I am a huge fan of transparency about platform content moderation. I’ve considered it a top policy priority for years, and written about it in detail (with Paddy Leerssen, who also wrote this great piece about recommendation algorithms and transparency). I sincerely believe that without it, we are unlikely to correctly diagnose current problems or arrive at wise legal solutions.

So it pains me to admit that I don’t really know what “transparency” I’m asking for. I don’t think many other people do, either. Researchers and public interest advocates around the world can agree that more transparency is better. But, aside from people with very particular areas of interest (like political advertising), almost no one has a clear wish list. What information is really important? What information is merely nice to have? What are the trade-offs involved?

That imprecision is about to become a problem, though it’s a good kind of problem to have. A moment of real political opportunity is at hand. Lawmakers in the US, Europe, and elsewhere are ready to make some form of transparency mandatory. Whatever specific legal requirements they create will have huge consequences. The data, content, or explanations they require platforms to produce will shape our future understanding of platform operations, and our ability to respond — as consumers, as advocates, or as democracies. Whatever disclosures the laws don’t require, may never happen.

It’s easy to respond to this by saying “platforms should track all the possible data, we’ll see what’s useful later!” Some version of this approach might be justified for the very biggest “gatekeeper” or “systemically important” platforms. Of course, making Facebook or Google save all that data would be somewhat ironic, given the trouble they’ve landed in by storing similar not-clearly-needed data about their users in the past. (And the more detailed data we store about particular takedowns, the likelier it is to be personally identifiable.)

For any platform, though, we should recognize that the new practices required for transparency reporting comes at a cost. That cost might include driving platforms to adopt simpler, blunter content rules in their Terms of Service. That would reduce their expenses in classifying or explaining decisions, but presumably lead to overly broad or narrow content prohibitions. It might raise the cost of adding “social features” like user comments enough that some online businesses, like retailers or news sites, just give up on them. That would reduce some forms of innovation, and eliminate useful information for Internet users. For small and midsized platforms, transparency obligations (like other expenses related to content moderation) might add yet another reason to give up on competing with today’s giants, and accept an acquisition offer from an incumbent that already has moderation and transparency tools. Highly prescriptive transparency obligations might also drive de facto standardization and homogeneity in platform rules, moderation practices, and features.

None of these costs provides a reason to give up on transparency — or even to greatly reduce our expectations. But all of them are reasons to be thoughtful about what we ask for. It would be helpful if we could better quantify these costs, or get a handle on what transparency reporting is easier and harder to do in practice.

I’ve made a (very in the weeds) list of operational questions about transparency reporting, to illustrate some issues that are likely to arise in practice. I think detailed examples like these are helpful in thinking through both which kinds of data matter most, and how much precision we need within particular categories. For example, I personally want to know with great precision how many government orders a platform received, how it responded, and whether any orders led to later judicial review. But to me it seems OK to allow some margin of error for platforms that don’t have standardized tracking and queuing tools, and that as a result might modestly mis-count TOS takedowns (either by absolute numbers or percent).

I’ll list that and some other recommendations below. But these “recommendations” are very tentative. I don’t know enough to have a really clear set of preferences yet. There are things I wish I could learn from technologists, activists, and researchers first. The venues where those conversations would ordinarily happen — and, importantly, where observers from very different backgrounds and perspectives could have compared the issues they see, and the data they most want — have been sadly reduced for the past year.

So here is my very preliminary list:

• Transparency mandates should be flexible enough to accommodate widely varying platform practices and policies. Any de facto push toward standardization should be limited to the very most essential data.
• The most important categories of data are probably the main ones listed in the DSA: number of takedowns, number of appeals, number of successful appeals. But as my list demonstrates, those all can become complicated in practice.
• It’s worth taking the time to get legal transparency mandates right. That may mean delegating exact transparency rules to regulatory agencies in some countries, or conducting studies prior to lawmaking in others.
• Once rules are set, lawmakers should be very reluctant to move the goalposts. If a platform (especially a smaller one) invests in rebuilding its content moderation tools to track certain categories of data, it should not have to overhaul those tools soon because of changed legal requirements.
• We should insist on precise data in some cases, and tolerate more imprecision in others (based on the importance of the issue, platform capacity, etc.). And we should take the time to figure out which is which.
• Numbers aren’t everything. Aggregate data in transparency reports ultimately just tell us what platforms themselves think is going on. To understand what mistakes they make, or what biases they may exhibit, independent researchers need to see the actual content involved in takedown decisions. (This in turn raises a slough of issues about storing potentially unlawful content, user privacy and data protection, and more.)

It’s time to prioritize. Researchers and civil society should assume we are operating with a limited transparency “budget,” which we must spend wisely — asking for the information we can best put to use, and factoring in the cost. We need better understanding of both research needs and platform capabilities to do this cost-benefit analysis well. I hope that the window of political opportunity does not close before we manage to do that.

CDDRL Visiting Scholar Michael Albertus’s Research Seminar presentation, “Winning Under Electoral Authoritarianism: Turning Out the ‘Right’ Votes in Venezuela,” examined how electoral infrastructure can become a subtle but powerful tool of authoritarian political control. The presentation, based on joint work with Felipe Baritto and Dany Jaimovich, focused on Venezuela and asked whether the expansion of polling centers under Chávez and Maduro was simply a response to demographic demand or whether it was politically targeted to benefit the ruling coalition.

The central puzzle of the presentation was that Venezuela substantially expanded its electoral infrastructure between 2000 and 2024, with the number of polling centers increasing by about 70 percent, even though population growth was much smaller. Albertus situated this puzzle within the broader literature on competitive authoritarianism, where regimes often maintain formally competitive elections but tilt the playing field through institutional design, state resources, media control, opposition harassment, and selective manipulation. His key contribution was to show that the organization of voting infrastructure itself may belong on this “menu of manipulation.”

The empirical strategy was built around a geocoded dataset of voting centers across Venezuelan election periods. The authors identified “new” polling centers and used stable polling centers to construct electoral Voronoi polygons, which served as local catchment areas. This allowed them to ask whether areas with higher prior support for Chavismo were more likely to receive new voting centers in later periods. Their baseline models used polygon and election-period fixed effects, with controls such as population, and clustered standard errors by municipality.

The main result was that lagged regime support predicted the creation of new polling centers. A 10-percentage-point increase in regime support was associated with roughly a 10-percentage-point increase in the probability of receiving a new polling center relative to the sample mean. Areas in the top quartile of regime support were about 30 percent more likely to receive a new center. These effects were strongest in urban areas and became larger as elections tightened and regime support weakened.

Albertus also presented evidence that new polling centers were not politically neutral spaces. Many carried regime-aligned names and ideological language, including terms associated with Bolivarianism, Chávez, communes, popular power, and revolutionary programs. This suggested that polling centers were not only administrative sites but also spaces of political embedding.

The presentation then turned to consequences. New polling centers were associated with higher turnout, especially in areas already supportive of the regime. They were also linked to smaller polling centers and more single-table centers, which may have made voter monitoring easier. In the 2024 election, the opposition's collection of actas (vote tabulations) was less likely in polygons where new polling stations had previously been established, suggesting that infrastructure expansion may have weakened the opposition's monitoring capacity.

Overall, the presentation argued that authoritarian regimes do not always need to rely on blatant fraud or overt suppression. They can instead selectively expand access, making voting easier for supporters while improving their own capacity for mobilization and monitoring. The project’s broader significance lies in showing how seemingly technical decisions about election administration can have deeply political effects.

Valentin Bolotnyy, an affiliated scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), has been appointed Vice Chair of the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors by Gavin Newsom. The council serves as a strategic advisory body to the governor and the California Department of Finance, bringing together leading experts to analyze economic trends and provide guidance on state and federal developments.

The announcement introduces new leadership for the council, with Renee Bowen (Georgetown University McDonough School of Business and the Walsh School of Foreign Service) serving as Chair and Bolotnyy as Vice Chair. The group convenes experts from academia, policy, and industry to examine evolving economic conditions and advise on issues shaping California’s economy, including federal policy shifts, trade dynamics, and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.

Bolotnyy is a Kleinheinz Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he contributes to the State and Local Governance Initiative and the Working Group on Civics and American Citizenship. His research focuses on designing and evaluating policies that improve economic and health outcomes, particularly for vulnerable populations, often in partnership with state and local agencies.

Using administrative data, quasi-experimental methods, and randomized controlled trials, his work examines issues including involuntary hospitalization, deinstitutionalization, and interventions for individuals cycling through hospitals, jails, and homelessness, as well as prison education and workforce development programs. He is also affiliated with CDDRL's Deliberative Democracy Lab.

His appointment comes as California continues to navigate global economic disruptions and policy shifts, with the council playing a key role in helping the state respond to emerging challenges and opportunities.

Katherine Casey, professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business and the faculty director of the King Center on Global Development, presented her team’s work in a CDDRL Research Seminar on Thursday, May 7. Casey opened her talk establishing that citizen esteem for politicians is on the decline. In the U.S., only 16 percent trust the federal government. Across 30 African countries, while 75 percent believe elections are the best way to choose leaders, only 37 percent are satisfied with how their democracies are working. Casey asserts that the root of this dissatisfaction runs deep, ultimately posing the question: how can high-human-capital, representative individuals be identified, screened, encouraged to run for office, and brought into consideration by political parties? 

Casey’s team examined local governance in Sierra Leone to answer this question, partnering with government and civil society to test an intervention designed to induce candidate entry. The field experiment was a nationwide, randomized controlled trial covering all fourteen local district councils in Sierra Leone. The team chose to focus on local councils because the barriers to entry are low, the work requires competence but is not particularly specialized, and its part-time nature allows candidates to run without quitting their day jobs. The experiment included two rounds of random assignment and implementation. 

The experiment focused on three headline factors: representation, quality, and gatekeeping. During the representation phase, the field team visited villages and spoke with residents to better understand who they would want to represent them. These nominees were then screened for quality using metrics for human capital, work experience, local experience, managerial capital, and conscientiousness. After this screening, candidates' profiles were sent to political parties. Of those nominated at the representation level, 85 percent were willing to share their profiles, and 89 percent said they were interested in running for office. 

When conducting analysis, Casey’s team found that top nominees from the representation stage score higher than both status quo applicants and incumbents on quality metrics, differences that are large in magnitude and highly statistically significant. Many top nominees came from traditional authority lineages, and many work in education, positioning them as alternative elites. Among lower-ranked nominees, only 16 percent ultimately entered electoral races, but this rate rose to 25 percent among top-ranked nominees.  Their entry enhanced the maximum observed quality of applicants in the potential candidate pool.

Analysis was then conducted to determine whether the parties selected any nominees from the profiles, which found that nearly all wards had at least one candidate selected and that nominations increased the likelihood that a local woman would make the candidate list.  Incumbents were highly favored in this election, leaving little space for new entrants to win elected seats.

Casey ended her talk with a few conclusions. Firstly, the intervention successfully identified popular, high-quality, new entrants to politics, drawn from a different set of elites. The nominees self-selected into the entry on quality, boasting the highest observed quality among applicants and selected candidates, which also showed that representation need not trade off quality. Casey’s team also found a challenge in translating willingness to run into formal applications, a challenge she believes could be honed in on with more recruitment efforts. Ultimately, the collaboration between research and policymakers crafted a unique model to empower dissatisfied voters to nominate leaders they want to see in office. 

As questions about democratic governance, institutional resilience, and authoritarian power become increasingly central to public life around the world, the need for rigorous, accessible scholarship has grown more urgent. Effective May 15, 2026, a new partnership between Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Journal of Democracy will expand Stanford’s role in those conversations. Through the partnership, CDDRL will support the production of the Journal’s quarterly print issues and expanding digital content, while creating new opportunities for faculty, researchers, and students to contribute to its work. 

Since 1990, the Journal of Democracy has served as a major forum for scholars, policymakers, democratic reformers, and public intellectuals examining how democracy emerges, endures, and comes under strain. Widely regarded as the leading global publication on democratic theory and practice, the Journal has played a central role in shaping debates on democracy worldwide. Previously, the Journal was housed within the National Endowment for Democracy — a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. The Journal was co-founded by Larry Diamond, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at CDDRL within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), who served as founding co-editor for the Journal's first 32 years. 

A natural alignment with CDDRL’s work

The partnership is a natural fit for CDDRL, which brings scholarship and practice together to examine the forces that advance or impede representative governance, human development, and the rule of law. It also builds on long-standing connections between the center and the Journal of Democracy: many CDDRL-affiliated faculty have contributed to the Journal over the years, and its focus closely aligns with the center’s research, teaching, and practitioner training programs. Moreover, CDDRL is already deeply engaged in the kinds of questions the Journal has long brought to wide audiences — whether through the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program, which brings civil society leaders from developing and transitioning countries to Stanford for intensive training in democratic practice and reform, the Democracy Action Lab’s work on democratic resilience, or the Leadership Academy for Development’s training for leaders advancing good governance and economic development.  

More broadly, the partnership reflects CDDRL’s research and teaching agenda, which focuses on the institutions, ideas, and political forces shaping democratic resilience, authoritarianism, and governance around the world. Across its faculty, fellows, students, and training programs, the center takes an interdisciplinary approach to some of the most pressing questions in global politics — from democratic backsliding and state capacity to political reform and accountability. The Journal of Democracy offers a complementary platform where that work can reach both academic and public audiences.

Connecting research to practice

For Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL and the Satre Family Senior Fellow at FSI, the partnership highlights how CDDRL’s work connects research to the practical challenges facing democracy.

“One of CDDRL’s core strengths is the ability to take high-quality research theories and methods and apply them to on-the-ground policy challenges,” Stoner said. “The Journal of Democracy serves a similar function in the field of political development. Our new partnership to produce the Journal enhances our global reach in both the international development policy and academic communities.”