Russ Feingold, the former U.S. senator perhaps best known for pushing campaign finance reform, will spend the spring quarter at Stanford lecturing and teaching.

Feingold will be the Payne Distinguished Lecturer and will be in residence at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies while teaching and mentoring graduate students in the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies and the Stanford Law School.

Feingold was recently the State Department’s  special envoy to the Great Lakes Region of Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He will bring his knowledge and longstanding interest in one of the most challenging, yet promising, places in Africa to campus with the cross-listed IPS and Law School course, “The Great Lakes Region of Africa and American Foreign Relations: Policy and Legal Implications of the Post-1994 Era.”

Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who served three terms in the Senate between 1993 and 2011, co-sponsored the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. Better known as the McCain-Feingold Act, the legislation regulated the roles of soft money contributions and issue ads in national elections.

Introduction and Contribution

Large parts of the Arab world were convulsed by mass protests between 2010 and 2012. The protests were fueled by decades of authoritarian rule and economic mismanagement by corrupt political parties and entrenched bureaucrats. Many of the region’s autocrats saw this as evidence that prior ways of “managing” politics — such as through unfree elections or parliamentary debate among relatively loyal politicians — were no longer reliable. Indeed, elections could serve as spaces to mobilize collective opposition while debate could quickly turn chaotic, stalemated, or critical of the autocrat. 

Accordingly, Arab autocrats became ever more reliant on two broad strategies. The first is repression: brutalizing, surveilling, jailing, and exiling their opponents, both real and suspected. The second is a more tightly controlled kind of management: creating parallel political institutions to produce a façade of genuine political engagement. This second strategy has been especially clear under Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi (2014-) in his embrace of youth-led propaganda initiatives.

In “Youth and the Reinvention of State-managed Politics in Sisi’s Egypt,” Hesham Sallam shows how what he terms the “New Youth Project” has helped Sisi bypass elections and parliaments, groom a new class of pro-military civilian leaders, and portray his regime as modern and inclusive. These projects include highly choreographed youth forums and conferences, organizations to build support for his regime within political parties, and publications by purportedly independent national security experts. As a consequence, Sisi has effectively co-opted key segments of Egyptian youth in hopes of avoiding the fate of his predecessors. Sallam carefully unpacks the New Youth Project’s history, varied functions, and embeddedness within Sisi’s domestic and foreign policy agenda. 

Background to the New Youth Project

At the time of the Arab Uprisings, Egypt was ruled by President Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011). His National Democratic Party and cadre of corrupt bureaucrats played a key role in igniting the public outrage that led to his downfall. Mubarak was succeeded by the civilian President Mohamed Morsi, who then-General Sisi ousted in a military coup after just over a year in power. For Sallam, these years were formative for Sisi, convincing him that ruling parties and entrenched “political classes” were serious impediments to regime survival, as was cooperation between civilian and military authorities. As such, Sisi did not build a party of his own. Yet he understood the need to groom new cadres and deepen his administration’s legitimacy.

Sallam dates the New Youth Project to 2014, when the Nasser Military Academy began organizing programs to socialize young civilian leaders in military propaganda. The following year, Sisi founded a Presidential Youth Leadership Program that holds regular forums. Meanwhile, the regime tacitly supported the youth-led Nation’s Future Party until it was internally overtaken by Mubarak-era elites. Sisi responded by creating a Coordination Committee of Parties’ Youth Leaders and Politicians, helping the regime build its influence within various parties while giving it the appearance of cross-partisan support.

Functions of the New Youth Project

Sisi’s efforts to build parallel institutions, groom pro-military civilian leaders, and construct a façade of participation can be helpfully illustrated via Sallam’s examination of the National Youth Conference (NYC). NYC is a regime-led forum where young Sisi supporters gather to discuss public policy and make recommendations to the president. 

NYC is an extravagant endeavor, involving fireside chats and Q&As between Sisi and Egyptian youths, TED-style talks by young entrepreneurs, screenings of documentaries touting the regime’s initiatives, and mock simulations of official dialogue. NYC moderators raise (likely prepared) proposals to Sisi, which he promises to take into consideration. These activities give authoritarian Egypt an air of democratic accountability: the president is responsive, public policy is effective, and the state is open and transparent. Importantly, the regime also uses NYC to respond to episodes of mass dissatisfaction. For example, during an economic downturn in 2017, NYC featured presentations justifying Sisi’s monetary policies and efforts to counter price hikes. 

NYC also serves as a reliable forum for the grooming of pro-military civilian leaders. This complements existing military training programs for bureaucrats, journalists, and university employees, which have become de facto prerequisites for government employment. The conferences consistently uphold the military’s view of national security. In 2019, for example, the regime faced protests sparked by a former contractor who accused Sisi and his inner circle of corruption; accordingly, the year’s NYC centered on how terrorists use misinformation and fake news to undermine Egypt. Such narratives and propaganda would likely be less persuasive in an electoral or parliamentary forum than in the carefully managed NYC.

During the conference, young speakers tell the audience about their self-improvement or entrepreneurial success — the implication being that anyone can be successful in Sisi’s Egypt. Meanwhile, presentations filled with data and statistics provide a sense of scientific credibility. One presentation sought to convey that NYC had been a resounding democratic success because it was attended by Egyptians across gender, age, and geography; yet no mention was made of the exclusion of opposition perspectives or those regularly victimized by state repression. 

Finally, the Egyptian Center for Strategic Studies has extended the regime’s efforts. Led by former security officials, the self-proclaimed independent think tank provides ostensibly expert analyses linking regime opponents, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, to terrorism. Ultimately, Sallam shows that Sisi’s youth project is less about empowering young Egyptians than about creating new channels through which the regime can exercise authoritarian control.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

Introduction and Contribution

American bureaucracies are frequently criticized for impeding the delivery of both public infrastructure and private development projects, wrapping them in the “red tape” of regulatory procedures. Of course, bureaucratic oversight is necessary to ensure public accountability, enable stakeholder input, and respond to market failures. It is hard to imagine how, for example, the natural environment could be protected from exploitation without regulation. Yet disagreement persists about whether the current regulatory landscape strikes the right balance between oversight and efficiency.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970 is one of the most significant federal administrative laws and is foundational to American environmental law. Per its objective of protecting the environment, NEPA requires agencies to assess the environmental impacts of major federal projects. These include construction, energy, water, and public lands projects. 

NEPA’s highest level of review is the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which requires substantial time and scientific expertise to complete. Accordingly, the EIS process has been criticized for causing project delays. This critique is plausible at first glance: average EIS reviews now take over four years to complete and often produce documents over 600 pages long (over 1,000 pages including appendices). 

Despite criticism over NEPA procedures, little is known about why some EISs take longer to be approved than others. Answering this question is important for assessing whether American bureaucracies can adequately balance the oversight-efficiency tradeoff.

In “A hazard analysis of federal permitting under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970,” Michael Bennon, Daniel De La Hormaza, and R. Richard Geddes present findings on the correlates of EIS permitting. Using a dataset of nearly 1,300 EISs, the authors show that major construction projects and those occurring in states with more restrictive environmental laws are associated with longer permitting times. By contrast, privately financed projects are permitted more quickly. These findings will likely cohere with readers’ intuitions, namely that (a) more demanding regulations increase approval times and (b) private economic interests have the resources to navigate regulatory environments.

The authors’ findings are relevant not only for those interacting directly with NEPA. Indeed, as illustrated in their analysis of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, lengthy environmental reviews can make it difficult to quickly undertake new infrastructure projects when they are needed — as was the case following the Great Recession.

Data, Methods, and Hypotheses

The authors’ dataset includes 1,269 EIS reviews. Of these, 1,161 reached a Record of Decision (ROD), the federal agency’s final decision. The average duration of time from a Notice of Intent (NOI — i.e., the intent to undertake an EIS) to ROD was 4.5 years, and the median was 3.6 years. This underscores the time required for projects to complete environmental review under NEPA.

The authors include variables for (1) major construction and infrastructure projects, which comprise about half of the data set; (2) projects backed by private investors; (3) states with restrictive environmental laws, defined, for example, in terms of whether uninjured parties can challenge projects in court or whether private actions require environmental review; and (4) inclusion in the “federal permitting dashboard,” which was created in 2015 with the goal of improving the efficiency of large projects.

To measure the correlates of EIS permitting, the authors use a “Cox proportional hazards model,” a statistical method for estimating how different variables affect the time until an event happens. For example, hazard models are often used to measure how different medical treatments affect patient mortality. For the authors’ purposes, a lower hazard rate indicates a longer permitting duration. 

The authors first hypothesize that larger projects will take longer to approve. This may be the case because such projects tend to attract greater stakeholder engagement, opposition, and litigation. Projects in states with more restrictive environmental laws, as well as those requiring supplemental EISs, are also hypothesized to take longer to approve. In addition, private financing ought to lead to faster approvals because private funders have the incentives and resources to expedite permitting. So too should the permitting dashboard decrease permitting times, consistent with its efficiency-maximizing objectives. 

Findings

As mentioned, the authors find that major construction and infrastructure projects have significantly longer permitting times, averaging 5.2 years.
 

Conversely, privately financed projects are indeed found to be approved more quickly, taking an average of just 3.7 years. Meanwhile, projects in states with restrictive environmental laws, such as California, New York, and Washington, are found to take longer. Contrary to the authors’ expectations, however, projects included in the federal permitting dashboard face longer permitting times. This may reflect selection bias, or the fact that projects placed on the dashboard tend to be especially large or complex. In terms of page count, longer EISs are associated with longer permitting times and longer delays. 

Finally, the authors examine permit completion rates by federal agencies, finding an average of 3 RODs per week. This rate is generally stable over time, though it spiked during Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and his inauguration in early 2017. Ultimately, the findings suggest that permitting duration is shaped not only by technical regulations but also by differences in economic resources, political conflict over projects, and federalism.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.