Communal violence remains an enduring experience across many multi-ethnic societies. In these diverse communities, small-scale clashes can quickly escalate into severe cycles of violence. While tensions within these communities are nearly ubiquitous, the outbreak of violence is not. What accounts for these pockets of peace within conflict zones? I argue that violent outbreaks depend on the efficacy of local leaders—and citizen responses—in dispute resolution, which are shaped by the strength of ties leaders possess both within (bonding capital) and across (bridging capital) communities.

To examine my core theoretical predictions, I conducted a randomized controlled trial and surveys with local leaders and citizens across 88 communities in Nigeria. I find that leaders with cross-group ties perceive outgroup leaders with more credibility, report more successful dispute resolution and, ultimately, fewer violent events. In addition, I find that the residents who live under more bridged leaders are more likely to comply with decisions and report improved security.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Catlan Reardon is the Einstein-Moos Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL at Stanford University. She received her PhD in Political Science in August 2022. Her research lies at the intersection of elite political behavior, violence, and the political economy of development, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her book project explores how local leaders impact violence through examining their key roles as arbiters of local disputes, drawing primarily from field research in North-Central Nigeria. She is particularly interested in understanding the incentives behind local leader behavior within local conflict resolution and how this influences the extent to which small-scale clashes escalate into larger spirals of violence. She also has several projects examining the effect of top-down and bottom-up peacebuilding interventions on violence and social cohesion. She has conducted field work in India, Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria.


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

Protest has been a key method of political claim-making in Jordan from the late Ottoman period to the present day. More than moments of rupture within normal-time politics, protests have been central to challenging state power, as well as reproducing it—and the spatial dynamics of protests play a central role in the construction of both state and society.

In her new book, Jillian Schwedler considers how space and geography influence protests and repression and, in challenging conventional narratives of Hashemite state-making, offers the first in-depth study of rebellion in Jordan. Based on twenty-five years of field research, Schwedler examines protests as they are situated in the built environment, bringing together considerations of networks, spatial imaginaries, space and place-making, and political geographies at local, national, regional, and global scales. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Jillian Schwedler is Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and the Graduate Center and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for the Middle East at Brandeis University. Her books include the award-winning Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (2006) and (with Laleh Khalili) Policing and Prisons in the Middle East (2010). Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including World Politics, Comparative Politics, Contention, and Social Movement Studies. Her newest book, Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent, was published by Stanford University Press in April 2022.

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

In many Muslim societies, autocrats expand their distributive policies in the religious season of Ramadan. Why do autocrats distribute in Ramadan? And, who do they target?

Focusing on Egypt (2014-2020), this paper argues that the regime distributes in Ramadan to contain political threats to its survival by co-opting areas where such threats are more credible. This strategy addresses rising political pressures during the season while signaling the regime's competency and goodness by capitalizing on the month's religious norms. I test this argument using an original municipality-level dataset of government-reported provision of economic benefits.

The findings show that the government reports more economic distribution in places where political threats are higher: more socioeconomically developed, more contentious, and more affected by unpopular austerity measures. Using survey data, I also find that distribution in Ramadan translates into reputational gains for the regime, particularly among its critics. The conclusions suggest that autocrats might adopt multiple targeting strategies to respond to different threats to their survival, sometimes rewarding threatening groups to buy their acquiescence. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ahmed Ezzeldin Mohamed is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law (CDDRL). He holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) in Political Science from Columbia University. He was a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School in the academic year (2021-2022). He is a junior fellow of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS).

Mohamed’s research focuses on the role of religion in political and economic development, with a special focus on the Middle East and the Muslim World. He utilizes a diverse set of tools for data collection and rigorous analysis. His work received several awards, including APSA 2022 Weber Best Conference Paper Award and MPSA 2019 Kellogg/Notre Dame Award for Best Paper in Comparative Politics. 

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What effect do gender quotas have on political responsiveness? We examine the effect of randomly imposed electoral quotas for women in Mumbai’s city council, using a wide variety of objective and subjective measures of constituency-level public service quality.

The perceived quality of local public goods is higher in constituencies with quota members, and citizen complaints are processed faster in areas with more quota members. One mechanism for this effect is differences in the focus of legislator effort. In their legislative participation, quota members focus on public goods distribution, while nonquota members focus on individual goods, member perks, and identity issues. We suggest that men’s more extensive engagement with extralegal and rhetorical forms of political action has led to men and women cultivating different styles of political representation.
 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
 

Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra is a political scientist broadly interested in empirical political economy. His research focuses on the judiciary, women in politics, political institutions, and bureaucracies. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in the American Journal of Political Science and The Quarterly Journal of Political Science.

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

One of the most undertheorized issues in all of government today is the question of bureaucratic autonomy, that is, the degree of discretion that political principals should grant to bureaucratic agents. This article reviews the literature on bureaucratic autonomy both in US administrative law and in political science. It uses the American experience to define five mechanisms by which political principals grant and limit autonomy, then goes on to survey the comparative literature on other democratic systems using the American framework as a baseline. Other democracies use different mixtures of these mechanisms, for example by substituting stronger ex post review for ex ante procedures or using appointment and removal power in place of either. We find that the administrative law and social science literatures on this topic approach it very differently, and that both would profit from greater awareness of the other discipline. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS 

 

Katherine Bersch is a Kellogg Fellow at the University of Notre Dame (2022-23) and the Nancy Akers and J. Mason Wallace Assistant Professor of Political Science at Davidson College. A research affiliate of the CDDRL Stanford Governance Project, she is also a co-founder of the Global Survey of Public Servants. Her research focuses on democratic quality in developing countries, with an emphasis on governance reform and state capacity in Latin America. She is the author of When Democracies Deliver: Governance Reform in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which won the Van Cott Best Book Prize from LASA, the Levine Book Prize from IPSA, and the ASPA Prize for the Best Book Published in Public Administration. 

 

Francis Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, was published in September 2018. His latest book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, was published in the spring of 2022.

Dr. Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), and the Pardee Rand Graduate School. He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and at the Center for Global Development. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Governors of the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and the Volcker Alliance. He is a member of the American Political Science Association and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children. 

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

This November, Americans will vote in midterm elections for Congressional and state offices.

Join CDDRL's Bruce Cain, Hakeem Jefferson, and Didi Kuo in a discussion on the midterms. This panel will delve into the issues at stake in these elections, including the economy, abortion rights, and President Biden's policy agenda. It will discuss the ongoing influence of President Trump in the Republican Party, and the role of the Big Lie in campaigns for state offices. The panel will also discuss the implications of these elections for democracy, both at home and abroad. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Bruce E. Cain is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. He received a BA from Bowdoin College (1970), a B Phil. from Oxford University (1972) as a Rhodes Scholar, and a Ph D from Harvard University (1976). He taught at Caltech (1976-89) and UC Berkeley (1989-2012) before coming to Stanford. Professor Cain was Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley from 1990-2007 and Executive Director of the UC Washington Center from 2005-2012. He was elected the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and has won awards for his research (Richard F. Fenno Prize, 1988), teaching (Caltech 1988 and UC Berkeley 2003) and public service (Zale Award for Outstanding Achievement in Policy Research and Public Service, 2000). His areas of expertise include political regulation, applied democratic theory, representation and state politics. Some of Professor Cain’s most recent publications include “Malleable Constitutions: Reflections on State Constitutional Design,” coauthored with Roger Noll in University of Texas Law Review, volume 2, 2009; “More or Less: Searching for Regulatory Balance,” in Race, Reform and the Political Process, edited by Heather Gerken, Guy Charles and Michael Kang, CUP, 2011; “Redistricting Commissions: A Better Political Buffer?” in The Yale Law Journal, volume 121, 2012; and Democracy More or Less (CUP, 2015). He is currently working on problems of environmental governance.

Hakeem Jefferson is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University where he also is a faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Center for American Democracy. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and African American Studies from the University of South Carolina.

His research focuses primarily on the role identity plays in structuring political attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. He is especially interested in understanding how stigma shapes the politics of Black Americans, particularly as it relates to group members’ support for racialized punitive social policies. In other research projects, Hakeem examines the psychological and social roots of the racial divide in Americans’ reactions to officer-involved shootings and work to evaluate the meaningfulness of key political concepts, like ideological identification, among Black Americans.

Hakeem’s dissertation, "Policing Norms: Punishment and the Politics of Respectability Among Black Americans," was a co-winner of the 2020 Best Dissertation Award from the Political Psychology Section of the American Political Science Association.

Didi Kuo is Senior Research Scholar and Associate Director for Research at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Her research interests include democratization, political parties, and political reform. She oversees the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, which seeks to bridge academic and policy research on American democracy. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, and is the author of Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the Rise of Programmatic Politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press 2018). 

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the Philippines Room C330 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Comparative institutional studies have shown that the way we select public officials affects their behavior in office. Much less is known about how different selection procedures impact the types of individuals that choose to seek a political career, which would constitute one of the mechanisms connecting institutions and leader behavior. 

Guzel Garifullina argues that certain properties of the selection process lead to self-selection based on risk attitudes. Using a series of laboratory experiments in Russia, she demonstrates that higher costs of candidacy and public accountability of the selected officials lead to an increased role of risk-seeking in the decision to pursue an office. These findings imply, for example, that in hybrid regimes pro-regime candidates would be more risk-averse than the opposition candidates. The study expands the scholarship on ambition and candidacy in electoral autocracies. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER 

 

Guzel Garifullina is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on authoritarian politics, Russian local politics and governance, and bureaucratic behavior. Guzel is currently working on several projects that try to improve our understanding of the Russian state and the incentives faced by its local agents. Furthermore, she explores public participation both online and through regime-approved local initiatives to identify the potential for citizen self-organization at the local level, even as the national regime pressure on any forms of dissent has grown exponentially. Guzel's co-authored work on Russian regional elites appeared in Post-Soviet Affairs, Comparative Political Studies, Demokratizatsiya, and Europe-Asia Studies.

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