The rise of far-right populism in European Union (EU) member states such as Poland and Hungary has posed challenges to democracy and the rule of law few had anticipated as recently as a decade ago. European Commission action to counter rule of law violations has been weak. This panel will discuss the recent democratic backsliding in Poland and Hungary and the EU's (lack of) response to it. Particular attention will be paid to the April 3 Hungarian elections and the impact of the war in Ukraine.

Panel

Anna Grzymala-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics. Anna's most recent book project, "Nations Under God," examines why some churches have been able to wield enormous policy influence. Others have failed to do so, even in very religious countries. Where religious and national identities have historically fused, churches gained great moral authority, and subsequently covert and direct access to state institutions. It was this institutional access, rather than either partisan coalitions or electoral mobilization, that allowed some churches to become so powerful.

R. Daniel Kelemen is Professor of Political Science and Law, and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University. An internationally renowned expert on European Union politics and law, he is author or editor of six books including Eurolegalism: The Transformation of Law and Regulation in the European Union (Harvard University Press), which won the Best Book Award from the European Union Studies Association, and author of over one hundred articles and book chapters. Kelemen is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and he is a frequent commentator on EU affairs in US and international media. Prior to Rutgers, Kelemen was Fellow in Politics, Lincoln College, University of Oxford. He has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, visiting fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) at Princeton University, and a Fulbright Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels.

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. Scheppele's work focuses on the intersection of constitutional and international law, particularly in constitutional systems under stress. After 1989, Scheppele studied the emergence of constitutional law in Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. After 9/11, she researched the effects of the international "war on terror" on constitutional protections around the world. Since 2010, she has been documenting the rise of autocratic legalism first in Hungary and then in Poland within the European Union, as well as its spread around the world. Her many publications in law reviews, in social science journals and in many languages cover these topics and others. She is a commentator in the popular press, discussing comparative constitutional law, the state of Europe, the rule of law and the rise of populism.

Moderator

Christophe Crombez is Interim Director and Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium. He specializes in European Union (EU) politics and business-government relations in Europe.

Tuesday, April 19

11:30-12:30    Introductions and Lunch

12:30-1:10      Matthias Meyer: Politics and Narration: The Entertaining Side of the Coin. On Intrigues

1:15-1:55        Sara Lehner: Catastrophes in the “Buch von Akkon”

2:00-2:40        Beatrice von Lüpke: The Apocryphal Adam and Eve-Tradition

2:40-3:10        Break

3:10-3:50        Lauren Urbont: Translation of Bodies in Ashkenaz

3:55-4:35        Lane Baker: Chronicling Romani Immigrants in the Holy Roman Empire, 1400–1450

5:00-6:20        Fiona Griffiths & Kathryn Starkey: Medieval Germany (900-1220): Cities and Urban Life

 

Wednesday, April 20

9:00-9:40        Christina Lutter: Two Sides of the Same Coin: Spiritual and Material Dimensions of Urban Community Building in Medieval Central Europe

9:45-10:25      Herbert Krammer: Sustaining Networks: Multiplex Interrelations of Urban and Spiritual Communities in Late Medieval Towns (c. 14/15)

10:30-11:10    Daniel Frey: Community Building Strategies of Political Elites in Late Medieval Austria: Kinship, Gender and Spiritual Economy (c. 15)

11:10-12:00    Lunch (Box Lunch)

12:00-1:15      CMEMS Lecture by Matthias Meyer: The Austrian Chronicle 1454-1467 and what it tells us about narrative practices and the House of Habsburg

Join us on Tuesday, April 5th from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for “What Facebook and Instagram Users Tell Us About Misinformation” featuring Hubert Etienne, Philosopher and Researcher, Ecole Normale Supérieure and Meta AI in conversation with Julie Owono, Executive Director of the Content Policy & Society Lab. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

About The Seminar: 

Social media users who report content are key allies in the management of online misinformation. However, no research has been conducted yet to understand their role and the different trends underlying their reporting activity. Hubert Etienne presents an original approach to studying misinformation by examining it from the reporting users’ perspective at the content-level and comparatively across regions and platforms. This leads Etienne to propose the first classification of reported content pieces, resulting from a review of items reported on Facebook and Instagram in France, the UK, and the US in June 2020 to observe meaningful distinctions regarding misinformation reporting between countries and platforms as it significantly varies in volume, type, topic, and manipulation technique. Etienne identifies four reporting behaviors, from which he derives four types of noise capable of explaining the majority of the inaccuracy in misinformation reporting. He finally shows that breaking down the user reporting signal into a plurality of behaviors allows us to build a simple classifier trained on a small dataset with a combination of basic users-reports capable of identifying these different types of noise.

Speakers:

Hubert Etienne is a philosopher conducting research in AI ethics and computational philosophy at École Normale Supérieure and Meta AI. His research focuses on social interactions, especially the moderation of problematic interactions in cyberspace. He is a lecturer in AI ethics à Sciences Po, in data economics at HEC Paris and in digital regulation at the National School of Administration. He is currently a visiting fellow at Harvard University.

Julie Owono is the Executive Director of the Content Policy & Society Lab (CPSL) and a fellow of the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) at Stanford University. She is also the Executive Director of digital rights organization Internet Sans Frontières, one of the inaugural members of the Facebook Oversight Board, and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. She holds a Master’s degree in International Law from la Sorbonne University in Paris, and practiced as a lawyer at the Paris Bar.

While the number of women in political office around the world is on the rise, men continue to outnumber women at high rates in top leadership positions. There are many reasons why it remains difficult for women to reach, and keep, powerful positions within politics that cover a myriad of electoral, institutional, and individual conditions. Women often become leaders of organizations precisely when leadership conditions are most difficult, and therefore less attractive to powerful men (i.e. the glass cliff). Under these conditions, we might expect women to face greater challenges during their leadership, potentially affecting how long they are able to maintain their leadership roles. Thus, it is impossible to investigate how gender impacts leadership without accounting for selection conditions that place leaders in power. In this paper we take a holistic approach to examining the gendered nature of leadership survival. We investigate how the conditions under which party leaders are chosen, coupled with party performance while in office, impact how long men and women serve as party leaders. In order to do so, we construct a two-stage model that accounts for the endogeneity of the selection process alongside the impact of party performance on the survival of leaders. Using data from 212 leadership terms in eleven industrialized democracies between 1979 and 2018, we find that while women leaders are selected under similar conditions to men, their leadership tenure is more vulnerable to shifts in vote share. Vote share appears to be the main driver of women’s replacement. Men are less susceptible to changes in votes share than women but are also punished for poor poll performance and government loss.

 

Andrea S. Aldrich is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Yale University and her research interests are focused on political representation, gender, and comparative political institutions. Her work examines the relationship between internal political party dynamics and legislative representation. She is particularly interested in investigating the influence of internal party organization on gender equality in elections and party leadership, and her research has recently been published in JCMS: the Journal of Common Market Studies, Party Politics, and Politics & Gender. Before arriving at Yale, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Houston with the Political Parties Database under the direction of Dr. Susan Scarrow, a visiting scholar at Texas A&M University, and Fulbright Scholar at the University of Zagreb in Croatia.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by April 21, 2022.

 

Co-sponsored by:

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. For our final Spring 2022 seminar, please join us to hear our Honors Program award winners present their research.

Adrian Scheibler, Firestone Medal winner
 

Major: International Relations
Thesis Advisor: Christophe Crombez

Thesis Title: Challenging the State: Western European Regionalism in the Era of Financial Crisis

Abstract: The Global Financial Crisis and its aftershocks have substantially altered the Western European political landscape. But while the literature has extensively focused on the impacts of the economic hardship on traditional party competition, it has often failed to consider the center-periphery dimension. My thesis addresses both the demand for and supply of regionalist ideologies during the crisis. Using an original dataset containing 8 countries, 35 regions, and 128 regionalist parties, it finds that voters did not increase their support for regionalist parties during the crisis and may have even turned their backs on these political actors. In addition, I consider the reactions of regionalist parties in three Spanish autonomous communities - Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia - to the crisis. I find evidence of regionalist mobilization on the issue and even some indications of radicalization of regionalist demands. Taken together, these findings raise interesting implications for the impacts of the financial crisis and the interaction between economic indicators, party competition, and voting patterns.

 

Michal Skreta, CDDRL Outstanding Thesis winner
 

 

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