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Governance

FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling. 

FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world. 

FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.

Information Session - Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program

This event is open to Stanford undergraduate students only. 
 
The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is currently accepting applications from eligible juniors due February 15, 2019 who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department. CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.
 
For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.
 
honors info session 2019 1
 

 

Ground Floor Conference Rm E008 Encina Hall616 Serra MallStanford, CA 94305-6055

 

Stephen J. Stedman

CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-2705 (650) 724-2996
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
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Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.

In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.

In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.

In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.

His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).

Director, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law
Director, Program in International Relations
Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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Coalition-Directed Economic Vote and the Finance Minister

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Recent experimental evidence finds that the decision maker in a collective decision making entity with proposal power attracts a disproportionate amount of the blame or reward by those materially affected by these decisions. In the case of coalition governments evidence suggests that voters have heuristics for assigning responsibility for economic outcomes to individual parties and that they tend to disproportionately direct the economic vote toward the Prime Minister party. This essay demonstrates that voters also identify the Finance Minister party as an agenda setter on economic issues depending on whether the coalition context exaggerates or mutes its perceived agenda power. We define cabinet context as the extent to which coalition parties take issue ownership for particular policy areas. We find that when decision making is compartmentalized, voters perceive the finance minister as having agenda power and hence it receives a relatively larger economic vote; in more “diffuse” cabinet contexts it is the PM Party that is attributed responsibility for the economy.

Ray Duch

Raymond Duch is an Official Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and the Director of the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS), which currently has centres in Oxford (UK), Santiago (Chile), Tianjin (China) and Pune (India). Prior to assuming these positions, he was the Senator Don Henderson Scholar in Political Science at the University of Houston. He received his BA (Honours) from the University of Manitoba in Canada and his MA and PhD from the University of Rochester. In addition, he has held visiting appointments at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona; the Hoover Institute and the Graduate School of Management, Stanford University; the Institute for Social Research Oslo; the Université de Montréal; and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung. He is currently the Long Term Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Toulouse School of Economics.

He draws on theory, experiments and public opinion analysis to understand how citizens solve decision-making challenges. This includes looking at how citizens use information shortcuts to make decisions. For example in ‘Context and Economic Expectations: When Do Voters get it Right?’ (British Journal of Political Science, 2010), he demonstrates how information shortcuts result in quite accurate expectations regarding price fluctuations in 12 European countries. One of his current areas of interest is the micro-foundations of cheating and unethical behaviour. He has run real effort tax compliance experiments designed to understand who cheats at taxes, the results of which are summarized in ‘Why We Cheat?’ (currently under review). An extension of this project examines tax compliance in different tax regimes.

Ray has served as Associate Editor of the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Experimental Political Science. He is one of the founders of the European Political Science Association and the International Meeting on Behavioural Science (IMESBESS), and he is currently Vice President of the Midwest Political Science Association. In 2015, Ray was selected as a member of the UK Cabinet Office Cross-Whitehall Trial Advice Panel to offer Whitehall departments technical support in designing and implementing controlled experiments to assess policy effectiveness. He was recently nominated to the Evidence in Governance and Politics network.

This event is co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution.

 

Raymond Duch speaker Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Lectures

Reelection, Political Selection, and Economic Development

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Abstract:
 
We assemble novel data from approximately 120 countries around the world on recent reelection rates of legislators to the national lower house of representatives. Data
show that incumbent reelection rates increase substantially with acountry's level of economic development. Using a formal model to inform our understanding, we argue that as acountry develops economically, the pool of individuals who seek political office improves. As better candidates enter the political arena, more good types are elected and then reelected. Historical data buttresses this line of argument.  We use empiricalmethods to explore mechanisms to account for the pattern in political entry that we identify. 
 
 
Speaker Bio:
 

miriam golden
Miriam Golden is Professor of Political Science. She was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Cornell University.  Professor Golden's research is in the area of political economy. She has conducted field research on issues of corruption and political malfeasance in Europe, Asia, and Africa.  With economist Raymond Fisman, Professor Golden has recently authored Corruption: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017).  Her current field project concerns political responsiveness in Pakistan. She is also engaged in a cross-national and historical study of how and when politicians secure reelection.

 
 
Miriam Golden Professor of Political Science, University of California at Los Angeles
Seminars

Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

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Join members from the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age for a panel discussion and Q&A, moderated by Frank Fukuyama, Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), on the opportunities and challenges for electoral integrity created by technological innovations. The panel will explore the challenges to electoral integrity arising from the global spread of digital technologies and social media platforms, policy measures that can address these challenges, and opportunities that technological innovation offers for strengthening electoral integrity and political participation.

About the Commission:

Kofi Annan was a lifelong advocate for the right of every citizen to have a say in how they are governed, and by whom. He was adamant that democratic governance and citizen empowerment were integral elements to achieving sustainable development, security and lasting peace, and this principle guides much of the work of the Foundation, most notably the Electoral Integrity Initiative. As one of his last major initiatives, in 2018 Mr. Annan convened the Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age. The Commission named Stephen Stedman, senior fellow at FSI and deputy director of CDDRL to serve as its Secretary General. The chair of the commission is former president of Costa Rica, Laura Chinchilla. They are joined by Nathaniel Persily, Stanford Law Professor, and Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia who is now an affiliate of FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and other members from civil society and government, the technology sector, academia and media.

 

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/elections-and-democracy-in-the-digital-age…

Koret-Taube Conference Center, Gunn-SIEPR Building
366 Galvez St.
Stanford, CA 94305

Members of Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

Francis Fukuyama

Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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Moderator, Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL)
Panel Discussions

The Populist Citizen

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Abstract:

To what extent do European citizens have a populist view of politics? Under what conditions are these populist attitudes more prevalent? What are their political consequences in terms of individual behavior? The talk will present an overview of the causes and consequences of populist attitudes in Europe using comparative and longitudinal survey data. The effect of economic conditions (both objective and perceived), emotional reactions of anger and fear, and internal political efficacy are explored. Our evidence suggests that populism is more related to sociotropic perceptions than to objective economic hardship, and to anger than to fear. Populist attitudes seem to be also powerful mobilisatory motivations for political engagement, particularly for people with low levels of income and education. 
 
 
Speaker Bio:
 

eva perea
I am professor of political science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona where I am also ICREA Academia research fellow. I direct the research group on Democracy, Elections and Citizenship and I have until recently directed also the Master in Political Science. I am currently 2018-19 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University. My main areas of research deal with different aspects of citizens’ involvement in politics in advanced democracies. This includes an interest in the causes and consequences of electoral turnout, political protest, digital media and political attitudes. I am also interested in attitudes towards corruption and in survey and experimental methodology. Recently my research has focused on the attitudinal consequences of the economic crisis, with a special focus on populist attitudes. In my next project I intend to explore how individuals’ attitudes towards gender equality and feminism change along time.

 
Eva Anduiza Perea Professor of Political Science at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Seminars

Innovative Japanese Companies Harnessing Silicon Valley - Part 2

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This is part 2 of a talk presenting how innovative large Japanese companies are harnessing Silicon Valley. It is a review of the fireside chats and panels presented at the Silicon Valley – New Japan Summit last November at Stanford, which was in Japanese. The talk adds some historical context, and introduces through many of the company cases from the summit, including Panasonic, Fuji Film, Itochu, Rakuten, Obayashi, Nomura Holdings, Sourcenext, Komatsu, SMBC, and Toyota Research Institute.

The current surge of large Japanese companies into Silicon Valley is focused on firms aiming to identify new opportunities to collaborate with the startup ecosystem in order to understand future technological and industry trajectories, to facilitate new forms of “open” innovation within the company, and in some cases to even redefine how to add value to their core offerings. However, given a vast differently economic context from their core operations in Japan, many of the large Japanese firms’ initial forays tend to fall into patterns of “worst practices” that are ineffective. Yet, a small but growing number of innovative Japanese companies are producing novel and valuable collaborations with a variety of Silicon Valley firms, investors, and ecosystem players. The talk will survey a range of strategic options available to Japanese companies, with implications for how to better adapt companies from Japan to Silicon Valley, and more broadly from different political economic systems.

SPEAKER:

Kenji Kushida, Research Scholar, Shorenstein APARC Japan Program and Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project Leader

BIO:

Kenji E. Kushida is the Japan Program Research Scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University (APARC), Project Leader of the Stanford Silicon Valley – New Japan Project (Stanford SV-NJ), research affiliate of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE), International Research Fellow at the Canon Institute for Global Studies (CIGS), and Visiting Researcher at National Institute for Research Advancement (NIRA). He holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA in East Asian studies and BAs in economics and East Asian studies, all from Stanford University.

Kushida’s research streams include 1) Information Technology innovation, 2) Silicon Valley’s economic ecosystem, 3) Japan’s political economic transformation since the 1990s, and 4) the Fukushima nuclear disaster. He has published several books and numerous articles in each of these streams, including “The Politics of Commoditization in Global ICT Industries,” “Japan’s Startups Ecosystem,” “Cloud Computing: From Scarcity to Abundance,” and others. His latest business book in Japanese is “The Algorithmic Revolution’s Disruption: a Silicon Valley Vantage on IoT, Fintech, Cloud, and AI” (Asahi Shimbun Shuppan 2016).

He has appeared in media including The New York Times, Washington Post, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Nikkei Business, NHK, PBS NewsHour, and NPR.

He is also a trustee of the Japan ICU Foundation, a fellow of the US-Japan Leadership Program, an alumni of the Trilateral Commission David Rockefeller Fellows, and a member of the Mansfield Foundation Network for the Future.

AGENDA:

4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking

RSVP REQUIRED:

Register to attend at http://www.stanford-svnj.org/12819

For more information about the Silicon Valley-New Japan Project please visit: http://www.stanford-svnj.org/

 

Kenji E. Kushida

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Former Research Scholar, Japan Program
kenji_kushida_2.jpg MA, PhD
Kenji E. Kushida was a research scholar with the Japan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center from 2014 through January 2022. Prior to that at APARC, he was a Takahashi Research Associate in Japanese Studies (2011-14) and a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow (2010-11).
 
Kushida’s research and projects are focused on the following streams: 1) how politics and regulations shape the development and diffusion of Information Technology such as AI; 2) institutional underpinnings of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, 2) Japan's transforming political economy, 3) Japan's startup ecosystem, 4) the role of foreign multinational firms in Japan, 4) Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster. He spearheaded the Silicon Valley - New Japan project that brought together large Japanese firms and the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

He has published several books and numerous articles in each of these streams, including “The Politics of Commoditization in Global ICT Industries,” “Japan’s Startup Ecosystem,” "How Politics and Market Dynamics Trapped Innovations in Japan’s Domestic 'Galapagos' Telecommunications Sector," “Cloud Computing: From Scarcity to Abundance,” and others. His latest business book in Japanese is “The Algorithmic Revolution’s Disruption: a Silicon Valley Vantage on IoT, Fintech, Cloud, and AI” (Asahi Shimbun Shuppan 2016).

Kushida has appeared in media including The New York Times, Washington Post, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Nikkei Business, Diamond Harvard Business Review, NHK, PBS NewsHour, and NPR. He is also a trustee of the Japan ICU Foundation, alumni of the Trilateral Commission David Rockefeller Fellows, and a member of the Mansfield Foundation Network for the Future. Kushida has written two general audience books in Japanese, entitled Biculturalism and the Japanese: Beyond English Linguistic Capabilities (Chuko Shinsho, 2006) and International Schools, an Introduction (Fusosha, 2008).

Kushida holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He received his MA in East Asian Studies and BAs in economics and East Asian Studies with Honors, all from Stanford University.
Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project

Not Always Stand Divided: Islamists and Secular Rivals in Tunisia

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This event is co-sponsored with The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

Abstract:

Why were Islamists less polarizing in Tunisia than their counterparts in Egypt after the downfall of the autocratic regime in 2011? While the electoral processes that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt rapidly polarized society, the Muslim Brothers in Tunisia formed a coalition with secular groups to pry power from the old power centers immediately after the removal of Ben Ali. Different approaches focused on Tunisians’ liberal culture and their proximity to Europe. Scant attention paid to both the historical and political-strategic conditions that shaped boundaries of interactions between Islamists and non-Islamists. I argue that the historical relations between the state and Islamists affect the distribution of power between them on the one hand, and their secular opponents on the other. In Tunisia, Islamist and non-Islamist forces believed in the necessity of conciliation (or were forced to do so by political circumstances). They, therefore, reached across ideological lines and struck deals to hold democratic institutions.

 

Speaker Bio:

shimaa hatab
Shimaa Hatab is assistant professor of political science at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Essex University. She is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Abbasi Program, at Stanford. Her research interests include democratization, authoritarianism, political economy of development, with a focus on countries in the Middle East and Latin America.

Shimaa Hatab assistant professor of political science at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University
Seminars
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