Governance

FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling. 

FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world. 

FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.

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Social Media and Democracy book symposium

Please join the Cyber Policy Center for a discussion of Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field and Prospects for Reform, a new book with chapters by scholars and faculty at the Cyber Policy Center. The book explores the emerging multi-disciplinary field of social media and democracy, by synthesizing what we know, identifying what we do not know and obstacles to future research, and charting a course for the future inquiry. Chapters by leading scholars cover major topics – from disinformation to hate speech to political advertising – and situate recent developments in the context of key policy questions. In addition, the book canvasses existing reform proposals in order to address widely perceived threats that social media poses to democracy. 

Please note that we will also have a YouTube livestream available for potential overflow or for anyone having issues connecting via Zoom: https://youtu.be/KXtMB-3DlHc

REGISTER

 

AGENDA subject to change, with Q&A integrated throughout

  • 9 a.m.: Introduction with Nathaniel Persily, James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Faculty Co-Director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and Joshua A. Tucker, Professor of Politics, affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University
  • 9:15 a.m.-10:30 a.m.
    • Misinformation, Disinformation, and Online Propaganda with Andrew M. Guess, Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University.
    • Online Hate Speech with Alexandra A. Siegel, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder
    • Bots and Computational Propaganda: Automation for Communication and Control with Samuel C. Woolley, Assistant Professor at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin
    • Online Political Advertising in the United States with Travis N. Ridout, Thomas S. Foley Distinguished Professor of Government and Public Policy in the School of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at Washington State University and Co-Director of the Wesleyan Media Project
  • 10:30 a.m.: 10 min break
  • 10:40 a.m - 11:40 a.m.: 
    • Democratic Creative Destruction? The Effect of a Changing Media Landscape on Democracy with Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Oxford
    • Misinformation and Its Correction with Adam J. Berinksy, Mitsui Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab

    • Comparative Media Regulation in the United States and Europe with Francis Fukuyama, Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University and Andrew Grotto, William J. Perry International Security Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Director of the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center

  • 11:40 a.m.: 10 min break
  • 11:50 a.m - 12:30 p.m.: 
    • Facts and Where to Find Them: Empirical Research on Internet Platforms and Content Moderation with Daphne Keller, Director of the Program on Platform Regulation at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center
    • Democratic Transparency in the Platform Society, with Robert Gorwa, doctoral student in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford
  • 12:30 p.m.Closing and final Q&A with Nathaniel Persily and Joshua A. Tucker

 

Adam J. Berinsky

Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. 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 book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis 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. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

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Francis Fukuyama
Robert Gorwa
Andrew Guess

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C428

Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 723-9866
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Andrew Grotto

Andrew J. Grotto is a research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

Grotto’s research interests center on the national security and international economic dimensions of America’s global leadership in information technology innovation, and its growing reliance on this innovation for its economic and social life. He is particularly interested in the allocation of responsibility between the government and the private sector for defending against cyber threats, especially as it pertains to critical infrastructure; cyber-enabled information operations as both a threat to, and a tool of statecraft for, liberal democracies; opportunities and constraints facing offensive cyber operations as a tool of statecraft, especially those relating to norms of sovereignty in a digitally connected world; and governance of global trade in information technologies.

Before coming to Stanford, Grotto was the Senior Director for Cybersecurity Policy at the White House in both the Obama and Trump Administrations. His portfolio spanned a range of cyber policy issues, including defense of the financial services, energy, communications, transportation, health care, electoral infrastructure, and other vital critical infrastructure sectors; cybersecurity risk management policies for federal networks; consumer cybersecurity; and cyber incident response policy and incident management. He also coordinated development and execution of technology policy topics with a nexus to cyber policy, such as encryption, surveillance, privacy, and the national security dimensions of artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

At the White House, he played a key role in shaping President Obama’s Cybersecurity National Action Plan and driving its implementation. He was also the principal architect of President Trump’s cybersecurity executive order, “Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure.”

Grotto joined the White House after serving as Senior Advisor for Technology Policy to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, advising Pritzker on all aspects of technology policy, including Internet of Things, net neutrality, privacy, national security reviews of foreign investment in the U.S. technology sector, and international developments affecting the competitiveness of the U.S. technology sector.

Grotto worked on Capitol Hill prior to the Executive Branch, as a member of the professional staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He served as then-Chairman Dianne Feinstein’s lead staff overseeing cyber-related activities of the intelligence community and all aspects of NSA’s mission. He led the negotiation and drafting of the information sharing title of the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which later served as the foundation for the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act that President Obama signed in 2015. He also served as committee designee first for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and later for Senator Kent Conrad, advising the senators on oversight of the intelligence community, including of covert action programs, and was a contributing author of the “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program.”

Before his time on Capitol Hill, Grotto was a Senior National Security Analyst at the Center for American Progress, where his research and writing focused on U.S. policy towards nuclear weapons - how to prevent their spread, and their role in U.S. national security strategy.

Grotto received his JD from the University of California at Berkeley, his MPA from Harvard University, and his BA from the University of Kentucky.

Research Scholar, Center for International Security and Cooperation
Director, Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance
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Andrew Grotto
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Daphne Keller is the Director of Platform Regulation at the Stanford Program in Law, Science, & Technology. Her academic, policy, and popular press writing focuses on platform regulation and Internet users'; rights in the U.S., EU, and around the world. Her recent work has focused on platform transparency, data collection for artificial intelligence, interoperability models, and “must-carry” obligations. She has testified before legislatures, courts, and regulatory bodies around the world on topics ranging from the practical realities of content moderation to copyright and data protection. She was previously Associate General Counsel for Google, where she had responsibility for the company’s web search products. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, Brown University, and Head Start.

SHORT PIECES

 

ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS

 

POLICY PUBLICATIONS

 

FILINGS

  • U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief on behalf of Francis Fukuyama, NetChoice v. Moody (2024)
  • U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief with ACLU, Gonzalez v. Google (2023)
  • Comment to European Commission on data access under EU Digital Services Act
  • U.S. Senate testimony on platform transparency

 

PUBLICATIONS LIST

Director of Platform Regulation, Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology (LST)
Social Science Research Scholar
Date Label
Daphne Keller
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Stanford Law School Neukom Building, Room N230 Stanford, CA 94305
650-725-9875
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James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute
Professor, by courtesy, Political Science
Professor, by courtesy, Communication
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Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.   

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Nathaniel Persily
Travis Ridout
Alexandra A. Siegel
Joshua A. Tucker
Samuel C. Woolley
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**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the Event:

On November 3, in the midst of a pandemic, America elects its next President. CDDRL scholars will discuss the election results (or election challenges), Trump and Biden, key Congressional races, and what to expect between November and Inauguration Day. Join Bruce Cain, Nate Persily, Hakeem Jefferson, and Didi Kuo.

About the Speakers:

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. His areas of expertise include political regulation, applied democratic theory, representation and state politics.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, and New York, and as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform.

Hakeem Jefferson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His research interests move at the intersection of American politics and social psychology. In particular, his current work examines the conditions under which members of stigmatized groups punish group members who transgress social norms. Moving beyond a study of identity that centers largely on the attitudes and predilections of dominant social groups, his work explores the psychological and instrumental considerations stigmatized individuals bring to bear in response to “bad” (negatively stereotyped) behavior from within their own group. Using African-Americans as the test case, this work builds on scholarship about the politics of respectability and in-group policing to inform conversations about Blacks’ attitudes toward punitive social policies.

Didi Kuo is the Associate Director for Research and Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics, with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. Her recent work examines changes to party organization, and the impact these changes have on the ability of governments to address challenges posed by global capitalism. She is the author of Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which examines the role of business against clientelism and the development of modern political parties in the nineteenth-century.

Online, via Zoom: REGISTER

Bruce Cain Professor of Political Science at Stanford University
Stanford Law School Neukom Building, Room N230 Stanford, CA 94305
650-725-9875
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James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute
Professor, by courtesy, Political Science
Professor, by courtesy, Communication
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Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.   

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James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Hakeem Jefferson Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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Associate Director for Research and Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.
Seminars
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**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

 

About the Event:

Please join CDDRL as we kick off our 2020-21 seminar series with a panel on American democracy and the 2020 elections. Julia Azari (Marquette University), Ted Johnson (Brennan Center), and David Brady (Hoover Institute) will discuss the critical issues heading in to the Presidential elections this November.

 

About the Speakers:

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Julia Azari
Julia Azari is Associate Professor and Assistant Chair in the Department of Political Science at Marquette University. She holds Ph.D., M.A. and M.Phil. degrees in political science from Yale University, and a B.A. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research and teaching interests include the American presidency, American political parties, the politics of the American state, and qualitative research methods.

 

 

 

 

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Theodore Johnson
Theodore R. Johnson is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. In this role, he explores the intersection of race, politics, and public policy outcomes related to democratic reform. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Dr. Johnson was a career military officer, research manager at Deloitte, and a national fellow at New America.

His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other national and niche publications. He is the author of the forthcoming book When the Stars Begin to Fall, which explores how national solidarity can help overcome the effects of racism. As a military officer served as a speechwriter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as a White House Fellow during the Obama administration, among other roles.
 
Dr. Johnson holds a B.S. in mathematics from Hampton University, an A.L.M. with a concentration in International Relations from Harvard University, and a Doctorate of Law and Policy from Northeastern University.
 

 

 

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David Brady
David Brady is deputy director and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor of Political Science and Ethics in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and professor of political science in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the university.  Brady is an expert on the U.S. Congress and congressional decision making.

Online, via Zoom: REGISTER

 

Julia Azari Associate Professor and Assistant Chair in the Department of Political Science at Marquette University
Theodore (Ted) R. Johnson Senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice

Hoover Memorial Bldg, Room 350
Stanford, California, 94305-6010

(650) 723-9702 (650) 723-1687
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Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor in Public Policy, Bowen H. & Janice Arthur McCoy Professor in Leadership Values, Professor of Political Science
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David Brady is deputy director and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor of Political Science and Ethics in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and professor of political science in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the university.

Brady is an expert on the U.S. Congress and congressional decision making. His current research focuses on the political history of the U.S. Congress, the history of U.S. election results, and public policy processes in general.

His recent publications include, with John Cogan, "Out of Step, Out of Office," American Political Science Review, March 2001; with John Cogan and Morris Fiorina, Change and Continuity in House Elections (Stanford University Press, 2000); Revolving Gridlock: Politics and Policy from Carter to Clinton (Westview Press, 1999); with John Cogan and Doug Rivers, How the Republicans Captured the House: An Assessment of the 1994 Midterm Elections (Hoover Essays in Public Policy, 1995); and The 1996 House Elections: Reaffirming the Conservative Trend (Hoover Essays in Public Policy, 1997). Brady is also author of Congressional Voting in a Partisan Era (University of Kansas Press, 1973) and Critical Elections in the U.S. House of Representatives (Stanford University Press, 1988).

Brady has been on continuing appointment at Stanford University since 1987. He was associate dean from 1997 to 2001 at Stanford University; a fellow at the center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1985 to 1986 and again in 2001-2; the Autrey Professor at Rice University, 1980-87; and an associate professor and professor at the University of Houston, 1972-79.

In 1995 and 2000 he received the Congressional Quarterly Prize for the "best paper on a legislative topic." In 1992 he received the Dinkelspiel Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from Stanford University, and in 1993 he received the Phi Beta Kappa Award for best teacher at Stanford University.

Brady taught previously at Rice University, where he was honored with the George Brown Award for Superior Teaching. He also received the Richard F. Fenno Award of the American Political Science Association for the "best book on legislative studies" published in 1988-89.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Brady received a B.S. degree from Western Illinois University and an M.A. in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1970 from the University of Iowa. He was a C.I.C. scholar at the University of Michigan from 1964 to 1965.

Deputy director and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
Seminars
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* Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the event: Ahmet T. Kuru will talk about his award-winning new book Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Why do Muslim-majority countries have high levels of authoritarianism and low levels of socio-economic development in comparison to world averages? Kuru elaborates an argument about the ulema-state alliance as the cause of these problems in the Muslim world from the eleventh century to the present. Criticizing essentialist, post-colonialist, and new institutionalist alternative explanations, Kuru focuses on the relations between intellectual, economic, religious, and political classes in his own explanation.

 

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Ahmet Kuru
About the speaker:  Ahmet T. Kuru is Porteous Professor of Political Science at San Diego State University. Kuru received his PhD from the University of Washington and held a post-doc position at Columbia University. He is the author of award-winning Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey (Cambridge UP) and the co-editor (with Alfred Stepan) of Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey (Columbia UP). His works have been translated into Arabic, Bosnian, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Turkish. His 2019 book, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison (Cambridge UP) became the co-winner of the American Political Science Association's International History and Politics Section Best Book Award.

 

 
Ahmet Kuru Porteous Professor of Political Science at San Diego State University
Seminars
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**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

 

About the event: Governments in sub-Saharan Africa face tough choices in COVID-19 policy response. They have scarce resources but are under intense pressure to balance pandemic control with ensuring people have basic necessities -- while also staving off violence and political instability among distrustful publics. Until a vaccine is widely available, the primary way to combat COVID-19 is encouraging cooperation with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Our research provides African governments with evidence on how to increase voluntary cooperation with NPIs. I will present preliminary results from ongoing data collection efforts designed to provide policy-relevant information for government decision makers in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. Evidence from endorsement, list, and vignette experiments offer insights into citizen compliance with health policies, the gap between individual attitudes and perceptions of peers' behavior, and the dangers of COVID-related misinformation.

 

Leah R. Rosenzweig

About the speaker: Leah is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Graduate School of Business in the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her research centers on topics in comparative politics and the political economy of development. Her focus on the micro-foundations of political behavior to gain leverage on macro-political questions. How do autocrats survive? How can citizen-state relations be improved and government accountability strengthened? Can shared identities mitigate out-group animosity? Adopting a multi-method approach, use lab-in-the-field and online experiments, surveys, and in-depth field research to examine these questions in sub-Saharan Africa and the US. Her current book project reexamines the role of elections in authoritarian endurance and explains why citizens vote in elections with foregone conclusions in Tanzania and Uganda. Moving beyond conventional paradigms, her theory describes how a social norm of voting and accompanying social sanctions from peers contribute to high turnout in semi-authoritarian elections. In other ongoing projects, Her study is how national and pan-African identification stimulated through national sports games influence attitudes toward refugees, the relationship between identity, emotions, and belief in fake news, and how researchers can use Facebook as a tool for social science research.

 
 

Online, via Zoom: REGISTER

 

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CDDRL Postdoctoral Scholar, 2020-21
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My research centers on topics in comparative politics and the political economy of development. I focus on the micro-foundations of political behavior to gain leverage on macro-political questions. How do autocrats survive? How can citizen-state relations be improved and government accountability strengthened? Can shared identities mitigate out-group animosity? Adopting a multi-method approach, I use lab-in-the-field and online experiments, surveys, and in-depth field research to examine these questions in sub-Saharan Africa and the US. My current book project reexamines the role of elections in authoritarian endurance and explains why citizens vote in elections with foregone conclusions in Tanzania and Uganda. Moving beyond conventional paradigms, my theory describes how a social norm of voting and accompanying social sanctions from peers contribute to high turnout in semi-authoritarian elections. In other ongoing projects, I study how national and pan-African identification stimulated through national sports games influence attitudes toward refugees, the relationship between identity, emotions, and belief in fake news, and how researchers can use Facebook as a tool for social science research.

Postdoctoral fellow at Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Seminars
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**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

 

About the Event:  American democracy has been more prone to crisis than we commonly recognize. Comparative studies of democracy suggest that four threats imperil democracy: political polarization, conflict over who belongs as a full member of society, high and rising economic inequality, and excessive executive power. We survey five periods of American history in which these threats have appeared in different configurations, posing recurring challenges to American democracy. When even one threat was present – as in the 1790s, the 1930s, or the 1970s – the nation risked backsliding. Twice – in the 1850s and again in the 1890s – three threats converged, leading to civil war and then precipitating the disenfranchisement of millions of African American men. Today, all four threats are present for the first time, presenting unprecedented danger to the American experiment.

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About the Speaker:  Robert C. Lieberman is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of several award-winning books on American politics and previous served as provost of Johns Hopkins and dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

 

 

 

 

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Suzanne Mettler is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell. She is the author five previous books, including, most recently, The Government-Citizen Disconnect and Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream. She was recently awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship and a Guggenheim Award, and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

 

 

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Online, via Zoom: REGISTER

Robert Liberman Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University
Suzanne Mettler John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University
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Norman Naimark received the 2020 Norris and Carol Hundley Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association

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Russia seemed a country on the rise globally, with President Vladimir Putin well on his way to lengthening his time in power. But he faces serious headwinds with COVID 19, the virus’s economic impact in Russia, and the collapse of oil prices that are driving the Russian economy into recession. Steven Pifer discusses Putin’s future and the prospects for US-Russian relations.

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Avi Tuschman, Adam Berinsky, David Rand

Please join the Cyber Policy Center for Exploring Potential “Solutions” to Online Disinformation​, hosted by Cyber Policy Center's Kelly Born, with guests Adam Berinsky, Mitsui Professor of Political Science at MIT and Director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab (PERL) at MIT, David Rand, Erwin H. Schell Professor and an Associate Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Director of the Human Cooperation Laboratory and the Applied Cooperation Team at MIT, and Avi Tuschman, Founder & CIO, Pinpoint Predictive. The session is open but registraton is required.

Adam Berinsky is the Mitsui Professor of Political Science at MIT and serves as the director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab (PERL). He is also a Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Berinsky received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2000. He is the author of "In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq" (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He is also the author of "Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America" (Princeton University Press, 2004) and has published articles in many journals. He is currently the co-editor of the Chicago Studies in American Politics book series at the University of Chicago Press. He is also the recipient of multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and an Associate Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT Sloan, and the Director of the Human Cooperation Laboratory and the Applied Cooperation Team. Bridging the fields of behavioral economics and psychology, David’s research combines mathematical/computational models with human behavioral experiments and online/field studies to understand human behavior. His work uses a cognitive science perspective grounded in the tension between more intuitive versus deliberative modes of decision-making, and explores topics such as cooperation/prosociality, punishment/condemnation, perceived accuracy of false or misleading news stories, political preferences, and the dynamics of social media platform behavior. 

Avi Tuschman is a Stanford StartX entrepreneur and founder of Pinpoint Predictive, where he currently serves as Chief Innovation Officer and Board Director. He’s spent the past five years developing the first Psychometric AI-powered data-enrichment platform, which ranks 260 million individuals for performance marketing and risk management applications. Tuschman is an expert on the science of heritable psychometric traits. His book and research on human political orientation have been covered in peer-reviewed and mainstream media from 25 countries. Previous to his career in tech, he advised current and former heads of state as well as multilateral development banks in the Western Hemisphere. Tuschman completed his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in evolutionary anthropology at Stanford.

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