CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program trains students from any academic department at Stanford to prepare them to write a policy-relevant research thesis with global impact on a subject touching on democracy, development, and the rule of law. Please join us for this seminar to hear our Honors Program award winners present their research.

The Psychology of Adolescent Poverty Under Climate Change: Evidence from Bangladesh

By Liza Goldberg (2024 Firestone Medal Winner)
Under the Advisement of Dr. Stephen Luby, Mr. Erik Jensen

Climate change has already begun deepening cycles of poverty across low- and middle-income nations, threatening decades of progress in development outcomes. The physical impacts of climate change on poor households have been well established, ranging from food insecurity to infrastructure loss. However, the impacts of chronic climate stress on the psychological health of low-income individuals in high-risk regions remain unexplored. This leaves a knowledge gap on a potentially vital clinical need among climate-vulnerable populations, but also a lack of consideration of a key potential contributor to psychological poverty traps in low-resource communities. This mixed-methods observational study investigates the effect of repeated climate threat exposure on the psychological health of low-income adolescents across Bangladesh and, in turn, how these psychological health trends influence adolescent temporal discounting trends. We administered psychological health and temporal discounting surveys to 1200 low-income adolescents in Dhaka, a moderate flood risk location, and Barisal, a very high flood risk location. We also conducted 24 semi-structured focus groups among 80 adolescents in each location to discern potential causal pathways from climate stress exposure to our quantitative outcomes. We find that high climate threat exposure is associated with significantly higher rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents and that those experiencing at least moderate anxiety and depression are significantly more likely to exhibit temporal discounting. In turn, we find that climate-driven psychological health challenges and resultant temporal discounting levels contribute substantially to modified future planning around migration and occupational planning, with climate adaptation preferences widely differing by gender. This study ultimately identifies a key emerging public health challenge with significant implications for community adaptation and poverty alleviation on our planet’s climate frontlines, demonstrating an urgent need for cross-sector intervention design.

Chemical Castration as Gender Justice: How punitive attitudes inform gender policy preferences and voting behavior among Brazilian women

By Solange Melissa Severino de Oliveira Godoy (2024 CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Award Winner)
Under the Advisement of Beatriz Magaloni-Kerpel, Ph.D. and Soledad Prillaman, Ph.D.

Currently, 19% of the women in the Brazilian Congress are part of Bolsonaro’s party, known for its anti-feminist and pro-punishment stances. At first, this fact seems to contradict expectations based on substantive representation. This concept would predict that women share similar interests and, therefore, would want to advance similar gender policies once in power. I argue that this apparent contradiction can be better explained by exploring how gender, along with punishment attitudes, interacts with voting choices, a current gap in the literature. This project aims to fill this gap. Specifically, it answers the question: “How do attitudes toward punishment impact the gender policy preferences and voting behavior of Brazilian women?”. This mixed-methods study works with a novel data set of 39 interviews and 1,194 observations from an online survey experiment. This qualitative data was coded in 2 passes, using deductive, grounded, and in vivo codes, with the support of NVivo, followed by analytic memoing. The quantitative data includes results from a conjoint experiment and a survey experiment, which were analyzed, respectively, through average marginal component effect analysis and logistic regressions. The main findings of this thesis indicate that Brazilian women mostly have progressive views on gender issues, and there is high demand for gender policy among all women. However, the content of the policies prioritized by them varies when voting, with a particular division of women across issues of gender punishment and abortion, which are mostly defined across partisan lines. This study aims to contribute to the literature on gender and punitive attitudes and substantive representation. Furthermore, through its survey gathering substantive data on policy preferences in Latin America, this project addresses a key challenge to research so far, namely the lack of data on these preferences.

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

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