Stanford University

Latest research examines link between violence and economic growth

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Program on Poverty and Governance director Beatriz Magaloni, associate professor of political science and FSI senior fellow, post-doctoral fellow Gabriela Calderón and graduate student Gustavo Robles were recently featured in an Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) report for their participation in a research group for the IDB's Citizen Security Research Platform. Their project, entitled "The Economic Consequences of Drug-Trafficking Violence in Mexico," seeks to quantify the local economic impact of Mexico's drug war across the country.

The study uses electricity consumption as a proxy for per-capita gross domestic product to calculate the impact of violence on economic output in Mexico. The research team found that when municipalities become embroiled in high levels of drug violence, local electrical consumption drops. They also examined census employment statistics to measure the impact of violence on the number of people employed or actively seeking employment. Their research has suggested that citizens are increasingly hesitant to launch businesses, and may even choose unemployment over risking the daily walk to work in a highly insecure environment.

The team presented their work for a seminar at the IDB's Washington, D.C., headquarters as part of the project "The Cost of Crime and Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean" on Jan. 23-24, 2013.

Click below for a working draft of the paper available in both Spanish and English. 

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Citizen Insecurity in Latin America: a Regional Challenge

Following the highly successful conference "Violence, Drugs and Governance: Mexican Security in Comparative Perspective", the Program on Poverty and Governance is partnering with the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to host a new conference on violence, crime and citizen insecurity in Latin America. The greater objectives of this two day conference are to:

  • Deepen the critical analysis of insecurity in Latin America through an interdisciplinary dialogue and the creation of methodological tools
  • Create an interdisciplinary network of academics focused on the study and comprehension of insecurity in the Western Hemisphere
  • Share the findings and recommendations from this network with key actors and decision makers of the region

  • Develop a program of annual Forum-Conferences on citizen security in Latin America, with a high degree of academic analysis, and open to dialogue with government officials and authorities

  • Launch a new collaborative database for crime and violence research among the networks of scholars

Presenters will speak on four thematic areas:

  1. Citizen Insecurity Tipping Points
  2. Costs and Impacts of Insecurity
  3. Drug Trafficking and Drug Regimes
  4. Interventions and Best Practices to Decrease Violence

The conference will be held at ITAM's Santa Teresa campus in Mexico City on March 11-12.

Anuncio del evento en español via ITAM: haz click aquí.

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Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México
Mexico City, Mexico

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CISAC welcomes microbiologist David Relman as co-director

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David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist and professor of infectious diseases, has taken up the mantle as CISAC co-director alongside Stanford law professor Tino Cuéllar, both of whom intend to broaden the center’s research in biosecurity and the life sciences.

Relman, the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine and chief of infectious disease at the VA Palo Alto Healthcare System, has advised the U.S. government about pathogen diversity, dual-use technology and biosecurity. He also is the current president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

“The appointment of a life scientist who focuses on infectious diseases and biosecurity is an innovative step for our work in international security and cooperation,” said Gerhard Casper, president emeritus of Stanford University and director of CISAC’s umbrella organization, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Relman succeeds Siegfried S. Hecker, a nuclear scientist and director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who was the CISAC co-director since 2007. One of the world’s foremost experts on plutonium, nuclear weapons and nonproliferation, Hecker is on sabbatical in New Mexico and the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation. He is working on a book about his historic efforts to foster collaboration between U.S. and Russian nuclear labs, as well as traveling to meet his nonproliferation counterparts in parts of Europe and Russia.

Hecker will return to CISAC this summer to resume his teaching in the Department of Management Science and Engineering, as well as his writing and research as a senior fellow at CISAC and FSI.

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CDDRL-CISAC Special Seminar: The Logic of Violence in Drug Wars: Cartel-State Conflict in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia

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Why have militarized crackdowns on drug cartels had wildly divergent outcomes, sometimes exacerbating cartel-state conflict, as in Mexico and, for decades, in Brazil, but sometimes reducing violence, as with Rio de Janeiro's new 'Pacification' (UPP) strategy?  CDDRL-CISAC Post Doctoral Fellow Benjamin Lessing will distinguish key logics of violence, focusing on violent corruption--cartels' use of coercive force in the negotiation of bribes. Through this channel, crackdowns can lead to increased fighting unless the intensity of state repression is made conditional on cartels' use of violence--a key difference between Mexico and Brazil.

Speaker Bio:

Benjamin Lessing is a recent Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a joint postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center on International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and will join the Political Science faculty at University of Chicago as assistant professor in 2013.

Lessing studies 'criminal conflict'—organized armed violence involving non-state actors who, unlike revolutionary insurgents, are not trying to topple the state. His doctoral dissertation examines armed conflict between drug trafficking organizations and the state in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. Additionally, he has studied prison gangs’ pernicious effect on state authority, and the effect of paramilitary groups’ territorial control on electoral outcomes. 

Prior to his graduate work, he conducted field research on the licit and illicit small arms trade in Latin America and the Caribbean for international organizations like Amnesty International, Oxfam, and the Small Arms Survey, as well as Viva Rio, Brazil’s largest NGO, and was a Fulbright Student Grantee in Argentina and Uruguay.

 

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Benjamin Lessing Post-doctoral Fellow Speaker CDDRL and CISAC

Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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How marijuana legalization will affect Mexico’s cartels, in charts

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The decision by voters in Colorado and Washington state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana has “changed the rules of the game” for the administration of Mexican President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto in the U.S.-backed drug war, according to a report by the Washington Post’s William Booth.
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A 'call to arms' for a transition to sustainability

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FSE affiliated faculty member Pamela Matson was the keynote speaker at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center at the University of Maine. Her talk focuses on what is needed to transition to a sustainable world. She frames her lecture around FSE's agricultural sustainability research in the Yaqui Valley, Mexico.
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The Program on Poverty and Governance releases report on Mexico's elections

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On July 1, over 50 million Mexicans went to the polls to elect the next president of the republic. The official count showed the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, as winning with 38.21% of the vote. He was followed by Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who received 31.59% of the vote and National Action Party (PAN) candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota with 25.41% of the vote.

Researchers with CDDRL's Program on Poverty and Governance compiled a comprehensive report on electoral patterns and the geography of the election. Using cutting edge statistical methods, they published this report through the Mexico City think-tank México Evalua.

The report is available in Spanish (check back soon for the English-language translation). 

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How Governmental Corruption Breeds Clientelism: Evidence from Mexico

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Abstract:

It has long been recognized that corruption and clientelism feed upon each other. However, how public malfeasance affects citizens' willingness to engage in patron-client relations remains unexplored. This article shows that perceptions, experiences, and information about political corruption influence a citizen's likelihood to sell his or her vote, and the types of gifts, favors, or public services he or she is willing to trade for it. The context of the article is Mexico's presidential and local elections. To circumvent methodological challenges posed by social desirability bias and reverse causation, the article presents evidence from a list experiment embedded in a national representative survey conducted close to the 2012 presidential election, and evidence from a field experiment conducted close to the 2009 municipal elections. I conclude that, given favorable circumstances, governmental corruption breeds forms of political behavior that are detrimental to the proper functioning of democracy, such as vote buying.

About the Speaker:

Ana L. De La O is assistant professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is affiliated with the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Institution of Social and Policy Studies, and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Her research relates to the political economy of poverty alleviation, clientelism and the provision of public goods. She recently completed a book manuscript that explores the causes and political consequences of the proliferation of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. She earned her PhD in Political Science from M.I.T.

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Ana L. De la O Assistant professor, Political Science, Yale University Speaker
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