Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is proud to announce our four incoming fellows who will be joining us in the 2016-2017 academic year to develop their research, engage with faculty and tap into our diverse scholarly community. 

The pre- and postdoctoral program will provide fellows the time to focus on research and data analysis as they work to finalize and publish their dissertation research, while connecting with resident faculty and research staff at CDDRL. 

Fellows will present their research during our weekly research seminar series and an array of scholarly events and conferences.

Topics of the incoming cohort include electoral fraud in Russia, how the elite class impacts state power in China, the role of emotions in support for democracy in Zimbabwe, and market institutions in Nigeria. 

Learn more in the Q&A below.

Hometown: Tomsk, Russia

Academic Institution: Northwestern University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: Sociology, April 2017

Research Interests: authoritarianism, state capacity, social policy, civil society, trust, Russia and post-communist countries

Dissertation Title: The State that Betrays the Trust: Infrastructural State Power, Public Sector Organizations, and Authoritarian Resilience in Putin's Russia

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? I study the connection between state capacity and political regimes - the topic that is at the core of many research initiatives at CDDRL. Learning more about this work and receiving feedback for my dissertation will enrich and sharpen my analysis, while helping me to place it into a comparative context. I am looking forward to discussing my work with the faculty who study the post-Soviet region. I also will explore policy implications of my work with the help of policy experts at CDDRL.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? Besides finishing writing my dissertation, I will workshop three working papers to prepare them for publication. The first one argues that Putin's regime used the school system to administer a large-scale electoral fraud in 2012 presidential elections; the second one shows how the networks of social organizations were used by subnational autocrats to strengthen the regime; and the third one will look at the factors that make the abuse of such organizations more difficult in some regions. In addition to these papers I will continue developing my post-graduation research project exploring the relationship between social trust and distrust, institutions, political competition, and democratization.

Fun fact: I have spent 25 years of my life in Siberia, and I can tell you: Chicago winters are worse!

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Shelby Grossman

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Reading, MA

Academic Institution: Harvard University

Discipline & Graduation Date:  Government, Summer 2016

Research interests: political economy of development, private governance, market institutions, Sub-Saharan Africa, survey methods

Dissertation Title: The Politics of Order in Informal Markets: Evidence from Lagos

What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? I was attracted to CDDRL largely for its community of scholars. Affiliated faculty work on the political economy of development and medieval and modern market institutions, topics that are tied to my own interests.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? I plan to prepare a book manuscript based on my dissertation, a project that explains variation in the provision of pro-trade institutions in private market organizations through the study of physical marketplaces in Nigeria. In addition, I will continue to remotely manage an on-going project in Nigeria (with Meredith Startz) investigating whether reputation alleviates contracting frictions. I also plan to work on submitting to journals a few working papers, including one on the politics of non-compliance with polio vaccination in Nigeria (with Jonathan Phillips and Leah Rosenzweig). 

Fun fact: Contrary to popular belief, not all cheese is vegetarian. I have a website to help people determine if a cheese is vegetarian or not: IsThisCheeseVegetarian.com. 

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Daniel Mattingly

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Oakland, California

Academic Institution: University of California, Berkeley

Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science, Summer 2016

Research Interests: Governance, rule of law, state building, authoritarian politics, Chinese politics

Dissertation Title: The Social Origins of State Power: Democratic Institutions and Local Elites in China

What attracted you to CDDRL?  The Center has a fantastic community of scholars and practitioners who work on the areas that I'm interested in, including governance and the rule of law. I'm excited to learn from the CDDRL community and participate in the Center's events. The fellowship also provides me with valuable time to finish my book manuscript before I start teaching.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? While at CDDRL, I plan to prepare my book manuscript and to work on some related projects on local elites and state power in China and elsewhere. 

Fun fact: I grew up on an organic farm in Vermont.

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Lauren E. Young

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Saratoga, CA

Academic Institution: Columbia University 

Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science (Comparative Politics, Methods), May 2016 (defense), Oct 2016 (degree conferral)

Research Interests: political violence, political economy of development, autocratic persistence, democratization, protest, electoral violence

Dissertation Title: The Psychology of Repression and Dissent in Autocracy

What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? As a graduate of the CISAC honors program when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, I have seen first-hand how intellectually stimulating, collaborative, and plugged into policy CDDRL is. While at the center I will be revising my dissertation work on the political psychology of participation in pro-democracy movements in Zimbabwe for submission as a book manuscript, and moving forward new projects that similarly seek to understand how different forms of violence by non-state actors affects citizens' preferences and decision-making. Because of its deep bench of experts on autocracy, narco-trafficking, and insurgency, CDDRL will add enormous value to these projects.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL?  During my fellowship year, my primary goal is to revise my research on Zimbabwe into a book manuscript. I defended my dissertation as three stand-alone articles, including two experiments showing that emotions influence whether opposition supporters in Zimbabwe express their pro-democracy preferences and a descriptive paper showing that repression has a larger effect on the behavior of the poor. To prepare the book manuscript during my fellowship, I will bring in additional quantitative and qualitative descriptive evidence and tie the three papers together into a cohesive argument about how opposition supporters make decisions about participation in protest, why emotions have such a large effect on these decisions, and how this affects variation across individuals and the strategic choices of autocrats and activists.

Fun fact: During my fieldwork I took an overnight train from Victoria Falls to a southern city in Zimbabwe and hitch-hiked into a national park. It got a little nerve-wracking when night started to fall, but ended with  an invitation to a barbecue! 

A key concern weighing heavily on those attending this week’s global conference on AIDS is the diminishing donor support to fight the communicable disease, which has claimed an estimated 35 million lives since the beginning of the epidemic.

“That’s on everybody’s mind now — how to continue facing the epidemic with the shrinking resources,” said Eran Bendavid, a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy and assistant professor at Stanford Medicine attending the conference in Durban, South Africa.

Donor government funding to support HIV efforts in low- and middle-income countries fell for the first time in 2015, decreasing from $8.6 billion in 2014 to $7.5 billion last year, according to a new report by the Kaiser Family Foundation and UNAIDS.

Funding for HIV treatment declined for 13 of 14 major donor governments, with the U.S. continuing to provide more donor funding for HIV than any other country or organization.

“There’s a sense of panic about how we’re going to fill the shortfall in funding,” Bendavid said. “All the major donors are here, PEPFAR, the Global Fund, and everyone is saying `We need more to continue the fight.’

“But, in my mind,” Bendavid continued, “the conversation that is mostly missing is the one between the organizations on the front lines and the national ministries of health and finance. See what they can do to get domestic resources to fill the gap.”

PEPFAR — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Release — is the U.S. government initiative to help those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

Bendavid, an infectious disease physician, joins 18,000 global leaders, researchers, activists and front-line health workers attending the conference July 18-22.

The U.N. General Assembly last month pledged to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030. But more than half of the nearly 37 million people around the world infected with HIV still have no access to the antiretroviral therapy that is saving so many lives.

U.S. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on the opening day of AIDS2016 that when the conference was last held in Durban 16 years ago, less than 1 percent of all people living with HIV in developing countries had access to treatment.

“Today, the world has proven that when we come together, we can transform lives,” Ban said, noting that of the 36.7 million people living with HIV today, about 46 percent of infected adults have access to antiretroviral treatment.

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“In addition, medicines are more effective and less toxic, technology allows diagnosis in 20 minutes or less, generic medicines reduced the cost of treatment to just a dollar a day and great international finance has been made available,” Ban said.

Still, the secretary-general warned, “the gains are inadequate — and fragile,” when you consider that more than half of all people living with HIV still lack access to treatment.

Bendavid, who spoke by telephone from Durban, gave a symposium at the conference on Tuesday that summarizes his research and provides his conclusions on the most effective approaches to use donor resources.

He said the while the global burden of noncommunicable diseases, such as heart disease and cancer, is greater than HIV, malaria, or TB, the interventions available to combat infectious diseases are more cost-effective. 

“Basically, the resource constraints are forcing us to think carefully about what to invest in, and we want to invest in what works,” Bendavid said, adding that donor funding typically goes straight to the disease rather than the local health system infrastructure.

“The scarce donor resources should not be directed towards interventions that are either inefficacious or costly,” he argued. “The opportunity cost of investing in costly or ineffective interventions is very high when you consider the millions who could benefit from inexpensive, simple interventions such as bed nets and drugs for TB.”

He conceded that he typically gets push back on this line of reasoning.

“But when you’re talking about what you can do with very limited resources, investing in noncommunicable diseases, in my mind, jeopardizes the premise of donor funding: There are many people who would be happy to shut down PEPFAR and the Global Fund if they were shown to be ineffective.”

He published a paper earlier this year that found the U.S. government has invested $1.4 billion in HIV prevention programs that promote sexual abstinence and marital fidelity. But there is no evidence that the programs have been effective at changing sexual behavior and reducing HIV Risk.

Bendavid said his presentation at the symposium was received with a mix of understanding and concern.

“People mentioned that funding health systems could have averted Ebola, and that the fight against HIV needs to address health systems,” he said. “I agree, but also think governments should step up and help fill some of those gaps.”

The Asia Health Policy Program at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in collaboration with scholars from Stanford Health Policy's Center on Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the Next World Program, is soliciting papers for the third annual workshop on the economics of ageing titled Financing Longevity: The Economics of Pensions, Health Insurance, Long-term Care and Disability Insurance held at Stanford from April 24-25, 2017, and for a related special issue of the Journal of the Economics of Ageing.

The triumph of longevity can pose a challenge to the fiscal integrity of public and private pension systems and other social support programs disproportionately used by older adults. High-income countries offer lessons – frequently cautionary tales – for low- and middle-income countries about how to design social protection programs to be sustainable in the face of population ageing. Technological change and income inequality interact with population ageing to threaten the sustainability and perceived fairness of conventional financing for many social programs. Promoting longer working lives and savings for retirement are obvious policy priorities; but in many cases the fiscal challenges are even more acute for other social programs, such as insurance systems for medical care, long-term care, and disability. Reform of entitlement programs is also often politically difficult, further highlighting how important it is for developing countries putting in place comprehensive social security systems to take account of the macroeconomic implications of population ageing.

The objective of the workshop is to explore the economics of ageing from the perspective of sustainable financing for longer lives. The workshop will bring together researchers to present recent empirical and theoretical research on the economics of ageing with special (yet not exclusive) foci on the following topics:

• Public and private roles in savings and retirement security
• Living and working in an Age of Longevity: Lessons for Finance
• Defined benefit, defined contribution, and innovations in design of pension programs
• Intergenerational and equity implications of different financing mechanisms for pensions and social insurance
• The impact of population aging on health insurance financing
• Economic incentives of long-term care insurance and disability insurance systems
• Precautionary savings and social protection system generosity
• Elderly cognitive function and financial planning
• Evaluation of policies aimed at increasing health and productivity of older adults
• Population ageing and financing economic growth
• Tax policies’ implications for capital deepening and investment in human capital
• The relationship between population age structure and capital market returns
• Evidence on policies designed to address disparities – gender, ethnic/racial, inter-regional, urban/rural – in old-age support
• The political economy of reforming pension systems as well as health, long-term care and disability insurance programs

Submission for the workshop

Interested authors are invited to submit a 1-page abstract by Sept. 30, 2016, to Karen Eggleston at karene@stanford.edu. The authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by Oct. 15, 2016, and completed draft papers will be expected by April 1, 2017.

Economy-class travel and accommodation costs for one author of each accepted paper will be covered by the organizers.

Invited authors are expected to submit their paper to the Journal of the Economics of Ageing. A selection of these papers will (assuming successful completion of the review process) be published in a special issue.

Submission to the special issue

Authors (also those interested who are not attending the workshop) are invited to submit papers for the special issue in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing by Aug. 1, 2017. Submissions should be made online. Please select article type “SI Financing Longevity.”

About the Next World Program

The Next World Program is a joint initiative of Harvard University’s Program on the Global Demography of Aging, the WDA Forum, Stanford’s Asia Health Policy Program, and Fudan University’s Working Group on Comparative Ageing Societies. These institutions organize an annual workshop and a special issue in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing on an important economic theme related to ageing societies.

More information can be found in the PDF below.

Studying the microorganisms that live in our gut is a relatively new field, one that has only really taken off in the last decade. In fact, it is estimated that half of the microbes that live in and around our GI track have yet to be discovered.

“This means there is a huge amount of this dark matter within us,” said Ami S. Bhatt, an assistant professor of medicine and genetics who runs the Bhatt Lab at the Stanford School of Medicine. The lab is devoted to exploiting disease vulnerabilities by cataloguing the human microbiome, the trillions of microbes living in and on our bodies.

“I think if we fast-forward to the impact of some these findings in 10 years, we’re going to learn that modifying the microbiota is a potent way to modulate health,” Bhatt said. “Humans are not only made up of human cells, but are a complex mixture of human cells and the microbes that live within us and among us — and these microorganisms are as critical to our well-being as we are to theirs.”

Bhatt, along with key collaborators at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and the INDEPTH research consortium, now intends to take this research to Africa.

She is this year’s winner of the of the Rosenkranz Prize for Health Care Research in Developing Countries, awarded by Stanford Health Policy to promising young Stanford researchers who are investigating ways to improve health care in developing countries.

The $100,000 prize is targeted at Stanford’s emerging researchers who are dedicated to improving health care in poorer parts of the world, but may lack the financial resources.

Bhatt, MD, PhD, intends to take the prize money to execute the first multi-country microbiome research project focused on non-communicable disease risk in Africa. The project intends to explore the relationship between the gut microbiome composition and body mass index (BMI) in patients who are either severely malnourished or obese.

“As a rapidly developing continent with extremes of resource access, Africa is simultaneously faced with challenges relating to the extremes of metabolic status,” Bhatt wrote in her Rosenkranz project proposal. The Bay Area native, who is also the director of global oncology at Stanford, came to the School of Medicine in 2014 to focus on how changes in the microbiome are associated with cancer.

In this new project, Bhatt and members of her lab will team up with colleagues in Africa, first in South Africa, and then in Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Kenya. They will leverage the infrastructure already in place at the INDEPTH Network of researchers, using an existing cohort of 12,000 patients at within those four countries. The patients have already consented to be involved in DNA testing and have given blood and urine specimens.

Identifying alterations of the microbiome that are associated with severe malnutrition or obesity could pave the way for interventions that may mitigate the severity or prevalence of these disorders, Bhatt said.

“These organisms are critical to our health in that they are in a delicate balance with one another and their human hosts,” she said. “Alterations in the microbiome are associated with various diseases — but have mostly been studied in Western populations. Unfortunately, little is known about the generalizability of these findings to low- and middle-income countries – where most of the world’s population lives.”

Bhatt said that as Africa rapidly continues to develop, the continent is simultaneous faced with challenges relating to extreme weight gain and loss. While the wealthy are facing obesity and its associated disease such as stroke, heart failure and diabetes, many people are still faced with issues related to food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition.

The research, she hopes, could lead to aggressive behavioral, dietary and lifestyle modifications targeted at maintaining healthy BMI in at-risk individuals.

Video by Ankur Bhatt

Grant Miller, an associate professor of medicine and core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy who chaired the Rosenkranz Prize committee this year, believes Bhatt’s research could eventually break new ground.

“The entire Rosenkranz Prize selection committee was highly impressed with Ami and the innovation of her project,” Miller said. “Ami’s work on the human microbiome in the extremes of nutritional status in developing countries — including its potential link to obesity, an emerging challenge in low income countries — is potentially path-breaking.”

The award’s namesake, George Rosenkranz, first synthesized cortisone in 1951, and later progestin, the active ingredient in oral birth control pills. He went on to establish the Mexican National Institute for Genomic Medicine, and his family created the Rosenkranz Prize in 2009.

The award embodies Dr. Rosenkranz’s belief that young scientists hold the curiosity and drive necessary to find alternative solutions to longstanding health-care dilemmas.