. Sessions are in-person and virtual, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance.

In person attendance is available to Stanford affiliates and virtual attendance via zoom is open to the public; registration is required.

About the Speaker

Dr. Marie-Elisabeth Paté-Cornell is the Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor in the School of Engineering and a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) of the Stanford Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies. Her specialty is engineering risk analysis, with applications to complex systems (space, medical, offshore oil platforms, cyber security, etc.). Her work has been based on probabilistic and stochastic models and on Artificial Intelligence. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the French Académie des Technologies, the NASA Advisory Council, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist of the Jet Propulsion Lab. She was a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (2001 to 2008). She holds a BS in Mathematics and Physics, Marseille (France), an Engineering degree (Applied Math/CS) from the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble (France), an MS in Operations Research (OR) and a PhD in Engineering-Economic Systems (EES), both from Stanford University. She is the author or coauthor of numerous publications including several Best Paper awards. She was awarded the 2002 Distinguished Achievement Award of the Society for Risk Analysis (of which she is a Fellow), the INFORMS Ramsey Medal of Decision Analysis  (2010), an Honorary PhD from the University of Strathclyde (2016), and the IEEE Ramo medal for Systems Engineering and Science in 2021. Her recent work focuses on cyber security for specific systems and spacecraft design and monitoring.

Join the Cyber Policy Center, together with the Program on Democracy and the Internet on Tuesday, February 7, from Noon–1 PM Pacific, for "Platform Drama: 'Cancel culture,' Celebrity, and Accountability on Social Media" a discussion with Becca Lewis, Stanford Graduate Fellow and PhD candidate in Communication at Stanford University. The session will moderated by Nate Persily, Co-Director of the CPC and James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.

Recent years have witnessed debates about so-called “cancel culture” and more broadly about online accountability practices. In this talk, Becca Lewis examines the issue from a new perspective, using "YouTube drama" as a case study that reflects a long line of ethical negotiations in popular media contexts. Drawing on her research conducted with Professor Angèle Christin in the Stanford Department of Communication, Lewis will outline a framework for understanding accountability practices on social media: as an ongoing “platform drama” in which creators engage in perpetual and highly visible power struggles with celebrities, audiences, legacy media, other creators, and social media platforms themselves.

This session is part of the Winter Seminar Series, a series spanning January through March, hosted at the Cyber Policy Center with the Program on Democracy and the Internet. Sessions are in-person and virtual, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance.

In person attendance is available to Stanford affiliates and virtual attendance via zoom is open to the public; registration is required.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Becca Lewis is a Stanford Graduate Fellow and PhD candidate in Communication at Stanford University. She is an expert on disinformation and far-right digital media, and her white papers published with Data & Society are considered foundational studies in the field. Her research has also been published in academic journals including New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, and American Behavioral Scientist. In 2022, she served as an expert witness in the defamation lawsuits brought against Alex Jones by parents of Sandy Hook shooting victims. She holds an MSc in Social Science from the Oxford Internet Institute.