Democracy and security coexist uneasily. Security asserts priority over democracy during emergencies, when democratic processes seem luxuries. Yet deference paid to security can sow the seeds of democracy’s destruction. This prospect is magnified now, as both popular and elite usages of security in the United States have reached their highest levels in history. A short list of recent threats to national security alleged by our leaders includes unions of government workers, wind turbines, Chinese automobiles, Chinese garlic, America’s lack of sovereignty over Greenland, and America’s declining birth rate.

Why is security discourse so pervasive now, and what does this mean for democracy? This talk addresses these questions through examining security's history, focusing on three problematic features — ambiguity, immeasurability, and amorality — and their implications for contemporary democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Professor by Courtesy of Political Science, and Director of Stanford's Program in International Relations. He joined Stanford in 1997, initially at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, before moving to the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) in 2010. Previously, he taught at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Washington University in St. Louis.

Professor Stedman has led three major global commissions examining critical aspects of international security and democracy. From 2003-2004, he served as Research Director for the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, and in 2005 as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. This work produced the landmark report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (2004) and led to significant institutional innovations, including the UN peacebuilding architecture (commission, support office, and fund), the mediation support office, a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy, adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, and streamlined decision-making processes for the Secretary General. From 2010 to 2012, he directed the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, which published Deepening Democracy: A Strategy for Improving the Integrity of Elections Worldwide (2012). From 2018 to 2020, he served as Secretary General of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age, which examined how social media and the internet affect democratic processes, resulting in Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age (2020).

Professor Stedman's research spans mediation, civil war termination, international institutions, American foreign policy, and democracy. His work has appeared in leading journals, including The Lancet, International Security, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Democracy, International Affairs, International Studies Review, and Boston Review. His co-authored book Power and Responsibility (Brookings, 2009) drew praise from Brent Scowcroft, who wrote that "the vision, ideas, and solutions the authors put forward…have the potential to redeem American foreign policy."

A dedicated teacher, Professor Stedman has directed the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL since 2015 and received Stanford's Dinkelspiel Award in 2018 for outstanding contributions to undergraduate education. 

The competence of elected officials affects state performance and economic growth, yet it is often difficult to find high human capital, representative citizens willing to put themselves forward as political candidates. We analyze an intervention designed to address this challenge that combines structured community nominations, private screening of technocratic skills, and information provision to political parties in advance of local elections in Sierra Leone.  Estimates show that this successfully identifies individuals who are higher quality and enjoy broader local support than incumbents and status quo candidates.  While new to elected politics, these individuals remain elite, drawn from traditional chiefly families. One quarter of top nominees formally enter politics, positively self-selected on quality and boosted by an encouragement nudge.  Their entry improves the maximum quality observed in the potential candidate pool and among those selected onto the parties’ lists. These results provide proof of concept that there are better people out there willing to run.  

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Katherine Casey is a professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business and the faculty director of the King Center on Global Development. Her research explores the interactions between economic and political forces in lower-income countries, with particular interest in the role of information in enhancing political accountability, the influence of foreign aid on economic development, and the provision of local public infrastructure. Her regional focus is Sub-Saharan Africa.

Electoral autocracies have become one of the most prevalent forms of authoritarian rule. In these regimes, incumbents use state resources to shape electoral competition and bias outcomes in their favor. Existing research highlights media control, clientelism, and opposition harassment as central strategies. This paper identifies a distinct mechanism: the manipulation of electoral infrastructure as a tool of dispersed political engineering. We study this mechanism in Venezuela, an archetypal case of contemporary electoral autocracy, where the number of voting centers has nearly doubled over the last two decades. Using a novel panel dataset of geocoded polling centers covering 2000–2024, we examine the determinants of new center creation. We show that new voting centers are significantly more likely to be established in areas that previously exhibited stronger support for the incumbent. This relationship holds after accounting for population dynamics and spatial factors. The effect is particularly pronounced in urban areas and among centers that can be identified as politically motivated additions to the electoral infrastructure. We also find evidence that local pro-government organizations contribute to this process by generating bottom-up demand for new centers. These findings highlight how incumbents in electoral autocracies can manipulate the organization of elections to maintain political advantage.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michael Albertus is a CDDRL Visiting Scholar and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research examines democracy and dictatorship, inequality and redistribution, property rights, and civil conflict. He has authored five books and over thirty peer-reviewed articles. His most recent book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, published by Basic Books in 2025, examines how land became power, how it shapes power, and how who holds that power determines the fundamental social problems that societies grapple with. Albertus' work has also been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Development Economics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and elsewhere. 

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. Honors Program award winners, Shayla Fitzsimmons-Call and Marco Widodo will be presenting their award winning presentations. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E-008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

2026 CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Award Winner: Shayla Fitzsimmons-Call

Bound by the Ballot? Autocratic Compliance After Electoral Defeat 

When autocrats lose elections, what determines whether they comply with the electorate's judgment? And if they resist, what determines whether they succeed? Despite the frequency and consequences of autocratic electoral crises, electoral compliance decisions remain undertheorized. To address this gap, I propose a two-stage theory of incumbent compliance. At Stage 1, pre-election structural conditions - military control, elite unity, and international vulnerability - determine whether resistance is viable. At Stage 2, activated only if resistance occurs, two reactive forces- mass mobilization and activated international pressure - become salient. Drawing on an original dataset of elections held in autocratic regimes between 1970 and 2018, the results partially support and partially challenge this theory. While structural weakness reliably precludes resistance, structural strength does not reliably cause it; among cases where resistance occurs, high, cohesive international pressure emerges as the most consistent determinant of whether incumbents ultimately exit. This thesis posits that compliance is best understood as a process shaped by forces operating at different moments, and that this temporal distinction has both implications for how scholars and international actors understand and respond to electoral crises in electoral autocracies.

2026 Firestone Award Winner: Marco Widodo

Why Resist? The Microfoundations of Democratic Resilience in an Age of Backsliding

Why do Indonesian citizens fail to punish democratic backsliding at the ballot box? Across more than a decade of democratic decline, Indonesian voters have registered remarkably little alarm, continuing to reward leaders associated with democratic erosion while still professing support for democracy. This thesis investigates the demand-side foundations of that puzzle, probing whether the content of democracy might itself be the problem. To pinpoint precisely where and how the accountability chain breaks down, I fielded an original nationally-representative survey experiment in February 2026 with Indikator Politik Indonesia (N = 1,566), randomly assigning Indonesian respondents to one of three definitions of democracy—electoral, liberal, or substantive—and tracking their responses across four hypothetical scenarios. To measure treatment comprehension and experimental manipulation, I score open-ended responses using a novel multi-model LLM coding ensemble. Combined, this empirical design enabled me to discriminate between two candidate diagnoses of conceptual failure: that Indonesian citizens hold conceptions of democracy that simply diverge from those of scholars (the divergent conceptions argument), or that “democracy” itself carries too little evaluative content to differentiate governance failures of different kinds (the thinness argument). Ultimately, the evidence points overwhelmingly in support of the latter interpretation—that for many Indonesian citizens, “democracy” functions less as a thick descriptive concept than as a thin term of approval whose application tracks perceived governance quality. The divergent conceptions hypothesis, meanwhile, yields a robust null across thirteen specifications. In this era of backsliding, the conceptual thinning of “democracy” carries severe implications for the validity of cross-comparative survey research, for the elite strategies that exploit the term’s elasticity, and for the resilience of democracy in Indonesia and beyond.

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Why did the Soviet Union organize regular elections, national and local, with one candidate and reported 99.9% support with 99.9% turnout? Were the Soviet citizens so stupid that they did not understand that they have no say in choosing their government? The Reverse Cargo Cult metaphor explains why dictators tell their citizens lies that citizens know to be lies: a verifiable lie told by a politician changes citizens' perceptions of politicians and reduces their willingness to replace them. The model explains the mechanics of authoritarian propaganda that puts much emphasis on persuading citizens about foreign politicians.

Konstantin Sonin is the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. His research interests include political economics, economic theory, and conflict. 

Sonin earned MSc and PhD in mathematics from Moscow State University and MA in economics from Moscow’s New Economic School (NES). Before joining the University of Chicago, he served on the faculty and as a vice-president of the New Economic School and HSE University in Moscow. Over two decades, he has guest-lectured in dozens of universities, summer schools, and high schools across Russia and worked part-time as a teacher of economics in a high school.

His research has been published in leading academic outlets in economics and political science. In addition to academic work, Sonin blogs, tweets, and op-eds on Russian political and economic issues. In May 2024, Russian authorities sentenced him to 8.5 years in prison (in absentia) for posting information about the atrocities committed by Russian occupying forces in the town of Bucha in Ukraine.