The Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research recognizes Stanford's top ten percent of honors theses in social science, science, and engineering among the graduating senior class. Charles's thesis is entitled The Limits of Payout Politics: How Biden-Harris Federal Spending Shaped (and Didn't Shape) the 2024 Presidential Vote. His thesis examines whether the Biden-Harris administration’s signature spending programs — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS Act — yielded electoral rewards in the 2024 presidential election. Using an original dataset of over 40,000 geocoded federal projects representing $227 billion in county-level investments, Charles finds no statistically significant association between per-capita spending and shifts in Democratic vote margins, even when accounting for partisan context and project visibility. Through interviews with federal and local officials, he identifies three explanatory mechanisms: implementation lags prevented most projects from reaching completion before Election Day, administrative and policy bottlenecks systematically delayed development, and Republican messaging successfully reframed spending as inflationary. These findings suggest that retrospective voting operates primarily through immediate, visible benefits rather than campaign promises or announced investments, with significant implications for how policy initiatives must be designed to deliver outcomes within electoral cycles.

Adrian's thesis is entitled The Gavel and the Gun: Post-War Trials and State-Building Politics in Yugoslavia (1945-1949). His thesis explores how the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) authorities used the post-World War II justice process to consolidate power from 1945 to 1949. Drawing on trial transcripts, newspapers, and other archival materials, the study argues that the Yugoslav state instrumentalized judicial structures in three distinct stages: first, using honor courts to assert basic state capacity; second, conducting public-facing war crimes trials to promote the state’s ideological legitimacy; and third, orchestrating espionage trials to suppress dissent and entrench single-party rule. While affirming that the KPJ often subordinated judicial integrity to its state-building project, the thesis complicates conventional narratives by attending to the moral ambiguities, partial truths, and undeniable moments of justice present in even the most politicized of trials. In doing so, it offers broader insights into the fraught intersection of law, memory, and power in postwar societies.

Adelaide's thesis is entitled Philoxenia: Local Responses to Immigration in Calabria, Italy. Over recent decades, many nations across Europe and the Americas have responded to mass migration movements across the globe with hostile policies, xenophobic sentiment, and poorly managed immigration systems. At the same time, several municipalities in Calabria, Italy that struggle with severe depopulation and economic hardship have experienced positive transformations upon opening refugee reception centers, including reversals to declining population trends, job creation and the continuation of important public goods, such as elementary schools — but not all towns that have a demand for immigration respond in the same way. Many Calabrian municipalities have not opened refugee resettlement centers, and others have become a breeding ground for labor exploitation among migrant workers. This thesis employs a mixed-methods approach to consider how structure, agency, and culture account for the variation in local responses to migrants and refugees throughout the relatively homogenous region of Calabria. A systematic analysis of quantitative municipal-level data paired with four granular case studies suggests that a municipality’s structural characteristics alone do not explain the variance in local responses to immigration. Rather, the presence of an entrepreneurial local actor, such as a mayor or non-profit leader with strong humanitarian commitments, is necessary to recognize and actualize the aligned interests between locals and newcomers and bring about cultures of hospitality. While much of the literature on local responses to immigration has focused on urban settings, this thesis aims to widen academic discussions to include more rural contexts and contributes to the underdeveloped literature on hospitality, rather than hostility, toward newcomers.

The Class of 2025

Charles, Adrian, and Adelaide are part of a cohort of 13 graduating CDDRL honors students who have spent the past year working in consultation with CDDRL-affiliated faculty members and attending honors research workshops to develop their thesis projects. The theses this year covered topics as wide ranging as authoritarian repression, conflict and state-building, regulation and governance, and democratic accountability. Students embarked on original research across multiple countries, conducting interviews, fielding surveys, plumbing archives, and building datasets.

“We are so proud of this year’s cohort of seniors in the Fisher Family Honors Program,” shared Didi Kuo, Center Fellow at FSI and co-director of CDDRL’s Fisher Family Honors Program. “Our multidisciplinary students brought a range of methods and analytical approaches to inform their understanding of democracy and development. They asked a range of trenchant research questions and brought a collaborative spirit to the research enterprise that improved everyone’s projects.”

In addition to the Firestone Medal and CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Awards, members of the Class of 2025 have received several other honors heading into graduation:

• Kate Tully is among four Stanford students named as 2025 Rhodes Scholars. The prestigious award provides support for talented scholars to pursue postgraduate degrees at Oxford University in England.
• Alex Borthwick, Adrian Feinberg, Malaina Kapoor, and Avinash Thakkar, along with junior Emma Wang, are among the newest members elected to the Phi Beta Kappa academic honors society.
• Adrian Feinberg was also named a Gaither Fellow. The national program offers recent graduates the opportunity to work as research assistants on projects related to democracy, global security, and foreign policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C.
• Alex Borthwick, Adrian Feinberg, Elizabeth Jerstad, and Gabriela Holzer have all received the Award of Excellence. Designed to recognize the top 10% of the class, this award honors graduating seniors who have demonstrated a sincere commitment to the university through involvement, leadership, and extraordinary Stanford spirit.

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. Honors students participate in research methods workshops, attend honors college in Washington, D.C., connect to the CDDRL research community, and write their thesis in close consultation with a faculty advisor to graduate with a certificate of honors in democracy, development, and the rule of law.
 

Explore the rest of the thesis topics of the Fisher Family Honors Program Class of 2025 below: