About the Seminar: As democracy hangs in the balance around the globe, people all over the world are pouring into the streets. Yet, the overwhelming response is stasis. Can people-powered movements make change possible? Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st c. America is a new book that looks systematically at the outliers to identify the characteristics that successful movement organizations share. Drawing on six cases in the United States, the book shows how these movements won not by doing things we all know--registering voters, canvassing neighborhoods and so on--but instead by negotiating for power in ways that rejected the false choice between idealism and pragmatism, between working inside the system and outside the system, between articulating a bold vision and making political compromises. Through careful analysis and vivid storytelling, the story turns conventional stereotypes of activists on their head.

 

 

About the Speaker: Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in the study of organizing, movements, civic engagement, and democracy. She has published four books and numerous articles in the American Political Science Review, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and numerous other outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a fifth book, to be published with Knopf (an imprint of Penguin Random House), about faith and race in America, with a particular focus on evangelical megachurches.

This seminar is presented in partnership with the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.

About the Seminar: Domestic migration separates voters into nationally- and locally-minded electorates because migrants differ from non-migrants regarding the strength of their local identities. To demonstrate how migration alters the importance of local identities, I study sub-national variation in the nationalization of local elections: in out-migration areas, strong local identities mean that non-migrant voters are active in local politics and consider locally defined issues when voting, while weak local identities lower migrant voters' ability to do so in in-migration areas. I support my argument using household panel data and comprehensive data on cross-county migration, national and sub-national elections, and civil society organizations in contemporary Germany. My identification strategy uses a shift-share instrument for migration and exploits a large-scale welfare reform in 2005 that lastingly altered domestic migration flows. My focus on local identities calls for a reappraisal of conventional descriptions of contemporary democratic politics, which mostly examines divides in national politics. The paper identifies a new research agenda on the political consequences of domestic migration, which has important implications for our understanding of democratic polarization and local service delivery.

 

 

About the Speaker: Hans Lueders holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His research seeks to understand the causes and consequences of political inequality in different political contexts. Hans is currently working on a book project that links political inequality in contemporary democratic societies to domestic migration. Additionally, Hans researches political inequality in closed authoritarian regimes, where state institutions ensure that citizens have little political say. His work identifies little-acknowledged ways through which citizens can still influence politics despite this extreme inequality. Moreover, his research on unauthorized migration in the United States studies political inequality from the perspective of a politically marginalized group. It seeks to understand how unauthorized immigrants navigate life while being politically disenfranchised.  Hans’ work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy, and the European Political Science Review, among others.

About the Seminar: How are politicians selected in the countries of Middle East and North Africa where electoral politics is to a large extent dominated by secular-Islamist competition? By bringing together a novel candidate survey, a contemporaneous household survey, interviews and a conjoint experiment with party officials, this paper describes the political selection processes around the first democratic local elections in Tunisia. It shows that there is a divergence between the main secular party and the main Islamist party: The secular party suffers from a relatively negative political selection, because its candidates are less competent even though the secular voter base has a larger share of citizens with higher educational attainment. Party-related factors, i.e. what the party elites look for when selecting their candidates, are likely to explain a large share of this divergence: Secular party officials prioritize connectedness and loyalty over competence.

 

 

About the Speaker: Aytug Sasmaz is a political scientist working on political parties, social policy and democratic decline, primarily in the Middle East and North Africa region. He recently received his PhD from Harvard.

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.

* 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.