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.

Overview and Contribution:

The rule of law (RoL) is an important component of democracy, key to protecting individual rights and ensuring that representatives follow the same rules as those being represented. As countries become more democratic, one would expect corresponding increases in the rule of law.

In “Fabricated Justice,” Beatriz Magaloni and Esteban Salmón show how these expectations must be seriously qualified. Beginning in 2008, Mexico gradually implemented RoL reforms. Thereafter, citizens witnessed some important gains in due process and individual rights, in particular, a dramatic decline in torture. However, these changes coincided with rising insecurity, violence, and popular demands for retribution against criminals. Owing to these pressures — as well as their own desire to work with fewer constraints — police and prosecutors found ways to circumvent the new reforms, particularly by planting evidence (drugs and weapons) on suspects, a serious RoL violation. 

However laudable its reforms, Mexican authorities failed to equip justice system officials with the tools and capacities to properly fight crime. Facing similar social and professional pressures as they had prior to the reforms, fabricated evidence struck them as a reasonable adaptation to new procedures. 

Marshalling an impressive array of quantitative and qualitative data, Magaloni and Salmón show how these legal changes can be said to have led to changes in police tactics and in the categories of arrests made. Interviews with police and prosecutors make clear just how much RoL reforms have left justice system officials feeling impotent and compelled to “fabricate justice.”

Mexico’s (Staggered) Legal Changes:

Prior to 2008, Mexico’s legal system was an “inquisitorial” one inherited from Spanish colonial rule. This meant that judges largely based their rulings on an often-secretive case file assembled by police and prosecutors. Case files contained confessions frequently obtained by torture, which Mexico’s Supreme Court upheld on multiple occasions. After 2008, however, Mexico adopted an “adversarial” system with greater procedural oversight of detention and the early stages of investigation (when torture was more likely), stricter standards on the use of force and collection of evidence, and so on.

Importantly, Mexico’s RoL constitutional amendment set an 8-year period to fully implement the reforms. This led to a high degree of variation in when individual states adopted the reforms, as well as whether they adopted all of the reforms at once or in a piecemeal fashion. From a statistical point of view, this created a “quasi-experimental” scenario in which outcomes (e.g., whether prisoners reported being tortured) in “treated” states or municipalities (i.e., those that reformed) could be compared with “control” units that had not yet reformed. This helps ensure that other differences between states and municipalities (e.g., levels of economic development or state capacity) do not bias the results.

Quantitative and Qualitative Findings:

Magaloni and Salmón first draw on a 2021 survey of 60,000 prisoners conducted by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography. The authors document (1) a substantial decline in reports of torture after 2014 (when many states and municipalities implemented the RoL reforms), (2) a rise in drug and weapons convictions by 2016 (likely the product of evidence fabrication), and (3) a decline in homicide convictions (because [a] homicide confessions could no longer be elicited through torture and [b] corpses are difficult to fabricate). These findings are largely borne out when the authors conduct their “difference in differences” analysis using the aforementioned geographical and temporal variation. As the authors show, declines in torture are likely driven by greater judicial oversight of cases, a key goal of the 2008 reforms.
 

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Fig. 1. Torture and objects (drugs and weapons).

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Fig. 4. Event study plots with imputation estimator: torture, objects, judicial oversight, and drug trafficking.
 

To show that these quantitative findings have some basis in the beliefs of criminal justice actors, the authors conducted extensive fieldwork across Mexico. This included interviewing over 100 police officers and prosecutors, observing the activities of investigative agencies for 18 months, and following dozens of cases from arrest to hearing. This generated some remarkably honest reflections about how arrests are systematically based on false accusations and the planting of evidence on suspects. 

Interviews with police reveal a widespread belief that the RoL reforms profoundly disrupted their work. To be sure, some of these “disruptions” simply concern how police can no longer torture suspects. For example, “With arrests, we used to investigate, we could pressure them, get information. Now we are just transporters. We catch them and deliver them. That’s all” (p.10, italics added). 

Another important aspect of these changes concerns just how much time it takes to complete arrest paperwork to meet new legal requirements. This highlights officers’ limited capacity to perform since the reforms were implemented. Many reported simply not making arrests, while others bluntly admitted:

Before, we pressured the person. Now we pressure the paperwork…chain of custody has to be perfect. If it’s not, the judge will throw it out. So…[w]e fix it. Sometimes that means planting what’s missing, sometimes writing what didn’t happen (p.10). 

Meanwhile, some prosecutors expressed nostalgia for the days when their authority was less constrained and, for example, they could raid homes without warrants. Prosecutors spoke openly about the strains on police capacity and the corresponding need for fabricated evidence: “If the police officers really investigated properly, they could get the criminals for what they actually did. They’ve just been instructed to take them out of circulation no matter what” (p.12). 

Finally, the authors show that evidence fabrication is consistent with the strong desire for retribution held by ordinary Mexicans. There is a widespread perception that the new criminal justice system is too lenient, a source of impunity for criminals. Accordingly, cases that prosecutors deem especially likely to anger the public are classified as “relevant,” compelling prosecutors to resolve them at all costs, especially by encouraging officers to plant evidence. Prosecutors who don’t accept these cases may be demoted or fired. In sum, Magaloni and Salmón deepen our understanding of just how difficult it is to democratize in places where criminal justice systems are poorly resourced and where citizens demand a specific kind of retributive justice that often sidesteps individual rights.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.
 

Introduction and Contribution:

Addressing the climate crisis will require concerted action from political parties. Western countries arguably bear a greater responsibility to act given their greater levels of wealth. Some of this wealth has been accumulated at the expense of the countries most affected by climate change. Yet Western political parties vary widely in terms of their positions on environmental protection, particularly across Europe. Some parties conceive of climate action as a moral imperative, as a costly endeavor in which the government should not be involved, or even as a conspiracy to undermine national sovereignty.

Environmental party platforms would intuitively seem to align with familiar political “cleavages” — parties that support economic redistribution tend to favor climate action, while those resistant to social change tend to oppose it. But Europe is a continent with distinct regional and historical legacies. Indeed, some countries left the Communist bloc less than 35 years ago. All of this complicates simple inferences about party platforms and requires more thorough efforts to validate our intuitions. 

In “How green is my party?,” Anna Grzymala-Busse, Piotr Jabkowski, and Mariusz Baranowski assess the determinants of environmental platforms across 280 European parties in 38 countries. The authors find a significant relationship between support for climate action and three cleavages: the economy, cultural values, and populism. As one might expect, parties with right-wing economic positions and conservative cultural positions are less likely to support environmental protection. More surprisingly, both right- and left-wing populist parties are less likely to support climate action. However, these general associations vary considerably across regions, especially in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).

The authors show that regional differences, especially between CEE and Northwestern or Southern Europe, persist and map onto climate politics. At the same time, and as populist parties in CEE such as Hungary’s Fidesz and Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) gain power and promote climate skepticism, the reader gains a sense of why these parties depart from traditional understandings of European politics and ideology.

More generally, populist parties and movements have garnered huge followings in places as diverse as India, the United States, and Brazil. “How green is my party?” deepens our understanding of why these movements can be so unwilling to budge on addressing climate change. 

Data and Findings:

The authors use data from a 2019 questionnaire of nearly 1900 European party and election experts. The three cleavages mentioned above are measured on an 11-point scale, with higher values indicating more right-wing, conservative, and populist platforms. Countries are grouped into three regions: Northwest, South, and CEE. The South Caucasus and the closed autocracies of Russia and Belarus are excluded.
 

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Figure 1. European democratic countries covered by the Global Party Survey, 2019.
 

Two of the most interesting contributions in “How green is my party?” are to show that (a) populism is significant in shaping opposition to climate action and (b) CEE remains a distinctive region in respect of its climate politics. Why might this be the case? 

Regarding populism, one would expect left-wing populists — who denounce a wealthy elite as standing against “the people” — to support climate action. Indeed, this elite can be easily constructed as destroying the environment in order to accumulate wealth. However, the authors note that left populists tend to deemphasize environmental issues or reframe them as purely economic. For example, such parties have been skeptical of policies such as tax breaks for electric vehicle production, on the grounds that they primarily benefit wealthy corporations. 

More generally, populists tend to view appeals to scientific consensus with skepticism, as “technocratic” schemes to undermine the people. This likely explains why the authors find a strong association between populism and opposition to environmental action across all three European regions (Southern, Northwest, and CEE). Interestingly, right populists are not found to be particularly likely to oppose environmental protection. Left and right populists are also more likely to oppose climate action than social conservatives.
 

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Figure 3. Moderating effect of populism on the impact of party position on social conservatism-liberalism on the position on the environmental protection scale.
 

CEE is distinctive in part because right-wing populist parties have thrived there. Many of these parties view climate action as a foreign, leftist conspiracy. This has fueled skepticism and opposition to green agendas. Meanwhile, CEE’s reliance on fossil fuels has led parties to view climate action as a threat to economic growth — and thus as political suicide. For these reasons and because CEE states are relatively new, the region also lacks strong environmental civil society organizations or green parties. On the 11-point scale, median opposition to environmental action in CEE is about one point higher than in Southern Europe and nearly three points higher than in Northwestern Europe.
 

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Figure 2. Parties’ positions on environmental issues by region of Europe.
 

A third notable finding is that the intuitive link between economic and cultural values is weaker in CEE. In other words, opposition to environmental protection is only associated with the economic right in South and Northwest Europe. This is because populist parties in CEE tend to support both economic redistribution and conservative cultural values. Redistribution is framed as a means of protecting people from perceived threats to their way of life, such as immigration or social liberalism. By contrast, CEE social liberals tend to support the free market, a position owing to their negative experiences with communist central planning.

“How green is my party?” both accounts for the high degree of variation across European party platforms and identifies patterns and regional clusters to help readers sift through climate politics across the continent. It remains to be seen whether supranational institutions such as the EU can offset weak climate action by some European ruling parties.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.