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.

Psychology of Political Risk in Autocracy

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Abstract:

Many authoritarian regimes use the threat of repression to suppress dissent. Theory from psychology suggests that emotions should affect how citizens perceive and process information about repression risk, and ultimately how they behave. I test the implications of this view for understanding dissent in autocracy by running a lab-in-the-field experiment with 671 opposition supporters in Zimbabwe. In the experiment, I randomly assign some participants to an exercise that induces a state of fear. The fear treatment reduces participation in a behavioral measure of dissent by 14-23%, and increases pessimism and risk aversion. These effects may lead to variation in real participation in dissent: self-efficacy, a psychological characteristic that influences emotional reactions to threats, is a better predictor of dissent than access to information and communication technology or strength of identification with the opposition. These effects suggest that fear may be used strategically by autocrats to suppress dissent.

 

Speaker Bio:

lauren young
Lauren Young is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL. Her research aims to understand how citizens make decisions when faced with the threat of political violence. Her dissertation uses a mix of experimental, quasi-experimental, and qualitative methods with more than 2,100 total participants to investigate how emotions influence decisions to participate in pro-democracy dissent using the case of Zimbabwe. Lauren is currently working on projects that test for similar effects in the context of narco-trafficking, violent crime, and police abuse. Lauren received her PhD in Political Science with distinction from Columbia University in May 2016 and holds a BA from Stanford University with honors in International Security Studies. She is also a non-resident postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Global Development.

Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL
Seminars

Singapore's Cartographic Cinema: Mapping an Identity

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Singapore brandishes an unusual post-colonial identity. As several of its eminent voices have suggested, the country remembers its colonial past with “no hangups.” Meanwhile the visibility of Singapore’s cinema has surged at festivals and in film criticism. Prof. Sim will argue that the films reflect the city-state’s distinctive location between post-colonialism and globalization. He will show how the films evince a local preoccupation with space, which is desperately scarce on the island nation and thus intensely politicized. He will explore how the films map, organize, and understand Singapore as a place, and Singapore’s place in the world, while retaining the ideological inflections of its post-colonial status.

Existing scholarship on cinema in Singapore dwells on how the films, as texts, respond to social realities, political power, and state ideology. These readings are legitimate and illustrative. But they do not adequately account for Singapore’s postcolonial identity and how that identity is expressed in a mapping impulse. Prof. Sim will go beyond this literature to analyze key films, art and museum exhibits, and other cultural artifacts as symptoms of Singapore’s intriguing but understudied fixation on space and place.

Gerald Sim is associate professor of film and media studies at Florida Atlantic University, and the author of The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (2014). His current book-in-progress, tentatively entitled Besides Hybridity: Postcolonial Poetics of Southeast Asian Cinema, is contracted with Indiana University Press. In 2016 and 2013 he was a visiting senior research fellow in the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute.

 

Gerald Sim 2016-17 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Southeast Asia
Seminars

Massive cyberattack poses policy dilemma, Stanford scholar says

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The coordinated cyber attack that crippled parts of the internet on Friday highlighted key policy problems, a Stanford cybersecurity scholar said.And while the problems were clear, there are no easy solutions, said Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar for cyberpolicy and security at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. A research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Lin serves on the President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.

Beginning early Friday morning, several major websites including Twitter and Amazon went down for most of the day, and many other sites were inaccessible. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are investigating what is described as a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. The attacks mainly focused on Dyn, one of the companies that run the internet’s domain name system (DNS).

The following is an interview with Lin:

What happened on Oct. 21?

It was a distributed denial-of-service attack on a major internet services provider. The company operates much of the internet’s infrastructure. It’s not a consumer-facing company, but is in between the user and a company like, say, Amazon. These attacks centered on the domain name system (DNS), which is the service that translates something like stanford.edu into a numerical IP address. People remember Amazon.com, but they don’t remember the numerical IP address (which is actually where a company like Dyn sends web users going to a site like Amazon). What a DOS attack involves is the flooding of this (Dyn) company’s servers with millions of fake requests from sources for service to go to those web sites. Being forced to process all these requests, the company can’t service real people trying to use web sites. On Friday, the millions of sources making these requests appear to have been part of the Internet of Things.

What is the Internet of Things, and how did it factor into the cyberattack?

In this case, they weren’t, by and large, products like your computer or mine, but were mostly smaller things like surveillance cameras, baby monitors and home routers [everyday objects that have network connectivity to the internet]. What makes these things particularly vulnerable is that they are small, they don’t have much computational power in them, and they don’t include many, if any, security features. In fact, a Chinese company just admitted that it didn’t pay enough attention to security, and they recommend users do some things to improve security. But they shipped their products without paying much attention to security, and that’s why this was a vulnerability.

What new public policies could lessen the likelihood of this happening again?

The primary policy recommendation is that we need policy that encourages – or mandates, depending on how strong you want to be about it – at least minimal security measures for devices that connect to the internet, even Internet of Things devices. How you actually promote, encourage or incentivize that without a legal mandate is problematic, however, because nobody quite knows what the market will accept. Also, if you’re going to force manufacturers to pay attention to security, you’re going to reduce the rate of innovation for these products. Then there’s the question of who’s going to buy them, because the unsecure ones will probably be cheaper. The fundamental problem here is that guys who use the Internet of Things, like surveillance cameras, will find those cameras work perfectly fine, even if they were compromised. So they don’t care about security. They have no incentive to do so. Why should they pay more to protect me?

Does this show that our November election is even more vulnerable to hacking?

At this point, it looks unrelated … But I don’t know, it is all just speculation.

Herb Lin's research interests focus on policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, especially regarding the use of offensive operations in cyberspace as instruments of national policy. In addition to his Stanford positions, he is chief scientist, emeritus, for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies. Prior to this, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. To learn more, read Lin's "An Evolving Research Agenda in Cyber Policy and Security."

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 says the Oct. 21 cyberattack reveals weaknesses in the ‘Internet of Things’ that need to be addressed. But stricter security requirements could slow innovation, increase costs and be difficult to enforce. | NicoElNino, Getty Images
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The Whore, the Hostess, and the Honey: Policing, Health, Business and the Regulation of Prostitution in China

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Speaker Bio:

boittin margaret
Margaret Boittin is Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada. She studies Chinese law and politics.

She was a predoctoral and postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL (2012-2015).

Margaret Boittin

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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The Governance Project Postdoctoral Fellow, 2013-15
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Margaret Boittin has a JD from Stanford, and is completing her PhD in Political Science at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation is on the regulation of prostitution in China. She is also conducting research on criminal law policy and local enforcement in the United States, and human trafficking in Nepal.

The Governance Project Postdoctoral Fellow, 2013-15
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Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada
Seminars

Election 2016: Recapping the Presidential Race

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**We are no longer accepting RSVPs. This event is at capacity. Please join us via Facebook Live.**

 

The Presidential Election of 2016 has been unlike any in modern American history. How will voters decide between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton on Election Day? What issues dominated the election in the final days of each campaign, and what consequences will this campaign have on the Republican and Democratic parties? What does this election mean for political polarization, campaign finance reform, and the rise of social media? 

Join a panel discussion with Larry Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, Bruce Cain, and Nate Persily of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law after the election. The panel will discuss  the candidates, the campaigns, and the implications for American democracy. 

And join the conversation on Twitter: @StanfordCDDRL #CDDRLrecap

Speaker(s) Bio:

francis fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Mosbacher Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).  He is also a professor by courtesy in the Department of Political Science. He was previously at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, where he was the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and director of SAIS' International Development program.

 

 

 

 

diamond larry smile

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and he continues to lead its programs on Liberation Technology, Arab Reform and Democracy, and Democracy in Taiwan.  He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy.

 

 

 

 

 

bruce cain

Bruce E. Cain is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. He received a BA from Bowdoin College (1970), a B Phil. from Oxford University (1972) as a Rhodes Scholar, and a Ph D from Harvard University (1976). He taught at Caltech (1976-89) and UC Berkeley (1989-2012) before coming to Stanford. Professor Cain was Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley from 1990-2007 and Executive Director of the UC Washington Center from 2005-2012.

 

 

 

 

 

nate persily

 

Nathaniel Persily is a James B. McClatchy Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and of Communication at Stanford Law School.  He received J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1998 and M.A. in 1994; PhD in Political Science in 2002 from U.C. Berkeley.  He served as Senior Research Director at the Presidential Commission on Election Administration June 2013-2014.

 

 

 

Larry Diamond

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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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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Director Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
Director Bill Lane Center for the American West
Nathaniel Persily Professor of Law Stanford Law School
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American Democracy Events

The Current Social and Political Challenges in Catalonia: An Unprecedented Process

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The social and political process that a significant part of Catalan society is engaged in needs to be explained analyzing its origins some ten years ago and its current state of development. At present no one can reasonably predict the future evolution and eventual outcome of this impressive democratic challenge to twenty-first century Europe.

Photo of Professor Salvador Cardüs

Salvador Cardús is a professor of sociology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the current Ginebre Serra Visiting Professor in Catalan Studies at Stanford's Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures.  His research interests include identity and immigration, sociology of religion, mass media and culture, nationalistic phenomena and the epistemology of the social sciences. Cardús' recent work is on the shaping of a new paradigm to study contemporary identity processes and the challenges of fragmented societies in the global order as a means to negotiate recognition while avoiding difficulties of self-definition.

Salvador Cardús Professor of Sociology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Ginebre Serra Visiting Professor in Catalan Studies, Division of Literatures, Languages and Cultures Speaker
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