Voter-endorsed challenges to international institutions present a growing problem for international cooperation. This talk discusses the challenges that unilateral, voter-endorsed attempts by one member state to withdraw from or renegotiate the terms of existing international institutions create for the institution’s other member states. It argues that such voter-endorsed “cooperation challenges” tend to reverberate abroad: First, they influence public and elite views about the merits of the international institution and thus can create contagion effects, but can also have stabilizing effects depending on how the they highlight the risks and opportunities associated with exit and renegotiation. Second, the loss of, or change in the distribution of, cooperation gains can have considerable effects on the institutions’ other member states.

Finally, these reverberations abroad influence how member states respond to unilateral voter-endorsed “cooperation challenges.” Drawing on comparative case studies of a diverse set of voter-endorsed challenges to international institutions and on survey evidence from the EU-27 as well as a panel of Swiss respondents, the talk shows that this framework can help us better understand the (non-)existence of contagion effects across member states, variation in the responses of the remaining member states to voter-endorsed challenges to international institutions, and the ultimate outcomes of such cooperation challenges.

Stefanie Walter is Full Professor for International Relations and Political Economy at the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich. Her research examines distributional conflicts, political preferences and economic policy outcomes related to globalization, European integration, and financial crises. Current projects examine the backlash against globalization, and challenges to international cooperation.

Stefanie Walter’s work has been published in journals such as the Annual Review of Political Science, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and International Organization. She is the author of “Financial Crises and the Politics of Macroeconomic Adjustments” (2013, Cambridge University Press) and co-author of “The Politics of Bad Options” (2020, Oxford University Press).

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by January 12, 2023.

Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Daphne Keller, in conversation with Aleksandra Kuczerawy for European Developments in Internet Regulation.

This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person (Stanford-affiliation required) and virtual attendance (open to the public) is available; registration is required.

The Digital Services Act is a new landmark European Union legislation addressing illegal and harmful content online. Its main goals are to create a safer digital space but also to enhance protection of fundamental rights online. In this talk, Aleksandra Kuczerawy will discuss the core elements of the DSA, such as the layered system of due diligence obligations, content moderation rules and the enforcement framework, while providing underlying policy context for the US audience.

Aleksandra Kuczerawy is a postdoctoral scholar at the Program on Platform Regulation and has been a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven’s Centre for IT & IP Law and is assistant editor of the International Encyclopedia of Law (IEL) – Cyber Law. She has worked on the topics of privacy and data protection, media law, and the liability of Internet intermediaries since 2010 (projects PrimeLife, Experimedia, REVEAL). In 2017 she participated in the works of the Committee of experts on Internet Intermediaries (MSI-NET) at the Council of Europe, responsible for drafting a recommendation by the Committee of Ministers on the roles and responsibilties of internet intermediaries and a study on Algorithms and Human Rights.

Image

This conference focuses on medieval women married to or living with priests, with the goal of restoring priests’ wives to scholarship on gender, spirituality, family life, and the church, particularly in western Europe. Speakers will explore the lives and circumstances of priests’ women, the sources that can reveal or shed light on their status or experiences, and the various roles—social as well as cultural—that they played within the family, their local communities, and the church more broadly.  More information about the project can be found here. 

Organized by the Department of History with generous funding from France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. Cosponsored by Department of Religious Studies, Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Language, and The Europe Center.

Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Nate Persily, in conversation with Chenyan Jia for The Evolving Role of AI In Political News Consumption: The Effects of Algorithmic vs. Community Label on Perceived Accuracy of Hyper-partisan Misinformation.

This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person (Stanford affiliation only) and virtual attendance (open to the public) is available; registration is required.

Chenyan Jia (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin) is a postdoctoral scholar in The Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) at Stanford University. In 2023 Fall, she will be joining Northeastern University as an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism in the College of Arts, Media, and Design with a joint appointment in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. She has been working as a research assistant for UT's Human–AI Interaction Lab.

Her research interests lie at the intersection of communication and human-computer interaction. Her work has examined (a) the influence of emerging media technologies such as automated journalism and misinformation detection algorithms on people’s political attitudes and news consumption behaviors; (b) the political bias in news coverage through NLP techniques; (c) how to leverage AI technologies to reduce bias and promote democracy.

Her research has appeared in mass communication journals and top-tier AI and HCI venues including Human-Computer Interaction Journal (CSCW), Journal of Artificial Intelligence, International Journal of Communication, Media and Communication, ICLR, ICWSM, EMNLP, ACL, and AAAI. Her research has been awarded the Best Paper Award at AAAI 21. She was the recipient of the Harrington Dissertation Fellowship and the Dallas Morning News Graduate Fellowship for Journalism Innovation.

Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Nate Persily, in conversation with Meicen Sun for Internet Control as A Winning Strategy: How the Duality of Information Consolidates Autocratic Rule in the Digital Age.

This paper advances a new theory on how the Internet as a digital technology helps consolidate autocratic rule. Exploiting a major Internet control shock in China in 2014, this paper finds that Chinese data-intensive firms have gained from Internet control a 10% increase in revenue over other Chinese firms, and about 1-2% over their U.S. competitors. Meanwhile, the same Internet control has incurred an up to 25% reduction in research quality for Chinese scholars conditional on the knowledge-intensity of their discipline. This occurred specifically via a reduction in the access to cutting-edge knowledge from the outside world. These findings suggest that while politically motivated information flow restrictions do take a toll on the country’s long-term capacity for innovation, they lend a short-term benefit to its data-intensive sectors. Conventional wisdom on the inherent limit to information control by autocracies overlooks this crucial protectionist benefit that aids in autocratic power consolidation in the digital age. 

This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person and virtual attendance is available; registration is required.

Meicen Sun is a postdoctoral scholar with the Program on Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University. Her research examines the political economy of information and the effect of information policy on the future of innovation and state power. Her writings have appeared in academic and policy outlets including Foreign Policy Analysis, Harvard Business Review, World Economic Forum, the Asian Development Bank Institute, and The Diplomat among others. She had previously conducted research at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and at the UN Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Africa. Bilingual in English and Chinese, she has also written stories, plays, and music and staged many of her works -- in both languages -- in China, Singapore and the U.S. Sun has served as a Fellow on the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on China and as a Research Affiliate with the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. She holds an A.B. with Honors from Princeton University, an A.M. with a Certificate in Law from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Nate Persily, in conversation with Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Oxford, for a look at how platforms shape the media and society.
 
Based on analysis of the relations between platform companies including Google and Meta, and news publishers in France, Germany, the UK, and the US, the session will explore key aspects of the “platform power” a few technology companies have come to exercise in public life, the reservations news publishers have about platforms—and the reasons why they often embrace them anyway.
 
This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person and virtual attendance is available; registration is required.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Oxford. He was previously Director of Research at the Reuters Institute and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Press/Politics.

His work focuses on changes in the news media, on political communication, and the role of digital technologies in both. He has done extensive research on journalism, American politics, and various forms of activism, and a significant amount of comparative work in Western Europe and beyond.