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.
Launched in 2016, this series of public lectures features academics, government practitioners, and business experts who explore contemporary issues focused on the countries of South Asia—their potential and problems, their economies, their place in the region and in the global arena, the agendas of their administrations, and their relations with the United States.
The event is jointly sponsored by the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.
Shujiro Urata is a Professor at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda Univeristy. His focus of research is in international and development economics. He received his PhD in Economics from Standford University in 1978.
The stories of North Korea and Myanmar (Burma) are two of Asia’s most difficult. For decades they were infamous as the region’s most militarized and repressed, self-isolated and under sanctions by the international community while, from Singapore to Japan, the rest of Asia saw historic wealth creation. Andray Abrahamian, author of the recent book North Korea and Myanmar: Divergent Paths (McFarland, 2018), examines and compares the recent histories of North Korea and Myanmar, asking how both became pariahs and why Myanmar has been able to find a path out of isolation while North Korea has not.
Abrahamian finds that both countries were faced with severe security threats following decolonization. Myanmar was able to largely take care of its main threats in the 1990s and 2000s, allowing it the space to address the reasons for its pariah status. North Korea's response to its security threat has been to develop nuclear weapons, which in turn perpetuates and exacerbates its isolation and pariah status. In addition, Pyongyang has developed a state ideology and a coercive apparatus unmatched by Myanmar, insulating its decision makers from political pressures and issues of legitimacy to a greater degree.
Dr. Andray Abrahamian is currently the 2018-19 Koret Fellow in Korea Program at Stanford. He is a member of the US National Committee on North Korea and an Adjunct Fellow at Pacific Forum and at Griffith University. Working for a non-profit, Choson Exchange, has taken him to the DPRK nearly 30 times; he has also lived in Myanmar.
CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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).
Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
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.
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.
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.
Francis Fukuyama sits down with The World's Carol Hills to go over the identity politics of 2018. Listen here.
Beijing enjoys a big megaphone in America even as it blocks U.S. media outlets, hinders independent scholars and limits U.S. public diplomacy, saysLarry Diamondand Asia Society'sOrville Schell. Read here.
Francis Fukuyama discusses why populist messages have emerged in contemporary politics alongside Anna Grzymala-Busse, Neil Malhotra.
Read here.
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.Image
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
Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
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)