Stanford University

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.

The Haves and the Have-Nots: Exploring the Global History of Wealth and Income Inequality"

Few topics have captured mass, political, and scholarly attention as consistently as income inequality and the distribution of wealth. Seeking to better understand these phenomena by adding a more historical perspective to contemporary debates, Stanford University's Walter Scheidel and colleagues at the University of Vienna organized a conference of scholars working on inequality. Over the course of three days, attendees presented cutting-edge research on historical analyses of inequality within and across countries over three millennia.

This conference, The Haves and the Have Nots: Exploring the Global History of Wealth and Income Inequality, was sponsored by The Europe Center and the University of Vienna. Additional information about the participants and their projects can be found in the conference program.

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Juridicum (top floor / Dachgeschoss)
University of Vienna

 

Conferences

The Art of Authoritarian Control in China

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Abstract:

When villages in China began to introduce local elections in the 1980s it was, for many, a moment of great optimism about the prospects for local democracy in the Peoples' Republic. Yet village self-government has not curbed the power of local officials in China to confiscate the wealth from the rural poor. Following the introduction of village elections, over 60 million villagers have had their land seized by their local governments. These land seizures amount to a redistribution of trillions of dollars of wealth from smallholders to the government. In this talk, I argue that local self-government in China is a strikingly effective tool for top-down authoritarian control. I focus on the consequences of including communal elites, like the leaders of lineages or religious groups, in village institutions of self-government. The view that local democracy nurtures accountability would suggest that the inclusion of communal elites in village government would strengthen villagers' land rights. After all, these communal elites face strong social expectations that they cooperate with their group and enact policies that benefit them. Drawing on case studies and a new dataset, I show that when communal elites join local institutions of self-government, the state is instead able to expropriate more land than when these elites remain outside of government. I argue that these communal elites are important intermediaries that help China's authoritarian state control and extract from their groups.

 

Speaker Bio:

daniel embedded
Daniel Mattingly is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. Starting in summer 2017, he will join the department of political science at Yale as an assistant professor. Dan’s dissertation focuses on the sources of state power in China, and shows how the ruling party uses democratic institutions to strengthen its political control over rural China. More broadly he is interested in local governance, state-building, authoritarian rule, and political accountability. His work appears in Comparative Political Studies and World Politics.

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow, 2016-17
Seminars

1984 or the Brave New World? Evidence from China

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Abstract:

Media censorship is considered as the hallmark of authoritarian regimes. Why don’t citizens acquire uncensored info despite the low cost availability? What does it take to expose citizens to uncensored information, and how does exposure affect their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? We conduct a field experiment directly varying the supply of uncensored information (by providing free access to uncensored internet to university students in China), and students’ demand for information (by providing informational and monetary incentives) over the course of 18 months. We measure and trace students’ media consumption, beliefs and attitudes regarding media, as well as a broad range of economic and political attitudes and behaviors. We find that censorship successfully prevents information consumption due to the combination of restricted supply of and low demand for uncensored information. The low demand is primarily driven by students’ skeptical beliefs regarding uncensored media outlets, and such beliefs can be persistently changed after a period of exposure. Having exposed to uncensored information makes students more knowledgeable, more pessimistic of the Chinese economy, more critical of the government, and more likely to plan on leaving China in the near future.

 

Speaker Bio:

david yang
David Y. Yang is a PhD candidate in Economics at Stanford University. He received B.A. in statistics and B.S. in business administration from University of California, Berkeley. His research interests center on political economy, behavioral and experimental economics, and economic history. In particular, he is interested in the causes and consequences of political beliefs, attitudes, and preferences.

David Y. Yang PhD candidate in Economics at Stanford University
Seminars

The Evolution of Autocracy

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Abstract:

Globalization, shifting great power dynamics, and the growing accessibility of Internet and communication technology has changed the environment within which autocrats operate. Many analysts have noted these changes and concluded that the masses now hold the upper hand and that dictators’ days are surely numbered. It may be true that 21st century autocrats face more and increasingly complex challenges to their rule. But current accounts of dictatorship seriously underestimate the adaptability of authoritarian systems. Since the end of the Cold War, dictators have evolved to survive and even thrive amid changes in their domestic and international environments. In this presentation, I examine the evolution of authoritarianism since the end of the Cold War. Since 1991 there have been substantial changes in the ways that dictators assume power, in the tactics they use to maintain power, and in the ways in which they lose power. Each of these changes has significant implications for the political dynamics in today’s autocracies.

Speaker Bio:

andrea kendall taylor

Andrea Kendall-Taylor works at the National Intelligence Council, where she is a deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. During her seven years in the U.S. government, she has focused her research and analysis on the political dynamics of authoritarian regimes, political stability, democratization, and civil society, with a particular focus on Russia and Eurasia. Dr. Kendall-Taylor is also a non-resident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the Human Rights Initiative and an adjunct professor in political science at Georgetown and American Universities. Her work has been published in numerous political science journals, including the Journal of Peace Research, Democratization, and Journal of Democracy, as well as a number of policy outlets such as Foreign Affairs, the Washington Quarterly, and Foreign Policy. Dr. Kendall-Taylor received her B.A. in politics from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor Deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia
Seminars

Making Politics Work for Development

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Abstract:

Synthesizing the vanguard of economics research on the functioning of political markets, the World Bank’s Policy Research Report, Making Politics Work for Development, distils implications for policy and future research. It shows how political engagement—the processes through which citizens select and sanction the leaders who wield power in government—is fundamental to understanding and solving government failures to pursue good public policies. The confluence of political engagement with transparency can be a driving force for countries to transition toward better-functioning public sector institutions, starting from their own initial and contextual conditions. But good outcomes are far from guaranteed, with many risks of unhealthy political engagement by citizens and repressive responses by leaders. To harness the potential of these forces, the report offers ideas for policy actors to target transparency to improve citizens’ ability to hold leaders accountable for the public goods needed for development.

 

Speaker Bio:

stuti khemani
STUTI KHEMANI is a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. She joined through the Young Professionals Program after obtaining a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her area of research is the political economy of public policy choices, and institutional reforms for development. Her work is published in economics and political science journals, such as the American Economic Journal, Journal of Development Economics and American Political Science Review. She has studied the impact of electoral politics on fiscal policy and intergovernmental fiscal relations; drawn policy implications for the design of institutions to promote fiscal responsibility; and analyzed political constraints to efficient allocation of resources for health and education services. She is currently examining the role of mass media and local elections in building effective public sector institutions. She is also the lead author of the Policy Research Report Making Politics Work for Development: Harnessing Transparency and Citizen Engagement. Her research and advisory work spans a diverse range of countries, including Benin, China, India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda.

Stuti Khemani Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank
Seminars

Whither Parties?

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Abstract:

Scholars of comparative politics have long examined political parties as organized vehicles of mass mobilization, interest mediation, and policy formation. But with mounting evidence that parties in the twenty-first century serve different purposes, how are we to understand the role of traditional, mainstream parties today? This talk examines factors driving a decline in traditional party organization, which includes an erosion of social and intermediary groups, insufficient state capacity, delegation of party functions to private interests, and ideological convergence between the mainstream parties. It argues for more rigorous conceptualization of the role parties serve in representative democracies, and greater theoretical examination of the link between parties and governance outcomes.

 

Speaker Bio:

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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
didi_kuo_2026.jpg

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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Academic Research & Program Manager, Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective
Seminars

Dictatorship and Information

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Abstract:

How do autocracies collect information on popular discontent? The existing literature has not provided a systematic answer to this question despite its fundamental importance for understanding the logic of authoritarian rule. This talk offers a theory of information gathering in single-party communist autocracies, which are the most durable subtype of authoritarian regime to emerge since World War I. It argues that the unusual longevity of communist regimes allows us to develop and test a theory of the emergence, evolution, and eventual demise of non-electoral institutions for information gathering in autocracies. The talk uses the East European communist regimes that existed prior to 1989 to generate a theory of information and the case of post-1949 China (where institutional evolution is still ongoing) as a provisional test of the theory. The talk is based on archival sources and regime-generated materials collected in China and several East European countries.

 

Speaker Bio:

martin dimitrov
Martin K. Dimitrov is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. His books include Piracy and the State: The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights in China (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Why Communism Did Not Collapse: Understanding Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Asia and Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and The Politics of Socialist Consumption (Sofia: Ciela Publishers, 2017). He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Dictatorship and Information: Autocratic Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China and two edited volumes: China-Cuba: Trajectories of Post-Revolutionary Governance and Popular Authoritarianism: The Quest for Regime Durability. After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2004, he taught at Dartmouth and held residential fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, Notre Dame, the University of Helsinki, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has conducted fieldwork in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Russia, Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Cuba.

Martin K. Dimitrov Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University
Seminars

Cybersecurity reform urgent, panel warns

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Stanford cybersecurity expert Herb Lin said America may be at a “tipping point” regarding the rewards and risks of the Internet, unless new cybersecurity policies are adopted by the incoming Trump Administration. He speaks Dec. 7 at Stanford on the issue.

The costs of using the Internet and computational devices due to inadequate security may soon outweigh the benefits unless dramatic cybersecurity measures are taken, a Stanford scholar said.

Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), serves on the President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity, which on Dec. 2 issued strong recommendations to upgrade the nation’s cybersecurity systems.

Lin will speak Dec. 7 at Stanford about the report – his talk will be featured live on video. The 100-page report aims to inform the incoming Trump Administration about how to approach escalating cybersecurity dangers. The effort follows significant hacking of U.S. government systems in and accusations by the White House that Russia interfered in the U.S. presidential election.

The commission suggested both short- and long-term measures, such as fixing problems from the weakly protected ‘internet-of-things’; creating an assistant to the president for cybersecurity; and re-organizing responsibility for the cybersecurity of federal agencies, among others.

The report also urged getting rid of traditional passwords, which could help reduce identity theft. It also advised that the new administration train 100,000 new cybersecurity workers by 2020.

A research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Lin was recently interviewed by CISAC about the report:

What is the reason to move the burden of cybersecurity away from the user to higher levels of companies, government?

Taking the necessary and appropriate measures for cybersecurity is, for practical purposes, too complex for average end-users. A successful effort to push cybersecurity measures farther from the user will result in better security because security decisions will be made by those who are security experts rather than users that are unfamiliar with security.

Why is the White House the best entity to lead cybersecurity efforts?

Enhancing national cybersecurity requires a whole-of-government effort, indeed a whole-of-society effort.  The task is making a meaningful dent in a problem that is so large. Only with high-level leadership does that effort have any chance of success.

Will the distrust of the U.S. government by the technology community in general hinder this approach to cybersecurity? How can the tech world's trust in the government on cybersecurity issues be improved?

Distrust harms both sides – the U.S. government and the technology community.  The U.S. government loses the ability to enlist the cooperation of the private sector, which has many capabilities that it does not have, capabilities that would be useful in fulfilling its responsibilities to the American people. The tech sector invites harsh legislation and suspicion that work against its interests. At the same time, the distrust is not entirely unfounded, as both sides have indulged in apocalyptic rhetoric that has raised the temperature of the debate without much productive result.  But what I’m saying here represents a personal perspective, and isn’t part of the commission’s report.

What happens if these recommendations are not enacted or adopted? What happens to the typical American computer user? In the long run, if we do little or nothing, how will this affect the Internet – as an economic driver or engine for the economy, place where people connect?

President Obama created the commission because he believed that cybersecurity was a high national priority, a sentiment with which both presidential candidates agreed. If the nation does too little to improve its cybersecurity posture, the gap between the security we have and the security we need will only grow because the cybersecurity threat we face is growing. And if that is the case, the costs of using the Internet and computational devices due to inadequate security will outweigh the benefits – indeed, there is evidence that we are near such a tipping point today. Even now, a large fraction of Americans are unwilling to use the Internet for certain purposes due to security concerns – and I can tell you that I personally refrain from conducting certain transactions online for just such reasons.

Any other issues?

One of the most surprising aspects of the report was the process that produced it.  The chair of the commission is known to be a Democrat. The vice-chair is known to be a Republican.  Other than that, you would be hard-pressed to identify the political affiliations of anyone else on the commission on the basis of what they said. So it was thoroughly a nonpartisan effort that produced the report.

Herb Lin will speak at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 7 in the NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building Room B3. More information and live video information is available at http://ee380.stanford.edu. The title of the talk is “Charting a Cybersecurity Path for the Next Administration: Report of the President's Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.” In February, President Obama announced a Cybersecurity National Action Plan to take a series of short-term and long-term actions to improve our nation’s cybersecurity posture.  A central feature of that plan is the non-partisan Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.

Follow CISAC on Twitter at @StanfordCISAC and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/StanfordCISAC.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Herbert Lin, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 497-8600, herbert.s.lin@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

 

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Stanford cybersecurity expert Herb Lin said America may be at a “tipping point” regarding the rewards and risks of the Internet, unless recommended new cybersecurity policies are adopted in the near future. | scyther5/Getty Images
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