Stanford University

Voting Patterns in the European Parliament: Is the Structure of Political Conflict Changing?

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In this paper we study the changing multi-dimensional structure of political (ideological) conflict in the European Parliament. We analyze whether a structural change in terms of coalition formation is taking place in the current European Parliament.  Using the roll call votes from the sixth (2004-09), seventh (2009-14), and eighth (2014-19) European Parliaments, we show that, as in the past, two dimensions are needed to explain voting behavior in the European Parliament.  However, we find that the dimensionality of policy space has changed.  Before 2014, the first dimension was left-right and the second dimension was pro/anti-EU; after 2014, the first dimension seems to be related to pro/anti-EU and left-right.  

 

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Abdul Noury is an associate professor in the division of the social sciences at New York University Abu Dhabi. This year he is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

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Abdul Noury Associate Professor of Political Science Speaker New York University Abu Dhabi
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European Governance
European Governance Seminar Series

Reflections on the Future of Ukraine

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Please join visiting scholar Sviatoslav Vakarchuk and Mosbacher Director of CDDRL Francis Fukuyama for a conversation on Ukraine's future success. 

 

Francis Fukuyama

Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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CDDRL Mosbacher Director and Olivier Nomellini Fellow at FSI

Sviatoslav Vakarchuk

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Visiting Scholar, Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program, 2017-18
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Vakarchuk is a Ukrainian civic activist, musician and the lead vocalist and founder of the band “Okean Elzy.“ He will be in residence at CDDRL this fall to attend courses and study with some of the leading intellectuals and academics at CDDRL. He holds a doctorate degree in theoretical physics from the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.

Vakarchuk is also the founder of a charity fund called “Lyudi Maybutnyogo” (People of the Future) and co-founder of the Center for Economic Strategy, an independent policy think tank dedicated to supporting reforms and sustainable economic growth in Ukraine. He served as a Yale World Fellow in 2015.

CDDRL Visiting Scholar and lead singer of "Okean Elzy" rock group
Seminars

Global Europe: Rethinking migration, democracy, and what sustains Europe at home at abroad

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The "Brexit" has been seen as a major blow that changes the future of Europe, at the time when nationalist and separatist movements seem most ascendant, and the EU seems to be the toxic subject for plebiscites, the European Union is expanding its role as a global actor. These referendums, and threats to withdraw, are spurring Member States to return to the roots of the European Project. From its historical foundation, that project prizes freedom from war on the continent, and prosperity through free movement of trade and social capital.

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Roland Hsu
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From Brain Drain to Brain Circulation and Linkage

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The development community has increased its focus on higher education over the past two decades, recognizing that education can contribute to building up a country’s capacity for participation in an increasingly knowledge-based world economy and accelerate economic growth. The value added by higher education to economies—job creation, innovation, enhanced entrepreneurship, and research, a core higher education activity—has been highlighted by an important body of literature. 

Yet experts remain concerned that investing in higher education in less-developed countries may lead to a “brain drain”--highly educated students and professionals permanently leaving their home countries. In the 2016 Kauffman report on international science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students in the United States, for instance, 48 percent among a randomly sampled survey of 2,322 foreign doctoral students in the United States wished to stay there after graduation, with only 12 percent wanting to leave and 40.5 percent being undecided. In fact, high percentages of foreign students in the United States with doctorates in science and engineering continue to stay in the United States, creating a brain drain problem for the sending countries. 

Because students tend to move from developing to developed countries to study, brain drain is more problematic for developing countries. In addition, given accelerated talent flows around the world and the increasing integration of less-developed countries into global value chains, the negative impact of brain drain could be further amplified. As demonstrated by the studies reviewed in this paper, the migration of high-skilled professionals from developing countries may indeed create brain drain for them, but at the same time can significantly enhance the social and economic development of their home countries, regardless of whether or not they decide to return home, thus complicating what used to be seen as a straightforward case of brain drain. 

From Brain Drain to Brain Circulation and Linkage examines how brain drain can contribute to development for the sending countries through brain circulation and linkage. It provides an overview of the conceptual framework to map out high-skilled labor flows, identifies empirical cases and policies in Asia that demonstrate high-skilled migrant professionals actually make significant contributions to their home countries (beyond monetary remittances), summarizes key social and economic enabling factors that are important in attracting and motivating migrant high-skilled professionals to return or engage with their home countries, and concludes with policy implications and suggestions for further research based on these findings.

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Gi-Wook Shin
Rennie Moon
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978-1-931368-49-0

Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor: Axel Polleres

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Axel PolleresAxel Polleres is currently a visiting professor at Stanford under the Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professors program hosted by The Europe Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
 
During his stay at Stanford, Axel will work mainly with the Biomedical Informatics Research Center (BMIR). At his home institution he heads the Institute of Information Business of Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien) which he joined in September 2013 as a full professor in the area of Data and Knowledge Engineering. Since January 2017 he is also a member of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna Faculty. Apart from his research in the area of efficient and intelligent Data management, Semantic Web and Web standards, he recently co-founded a research lab on Privacy and Sustainable Computing at WU where he works on projects about privacy and lowering the entry barriers to Open Data on the Web. 
 
While visiting Stanford, he plans on transfer his work on Linked Data, which he so far applied mostly in the are of Open Government Data, to other domains such as biomedical research data or in the library domain, both areas where the integration of vast amounts of heterogeneous (meta-)data from different sources and lowering entry-barriers to access this data are likewise important.
 
Axel will be giving a talk on Digital transformation of democracy? Challenges and Opportunities at The Europe Center on May 17, 2018. He will discuss the challenges and opportunities of various digital initiatives and their potential to affect democracy. More concretely, he will discuss the status of Open Government Data, eID, and Online privacy in Austria and in an international context:
 
Open Government Data (OGD) is a global trend to enable transparency by making public data accessible to citizens, providing trustworthy and transparent information in machine readable form, not least promising to counter populism and "fake news". Austria's OGD initiative is a success story, but also faces many challenges. Electronic IDs can provide means to make eGovernment and interaction with public institutions more efficient, but depending on how hey are implemented, also provide a potential threat to privacy and enable surveillance: this holds both IDs provided by international companies but also for national eIDs: against this background, we shall compare the Austrian eID system with other, alternative models. Lastly, he will speak about transparency and accountability of processing of personal information by both private and public institutions. The new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides both an opportunity, but also imposes several challenges to the government economically and in terms of preserving the citizens' rights.

 

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Featured Faculty Research: Jonathan Rodden

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Jonathan Rodden imageJonathan Rodden started his academic career at MIT, and joined the Stanford political science faculty in 2007. In 2012, he founded the Stanford Spatial Social Science Lab, which is a center for research and teaching dedicated to the use of geo-spatial data in the social sciences. Jonathan’s recent work focuses on the geography of economic production and political competition, especially in industrialized societies. He has written a number of journal articles examining the spatial arrangement of voting behavior in Europe, North America, and Australasia since the industrial revolution. He has also written a series of related papers on redistricting and partisan gerrymandering.

Jonathan is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled Why Cities Lose, which is scheduled for publication by Basic Books in early 2019. He argues that ever since the rise of manufacturing in the late 19th century and the accompanying construction of dense working-class housing, the support base of left parties has been primarily urban. Over time, these parties came to adopt a variety of additional policy platforms having less to do with the rights of manufacturing workers, and more to do with the interests of urban groups including social progressives and more recently, educated workers in knowledge-intensive industries. Along the way, urban-rural political polarization has grown, not just in the United States but also in countries like the United Kingdom and Canada.

As a result of this process, Rodden shows that votes for left parties have become highly concentrated in city centers, while votes for right parties are more evenly distributed in space. Rodden explains that when winner-take-all electoral districts are drawn, as in Britain and its former colonies, this geography leads to a substantial advantage for parties of the right in achieving legislative representation. He demonstrates that urban-rural polarization—and a bias against urban parties—is less likely to emerge in multi-party systems like those of Continental Europe. His book concludes by exploring implications for policy, as well as for debates about redistricting and electoral reform.

Jonathan has also been working for two decades on a set of issues related to political and fiscal federalism. While some of his ongoing work focuses on fiscal decentralization in developing countries, he has also been involved in debates about the European debt crisis and reforms to the Eurozone, and recently presented the Pierre Werner Chair lecture at the European University Institute in Florence as part of a project called “A Dynamic Economic and Monetary Union” (ADEMU). In this lecture and an accompanying policy paper written for the European Parliament, Rodden extracts broad lessons from other federations, including the United States and Canada, for some of the design challenges facing the European Monetary Union.

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Art and Power: Patronage and Politics in Europe from the Old Regime to the Present

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This conference examines the history of state arts patronage in Europe and its ramifications in the present. Presentations on literature, music, theater, and the visual arts will provide an interdisciplinary examination of the origins and the tensions underlying the European model of state arts funding, along with a contemporary perspective on how and why European governments seek to support the arts today by the Cultural Counselor of the French Embassy in the United States. The panels will address questions such as: How have the arts been used to secure domestic political legitimacy or project power internationally at different times? What kinds of art are deemed worthy of support, and what artistic forms have been excluded from such patronage? What are the different historical genealogies of this state patronage, and what do they tell us about why European governments remain committed to funding the arts when such support is controversial in the United States?

RSVP to andreip@stanford.edu


Conference schedule

Breakfast served at 8:45am

Introduction: 9am (Dan Edelstein)

Panel 1: Representations of Power in the Old Regime (9:15-10:45am)

  • Sarah Grandin (Harvard), “’To Preserve and Augment’: Printing the Cabinet du Roi, c. 1670”
  • Chandra Mukerji (UCSD), “Meaning vs. Imagination in the Art of the Sun King: Sculpture, themes, and political possibility”
  • Gerardo Tocchini (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice), “The Aristocratic Romance: Greuze’s ‘Bourgeois’ Scenes”

Coffee break (10:45-11am)

Panel 2: Patronage, Circulation, and Institutions (11am-12:30pm)

  • Rahul Markovits (École Normale Supérieure), “Actors of soft power: French theatre and the paradoxes of cultural grandeur in eighteenth-century Europe”
  • Audrey Calefas-Strebelle (Mills College), “Turkish and French delights: From Turkish origin to French manufacture, the circulation of artefacts and savoir faire in French-Ottoman cultural diplomacy”
  • Andrei Pesic (Stanford), “Patronage on the Cheap: Monopolies and Enlightenment Cultural Markets”

Lunch (12:30pm-2pm)

Art and Power Today: France’s Cultural Policy. Presentation and Discussion (2-3:00pm)

  • Bénédicte de Montlaur (French Embassy in the U.S.) and Matthew Tiews (Stanford Arts Initiative)

Coffee break (3-3:15pm)

Panel 3: After the Revolution: Rethinking Art and Power in the New Regime (3:15-4:45pm)

  • Robert Morrissey (U. of Chicago), “Enlightenment and Liminality: Mme de Staël, Victim as Arbiter of Taste and Glory”
  • Anne Higonnet (Barnard College of Columbia University), “Sumptuary law failure, fashion magazine success”
  • Heather Hadlock (Stanford), “Verdi’s Aida from Italian tourist to French resident: Paris, 1876-1880”

 

Conference Organizers: Dan Edelstein and Andrei Pesic

Sponsored by The Europe Center of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Stanford Department of French and Italian, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

 

Art and Power Conference Poster
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France's Cultural Policy Presentation and Discussion flyer
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Levinthal Hall
Stanford Humanities Center
 

Conferences

How Populism is Poisoning the Global Liberal Order

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"There is growing consensus that populism constitutes a grave threat to liberal democracy, and to the liberal international order on which peace and prosperity have rested for the past two generations," writes Francis Fukuyama in the World Economic Forum. The fate of the global liberal order could be jeopardized due to rising populist powers and movements. Read the full article here. 

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The Elusive Goal of Global Food Security

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Ending world hunger is a universal goal, yet progress and social awareness of the issue waxes and wanes in the course of broader political and economic developments. The massive famine in China under Chairman Mao’s 1958–62 Great Leap Forward, a succession of severe droughts and associated famines in India in 1965–66, and the political violence that accompanied regime change in Indonesia in 1964–67 left tens of millions of people starving and drew global attention to the threat of food insecurity. What emerged from these events was an international commitment to agricultural technology transfers, water resource development, and foreign assistance – partly in the spirit of humanitarian goodwill and partly in pursuit of long-term geopolitical and economic interests revolving around the Cold War. Whatever the motivation, the outcome over the ensuing decades was more than a doubling of staple cereal yields in Asia, and a steady decline in real (inflation-adjusted) cereal prices.

Despite these gains, a second, quite different, rallying cry for food security resounded in 2007–8 as international grain prices spiked, food riots erupted in numerous cities throughout the developing world, and the global economy headed into a deep recession. Several factors sparked this crisis, but unlike the earlier periods of dire food shortages, the root causes included unwieldy financial markets and escalating demands for food, animal feeds, and fuel (including biofuels) in a globalized economy. This episode prompted new analyses of the connection between global commodity markets and food security, the political-economy foundations of agricultural development, and the differential impacts of food prices on net producers and net consumers. In the five-year period from 2007 to 2012, international cereal prices were highly unstable, varying by as much as 300 percent.

Today, international agricultural markets have settled at relatively low prices, but civil conflicts, extreme climate events, and other natural disasters are blocking the path toward ending hunger. In February 2017, the United Nations declared a famine in South Sudan, as war and economic collapse ravaged the newly independent nation. Although the famine officially ended in mid-2017, food emergencies and severe undernourishment still threaten tens of millions of people in South Sudan, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, and Syria, due to a combination of civil conflict, prolonged droughts, and occasional floods. On the surface, it seems incomprehensible that there could be such difficulty in addressing these looming famines at a time when global cereal production and stocks are at historical highs. But the problem is not a matter of food supply; the problem is war.

Download full article here.

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Rosamond L. Naylor
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