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About The Seminar: 

Social media users who report content are key allies in the management of online misinformation. However, no research has been conducted yet to understand their role and the different trends underlying their reporting activity. Hubert Etienne presents an original approach to studying misinformation by examining it from the reporting users’ perspective at the content-level and comparatively across regions and platforms. This leads Etienne to propose the first classification of reported content pieces, resulting from a review of items reported on Facebook and Instagram in France, the UK, and the US in June 2020 to observe meaningful distinctions regarding misinformation reporting between countries and platforms as it significantly varies in volume, type, topic, and manipulation technique. Etienne identifies four reporting behaviors, from which he derives four types of noise capable of explaining the majority of the inaccuracy in misinformation reporting. He finally shows that breaking down the user reporting signal into a plurality of behaviors allows us to build a simple classifier trained on a small dataset with a combination of basic users-reports capable of identifying these different types of noise.

Speakers:

Hubert Etienne is a philosopher conducting research in AI ethics and computational philosophy at École Normale Supérieure and Meta AI. His research focuses on social interactions, especially the moderation of problematic interactions in cyberspace. He is a lecturer in AI ethics à Sciences Po, in data economics at HEC Paris and in digital regulation at the National School of Administration. He is currently a visiting fellow at Harvard University.

Julie Owono is the Executive Director of the Content Policy & Society Lab (CPSL) and a fellow of the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) at Stanford University. She is also the Executive Director of digital rights organization Internet Sans Frontières, one of the inaugural members of the Facebook Oversight Board, and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. She holds a Master’s degree in International Law from la Sorbonne University in Paris, and practiced as a lawyer at the Paris Bar.

SCCEI Spring Seminar Series 

Wednesday, April 13, 2022      11:00 am -12:15 pm Pacific Time

Models of Bilateral Clean Energy Cooperation with China: A Tale of Three Clean Energy Research Centers

As global interest in clean energy technologies increases, we have seen countries around the world partner with China as the epicenter of clean energy deployment and an important location for learning-by-doing innovation. This paper presents three new case studies of the largest bilateral clean energy research centers developed in partnership with China over the past two decades. These cases facilitate an assessment of the political and technological benefits to international technology collaboration with China, as well as the substantial challenges.

About the Speaker 
 

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Joanna Lewis is Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA) at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She has two decades of experience working on international climate and clean energy policy with a focus on China. At Georgetown she runs the Clean Energy and Climate Research Group and leads several dialogues facilitating U.S.-China climate change engagement. Lewis is also a faculty affiliate in the China Energy Group at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is the author of the award-winning book Green Innovation in China, and was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report. Lewis has worked for a number of governmental and non-governmental organizations including the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the Asia Society and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and has been a visiting scholar at Tsinghua University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the East-West Center. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Center for Security and Emerging Technologies, among others. Lewis holds a Master’s and Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science and Policy from Duke University.

Seminar Series Moderators

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Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University.  For the past 30 years, he has worked on the economics of poverty reduction. Currently, his work on poverty has its full focus on human capital, including issues of rural health, nutrition and education. For the past 20 year, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Most recently, Rozelle's research focuses on the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition in China. In recognition of this work, Dr. Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards. Among them, he became a Yangtse Scholar (Changjiang Xuezhe) in Renmin University of China in 2008. In 2008 he also was awarded the Friendship Award by Premiere Wen Jiabao, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a foreigner. 

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Hongbin Li is the Co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Hongbin obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2001 and joined the economics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he became full professor in 2007. He was also one of the two founding directors of the Institute of Economics and Finance at the CUHK. He taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing 2007-2016 and was C.V. Starr Chair Professor of Economics in the School of Economics and Management. He founded the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) in 2009 and the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) in 2014.

Hongbin’s research has been focused on the transition and development of the Chinese economy, and the evidence-based research results have been both widely covered by media outlets and well read by policy makers around the world. He is currently the co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics.

Register once to receive the Zoom meeting link that will be used for all lectures in this series.

Questions? Contact Debbie Aube at debbie.aube@stanford.edu

The Web of Power: How Elite Networks Shaped War and China

Scholars have argued that powerful individuals can influence the path of a nation's development. Yet, the process through which individuals affect macro-level political economy outcomes remains unclear.  This study uses the deadliest civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion (1850--1864), to elucidate how one individual---Zeng Guofan---employed his personal elite networks to organize an army that suppressed the rebellion, and how these networks consequently affected the power distribution of the nation. Two findings stand out: (i) counties with more elites in Zeng's pre-war networks experienced more soldier deaths after he took power; and (ii) the post-war political power shifted significantly toward the home counties of these very elites, which created a less-balanced national-level power distribution.  Our findings highlight the role of elite networks that propagate individual-level influences to shape national politics and the distribution of power in a society. 

About the Speaker

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Ruixue Jia is a Visiting Senior Fellow at London School of Economics and an Associate Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego. She is interested in the interplay of economics, history and politics. One stream of her research focuses on understanding elite formation and elite influence, in both historical and modern contexts. A second focus of her work is the deep historical roots of economic development. More recently, she started following the ongoing transformation of the manufacturing sector in China and expanded her interest to labor and technology issues. For more information, please visit her personal site.

This event will be held in-person at Stanford University, however, the lecture will be recorded. If you are interested in viewing the recording, please contact Debbie Aube.

Questions? Contact Debbie Aube at debbie.aube@stanford.edu

While the number of women in political office around the world is on the rise, men continue to outnumber women at high rates in top leadership positions. There are many reasons why it remains difficult for women to reach, and keep, powerful positions within politics that cover a myriad of electoral, institutional, and individual conditions. Women often become leaders of organizations precisely when leadership conditions are most difficult, and therefore less attractive to powerful men (i.e. the glass cliff). Under these conditions, we might expect women to face greater challenges during their leadership, potentially affecting how long they are able to maintain their leadership roles. Thus, it is impossible to investigate how gender impacts leadership without accounting for selection conditions that place leaders in power. In this paper we take a holistic approach to examining the gendered nature of leadership survival. We investigate how the conditions under which party leaders are chosen, coupled with party performance while in office, impact how long men and women serve as party leaders. In order to do so, we construct a two-stage model that accounts for the endogeneity of the selection process alongside the impact of party performance on the survival of leaders. Using data from 212 leadership terms in eleven industrialized democracies between 1979 and 2018, we find that while women leaders are selected under similar conditions to men, their leadership tenure is more vulnerable to shifts in vote share. Vote share appears to be the main driver of women’s replacement. Men are less susceptible to changes in votes share than women but are also punished for poor poll performance and government loss.

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Andrea S. Aldrich is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Yale University and her research interests are focused on political representation, gender, and comparative political institutions. Her work examines the relationship between internal political party dynamics and legislative representation. She is particularly interested in investigating the influence of internal party organization on gender equality in elections and party leadership, and her research has recently been published in JCMS: the Journal of Common Market Studies, Party Politics, and Politics & Gender. Before arriving at Yale, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Houston with the Political Parties Database under the direction of Dr. Susan Scarrow, a visiting scholar at Texas A&M University, and Fulbright Scholar at the University of Zagreb in Croatia.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by April 21, 2022.

Co-sponsored by:

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Register: https://bit.ly/3Ncvj7B

AHPP “Aligning incentives” series final webinar: May 12th 6pm PDT, May 13th 9am in Hong Kong and Singapore

How has Myanmar’s health system dealt with the devastation caused by the coup and the pandemic, and what are the current opportunities and challenges for response and recovery? In this panel of two experts, Dr. Thin Zaw will first discuss how Myanmar’s health system and health workforce are endeavoring to respond to the syndemic crisis, a deadly combination of the global pandemic, the military coup, and post-coup civil conflicts. She will also discuss how stakeholders are working together to try to mitigate the crisis, and how a federal health system could be built up to align incentives for effective collaboration among ethnic health organizations. Second, Dr. Tun will provide a grassroots medical humanitarian perspective on what is happening in Myanmar. He will present results of a mixed-methods survey conducted in non-military-controlled areas from October to December 2021, discussing how Myanmar professionals including healthcare workers are spearheading the Civil Disobedience Movement, helping internally displaced people, and trying to address the healthcare needs of populations in conflict areas.

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Register: bit.ly/3tymltK

Gender and socioeconomic differences affect a country's ability to support its older adult population. Specifically, the longevity risk associated with females' longer life expectancy entails different needs between genders in old age. In the first project, we aimed to quantify gender differences in the aging experience of OECD countries. Our second project compares differences in projections of disability and chronic diseases among future cohorts of older adults, including disparities by educational attainment. The model projected future chronic diseases and disability trends in Singapore and South Korea from 2020 to 2050. This presentation focuses on gender and socioeconomic differences in aging.

Register: bit.ly/3wpm8uB

Most studies on China’s relations with Southeast Asian states focus on China’s power and how such power has been used to achieve influence in the region. The emphasis is on intention and causation: how China willingly uses its power to coerce, coopt, or persuade others to behave in a certain way. Professor Han will acknowledge but go beyond this conventional approach to explore the unintended outcomes and ripple effects that are also associated with China’s presence in Southeast Asia. His talk will feature a typology for use in thinking about China’s regional presence and the various everyday forms that it takes. He will argue that we need to understand such nuance and complexity if we are to make sense of China’s relations with Southeast Asia and what they imply.

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Stanford students are invited to a question-and-answer session with Professor Michael McFaul about the current war in Ukraine. Professor McFaul is a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. This event is a chance to hear from him directly about Russia's attack on Ukraine, and for students to hear and connect with each other during this urgent crisis.