About the Event: 

Political violence is rising in the United States, alarming citizens and leaders alike. How many Americans endorse partisan violence and other forms of extreme hostility? What are its deep social, political, historical, and psychological roots? What can be done about it? And what does it mean for democracy? 

In this talk, Drs. Mason and Kalmoe make sense of our contentious politics with a groundbreaking study of radicalism among ordinary American partisans. Their individual-level studies utilize more than a dozen new nationally representative surveys and experiments to trace recent trends since 2017, reactions to elections and violent events, broader conditions that spur support for violence, links from violence attitudes to aggressive behavior, and the role of leaders in enflaming or pacifying their followers.

The results reshape the study of modern American political behavior by showing that ordinary partisanship is far more volatile than scholars have recognized in the past century of study.  

 

About the Speaker(s)

Dr. Nathan P. Kalmoe is an associate professor of political communication at Louisiana State University in the Manship School of Mass Communication and Department of Political Science. He is the author of With Ballots & Bullets: Partisanship & Violence in the American Civil War and co-author of Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public. He has also written essays for The Washington Post and Politico, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Vox, among other popular outlets.

 

 

 

 

Lilliana Mason is associate professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (University of Chicago Press). Her research on partisan identity, partisan bias, social sorting, and American social polarization has been published in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Behavior, and featured in media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and National Public Radio.

 

 

In many countries around the world, women's enfranchisement marked the single largest expansion in the eligible electorate. In Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany, the electorate more than doubled once women could vote, while in countries that rolled out women's suffrage gradually, such as the UK and Norway, even the second smaller reforms saw the electorate grow by more than a third. The sheer size of the expansion had the potential to transform electoral politics, a prospect that provoked optimism and fear alike: for those who fought for women’s suffrage, the victory brought legitimacy and new beginnings; yet for those who fought against, the reform heralded instability. Did women's suffrage transform electoral politics for good or for bad? Did it increase electoral instability? Did women favor particular parties?

Prominent theories of post-suffrage politics suggest either that women would vote conservatively, or that women's voting power would be vitiated by their reluctance to turn out. Leveraging fine grained municipal level data from Sweden, which includes turnout figures separated by sex, to examine the impact of women's suffrage on electoral politics, we argue that the geography of the gender gap, both in terms of turnout and vote choice, jointly determine the impact of women's votes. Using three methods to estimate the gender vote gap, we find that in cities, women were slightly more likely to vote for the left than men. Although women turned out at lower rates than men overall, their concentration in cities produced a national gender vote gap for the left. These findings, which highlight how diversity among women and electoral geography produce electoral outcomes, complicate longstanding theories about the "traditional" gender voting gap.

Dr. Dawn Teele holds a B.A. in Economics from Reed College, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn she was a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics. Dr. Teele's research has been published in a variety of outlets in political science, including the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, and Politics & Society. She is editor of a volume on social science methodology, Field Experiments and Their Critics  (Yale University Press 2014), and co-editor of Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy (Temple University Press 2020). In 2018, Princeton University Press published her book Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote which won the Luebbert Prize for the best book in Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association.

About the Speaker:

Stephen Krasner is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations. A former director of CDDRL, Krasner is also an FSI senior fellow, and a fellow of the Hoover Institution.

From February 2005 to April 2007 he served as the Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department. While at the State Department, Krasner was a driving force behind foreign assistance reform designed to more effectively target American foreign aid. He was also involved in activities related to the promotion of good governance and democratic institutions around the world.

At CDDRL, Krasner was the coordinator of the Program on Sovereignty. His work has dealt primarily with sovereignty, American foreign policy, and the political determinants of international economic relations. Before coming to Stanford in 1981 he taught at Harvard University and UCLA. At Stanford, he was chair of the political science department from 1984 to 1991, and he served as the editor of International Organization from 1986 to 1992.

He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (1987-88) and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2000-2001). In 2002 he served as director for governance and development at the National Security Council. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

About the Event:  Decentralization and community-driven development programs have become increasingly common policies to attempt to improve the distribution of public goods across low- and middle-income countries. We study a series of reforms in the city of Delhi that decentralized the administration of discretionary school-level budgets to elected bodies of parents. We find that parents have preferences for representatives that are substantially more educated than them and discriminate against Muslims. Parents act on these preferences when given the opportunity to elect SMC members. They elect parents that are wealthier and more educated and are also of higher status. The paper provides empirical evidence to the question of under what conditions decentralization leads to elite capture. When bureaucrats have a stronger say in the selection of representatives, budgets are captured to reflect the preferences of state representatives, rather than constituents.

 

About the Speaker:  Emmerich Davies is an Assistant Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Center for International Development, and a co-convener of the Brown-Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics. He studies the political economy of education with a regional focus on South Asia. His work has been published in Comparative Political Studies and Governance. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania, and his B.A. in political science and economics from Stanford University.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/Mwjn39S48rE

 

About the Event: NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg will speak about how the transatlantic alliance is adapting to change in this turbulent period.  President Biden has clearly signaled that he is resolved to reach out to the NATO allies, working to repair the trans-Atlantic bond. To strengthen the bond between America and Europe and prepare the alliance for the future, the Secretary General has launched the NATO 2030 initiative.  This includes proposals on how NATO can better harness technology and innovation, tackle the security implications of climate change, and help make our societies more resilient. While NATO must continue to deter and defend against Russia, it is also keeping channels open to Moscow. The rise of China presents both challenges and opportunities that NATO has started to address. And missions in Afghanistan and Iraq are on the cusp of change, with decisions underway about what role NATO will play in the future. All in all, an exciting time to hear from NATO’s Secretary General.

This event is co-sponsored with The Europe Center.

 

About the Speaker: 

Jens Stoltenberg became NATO Secretary General in October 2014, following a distinguished international and domestic career. As a former Prime Minister of Norway and UN Special Envoy, Mr. Stoltenberg has been a strong supporter of greater global and transatlantic cooperation. Mr. Stoltenberg’s mandate as NATO Secretary General has been extended until the end of September 2022.

Under Mr. Stoltenberg’s leadership, NATO has responded to a more challenging security environment by implementing the biggest reinforcement of its collective defence since the Cold War, increasing the readiness of its forces and deploying combat troops in the eastern part of the Alliance. He believes in credible deterrence and defence while maintaining dialogue with Russia. He has also advocated for increased defence spending and better burden sharing within the Alliance, and a greater focus on innovation. NATO has also stepped up its efforts in the fight against terrorism. He strongly supports a partnership approach, with cooperation between NATO and the European Union reaching unprecedented levels.

Before coming to NATO, he was the UN Special Envoy on Climate Change from 2013 to 2014. He has also chaired UN High-level Panels on climate financing and the coherence between development, humanitarian assistance and environmental policies.

As Prime Minister of Norway, Mr. Stoltenberg increased the defence spending and transformed the Norwegian armed forces with new high-end capabilities and investments. He also signed an agreement with Russia on establishing maritime borders in the Barents and Polar Sea, ending a 30-years dispute.

Mr. Stoltenberg was also Prime Minister during the deadly terrorist attacks, which killed 77 people in Oslo and Utøya on 22 July 2011, urging in response, “more democracy, more openness, and more humanity, but never naïvete”.

Mr Stoltenberg holds a postgraduate degree in Economics from the University of Oslo. After graduating in 1987, he held a research post at the National Statistical Institute of Norway, before embarking on a career in Norwegian politics.

• 2005-2013: Prime Minister of Norway
• 2002-2014: Leader of the Norwegian Labor Party
• 2000-2001: Prime Minister of Norway
• 1996-1997: Minister of Finance
• 1993-1996: Minister of Industry and Energy
• 1991-2014: Member of Parliament
• 1990-1991: State Secretary at the Ministry of the Environment
• 1985-1989: Leader of the Norwegian Labour Youth

Jens Stoltenberg was born in Oslo on 16 March 1959. He is married to Ingrid Schulerud. They have two grown-up children.

About the Event:   The number of Americans arrested, brought to court, and incarcerated has skyrocketed in recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly different ways. How and why is the court process unequal? This talk draws on findings from my book Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Princeton University Press, November 2020). Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in the Boston court system, I show that lawyers and judges often silence, coerce, and punish disadvantaged defendants when they try to learn their legal rights and advocate for themselves. These dynamics reveal how unwritten institutional norms devalue the exercise of legal rights among the disadvantaged, and that ensuring effective legal representation is no guarantee of justice. Drawing on other research and activism on the courts as a tool of racialized social control, I conclude with reflections on the democratic potential and possibilities of criminal court abolition.  

 

About the Speaker:  Dr. Matthew Clair is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and (by courtesy) the Law School. His research examines the law, culture, and inequality. Dr. Clair's research has been published in Criminology, Law & Social Inquiry, Social Science & Medicine, and Social Forces and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the American Society of Criminology. He has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, the Law & Society Association, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. His first book Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court was published by Princeton University Press in November 2020.

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This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

How does autocratic lobbying affect political outcomes and media coverage in democracies? This talk focuses on a dataset drawn from the public records of the US Foreign Agents Registration Act. It includes over 10,000 lobbying activities undertaken by the Chinese government between 2005 and 2019. The evidence suggests that Chinese government lobbying makes legislators at least twice as likely to sponsor legislation that is favorable to Chinese interests. Moreover, US media outlets that participated in Chinese-government sponsored trips subsequently covered China as less threatening. Coverage pivoted away from US-China military rivalry and the CCP’s persecution of religious minorities and toward US-China economic cooperation. These results suggest that autocratic lobbying poses an important challenge to democratic integrity.

Erin Baggott Carter is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. There, she is also a Co-PI at the Lab on Non-Democratic Politics. She received a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and was previously a Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Dr. Carter's research focuses on Chinese politics and propaganda. She recently completed a book on autocratic propaganda based on an original dataset of eight million articles in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish drawn from state-run newspapers in nearly 70 countries. She is currently working on a book on how domestic politics influence US-China relations. Her other work has appeared or is forthcoming in the British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and International Interactions. Her work has been featured by the New York Times, the Brookings Institution, and the Washington Post Monkeycage Blog.

 

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This event is part of the 2021 Winter/Spring Colloquia series, Biden’s America, Xi’s China: What’s Now & What’s Next?, sponsored by APARC's China Program.