The "Meet Our Researchers" series showcases the incredible scholars at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Through engaging interviews conducted by our undergraduate research assistants, we explore the journeys, passions, and insights of CDDRL’s faculty and researchers.

How should we understand the role of fragmentation versus centralization in state formation?

Prof. Blaydes argued that fragmentation plays a foundational role in the development of strong institutions. Specifically, fragmentation and decentralization reduce the power of centralized rulers, fostering a political culture of executive constraint. This culture is critical for the later emergence of durable institutions, including democracy.

However, Prof. Blaydes clarified that fragmentation alone is not sufficient. Strong states are still necessary for effective governance and capacity. The key lies in sequencing: societies benefit from an initial phase of fragmentation that establishes executive constraint, followed by the development of centralized state capacity. In Prof. Blaydes’s view, both elements are necessary, but fragmentation must come first to produce stable and accountable institutions.

How can political culture arguments avoid becoming essentialist?

Prof. Blaydes defined political culture not as something rooted in geography or religion, but as a set of incentive structures that enable elites to constrain rulers. In this framework, political culture emerges from institutional conditions rather than inherent societal traits.

Prof. Blaydes emphasized that such cultures can arise in diverse contexts, provided that power differentials between rulers and elites are sufficiently reduced. However, in historically entrenched centralized states, this process is more difficult because rulers tend to remain far above other elites, limiting opportunities for constraint.

Is geography deterministic in shaping political outcomes?

Prof. Blaydes rejected deterministic interpretations of geography. Instead, geography was described as having probabilistic effects — it increases the likelihood of certain political outcomes without making them inevitable. Terrain and resource distribution can shape whether states tend toward centralization or fragmentation, but institutional and historical contingencies remain critical.

Is there a trade-off between state capacity and institutional durability?

Prof. Blaydes suggested that the relationship is not necessarily a direct trade-off but can be understood in terms of differences in political structures and ruler–elite dynamics. Systems with strong central authority may achieve high capacity but lack mechanisms for constraint, whereas more decentralized systems may develop more durable institutions over time.

Why would rulers adopt systems of alien rule (e.g., Mamluks)?

Prof. Blaydes explained that rulers often adopt such strategies to secure loyalty. Foreign elites are less tied to local populations and therefore more dependent on the ruler, making them appear more reliable.

However, Prof. Blaydes noted that this creates long-term instability. While individual rulers may perceive these arrangements as beneficial, over time, such elites can coordinate and overthrow rulers. Individual rulers may not recognize this pattern due to short time horizons and limited information, meaning the instability only becomes visible in aggregate historical data.

Does leadership quality decline over time within dynasties?

Prof. Blaydes argued that leadership quality often declines across generations within dynasties. Founders tend to possess exceptional capabilities, but these traits are not consistently transmitted to successors. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun, Prof. Blaydes noted that ruling groups often lose their initial cohesion and strength over time, becoming vulnerable to replacement by new elites.

Prof. Blaydes also suggested that assimilation into society may contribute to this decline by enabling coordination among subjects against rulers.

Do religious institutions independently shape political outcomes?

Prof. Blaydes took an endogenous view, arguing that religion does not independently determine political outcomes. Instead, religious institutions reflect broader social and political dynamics. Religious elites may either constrain or reinforce the state depending on their relationship with political authority, particularly whether they possess independent sources of power or revenue.

Introduction and Contribution:

The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War has been one of the most devastating conflicts of the 21st century. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, Ukraine has experienced not only mass casualties but immense cultural destruction, as well as the forcible deportation and adoption of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russian families. Ending the war requires understanding its causes, particularly from the point of view of Vladimir Putin and other key Russian decision-makers. 

Some observers of Russian and global politics — as well as Putin and his allies — have claimed that the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO caused the war. The argument here is that as a superpower, Russia could not tolerate the security implications of a country on its border joining a rival alliance. Russia’s war, then, was a preventive one — less a choice than a strategic necessity. Any superpower in such a situation would do the same.

In “NATO Did Not Cause Putin’s Imperial War,” James Goldgeier and Brian D. Taylor convincingly challenge the NATO hypothesis, showing it to be more a piece of Kremlin propaganda than a plausible account of Putin’s decision-making process. Instead, the authors draw our attention to Putin’s most deeply held and longstanding beliefs: that Ukraine is not a legitimate nation state, that Ukrainians would not freely associate with the West and its alliances (unless they were being manipulated), and that dominating Ukraine is essential to Russia reclaiming its status as a global superpower, one that is constantly disrespected by the West. 

As many social scientists focus on improving the causal power of their statistical inferences, Goldgeier and Taylor helpfully focus our attention on the beliefs and reasons of political actors who cause political outcomes such as wars and revolutions. More importantly, the authors provide a starting point for thinking about ending the Russo-Ukrainian war, one focused not on the distraction that is NATO arguments but on Putin’s imperial ambitions.

Pitfalls of the NATO Explanation:

The authors begin by noting that NATO enlargement clearly played a role in the deterioration of relations between Russia and the West over the past 25 years. In part, this is because many Russian elites — owing to their imperialistic beliefs, more on this below — never accepted that former Soviet Republics were free to join the alliance. However, NATO enlargement was but one item in a long list of Russian grievances, some based in reality and others fictional. These include the 2003-04 Color Revolutions — mainly reflecting widespread domestic sentiment, not Western machinations — and alleged American support for the 2011-13 Russian protests in the aftermath of Putin’s rigged elections, which were similarly homegrown.

There is good evidence that Putin and his inner circle neither feared NATO aggression nor believed that Ukraine could realistically join the alliance. After George W. Bush’s failed bid for Ukrainian membership in 2008, no American president has seriously entertained or pushed for Ukraine’s admission. NATO took minimal action after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, before which time Ukrainians themselves didn’t support joining the alliance (likely because they anticipated the negative consequences for Russia-Ukraine relations). NATO itself has worked against admitting Ukraine; indeed, much of its security assistance has been designed to make it possible for Ukraine to defend itself without formal admission. What’s more, no country bordering Russia joined NATO after 2004 until Finland did so in 2023.

When Putin decided on war in 2021, his invasion plan was based on the assumption that victory would be quick and easy, evidencing his lack of concern for NATO intervention. Further, he knew that NATO lacked the troops and would be extremely wary of confronting nuclear Russia. 

Putin’s Imperial Beliefs and Goals:

For several decades, Putin has expressed the belief that Ukraine is not a genuine nation-state and that Russia both gave away and was “robbed” of much of its territory. One of Putin’s key goals is arguably to rebuild Russian greatness via imperial conquest. The West is not merely intervening in Eastern European politics but, according to Putin, actively working to downgrade Russia to a second-class country and undermine its sovereignty. Putin views the war as key to reversing Russia’s declining status.

Because Putin and his inner circle view Ukraine to be a natural part of Russia, the possibility that Ukrainians would freely tie their fortunes to the West is inconceivable — Ukrainian elites must have been tricked, co-opted, or bribed. Some Russian propagandists have even described the war as one of “Russians killing Russians.”

Putin’s imperialism is not only confined to privately held beliefs. During COVID-19, he spent a great deal of time reading historical texts to prepare a 5000-word article on the alleged historic inseparability of Russia and Ukraine. What could such an undertaking have to do with NATO expansion?

Russia’s wartime conduct also provides strong evidence for the imperialism explanation. As mentioned above, Russia has gone to great lengths to destroy Ukrainian culture. It has rejected multiple peace deals that would have prevented Ukraine from joining NATO. Putin saw these as failing to address the conflict’s “root causes,” arguably a euphemism for Ukrainian sovereignty. Instead, Russian conditions for peace include making Russian an official language, disbanding “nationalist” political parties, and ensuring the influence of Moscow’s Orthodox Church. These conditions smack of Russian chauvinism.

Of course, elites’ imperial beliefs do not necessarily lead to war. And indeed, Putin initially sought to control Ukraine through political measures, such as election interference. However, the authors argue that when President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seized the assets of a key Putin ally, Putin realized his position was weakening. Russian security officials then assured Putin — likely out of fear — that overthrowing Ukraine’s government would be easy. This flawed decision-making process led to war. Readers will come away struck by how many lives have been lost while policy and scholarly debates remained focused on the NATO hypothesis.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

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.