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When we’re faced with a video recording of an event—such as an incident of police brutality—we can generally trust that the event happened as shown in the video. But that may soon change, thanks to the advent of so-called “deepfake” videos that use machine learning technology to show a real person saying and doing things they haven’t.

This technology poses a particular threat to marginalized communities. If deepfakes cause society to move away from the current “seeing is believing” paradigm for video footage, that shift may negatively impact individuals whose stories society is already less likely to believe. The proliferation of video recording technology has fueled a reckoning with police violence in the United States, recorded by bystanders and body-cameras. But in a world of pervasive, compelling deepfakes, the burden of proof to verify authenticity of videos may shift onto the videographer, a development that would further undermine attempts to seek justice for police violence. To counter deepfakes, high-tech tools meant to increase trust in videos are in development, but these technologies, though well-intentioned, could end up being used to discredit already marginalized voices. 

(Content Note: Some of the links in this piece lead to graphic videos of incidents of police violence. Those links are denoted in bold.)

Recent police killings of Black Americans caught on camera have inspired massive protests that have filled U.S. streets in the past year. Those protests endured for months in Minneapolis, where former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted this week in the murder of George Floyd, a Black man. During Chauvin’s trial, another police officer killed Daunte Wright just outside Minneapolis, prompting additional protests as well as the officer’s resignation and arrest on second-degree manslaughter charges. She supposedly mistook her gun for her Taser—the same mistake alleged in the fatal shooting of Oscar Grant in 2009, by an officer whom a jury later found guilty of involuntary manslaughter (but not guilty of a more serious charge). All three of these tragic deaths—George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Oscar Grant—were documented in videos that were later used (or, in Wright’s case, seem likely to be used) as evidence at the trials of the police officers responsible. Both Floyd’s and Wright’s deaths were captured by the respective officers’ body-worn cameras, and multiple bystanders with cell phones recorded the Floyd and Grant incidents. Some commentators credit a 17-year-old Black girl’s video recording of Floyd’s death for making Chauvin’s trial happen at all.

The growth of the movement for Black lives in the years since Grant’s death in 2009 owes much to the rise in the availability, quality, and virality of bystander videos documenting police violence, but this video evidence hasn’t always been enough to secure convictions. From Rodney King’s assailants in 1992 to Philando Castile’s shooter 25 years later, juries have often declined to convict police officers even in cases where wanton police violence or killings are documented on video. Despite their growing prevalence, police bodycams have had mixed results in deterring excessive force or impelling accountability. That said, bodycam videos do sometimes make a difference, helping to convict officers in the killings of Jordan Edwards in Texas and Laquan McDonald in Chicago. Chauvin’s defense team pitted bodycam footage against the bystander videos employed by the prosecution, and lost.

What makes video so powerful? Why does it spur crowds to take to the streets and lawyers to showcase it in trials? It’s because seeing is believing. Shot at differing angles from officers’ point of view, bystander footage paints a fuller picture of what happened. Two people (on a jury, say, or watching a viral video online) might interpret a video two different ways. But they’ve generally been able to take for granted that the footage is a true, accurate record of something that really happened. 

That might not be the case for much longer. It’s now possible to use artificial intelligence to generate highly realistic “deepfake” videos showing real people saying and doing things they never said or did, such as the recent viral TikTok videos depicting an ersatz Tom Cruise. You can also find realistic headshots of people who don’t exist at all on the creatively-named website thispersondoesnotexist.com. (There’s even a cat version.) 

While using deepfake technology to invent cats or impersonate movie stars might be cute, the technology has more sinister uses as well. In March, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a warning that malicious actors are “almost certain” to use “synthetic content” in disinformation campaigns against the American public and in criminal schemes to defraud U.S. businesses. The breakneck pace of deepfake technology’s development has prompted concerns that techniques for detecting such imagery will be unable to keep up. If so, the high-tech cat-and-mouse game between creators and debunkers might end in a stalemate at best. 

If it becomes impossible to reliably prove that a fake video isn’t real, a more feasible alternative might be to focus instead on proving that a real video isn’t fake. So-called “verified at capture” or “controlled-capture” technologies attach additional metadata to imagery at the moment it’s taken, to verify when and where the footage was recorded and reveal any attempt to tamper with the data. The goal of these technologies, which are still in their infancy, is to ensure that an image’s integrity will stand up to scrutiny. 

Photo and video verification technology holds promise for confirming what’s real in the age of “fake news.” But it’s also cause for concern. In a society where guilty verdicts for police officers remain elusive despite ample video evidence, is even more technology the answer? Or will it simply reinforce existing inequities? 

The “ambitious goal” of adding verification technology to smartphone chipsets necessarily entails increasing the cost of production. Once such phones start to come onto the market, they will be more expensive than lower-end devices that lack this functionality. And not everyone will be able to afford them. Black Americans and poor Americans have lower rates of smartphone ownership than whites and high earners, and are more likely to own a “dumb” cell phone. (The same pattern holds true with regard to educational attainment and urban versus rural residence.) Unless and until verification technology is baked into even the most affordable phones, it risks replicating existing disparities in digital access. 

That has implications for police accountability, and, by extension, for Black lives. Primed by societal concerns about deepfakes and “fake news,” juries may start expecting high-tech proof that a video is real. That might lead them to doubt the veracity of bystander videos of police brutality if they were captured on lower-end phones that lack verification technology. Extrapolating from current trends in phone ownership, such bystanders are more likely to be members of marginalized racial and socioeconomic groups. Those are the very people who, as witnesses in court, face an uphill battle in being afforded credibility by juries. That bias, which reared its ugly head again in the Chauvin trial, has long outlived the 19th-century rules that explicitly barred Black (and other non-white) people from testifying for or against white people on the grounds that their race rendered them inherently unreliable witnesses. 

In short, skepticism of “unverified” phone videos may compound existing prejudices against the owners of those phones. That may matter less in situations where a diverse group of numerous eyewitnesses record a police brutality incident on a range of devices. But if there is only a single bystander witness to the scene, the kind of phone they own could prove significant.

The advent of mobile devices empowered Black Americans to force a national reckoning with police brutality. Ubiquitous, pocket-sized video recorders allow average bystanders to document the pandemic of police violence. And because seeing is believing, those videos make it harder for others to continue denying the problem exists. Even with the evidence thrust under their noses, juries keep acquitting police officers who kill Black people. Chauvin’s conviction this week represents an exception to recent history: Between 2005 and 2019, of the 104 law enforcement officers charged with murder or manslaughter in connection with a shooting while on duty, 35 were convicted

The fight against fake videos will complicate the fight for Black lives. Unless it is equally available to everyone, video verification technology may not help the movement for police accountability, and could even set it back. Technological guarantees of videos’ trustworthiness will make little difference if they are accessible only to the privileged, whose stories society already tends to believe. We might be able to tech our way out of the deepfakes threat, but we can’t tech our way out of America’s systemic racism. 

Riana Pfefferkorn is a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory

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Q&A with Riana Pfefferkorn, Stanford Internet Observatory Research Scholar

Riana Pfefferkorn joined the Stanford Internet Observatory as a research scholar in December. She comes from Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, where she was the Associate Director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity.
Q&A with Riana Pfefferkorn, Stanford Internet Observatory Research Scholar
A member of the All India Student Federation teaches farmers about social media and how to use such tools as part of ongoing protests against the government. (Pradeep Gaur / SOPA Images / Sipa via Reuters Connect)
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New Intermediary Rules Jeopardize the Security of Indian Internet Users

New Intermediary Rules Jeopardize the Security of Indian Internet Users
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End-to-end encrypted (E2EE) communications have been around for decades, but the deployment of default E2EE on billion-user platforms has new impacts for user privacy and safety. The deployment comes with benefits to both individuals and society but it also creates new risks, as long-existing models of messenger abuse can now flourish in an environment where automated or human review cannot reach. New E2EE products raise the prospect of less understood risks by adding discoverability to encrypted platforms, allowing contact from strangers and increasing the risk of certain types of abuse. This workshop will place a particular focus on platform benefits and risks that impact civil society organizations, with a specific focus on the global south. Through a series of workshops and policy papers, the Stanford Internet Observatory is facilitating open and productive dialogue on this contentious topic to find common ground. 

An important defining principle behind this workshop series is the explicit assumption that E2EE is here to stay. To that end, our workshops have set aside any discussion of exceptional access (aka backdoor) designs. This debate has raged between industry, academic cryptographers and law enforcement for decades and little progress has been made. We focus instead on interventions that can be used to reduce the harm of E2E encrypted communication products that have been less widely explored or implemented. 

Submissions for working papers and requests to attend will be accepted up to 10 days before the event. Accepted submitters will be invited to present or attend our upcoming workshops. 

SUBMIT HERE

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Please note: the start time for this event has been moved from 3:00 to 3:15pm.

Join FSI Director Michael McFaul in conversation with Richard Stengel, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. They will address the role of entrepreneurship in creating stable, prosperous societies around the world.

Richard Stengel Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Special Guest United States Department of State

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Michael McFaul is Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995. Dr. McFaul also is as an International Affairs Analyst for NBC News and a columnist for The Washington Post. He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

He has authored several books, most recently the New York Times bestseller From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. Earlier books include Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; Transitions To Democracy: A Comparative Perspective (eds. with Kathryn Stoner); Power and Purpose: American Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (with James Goldgeier); and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. He is currently writing a book called Autocrats versus Democrats: Lessons from the Cold War for Competing with China and Russia Today.

He teaches courses on great power relations, democratization, comparative foreign policy decision-making, and revolutions.

Dr. McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. In International Relations at Oxford University in 1991. His DPhil thesis was Southern African Liberation and Great Power Intervention: Towards a Theory of Revolution in an International Context.

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Stanford Report: The First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, spoke at SCPKU today and said study abroad allows students to realize that countries all have a stake in each other's success.  Following her remarks, she held a conversation with students on the Stanford campu via SCPKU's Highly Immersive Classroom. Read more.

 

 

 

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Session 1: Meiji Restoration - 

Meiji Restoration, or revolution, was not only the establishment of centralized government, but also a democratic revolution in terms of wider participation of the people across classes and regions.

 

Join us for our Spring Quarter Seminar Series featuring Shorenstein APARC Visiting Scholar and Japan Program Fellow Dr. Shinichi Kitaoka, Emeritus professor at the University of Tokyo and a distinguished scholar in modern Japanese politics, presents his new interpretations of six major issues in modern Japanese politics based on recent studies in Japan and his own experience as the Ambassador to the United Nations and the President of Japan International Cooperation Agency.

This seminar series re-examines several important and well-known issues in modern Japanese politics and diplomacy from the late 19th century to the 21st century based upon the lecturer’s recent research and experience within the government. Major topics are, Meiji Restoration as a democratic revolution, resilience of Taisho Democracy, Military as a bureaucracy, Surrender and the American Occupation, Yoshida Doctrine and the Regime of 1955, Development of ODA policy, and recent development of Security Policy in the 21st Century.

 

Catered dinner will be served at seminar sessions.

This lecture is part of the Reexaminations of major issues in Modern Japanese Politics and Diplomacy Seminar Series

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Shinichi Kitaoka is the former President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA: 2015-2022) and Emeritus Professor, University of Tokyo. Previous posts include President of the International University of Japan (2012-2015), professor at University of Tokyo (1997-2012), Professor of National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) (2012-), Professor of Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, the University of Tokyo (1997-2004, 2006-2012), Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Deputy Permanent Representative of Japan to the United Nations (2004-2006), and Professor of College of Law and Politics, Rikkyo University (1985-1997).

Dr. Kitaoka’s specialty is modern Japanese politics and diplomacy. He obtained his B.A. (1971) and his Ph.D. (1976) both from the University of Tokyo. He is Emeritus Professor of the University of Tokyo and Rikkyo University. He received many awards including the Medal with Purple Ribbon for his academic achievements in 2011.

 

 

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Three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the joint declaration of a "friendship without limits" by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, the two leaders reaffirmed their partnership during a phone call, pledging continued coordination on foreign policy, security, and trade. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s controversial Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his administration's vitriolic foreign policy rhetoric have raised concerns that Washington may no longer be the reliable partner it once was. Moreover, amid ongoing U.S.-imposed tariffs, India is bracing for the fallout from Trump’s trade war, despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s February visit to the White House, which did not yield the concessions and Trump support New Delhi had hoped for.

The 2025 Oksenberg Symposium, titled China’s Strategic Relationships, brought together experts to discuss these evolving strategic relationships between China, the United States, Russia, and India, and to consider their perspectives and strategic adjustments in response to shifting internal and external political, economic, and social dynamics. The discussion, moderated by APARC’s China Program Director Jean Oi, featured panelists Da Wei of Tsinghua University, Alex Gabuev of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Sumit Ganguly of the Huntington Program on Strengthening U.S.-India Relations at the Hoover Institution, and FSI Director Michael McFaul.

This convening followed Chatham House rules to encourage candor, so the following summary does not attribute comments to individual panelists.

A Partnership Without Limits

The panelists first focused on the increasingly complex relationships between Russia, China, and the United States. On the one hand, a growing China-Russia alignment across military, economic, and political domains has been well documented. On the other hand, Russia’s increasing dependence on China — especially after the war in Ukraine — has raised questions about the asymmetry of their partnership.

Even so, the relationship between the two nations remains strong, partly due to their shared distrust of the West. Although China has been cautious about fully endorsing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has refrained from condemning the war, understanding the risks of destabilizing Russia or fostering a Western-aligned regime.

The View from New Delhi

India’s relationships with the United States and China are marked by a delicate balancing act. The U.S.-India partnership has strengthened over the years, driven by shared concerns about China’s growing assertiveness. Still, despite bipartisan support for this relationship, India’s historical experiences, particularly during the Cold War, have left a lingering distrust toward U.S. intentions. That wariness is now increasing under the uncertainties of the Trump administration.

India's relationship with China is complicated by military and economic disparities and by China’s strategic partnerships in South Asia, particularly with Pakistan. India's policy remains cautious, aiming to maintain a non-aligned stance while strengthening defense and trade ties with the United States and managing tensions with China, especially over border disputes.

Beijing’s Patience

U.S.-China relations took center stage at this year’s symposium. China’s rise as a global power has posed a complex challenge for U.S. foreign policy. Under the first Trump administration, China was portrayed as a revisionist power with expansionist ambitions. Trump’s rhetoric framed China as a strategic adversary, drawing comparisons to the Soviet Union under Stalin. This characterization contributed to the perception of a new Cold War and an accelerated decoupling of the two economies. In the second administration, tariffs and a looming trade war define the relationship.

From China’s perspective, the past decade has seen an overemphasis on its relationship with the United States., which at times strained its ties with Russia and India. China’s growing partnership with Russia, motivated by shared concerns over Western policies, has been key in countering perceived threats, particularly NATO’s expansion. However, China has remained cautious about fully endorsing Russia’s actions, such as the invasion of Ukraine, while acknowledging the risks of a collapsing Russian regime.

China’s relations with India have been challenged by border issues, as well as India’s shift away from non-alignment and its growing ties with the United States. These changes have complicated China’s strategic calculations in South Asia, though recent stabilization in Sino-Indian relations shows potential for improvement.

Challenges for Global Stability

The panelists noted that the increasing competition between the four countries is reshaping the international order, creating a more multipolar world where countries are single-handedly pursuing their national interests. This fragmentation of global power poses challenges for international cooperation but also provides China with opportunities to pursue more flexible diplomatic strategies, potentially easing tensions with Russia and India.

The U.S. response to these changes, particularly under Trump, was heavily scrutinized. In both Trump's first and second terms, the administration’s foreign policy marked a radical departure from past practices, blending radical isolationism, unilateralism, and realism. Panelists noted that the erosion of democratic ideals in U.S. foreign policy contrasts with its role in the Cold War era as a champion of democracy and human rights, particularly in opposition to Soviet authoritarianism. This shift has been especially evident in its approach to Taiwan, where there has been limited emphasis on supporting its democratic values amid growing pressure from China.

This new isolationist stance, driven largely by domestic concerns and a belief that the United States has been exploited in global trade, has led to a strategic pivot away from multilateralism. During Trump’s first term, the administration withdrew from key international agreements such as the Paris Climate Accords, the Iran nuclear deal, and the World Health Organization, favoring "America First" policies over collective global action. The continued shift toward isolationism and unilateralism marks a radical departure from previous administrations' commitment to liberal internationalism.

A Rough Road Ahead

Panelists expressed concern that this dramatic shift could leave Washington isolated, undermining its ability to address global challenges like climate change, international security, and the rise of authoritarian regimes. The erosion of key alliances could also diminish U.S. influence, making it harder to counter the growing power of China and Russia.

One panelist observed that while Trump initially framed China as a strategic adversary, his second term saw more conciliatory rhetoric, though his policies — especially the trade war — could ultimately harm U.S. interests. This approach could erode U.S. global influence by weakening international alliances and multilateral institutions that have long underpinned U.S. power. The panelists agreed that Trump’s foreign policy would fundamentally reshape U.S. relationships with key global players.

The symposium underscored the complexity of balancing strategic interests in a rapidly changing world, where traditional alliances are being tested and new dynamics continually emerge. The challenge for China, the United States., Russia, and India is to navigate these relationships in ways that secure their national interests while contributing to broader global stability.

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Inside Thailand’s Political Struggle for Democracy: Insights from Pita Limjaroenrat

At a discussion hosted by APARC’s Southeast Asia Program, Thai politician and democracy advocate Pita Limjaroenrat assessed the challenges facing Thailand and provided a hopeful vision for its future, one that relies on perseverance, strategic electoral victories, and the pursuit of a more just and equitable political system.
Inside Thailand’s Political Struggle for Democracy: Insights from Pita Limjaroenrat
Oriana Skylar Mastro on World Class podcast
Commentary

A New Framework for How to Compete with China

Drawing from her book "Upstart," Oriana Skylar Mastro joins Michael McFaul on World Class to discuss what the United States is getting wrong about its strategy toward China, and what America should do differently to retain its competitive advantage.
A New Framework for How to Compete with China
Anti-Yoon Suk Yeol protesters participate in a rally against impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol in Seoul, South Korea.
Q&As

Interview: Gi-Wook Shin on South Korea's Political and Institutional Crisis

The martial law episode — and all that followed — “reflects a broader global pattern of democratic erosion but also showcases Korea’s unique strengths," Stanford sociologist Gi-Wook Shin says in an interview with The Diplomat magazine.
Interview: Gi-Wook Shin on South Korea's Political and Institutional Crisis
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APARC's 2025 Oksenberg Symposium explored how shifting political, economic, and social conditions in China, Russia, India, and the United States are reshaping their strategies and relationships. The discussion highlighted key issues such as military and economic disparities, the shifting balance of power, and the implications of these changes for global stability, especially in the Indo-Pacific region.

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Flyer for the seminar "A Thousand Years of Corruption" with portrait of speaker Marco Garrido.
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The scholarly and popular commonsense about corruption in the Philippines is that the country has always been corrupt. Seventy-eight years of corruption as an independent state (1946-2024) may as well have been a thousand. Lay and scholarly accounts explain this continuity with respect to traditional values and premature democratization. In both accounts, corruption is all but genetic to Philippine culture or politics. To be sure, continuity is self-evident if we are looking only at corruption scandals—but scandals have been accompanied by anticorruption movements, broadly speaking. The two have gone hand-in-hand historically, suggesting that we need to understand them together. Taking them together, that is, focusing on their dialectic, produces, as I will show, a history of change. Specifically, how Filipinos relate to corruption has changed. They have become less tolerant of it in general and learned to embrace an anticorruption model of politics. How scholars and policymakers conceive of corruption has changed. They have come to adopt a view of corruption as a generic social problem, effectively disembedding it from society. These developments have enabled a more intolerant approach such that, today, the greater danger lies in an anticorruption “fundamentalism” leading to the rejection of politics altogether. Viewed as a whole, the history of corruption/anticorruption has been a popular struggle over what politics should look like, and thus we might read their dialectic as driving the progress of political modernization from below.

20250307 SEAP Marco Garrido

Marco Garrido is the author of The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila, which received multiple awards, including for best book in political and urban sociology. He is working on a second book, tentatively titled Bad Words, on the imbrication of corruption, politics, and the politics of knowledge in postcolonial Philippines.

Marco Garrido, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
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Event flyer: fireside chat with Pita Limjaroenrat. Image: speaker headshot.
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We have reached in-person capacity for this event but you are welcome to join us online and submit questions for Pita.

Join Pita Limjaroenrat, former leader of Thailand’s dissolved Move Forward Party, for a discussion on contemporary Thai politics and society. In this fireside chat, Pita will address audience questions on topics such as Thailand’s political and economic landscape, inequality, and democratic movements, as well as the country’s evolving relationships with ASEAN and major global powers. The discussion will also touch on broader regional challenges and the state of democracy on a global scale.

Limjaroenrat, Pita SEAP 20250228

Pita Limjaroenrat formerly led the Move Forward Party (MFP) in Thailand’s May 2023 general elections, where his social democratic platform won the most votes and seats in the Parliament. Despite this mandate, his attempts to form a government were blocked by institutional mechanisms, and the Constitutional Court dissolved the MFP on August 7. Pita’s policy focus centers on addressing grassroots issues, welfare improvements, and human rights, while advocating for the demilitarization of politics and economic de-monopolization. Currently, he is a Visiting Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. He holds a joint MPA-MBA from Harvard Kennedy School and MIT Sloan and has been named on the TIME 100 Next List. Today, Pita continues to champion transparent and equitable governance on a global scale.

Lunch will be served.

Kiyoteru Tsutsui
Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Co-Director, Southeast Asia Program at Shorenstein APARC
Pita Limjaroenrat, Visiting Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School
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Event flyer: fireside chat with Pita Limjaroenrat. Image: speaker headshot.
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Danila Serra
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We examine the impact of ethics and integrity training on police officers in Ghana through a randomized field experiment. The program, informed by theoretical work on the role of identity and motivation in organizations, aimed to re-activate intrinsic motivations to serve the public, and to create a new shared identity of "Agent of Change." Data generated by an endline survey conducted 20 months post training, show that the program positively affected officers' values and beliefs regarding on-the-job unethical behavior and improved their attitudes toward citizens. The training also lowered officers' propensity to behave unethically, as measured by an incentivized cheating game conducted at endline. District-level administrative data for a subsample of districts are consistent with a significant impact of the program on officers' field behavior in the short-run.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Danila Serra is Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford. She is an applied behavioral economist employing experimental methods to address policy-relevant questions in political economy, development, education, and gender economics. Her work has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the World Bank, the IZA G²LM|LIC program, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) and the Arnold Foundation. In 2017, she was the inaugural recipient of the Vernon Smith Ascending Scholar Prize, given by the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics (IFREE) to an exceptional scholar using experiments in economics research.

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

Hesham Sallam
Hesham Sallam

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

Danila Serra
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Soledad Artiz Prillaman seminar — Does Affirmative Action Worsen Quality? Theory and Evidence to the Contrary from Elections
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Affirmative action improves the representation of women and minorities, but critics worry that it is at odds with meritocracy. We argue that quotas can improve quality under conditions of discrimination, as quota recipients are held to a higher standard despite facing structural inequalities that make meeting these standards difficult. The net effect of quotas on observable proxies for quality -- qualifications -- therefore depends on the degrees of selection and structural discrimination. We test our argument by examining the effects of electoral quotas on politicians' education and quality in India. Using two censuses covering more than 40 million residents and 13 states, we show that randomly and quasi-randomly assigned quota politicians have lower average education than non-quota politicians but the same or higher quality. We further provide evidence of both voter and structural discrimination. Our results show that quotas can both enhance the representativeness and quality of politicians.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Soledad Artiz Prillaman is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. Her research lies at the intersections of comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus in South Asia. She investigates the political consequences of development; the political behavior and representation of minorities, specifically women; inequalities in political engagement; and the translation of voter demands. She is the faculty director of the Inclusive Democracy and Development Lab and recently published a book with Cambridge University Press titled "The Patriarchal Political Order: The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India."

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

Hesham Sallam
Hesham Sallam

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

Soledad Artiz Prillaman Assistant Professor, Stanford University
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