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 

 

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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. 

 

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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

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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 

 

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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.

This seminar will present the first evidence of systematic ethnic discrimination in Artificial Intelligence (AI) used to assist judges in criminal sentencing. Using audit experiments on a commercial criminal sentencing software, we find that AI predicts longer sentences for defendants with ethnic minority status and names that convey minority cues. The magnitude of discrimination is similar to existing findings from sentencing decisions of judges. Additionally, we find that AI may introduce new forms of discrimination not seen in human judgment.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
 

Eddie Yang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at UC San Diego and a predoctoral fellow at CDDRL and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. His research focuses on repression and the politics of Artificial Intelligence. His dissertation studies how existing repressive institutions limit the usefulness of AI for authoritarian control, with a focus on China. His work has been published in both computer science and political science. 

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

Challenging the conventional wisdom that power begets power, this paper argues that political gains for marginalized groups can create the very conditions for their political demise. When a marginalized group comes to power without institutional protections such as quotas or reservations, it can divide the marginalized group and unite the dominant group. I study this process, which I call the representation trap, in the context of one of the largest marginalized groups in the world's largest democracy: Indian Muslims. While India has made strides toward the political inclusion of many marginalized groups, Muslims stand in stark contrast, experiencing poor political representation, low socioeconomic status, and communal violence.

Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that a Muslim political win leads to an almost 30 percent lower likelihood of subsequent Muslim victory. I document the mechanisms for marginalized group divisions and dominant group consolidation through additional election analyses, experimental evidence from an original, in-person survey of about 5000 Muslim and Hindu voters, and qualitative evidence drawing on about 150 elite and voter interviews. Taken together, the theory and findings challenge the perspective that representation necessarily catalyzes the political empowerment of marginalized groups.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
 

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Feyaad Allie is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Stanford University and a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His dissertation project examines the sustained exclusion of marginalized groups in multi-ethnic democracies with a focus on one of the largest marginalized groups in the world’s largest democracy: Indian Muslims. This work identifies how dominant group consolidation and marginalized group divisions contribute to poor political outcomes for Muslims in India. In other ongoing research, Feyaad studies majority-minority relations and the intersection of technology and politics. At Stanford, Feyaad is affiliated with the Immigration Policy Lab and the Abbasi Program for Islamic Studies. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the King Center on Global Development, and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Prior to graduate school, Feyaad worked on an international development project in Nairobi, Kenya, and received his B.A. in Government from Dartmouth College. 

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

Lisa Blaydes and Hesham Sallam join CDDRL to discuss their new edited volume, Struggles for Political Change in the Arab World: Regimes, Oppositions, and External Actors after the Spring (University of Michigan Press, 2022).

The advent of the Arab Spring in late 2010 was a hopeful moment for partisans of progressive change throughout the Arab world. Authoritarian leaders who had long stood in the way of meaningful political reform in the countries of the region were either ousted or faced the possibility of political if not physical demise. The downfall of long-standing dictators as they faced off with strong-willed protesters was a clear sign that democratic change was within reach. Throughout the last ten years, however, the Arab world has witnessed authoritarian regimes regaining resilience, pro-democracy movements losing momentum, and struggles between the first and the latter involving regional and international powers.

This volume explains how relevant political players in Arab countries among regimes, opposition movements, and external actors have adapted ten years after the onset of the Arab Spring. It includes contributions on Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, and Tunisia. It also features studies on the respective roles of the United States, China, Iran, and Turkey vis-à-vis questions of political change and stability in the Arab region, and includes a study analyzing the role of Saudi Arabia and its allies in subverting revolutionary movements in other countries.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

 

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Lisa Blaydes is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton University Press, 2018).

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Hesham Sallam is a research scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and serves as the associate director of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. He is also a co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine and serves on the Editorial Committee of Middle East Report. His research focuses on Islamist movements and the politics of economic reform in the Arab World. He is the author of Classless Politics: Islamist Movements, the Left, and Authoritarian Legacies in Egypt (Columbia University Press, 2022), co-editor of Struggles for Political Change in the Arab World (University of Michigan Press, 2022), and editor of Egypt’s Parliamentary Elections 2011-2012: A Critical Guide to a Changing Political Arena (Tadween Publishing, 2013).

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

Global Health Economics, China, & the Science of Health Care Delivery in the Digital Age

Advances in artificial intelligence, use of "big data", digital platforms enabling mass collaboration, automation, the "internet-of-things" and other so-called "4th Industrial Revolution" (4IR) technologies are enabling a radical shift in how healthcare is delivered. Few places are attempting to integrate these technologies into healthcare as rapidly as China. This talk will discuss China's comparative advantage in the adoption of these technologies and lay out a research agenda for the economics of digital health. While these technologies bring potential to produce massive improvements in access to high-quality care and lower costs, this result is far from certain. Beyond mere technical uncertainty, 4IR technologies are likely to produce profound changes in healthcare markets by altering the nature of incentives in the health system and relationships between patients, providers, payers. Evidence on these issues is needed to inform policy and regulation aiming to maximize social value and mitigate unintended consequences. Specific applications will be drawn from online research in China and other middle-income countries.

About the Speaker

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Sean Sylvia is an Assistant Professor of health economics at UNC. His primary research interest is in the delivery of healthcare in China and other middle-income countries. Working with multidisciplinary teams of collaborators, he conducts large-scale population-based surveys and randomized trials to develop and test new approaches to provide healthcare to the poor and marginalized. His recent work focuses on the use of information technology to expand access to quality healthcare. 

For more information, please visit his personal website.

This event will be held in-person at Stanford University, masks are not required but strongly encouraged.

Questions? Contact sccei-communications@stanford.edu

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The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security 
북한의 난제: 인권과 핵안보의 균형
한국어 번역판 발간 행사 북토크

In association with the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB), a book talk on the Korean translated version of The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security is held in Seoul, Korea. 

For more information about the book, please visit the publication webpage.

<Consecutive Korean-English interpretation is provided at the book talk event>

Presenters:

Gi-Wook Shin, Director of Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University

Robert R. King, former Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues

Joon Oh, former South Korean Ambassador to the UN

Minjung Kim, Associate Executive Director, Save North Korea

Discussants:

Yeosang Yoon, Chief Director, Database Center for North Korean Human Rights

Haley Gordon, Research Associate, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University

Sookyoung Kim, Assistant Professor, Hanshin University

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South Korea's Democracy in Crisis: The Threats of Illiberalism, Populism, and Polarization 
위기의 한국 민주주의: 비자유주의, 포퓰리즘, 양극화의 위협

In this book launch event held in Korea, the participants will examine and discuss the threats to democracy in Korea. For more information about the book, please visit the publication webpage.

<The book launch event will be in Korean>

14:00-14:05 Introduction by Ho-Ki Kim, Professor of Sociology, Yonsei University

Moderated by Dukjin Chang, Professor of Sociology, Seoul National University

14:05-15:20 Presentations

Democracy in Crisis: Populism in Post-Truth Era
Gi-Wook Shin, Director of Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University
Ho-Ki Kim, Professor of Sociology, Yonsei University

Two divergences in South Korea’s Economy and Disparities in Democracy
Jun-Ho Jeong, Professor of Economics, Kangwon University
Il-Young Lee, Professor of Economics, Hanshin University

Judicialization of Politics and Politicization of  the Judiciary in Korea : Challenges in Maintaining the Balance of Power
Seongwook Heo, Professor of Law, Seoul National University

15:20-15:40 Break

15:40-16:55 Panel Discussion

Won-Taek Kang, Professor of Political Science, Seoul National University
Seeun Jeong, Professor of Economics, Chungnam National University
Chulwoo Lee, Professor of Law, Yonsei University

16:55-17:00 Closing Remarks by Gi-Wook Shin, Director of Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University

This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.