About the Seminar: Do voters value their political party over democracy? This paper examines how citizens make the trade-off between party loyalty and democracy when a president of their party violates essential democratic norms. Using two large-n original survey experiments, I show that partisanship is a predominant lens through which people view democracy. I find that, while in the aggregate people are fairly sensitive to differences in the severity of norm violations, they often choose their party and their president over support for those norms. Additionally, I demonstrate that members of the Democratic and Republican parties are starkly different in their treatment of democracy; Republican respondents have a higher tolerance for norm violations than Democratic respondents in all scenarios. This paper highlights the influence presidents have over democracy due to strong party allegiance.

About the Speaker: Alejandra is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. She studies how Americans think about democracy in an era of polarized politics and how presidents influence conceptions of democratic norms. Broadly, her research interests include presidential influence, democratic norms, voter behavior, presidential elections, experimental methods, survey methodology, and gender and politics. She graduated from Brigham Young University with a BA in Political Science.

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* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

This event is hosted by the Hoover Institution and co-sponsored by CISAC.

Registration required to attend in person.

Event and Registration Link: https://www.hoover.org/events/spies-lies-and-algorithms

About the Event: Spying has never been more ubiquitous―or less understood. The world is drowning in spy movies, TV shows, and novels, but universities offer more courses on rock and roll than on the CIA and there are more congressional experts on powdered milk than espionage. This crisis in intelligence education is distorting public opinion, fueling conspiracy theories, and hurting intelligence policy. In Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, Amy Zegart separates fact from fiction as she offers an engaging and enlightening account of the past, present, and future of American espionage as it faces a revolution driven by digital technology.

Drawing on decades of research and hundreds of interviews with intelligence officials, Zegart provides a history of U.S. espionage, from George Washington’s Revolutionary War spies to today’s spy satellites; examines how fictional spies are influencing real officials; gives an overview of intelligence basics and life inside America’s intelligence agencies; explains the deadly cognitive biases that can mislead analysts; and explores the vexed issues of traitors, covert action, and congressional oversight. Most of all, Zegart describes how technology is empowering new enemies and opportunities, and creating powerful new players, such as private citizens who are successfully tracking nuclear threats using little more than Google Earth. And she shows why cyberspace is, in many ways, the ultimate cloak-and-dagger battleground, where nefarious actors employ deception, subterfuge, and advanced technology for theft, espionage, and information warfare.

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About the Speaker: 

Amy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She is also a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Chair of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence and International Security Steering Committee, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She specializes in U.S. intelligence, emerging technologies and national security, grand strategy, and global political risk management.

SEMINAR RECORDING

All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. This event is part of the year-long initiative on “Ethics & Political Violence” jointly organized by the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. This event is hosted by CISAC and is co-sponsored by Society for International Affairs at Stanford, McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Center for South Asia.

About the Event: The dramatic scenes the world witnessed during the fall of Kabul in 2021 following the withdrawal of US and allied forces from Afghanistan nearly coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaeda and the subsequent US and allied invasion of Afghanistan. The United States committed trillions of dollars, dispatched soldiers, diplomats and spies across the globe, and made dramatic alterations to domestic and international law to combat terrorism. The material, humanitarian and normative consequences of two decades of war have been significant, both globally and in Afghanistan specifically. In this panel, Dr. Felter, Dr. Mir and Professor Zegart will assess U.S. responses during the global war on terror, identify unexpected outcomes and lessons learned, and ultimately weigh the costs and benefits of this two-decade struggle against terrorism.

About the Speakers: 

Joe Felter is a William J. Perry Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and research fellow at the Hoover Institution.  From 2017 to 2019, Felter served as US deputy assistant secretary of defense for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. There he was the principal advisor for all policy matters pertaining to development and implementation of defense strategies and plans in the region and responsible for managing bilateral security relationships and guiding Department of Defense (DoD) engagement with multilateral institutions.  

Asfandyar Mir is a senior expert in the Asia Center at USIP. Previously, heheld various fellowships at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. His research interests include the international relations of South Asia, U.S. counterterrorism policy and political violence — with a regional focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Asfandyar Mir’s research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as International Security, International Studies Quarterly and Security Studies. He received his doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago and a master’s and bachelor’s from Stanford University.

Amy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She is also a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Chair of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence and International Security Steering Committee, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She specializes in U.S. intelligence, emerging technologies and national security, grand strategy, and global political risk management.

About the Seminar: Nick surveyed the universe of recent applicants to the Indonesian civil service to study the effects of high-stakes examinations on political attitudes. Leveraging applicants' scores on the civil service examination, he employs a regression discontinuity design to compare the attitudes of applicants who narrowly failed against those who narrowly passed. Nick shows that the simple fact of failure on the civil service examination negatively affects applicants’ belief in the legitimacy of the process, some attitudes towards outgroups, and national identification. Next, Nick found that applicants who were offered – and accepted – employment in the civil service reported higher satisfaction with the process, greater amity towards outgroups, and higher national identification. Since more applicants fail than pass, these results suggest that civil service examination outcomes may have unintended consequences for social cohesion – particularly in contexts where successful applicants disproportionately hail from specific ethnic, racial, or religious groups.

For Fall Quarter 2021, we will be hosting a hybrid weekly Research Seminar Series. All events will be open to the public online via Zoom, and a limited-capacity in-person element for Stanford affiliates may be added in accordance with the County's health and safety guidelines.
 

About the Speaker: Nick is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, studying comparative politics. Most of his research is interested in identifying whether and when certain political institutions worsen group-based antagonisms. He has a particular regional interest in Southeast Asia.

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* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/Mip2dRr2w7o

About the Event: With the rapid rise of China, power transitions and the possibility of great power conflict are the focus of popular and scholarly attention. The discipline of International Relations offers many insights on why violent power transition conflicts occur, yet few substantive treatments exist on why and how peaceful change happen in world politics. The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations (co-edited by T.V. Paul, Deborah Larson, Harold Trinkunas, Anders Wivel and Ralf Emmers) is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject of peaceful change in the field. It contains some 41 chapters, written by scholars from different theoretical and conceptual backgrounds examining the multi-faceted dimensions of this subject. Chapters in the volume examine this issue through the lens of different approaches in international relations theory, through a focus on key challenges in the international system, and from regional and state-level perspectives on the prospects for peaceful change. This panel with Handbook editors and contributors will discuss the conceptual framework, substantive contributions, and key findings of the project.

About the Speakers:

T.V. Paul is James McGill Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Montreal, Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He served as the President of International Studies Association (ISA) for 2016-17. He is the Founding Director of the Global Research Network on Peaceful Change (GRENPEC). Paul is the author or editor of 21 books and over 80 scholarly articles/book chapters including: Restraining Great Powers: Soft Balancing from Empires to the Global Era (Yale University Press, 2018); The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World (Oxford University Press, 2013); Globalization and the National Security State (with N. Ripsman, Oxford University Press, 2010); The Tradition of Non-use of Nuclear Weapons (Stanford University Press, 2009); India in the World Order: Searching for Major Power Status (with B.R. Nayar Cambridge University Press, 2002). Paul currently serves as the editor of the Georgetown University Press book series: South Asia in World Affairs.

Deborah Welch Larson is professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. at Stanford University. Her publications include Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Anatomy of Mistrust: US-Soviet Relations during the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); and “Status Seekers: Chinese and Russian Responses to U.S. Primacy,” International Security 34, no. 4 (Spring 2010): 63-95 (with Alexei Shevchenko). She has most recently published Quest for Status: Chinese and Russian Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), with Alexei Shevchenko.

Alexandra Gheciu is a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and Associate Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies. Her research interests are in the fields of international security, international institutions, Euro-Atlantic relations, global governance and the liberal order, the Global Right, state (re)building, and International Relations theory.

Alexandra's publications include, in addition to articles in leading academic journals, several books: NATO in the ‘'New Europe': The Politics of International Socialization After the Cold War: (Stanford University Press, 2005); Securing Civilization? (Oxford University Press, 2008),  The Return of the Public in Global Governance (co-edited with Jacqueline Best, Cambridge University Press, 2014 and 2015);  and, more recently, Security Entrepreneurs: Performing Protection in Post-Cold War Europe (Oxford University Press, 2018); and  The Oxford Handbook of International Security (co-edited with William Wohlforth, Oxford University Press, 2018).

The CDDRL Spring seminar series will be open to the Stanford community via Zoom

and will be recorded for the general public to watch later.

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Audrey Bloom - Firestone Award Winner

Major: Human Biology

Advisor: Terry Moe

Thesis Title: How Doctors Influence the Price of Healthcare in the United States and Japan: The Critical Role of Interest Group Politics in America’s Healthcare Cost Crisis

 

 

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Please join us for our final seminar to hear our Honors Program award winners present their research. 

Audrey Bloom - Firestone Award Winner
Major: Human Biology
Advisor: Terry Moe
Thesis Title: How Doctors Influence the Price of Healthcare in the United States and Japan: The Critical Role of Interest Group Politics in America’s Healthcare Cost Crisis


Hiroto Saito - CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Winner
Major: International Relations
Advisor: Dr. Gil-li Vardi, Dr. Stephen Stedman
Thesis Title: Colombia after the FARC: Has Peace Really Arrived?

A regime that is responsive to social unrest is one that takes steps to address social grievances and demands, rather than solely suppressing them. The distinction cannot be applied to authoritarian regimes if they are never responsive and always repressive. But that categorical description does not fit the behavior of the self-described communist regimes in Vietnam and China. When facing public protests triggered by official land seizures, both party-states have sometimes behaved responsively.  But not in the same manner or to the same extent.

Dr. Truong will show how and explain why, despite their many similarities, compared with China, Vietnam has been more responsive, and its responsiveness has been more institutionalized. Drawing on 16 months of field research in the two countries, she will make two arguments rooted in the differing histories of the two countries: In Vietnam, a more responsive party-state was forged in a crucible of accommodation and constraint that distinctively affected the political trajectories of the party and the state.  In China, the party-state’s path to power was riddled with confrontations and the dominance of elite over societal interests. 

Democracies and democratic values are being widely challenged in Asia today. It is accordingly vital that academics and policymakers develop a more nuanced and contextual understanding of authoritarian regimes and their institutional histories and dynamics, including their different ways of dealing with societal pressures. Dr. Truong’s talk and the discussion to follow should serve that goal.

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Stephan Haggard is the Krause Distinguished Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego. His publications on international political economy include The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (2000); Developmental States (2018); and Pathways from the Periphery: The Newly Industrializing Countries in the International System (1990). His work with Robert Kaufman on transitions to and from democratic rule includes Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World (Cambridge 2021); Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites and Regime Change (2016); Democracy, Development and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe (2008); and The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (1995). His work on North Korea with Marcus Noland includes Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements and the Case of North Korea (2017); Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea (2011); Famine in North Korea (2007); and a blog, Witness to Transformation (2017-19). He currently writes for the The Peninsula, a blog about Korea. His PhD and MA in political science are from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Tuong Vu has been on the faculty of the University of Oregon since 2008 and has held visiting appointments at Princeton University and the National University of Singapore. He is a former co-editor in chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies and the founding director of the US-Vietnam Research Center at the University of Oregon. His research has focused on the comparative politics of state formation, revolutions, nationalism, and communism in Northeast and Southeast Asia, and more recently, on Vietnam’s modern history and politics. He is the author and co-editor of six books and numerous journal articles and book chapters. Among his recent and forthcoming books are The Republican Era in Vietnam’s Modern History, vol. 1: From the Idea to the First Republic (1920-1963) (Hawaii, forthcoming), co-edited with Nu-Anh Tran; The Republic of Vietnam, 1955-1975: Vietnamese Perspectives on Nation-Building (Cornell, 2020), coedited with Sean Fear; and Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology (Cambridge, 2017). He has a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MPA (Master in Public Affairs) from Princeton University. 

About the Event:

The Autocratic Middle Class studies the post-communist middle classes – not as a force for democracy, but as a source of support for autocracy and authoritarian resilience. It helps to explain why authoritarianism deepened across the ex-Soviet region over a period when the middle class was rapidly expanding; why anti-Putin protests in Russia have thus far failed to achieve a critical mass; and why it has been so difficult to consolidate democracy in Ukraine. Drawing on attitudinal surveys, unique data on protest participation, and extensive fieldwork in the former Soviet Union, this book shows that state dependence weakens the middle classes’ incentives to prefer and pursue democracy and sheds light on why development doesn’t necessarily lead to democratization.

About the Speaker:

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* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

This event is co-sponsored by the Project on Russian Power and Purpose in the 21st Century and the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/gDD68gqClt8

About the Event: Media and public discussions tend to understand Russian politics as a direct reflection of Vladimir Putin’s seeming omnipotence or Russia’s unique history and culture. Yet Russia is similar to other autocracies—and recognizing this illuminates the inherent limits to Putin’s power. Weak Strongman challenges the conventional wisdom about Putin’s Russia, highlighting the difficult trade-offs that confront the Kremlin on issues ranging from election fraud and repression to propaganda and foreign policy.

Drawing on three decades of his own on-the-ground experience and research as well as insights from a new generation of social scientists that have received little attention outside academia, Timothy Frye reveals how much we overlook about today’s Russia when we focus solely on Putin or Russian exceptionalism. Frye brings a new understanding to a host of crucial questions: How popular is Putin? Is Russian propaganda effective? Why are relations with the West so fraught? Can Russian cyber warriors really swing foreign elections? In answering these and other questions, Frye offers a highly accessible reassessment of Russian politics that highlights the challenges of governing Russia and the nature of modern autocracy.

Rich in personal anecdotes and cutting-edge social science, Weak Strongman offers the best evidence available about how Russia actually works.

Book Purchase: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691212463/weak-strongman

Discount Code: FRYE 30%

About the Speaker: Timothy Frye is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University and Co-Director of the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow. He is also the Editor of Post-Soviet Affairs.

Professor Frye received a B.A. in Russian language and literature from Middlebury College in 1986, an M.I.A. from Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs in 1992, and a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1997. He served as the Director of the Harriman Institute from 2009-2015 and as Chair of the Political Science Department from 2016-18.