Abstract:

What explains the decline of clientelism in advanced democracies? This paper examines the United States and Britain from 1880-1920, a period in which political parties shifted from clientelistic to programmatic competition. I theorize that business pressures incentivize parties to change clientelistic strategies. Using archival and quantitative evidence, I find that the rise of managerial capitalism, the establishment of national business organizations, and the increasing costs of clientelism to economic development led businesses to push for programmatic reforms.

Speaker Bio:

Didi Kuo is a fellow with the Project on American Democracy at CDDRL. Her research interests include clientelism, democracy, and corruption. Her book project investigates clientelism in historical and comparative perspective using archival resources and new measures of electoral fraud. She received her PhD in political science from Harvard University in 2013.

The Mediterranean Studies Forum presents a panel discussion about the popular protests and recent developments in the Middle East.

Co-sponsored by the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the CDDRL Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, and the Stanford Humanities Center Workshop on Ethnic Minorities, Religious Communities and Rights and Democracy in the Modern Middle East and Central Asia.

Amr Adly (Stanford University), “Egypt after June 30^th: Between Abortive and Potential Fascism”

Adly is postdoctoral fellow in Stanford CDDRL’s Arab Reform and Democracy Program. He received his Ph.D. in political and social Sciences from the European University. His research focuses on state reform and development in the context of the Middle East. He is currently working on a project about entrepreneurial reforms in Egypt and Tunisia after the Arab Spring.

Ayça Alemdaroğlu (Stanford University), “Youth and Politics in Turkey”

Alemdaroglu is a lecturer in Stanford's Introductory Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Cambridge. Her research and teaching interests include social inequality and change, youth experiences, gender and sexuality, experiences of modernity, commercialization of education, nationalism and eugenics. In Winter 2014, she will teach ANTHRO 149A/URBANST144 Tahrir to Taksim: Cities and Citizens in the Middle East.

Alexander Key (Stanford University), “Should It Matter What We Call It? Islamic, Democratic, and Spring Politics”

Key is assistant professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Stanford. He received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard University. His research focuses on literary and intellectual history of the Arabic and Persian-speaking worlds from the seventh century, together with Western political thought and philosophy. He is currently working on two book projects about the Arabic philosophy of language during the 11th century. Key is founding editor of New Middle Eastern Studies, where he has edited articles on women Iran's nuclear program, Salafi conceptions of citizenship, and art in the Arab Spring. 

Kabir Tambar  (Stanford University), “Popular Protest and the Politics of the Present in Turkey”Panelists will discuss the contemporary political situation in the Middle East with special respect to Egypt and Turkey.

Tambar is assistant professor of anthropology at Stanford. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. As an anthropologist of the Middle East and Muslim world, he has published widely on secular political identities, contemporary appropriations of and challenges to Turkish nationalism, and the politics of devotional affect in Alevi Muslim contexts. His book, The Reckoning of Pluralism: Political Voice and the Demands of History in Turkey, is coming out from Stanford University Press in 2013.

This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

With the creation of the euro, the European Union embarked on a grand experiment. From the beginning, member countries had widely different degrees of budget, or fiscal, transparency. Early warnings about the potential of moral hazard in public finances as a consequence of asymmetric information about fiscal decisions were largely disregarded. In this paper, we analyze the political origins of differences in adherence to the fiscal framework of the euro. We identify in detail how manipulation of subcomponents of Stock-Flow Adjustments in national accounts is used to produce electoral cycles under the radar of the budget surveillance system of the EU. We show how these domestic incentives to use fiscal policy for electoral purposes and respond to fiscal rules at the supranational level interacted with limited budget transparency at the level of national fiscal authorities to produce a systematic undermining of the Economic and Monetary Union through employment of fiscal gimmicks or creative accounting.

David Dreyer Lassen (PhD 2002, Copenhagen) is Professor of Economics at the University of Copenhagen. His research is in empirical political economy and public economics, and includes work on fiscal transparency, political budget cycles, the politics of budgeting, and quasi-experiments in political behavior and political attitudes. His publications includes articles in American Economic Journal-Economic Policy, American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of Public Economics and the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization. He has been a visiting scholar at IQSS, Harvard University, and currently holds a Starting Grant from the European Research Council.

Abstract
We know poor governance when we see it, and we also have models of effective, responsive, and accountable governments across the globe. But the truth is that we know much less about how change happens. The limits of legal reforms and institutional forms imported from the outside are apparent, and additional resources are rarely a solution on their own.  Scholars increasingly agree on the need to develop reforms with greater consideration of local context and capacity.  New technologies create opportunities for institutional design, yet many widely touted interventions fail to attract government and citizen users.

Against this backdrop, Associate Professor of Political Science Jeremy Weinstein and I partnered over the 2012-2013 academic year to design the Governance Collaboratory. Our goal is to use the methods of human centered design to help civil society actors and government reformers develop innovations with the potential to disrupt the status quo. We conceived and tested five prototypes for our program, which involved applying the process of design thinking to various governance challenges around the world. I will discuss the key insights we uncovered relating to the substantive problems we addressed, as well as our findings on the utility of design thinking to support governance innovation.

Jenny Stefanotti is currently a fellow at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, where she applies design thinking to her work at the intersection of technology and international development. She is co-founder of the Governance Collaboratory, a Stanford-based program which supports civil society activists and government reformers to develop innovations that make government more efficient, empower people to have a say in how they are governed, and hold those in power accountable for what they deliver.

Prior to her post at the d.school, Jenny spent over ten years addressing strategic challenges across private, public, and non-profit sectors. She holds a Master’s in Public Administration and International Development from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

How do political institutions shape the costs of responding to financial crises? Previous research contends that policy-makers in democracies choose policies less costly to taxpayers than politicians in autocracies. In this research note we re-evaluate Keefer's (2007) contribution to this body of research using an updated theoretical model as well as updated fiscal costs data, which is his dependent variable. We argue that political institutions shapes when politicians spend, rather than how much they spend, in response to financial crises.  In the updated theoretical model we include the possibility that politicians can shift crisis response costs into the future by using policies that create contingent liabilities. Politicians facing removal pressures--such as elections--have incentives to create contingent, rather than immediately realized liabilities. Empirically we illustrate this dynamic by first updating Keefer (2007) using new data on the fiscal costs of financial crises. We further substantiate our argument with Eurostat's detailed yearly, cross-country comparable data from the late 2000s financial crisis to show that politicians in democracies tend to increase contingent liabilities,  while also decreasing realized liabilities, before elections.

Efforts to bolster economic and private sector development in Palestine are central components to many current efforts to build peace and resolve the conflict. But what do we really know about the relationship between economic development and conflict resolution? What does research, and experience tell us about when economic interventions help reduce conflict, and when they fail? This distinguished panel will offer insights and lessons from Palestine -- with voices from the Palestinian business community, the US government, and academia.

The panel is co-sponsored by the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

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