Political scientist Anna Grzymala-Busse finds that authoritarians face a choice in the face of change: try to cling to power, exit governing or reinvent themselves as democrats. It’s those who reinvent themselves as newly minted democrats who fare the worst in the long run.

In the years since World War II, as the global geopolitical map was drawn and redrawn along ideological lines, the world witnessed ascension of many authoritarians. They often ruled for long stretches, but eventually most faced a political reckoning. The people they governed no longer accepted their authority and demanded change.

Ironically, Grzymala-Busse found that the best choice for authoritarians is simply to cling to power “counting on a loyal if unhappy electorate,” even if it means ceding much of their once-monopolistic grip on power to democratic reforms.

81 governments studied

For her study, Grzymala-Busse examined and quantified the resulting political denouements of 81 authoritarian governments spanning the period from 1945 to 2015. Countries studied include the former Soviet Bloc, China, Cuba, several in Southeast Asia, many African nations and Mexico. The governing systems ranged from the communism of the Soviet Bloc and socialism to secular state-building and rule for the sake of national security.

The success of the reinventors can be rapid and remarkable, but so too can be the demise. Grzymala-Busse noted that the Hungarian Socialist Party won 43 percent of the vote and 49 percent of the seats in 2006, only to succumb to allegations of deception, mismanagement and fraud soon afterward. In Poland, the Democratic and Left Alliance (SLD), which won 41 percent of the vote in 2001, watched as its power steeply declined in the subsequent decade until the party dissolved entirely in 2011.

“Those who reinvented shone more brightly for a brief time, but burned out. Those who chose orthodoxy never enjoyed the great success of the reinventors, but they survived,” she said.

And what of those authoritarians who choose neither to remain nor to reinvent? Grzymala said that they simply dissolve back into society where former members often capitalize on their connections to become captains of industry.

“Some become oligarchs,” she said, “retaining power by other means.”

Lessons on change

The takeaway of her study for at-risk authoritarians, Grzymala-Busse said, is that reinvention alone is not enough to carry the party. New parties cannot survive as the remnants of their former selves. They must become entirely new organizations with viable programmatic approaches. Likewise, she said, when newly minted democrats hail competence as a competitive advantage, they must make good on the promise. If they fall short, they face exceptionally harsh outcomes at the polls.

“The irony is, without real change, the parties that built democracy by supporting free elections fall victim to those same democratic forces they championed.”

Anna Grzymala-Busse is the Kevin and Michelle Douglas Professor of International Studies and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

The study was made possible by financial support from the Carnegie Foundation.

Family planning programs in developing countries that offer contraceptives and reproductive health advice apparently do more than prevent pregnancies — they can keep girls in primary school for up to a year longer, even before the youngsters start to think about marriage and babies.

New research by Stanford Health Policy’s Grant Miller and Kim Singer Babiarz indicates that the availability of modern contraceptives alone can keep young girls in the classroom longer, likely because their parents develop greater expectations for their daughters’ long-term health outcomes and economic opportunities.

“What we find is that family planning exposure at a young age is linked to greater opportunities later in life – including economic empowerment,” said Babiarz, an SHP research scholar with a PhD in agricultural economics who focuses on women and children in development. “The fertility effects were modest; the most striking findings were the incentives created to keep girls in school and improvements in the types of jobs women have later in life.”

Babiarz and Miller, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director of the Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development, unveiled their study at the annual meeting of the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 7.

They conducted research with Christine Valente, an associate professor in the department of economics at the University of Bristol and Tey Nai Peng, the principal investigator for the Malaysia Family Life Survey. The Southeast Asia nation was one of the first low-income countries to provide modern contraceptives on a large scale, first in 1954 and then establishing a National Family Planning Board in 1966.

The government then scaled up its national program between 1966 and 1974 and conducted robust surveys with retrospective life histories and detailed community-level information about the timing of family planning availability. The use of contraceptives such as the pill, condoms and IUDs, went from 3 percent in 1961 to 39 percent in 1975. The country also experienced a decrease in the fertility rate of 6.2 children to 4.3 during the same period.

The researchers were able to compare what happened to Malaysian girls who were very young when contraceptives became available in their communities to those who were adolescents when they first gained access to modern contraception. They were not surprised by the effects on fertility; that has generally been the case in countries that adopt large-scale family planning programs.

But they also found unintended incentives: that girls in communities with family planning clinics stayed in school six months longer, increasing to more than an additional year for the girls who were born after the family planning programs began. And it didn’t matter if the girls had fewer younger siblings at home.

Other benefits later in life included better jobs when they became adults. When the Malaysian girls were grown, they were more likely to take in their own elderly parents (relative to their husbands’ parents), a signal of increased status in their households. In fact, they found that the incentives for investing in girls created by family planning may actually outweigh its direct effects, which work through reductions in fertility and changes in birth timing.

“The existence of family planning and contraceptives may lead parents to believe their daughters can participate in the labor force and that more schooling will therefore benefit them,” Miller said. “In other words, it can change their expectations about the world their daughter will live in one day.”

Few studies explicitly distinguish the incentive effects of family planning on women’s education from its direct effects on fertility. Miller said he hoped the new findings might lead policymakers to consider the broader beneficial consequences of family planning beyond those that work directly through changes in pregnancy and fertility.

“A central contribution of this working paper is that it studies the possible incentive effects of family planning programs for human capital investment in girls,” the authors wrote,” which could then translate into improvements in women’s economic status throughout their lives.”

Food security experts identify government support, policy implementation, private sector engagement and investment in smallholder farmers as keys to Africa’s agricultural future.

Food security experts from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) gathered to discuss transforming food production in Africa at Stanford on Nov. 29. The symposium, hosted by the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) examined the challenges, strategies, and possible solutions for catalyzing and sustaining an inclusive agriculture transformation in Africa. 

Moderator Ertharin Cousin, FSE visiting fellow and previous World Food Programme director with more than 25 years of experience on hunger, food, and resilience strategies, launched the panel by outlining Africa’s plight. “Today some 100 million of the farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa farm less than 2 hectares of land. Some 80 percent of those living in rural areas are poor. More than 30 percent of the rural population is chronically hungry and 35 percent of the under-five-year-olds are stunted. By 2050, the bulk of the world's population growth will take place on the continent. In fact, some project that 1.3 billion will be added to the continent, and Nigeria’s [population] will grow larger than the size of the United States between now and 2050,” Cousin said

.

While Africa continues to experience the highest occurrence of food insecurity worldwide, the continent also contains over 60 percent of the worlds uncultivated but fertile land. AGRA formed in 2006 to fulfill the vision that Africa can feed itself and the world. Panelists included Agnes Kalibata, AGRA President and former Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources of Rwanda; Kanayo F. Nwanze, AGRA board member and immediate past president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development; Usha Barwale Zehr, AGRA board member and Director and Chief Technology Officer of Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company Private Limited; and Rajiv Shah, AGRA board member, Rockefeller Foundation President and former Administer of USAID.

Kanayo F. Nwanze stressed the importance of agricultural transformation for Africa’s future. “No country in the world ever transformed itself without going through an agrarian change. No country. Europe, 17th; Japan, 18th century; 19th century was the US, your country; China, 20th century. Why should they be different from Africa? So, first and foremost, we have to have total agricultural transformation,” Nwanze said.

AGRA president, Agnes Kalibata, also spoke to the need for policy implementation and government support in helping drive change. “AGRA as an institution can only do so much. But these governments have the potential and the capacity to reach every corner of their countries. The problem is they are challenged by capacity to do that, by capacity to design proper programs, and by capacity to implement these programs,” Kalibata said.

Expanding on governments' ability to impact and drive change, Usha Barwale Zehr highlighted Asia’s success, specifically with strategic partnerships. “…we've done a lot of talking about public/private partnership. Not so much on the ground on implementing it in a manner, which happened in Asia, for instance, where there was policy, and, most importantly, government will. The government was willing to do whatever it took to make sure that agriculture was transformed at the end of it,” Zehr said.

Beyond government and policy support the panelists also addressed the need for innovation and access to seed technologies. “Why is it that the African farmer and the Indian farmer should not have access to what the American farmer has access to today and reaps benefit from it? …So it's the hybrids, the varieties, the GM technology. Tomorrow it'll be the gene-edited products. And after that we will talk about the satellite-based imaging data that we will use for developing drought-tolerant crops for that very, very small micro environment that existed in the one district in Nigeria,” Zehr said.

"By 2050, who is going to feed Africa? … It's the youth of today. But they're not going to be using the same technologies that exist today. Just think of what IT can do, aggregation, organization of farmer's groups. So, the elements are there. I see the agriculture of tomorrow meeting the challenge – for Africa meeting that challenge is Africa being at the forefront of feeding the world. Africa has to be able to feed itself first. And we have all the opportunities there,” Nwanze said.

This is the first installment of the Global Food Security Symposium series hosted by Stanford University's Center on Food Security and the Environment and generously supported by Zach Nelson and Elizabeth Horn. FSE is a joint initiative of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

There is plenty of research on how the rapid warming of the planet is going to have growing adverse impacts on global economies, health, food supplies and natural disasters.

A new study now suggests that as temperatures continue to rise — particularly with more and more 90-plus-degree days — more fetuses and infants will experience economic loss by age 30.

“There is a growing body of evidence that finds that shocks to the fetus and young child — whether nutritional, environmental, economic or stress-related — have long-term consequences on health, education and economic outcomes throughout the life cycle,” said Maya Rossin-Slater, an assistant professor of health research and policy at Stanford Medicine and a faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Rossin-Slater published her study Dec. 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicating early-life exposure to extreme temperatures is linked to potential losses in human capital. Her co-authors are Adam Isen, an economist with the U.S. Department of Treasury, and Reed Walker, an assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley.

The researchers used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamic Files, which contain information on adult labor market outcomes linked to county and exact date of birth. They looked at weather in counties in 24 states on any given day, and then measured how many days with average temperatures above 90 degrees a child born on that day in that county would have experienced during gestation and during the first year of life. They then compared the earnings of individuals who were exposed to different numbers of such hot days, but who were of the same race and gender, and born in the same county and on the same day of the year (but in different years).

Each day a fetus or infant experiences 90-plus-degree temperatures, Rossin-Slater and her co-authors found that he made $30 less a year on average, or $430 over the course of his lifetime. While that may not seem like a huge loss of income, the authors point out that their study is best understood from a population-level perspective rather than from an individual one.

“There is a lot of research already showing that extreme heat has immediate effects on labor market productivity and GDP,” she said. “What we are saying is that there is another wrinkle to this — that there can be consequences many years later, on cohorts who are still in the womb.”

Most Americans today only experience one day a year that is 90 degrees or hotter. But the Climate Impact Lab has indicated that if countries continue to take only moderate action on climate change, by the end of this century there will be about 43 such days a year.

So, if you multiple a $30 annual loss a day by 43 days, you come up with an average $1,290 a year — and compounded in large populations of pregnant women in hot climates.

“Prior research shows that exposure to extreme heat in utero leads to lower birth weight and increases infant mortality,” said Rossin-Slater, who is also a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy. She said poor fetal and infant health could impact adult earnings in three ways: cognitive impairment, poor health that causes people to miss school or work, and less non-cognitive skill development such as self-control.

“With regard to exposure to heat specifically, fetuses and infants are especially sensitive because their thermoregulatory systems are not fully developed and they have less capacity to self-regulate when their bodies are exposed to extreme temperatures,” Rossin-Slater said.

Hot Zones and Air Conditioners

The obvious questions that arise from such research: What happens to the babies of women who already live in very high temperatures? And why not just ensure that all pregnant women have air conditioners, at least in the developed world where it would be more affordable?

Women in warm zones such as parts of Africa and South Asia, as well as U.S. cities like Phoenix and Washington, D.C., shouldn’t worry too much. The loss of income is relatively little and people living in hot climates may actually adapt over time to exposure to extreme heat.

“Our study is not saying that individual people should be doing something differently to avoid exposure to extreme heat,” Rossin-Slater said. “Instead, we think we are providing additional evidence for the possible population-level consequences of climate change and the projected increase in the number of days with extreme temperatures.”

And what about those air conditioners? The cohorts in the study are actually born in the 1970s, during a period of rapid expansion in air conditioning across American households. The researchers found the earning losses went away in areas where most people got air conditioners installed.

“If we think that there is something biological going on as a result of the fetus being overheated, then it makes sense that AC, which prevents the overheating, can mitigate this negative effect,” Rossin-Slater said.

But it’s important to recognize, she said, that air conditioners come with costs, both financial from the perspective of individuals and households who can and can’t afford such systems, and environmental from the perspective of the country or planet as a whole.

“So this is not a `free’ solution and any cost-benefit calculations related to climate change should take into account this adaption response,” Rossin-Slater said. “But we ought to think about what these results imply at the global level — in many countries that are much hotter than the United States and still don’t have AC. So if we are trying to understand global inequality and the impacts of climate change on developing countries, our results suggest that climate change could play a role in perpetuating global inequality across generations.”

"The problems with our democracy—ever-deepening polarization, incivility, gridlock, dysfunction, conflicts of interest, and disregard for democratic norms—are not just problems of political culture and behavior. Politicians are driven by incentives, especially the desire to get re-elected. Institutions heavily shape these incentives, and our institutions are in need of reform. Unless we reform our democracy, we will be increasingly hard-pressed to improve the health of democracy globally." Listen to Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, explains in this podcast what are the options from here, by Hoover Institution. 

Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment launches new symposium series focused on global food security with panel exploring Africa’s agricultural potential.

Food security experts from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) will gather at Stanford for meetings and a symposium on transforming food production on that continent. R.S.V.P by Nov. 28 for Symposium: Can Africa rise to the challenge of feeding itself in the 21st century? | Nov. 29

Afflicted by conflict, political upheaval, and extreme weather patterns Africa continues to experience the highest occurrence of food insecurity. However, with over 60 percent of the worlds uncultivated but fertile land, there is significant room for improvement. AGRA formed in 2006 to fulfill the vision that Africa can feed itself and the world. As an alliance led by Africans with roots in farming communities across the continent, they work to understand the unique needs of farmers and offer sustainable solutions designed to boost production.

In a region with 27.4 percent of the population currently experiencing food insecurity, creating a sustainable agricultural revolution remains a key solution to improving food security across the area. Moderated by Ertharin Cousin, previous World Food Programme director, with 25 years of experience on hunger, food, and resilience strategies, the panel will explore how an agricultural transformation in Africa can sustain a growing population, relieve hunger, generate jobs, improve social cohesion, and create global exports.

Panel members include:
Ertharin Cousin (moderator), Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Visiting Fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, former US Ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome.


Agnes Kalibata, the President of AGRA and former Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources of Rwanda.

Kanayo F. Nwanze, the immediate past president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), winner of the Africa Food Prize in 2016, AGRA board member.

Rajiv Shah, Rockefeller Foundation President, former Administer of USAID (2010-15) where he led bipartisan reform and expansion of US efforts combating global food insecurity. During his previous work at the Gates Foundation he helped launched AGRA.

Usha Barwale Zehr, Director and Chief Technology Officer at Maharashtra – one of India’s largest and most successful multinational seed companies – and AGRA board member.

This is the first installment of the Global Food Security Symposium series hosted by Stanford University's Center on Food Security and the Environment and generously supported by Zach Nelson and Elizabeth Horn. FSE is a joint initiative of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The Center for International Security and Cooperation now has more than 46 podcasts, dating all the way back to Oct. 19, 2016. Listen to them on the CISAC page on the iTunes website. Simply mouse over the title and click play. Open iTunes to download and subscribe to CISAC podcasts. Seminars and events at CISAC are routinely audiotaped for use as podcasts. Also, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Relations offers the World Class podcast series, featuring scholars and experts from FSI, CISAC and beyond.

CISAC's Siegfried Hecker this week won the Dwight D. Eisenhower award from the American Nuclear Society. He received the honor, along with former Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) and former Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), for his "historic achievements in the advancement of nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy." The annoucement from the American Nuclear Society noted:

"Dr. Siegfried Hecker, an international expert in plutonium metallurgy, is being recognized for his nuclear non–proliferation efforts during and following his tenure as the Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Hecker was part of a historic visit by a U.S. delegation to Sarov, Russia, known as Arazamas-16 during the Cold War.  This was the first visit to the closed city by the U.S., and it laid the foundation for a series of programs aimed at securing nuclear materials in Russia and all of its former republics. Dr. Hecker’s current research at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation is focused on reducing the risks of nuclear terrorism worldwide, the nuclear challenges in India, North Korea, Pakistan, and the nuclear aspirations of Iran."

CISAC co-director Amy Zegart wrote the following essay in the Oct. 25 online edition of The Atlantic:

Pity the professionals. In the past month, President Trump has sideswiped certification of the Iran nuclear deal, sandbagged his own secretary of state’s diplomatic efforts with North Korea, and even provoked the ever-careful Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Bob Corker, to uncork his deepest fears in a series of bombshell interviews. “The volatility, is you know, to anyone who has been around, is to a degree alarming,” Corker told the Times earlier this month, revealing that many in the administration were working overtime to keep the president from “the path to World War III.” He doubled down on those comments a few weeks later, declaring that Trump, among other things, was “taking us on a path to combat” with North Korea and should “leave it to the professionals for a while.”

The professionals sure have their hands full. So far, the Trump Doctrine in foreign policy appears to consist of three elements: baiting adversaries, rattling allies, and scaring the crap out of Congress. The administration has injected strategic instability into world politics, undermining alliances and institutions, hastening bad trends, and igniting festering crises across the globe. “America first” looks increasingly like “America alone.” The indispensable nation is becoming the unreliable one. Even without a nuclear disaster, the damage inflicted by the Trump presidency won’t be undone for years, if ever.

But it’s also important to understand that today’s foreign-policy challenges— whether it’s Iran’s hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East, North Korea’s breakneck nuclear breakout, China’s rise, Russia’s nihilism, Europe’s populism and fragmentation, Syria’s civil war, or transnational terrorism and cyber threats—did not start with Trump. This is the most challenging foreign-policy environment any White House has confronted in modern history.

Three swirling complexities explain why.

Threat complexity

Take a look at any of the annual threat assessments issued by the Director of National Intelligence over the past few years. They will make your head spin. They are filled with rising states, declining states, weak states, rogue states, terrorists, hackers, and more. Bad actors don’t just threaten physical space these days. Adversaries are working on ways to cripple America in cyberspace and even outer space—by compromising all those satellite systems on which its digital society depends. In this threat landscape, the number, identity, magnitude, and velocity of dangers facing America are all wildly uncertain. Exactly how many principal adversaries does the United States have? Who are they and what do they want? What could they do to us? How are these threats changing and how can we keep up without spending ourselves into oblivion or leaving ourselves vulnerable to other nasty surprises? These are fundamental questions. There are no consensus answers. Uncertainty is what fuels America’s foreign-policy anxieties today.

The Cold War was different. Then, certainty was what fueled American foreign-policy anxieties. It was clear to all that the U.S. faced a single principal adversary. The Soviet Union had territory on a map and soldiers in uniforms. Thanks to U.S. intelligence, Soviet intentions and capabilities were fairly well understood. The threat landscape was deadly but slower-moving: Communists never met a five-year plan they didn’t like. And while superpower nuclear dangers were terrifying, they were also constraining in a helpful but insane sort of way. In 1961, President Kennedy invoked the specter of a “nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads” over the earth. Every American foreign-policy decision had to consider the question: What would Moscow think of that? Today, the nuclear sword of Damocles is still hanging—indeed, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all successfully tested nuclear devices since 1961—but no singular threat guides U.S. foreign policy as the Soviet Union once did.

Organizational complexity

As threats have grown more complex, organizational arrangements to deal with them have, too. Coordinating Soviet policy was one thing. Developing coherent U.S. foreign policy in the face of so much uncertainty across so many issues is quite another. Little wonder special advisers, envoys, commissions, boards, initiatives, czars, and new agencies have been growing like mushrooms. This may not sound so bad. But it is. Every new agency or czar or special arrangement says, “the regular process here ain’t working.” The crux of the problem is that bureaucracies are notoriously hard to kill or change. Ronald Reagan famously quipped that bureaucracy is the closest thing to immortal life on earth. Whenever a crisis hits, the natural response is to add a new organization and stir. But if today’s chief challenge is developing coherent, coordinated policy in the face of complexity, creating more organizations to coordinate doesn’t get you very far. Over time, the whole bureaucratic universe just keeps growing bigger, filled with obsolete organizations alongside new organizations; fragmented jurisdictions, overlapping jurisdictions, and unclear jurisdictions; and silos so specialized that nobody can see across all the key issues easily.

Cognitive complexity

Humans are not superhuman. Research finds that most people can remember at most seven items at a time, fewer as they grow older. Even the biggest brains have limits. In 2001, Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins noticed that highly trained medical teams at the university’s medical center were screwing up insertions of central line catheters, causing infections in critically ill patients at alarming rates. Why? Because they often forgot one of just five simple steps (like washing their hands) before starting the procedure. (Pronovost instituted a checklist that has since become widely used and is credited with saving thousands of lives.)

In foreign policy, too, the stakes are high and humans are frequently overloaded by complexity, resulting in catastrophic errors that nobody ever intended. One of the chief findings of the 9/11 Commission, for example, was that many inside the FBI simply didn’t know or couldn’t remember all the legal requirements and rules for sharing intelligence and law-enforcement information. Even the Bureau’s own 1995 guidelines were “almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied,” the commission concluded. As a result, clues to the terror plot emerged weeks before 9/11 but were marooned in different parts of the bureaucracy.

In 1935, an advanced bomber nicknamed “the Flying Fortress” crashed during a test flight. The Army Air Corps investigation found that the machine worked fine. The problem was the human. The airplane was so sophisticated, flying required the pilot to remember too many things, and he forgot one of them: unlocking the rudder and elevator controls during takeoff. It was “too much airplane for one man to fly,” one reporter later wrote. That crash sparked the invention of pilot checklists which have been used for nearly a century, transforming global aviation.

U.S. foreign policy is becoming too much airplane for one person to fly. “The professionals” surrounding Trump—Secretaries James Mattis and Rex Tillerson, Chief of Staff John Kelly, National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and others—are trying to keep the whole thing from crashing with a pilot who has never flown before. Let’s hope they can.

America’s approach to the world is a complicated mess, for reasons that predate the current president.

Amy Zegart is co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation and professor of political science, by courtesy. She is also the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and directs the Cyber Policy Program. She wrote this essay as a contributing editor to The Atlantic.