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.

Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment

-

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

About the event: Ahmet T. Kuru will talk about his award-winning new book Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Why do Muslim-majority countries have high levels of authoritarianism and low levels of socio-economic development in comparison to world averages? Kuru elaborates an argument about the ulema-state alliance as the cause of these problems in the Muslim world from the eleventh century to the present. Criticizing essentialist, post-colonialist, and new institutionalist alternative explanations, Kuru focuses on the relations between intellectual, economic, religious, and political classes in his own explanation.

 

Ahmet Kuru
About the speaker:  Ahmet T. Kuru is Porteous Professor of Political Science at San Diego State University. Kuru received his PhD from the University of Washington and held a post-doc position at Columbia University. He is the author of award-winning Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey (Cambridge UP) and the co-editor (with Alfred Stepan) of Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey (Columbia UP). His works have been translated into Arabic, Bosnian, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Turkish. His 2019 book, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison (Cambridge UP) became the co-winner of the American Political Science Association's International History and Politics Section Best Book Award.

 

 

https://youtu.be/VC-RPqVocjY

Ahmet Kuru Porteous Professor of Political Science at San Diego State University
Seminars

Informing Government Response to COVID-19 in sub-Saharan Africa

-

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

 

About the event: Governments in sub-Saharan Africa face tough choices in COVID-19 policy response. They have scarce resources but are under intense pressure to balance pandemic control with ensuring people have basic necessities -- while also staving off violence and political instability among distrustful publics. Until a vaccine is widely available, the primary way to combat COVID-19 is encouraging cooperation with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Our research provides African governments with evidence on how to increase voluntary cooperation with NPIs. I will present preliminary results from ongoing data collection efforts designed to provide policy-relevant information for government decision makers in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. Evidence from endorsement, list, and vignette experiments offer insights into citizen compliance with health policies, the gap between individual attitudes and perceptions of peers' behavior, and the dangers of COVID-related misinformation.

 

Leah R. Rosenzweig

About the speaker: Leah is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Graduate School of Business in the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her research centers on topics in comparative politics and the political economy of development. Her focus on the micro-foundations of political behavior to gain leverage on macro-political questions. How do autocrats survive? How can citizen-state relations be improved and government accountability strengthened? Can shared identities mitigate out-group animosity? Adopting a multi-method approach, use lab-in-the-field and online experiments, surveys, and in-depth field research to examine these questions in sub-Saharan Africa and the US. Her current book project reexamines the role of elections in authoritarian endurance and explains why citizens vote in elections with foregone conclusions in Tanzania and Uganda. Moving beyond conventional paradigms, her theory describes how a social norm of voting and accompanying social sanctions from peers contribute to high turnout in semi-authoritarian elections. In other ongoing projects, Her study is how national and pan-African identification stimulated through national sports games influence attitudes toward refugees, the relationship between identity, emotions, and belief in fake news, and how researchers can use Facebook as a tool for social science research.

 
 

Online, via Zoom: REGISTER

 

Leah R. Rosenzweig

0
CDDRL Postdoctoral Scholar, 2020-21
thumbnail_leah1_small.jpg

My research centers on topics in comparative politics and the political economy of development. I focus on the micro-foundations of political behavior to gain leverage on macro-political questions. How do autocrats survive? How can citizen-state relations be improved and government accountability strengthened? Can shared identities mitigate out-group animosity? Adopting a multi-method approach, I use lab-in-the-field and online experiments, surveys, and in-depth field research to examine these questions in sub-Saharan Africa and the US. My current book project reexamines the role of elections in authoritarian endurance and explains why citizens vote in elections with foregone conclusions in Tanzania and Uganda. Moving beyond conventional paradigms, my theory describes how a social norm of voting and accompanying social sanctions from peers contribute to high turnout in semi-authoritarian elections. In other ongoing projects, I study how national and pan-African identification stimulated through national sports games influence attitudes toward refugees, the relationship between identity, emotions, and belief in fake news, and how researchers can use Facebook as a tool for social science research.

Postdoctoral fellow at Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Seminars

The Crisis of American Democracy

-

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

 

About the Event:  American democracy has been more prone to crisis than we commonly recognize. Comparative studies of democracy suggest that four threats imperil democracy: political polarization, conflict over who belongs as a full member of society, high and rising economic inequality, and excessive executive power. We survey five periods of American history in which these threats have appeared in different configurations, posing recurring challenges to American democracy. When even one threat was present – as in the 1790s, the 1930s, or the 1970s – the nation risked backsliding. Twice – in the 1850s and again in the 1890s – three threats converged, leading to civil war and then precipitating the disenfranchisement of millions of African American men. Today, all four threats are present for the first time, presenting unprecedented danger to the American experiment.

Image

About the Speaker:  Robert C. Lieberman is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of several award-winning books on American politics and previous served as provost of Johns Hopkins and dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

 

 

 

 

Image

Suzanne Mettler is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell. She is the author five previous books, including, most recently, The Government-Citizen Disconnect and Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream. She was recently awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship and a Guggenheim Award, and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

 

 

Image

Online, via Zoom: REGISTER

Robert Liberman Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University
Suzanne Mettler John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University
Seminars

Norman Naimark Awarded the 2020 Norris and Carol Hundley Award

Authors
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
Professor Norman Naimark was awarded a 2020 Norris and Carol Hundley Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA, for his book Stalin and the Fate of Europe (Harvard University Press, 2019). The award is given annually for the most distinguished book on any historical subject submitted by a scholar who resides within the twenty–two Western states or four Canadian provinces from which the Branch draws its membership.
Read more at Stanford Department of History
Hero Image
Stalin and the Fate of Europe book
All News button
1
Subtitle

Norman Naimark received the 2020 Norris and Carol Hundley Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association

Where is Russia Heading in 2020?

Authors
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
Hero Image
Two men staring at the camera
All News button
1
Subtitle

Russia seemed a country on the rise globally, with President Vladimir Putin well on his way to lengthening his time in power. But he faces serious headwinds with COVID 19, the virus’s economic impact in Russia, and the collapse of oil prices that are driving the Russian economy into recession. Steven Pifer discusses Putin’s future and the prospects for US-Russian relations.

Exploring Potential “Solutions” to Online Disinformation

-

Avi Tuschman, Adam Berinsky, David Rand

Please join the Cyber Policy Center for Exploring Potential “Solutions” to Online Disinformation​, hosted by Cyber Policy Center's Kelly Born, with guests Adam Berinsky, Mitsui Professor of Political Science at MIT and Director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab (PERL) at MIT, David Rand, Erwin H. Schell Professor and an Associate Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Director of the Human Cooperation Laboratory and the Applied Cooperation Team at MIT, and Avi Tuschman, Founder & CIO, Pinpoint Predictive. The session is open but registraton is required.

REGISTER

 

Adam Berinsky is the Mitsui Professor of Political Science at MIT and serves as the director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab (PERL). He is also a Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Berinsky received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2000. He is the author of "In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq" (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He is also the author of "Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America" (Princeton University Press, 2004) and has published articles in many journals. He is currently the co-editor of the Chicago Studies in American Politics book series at the University of Chicago Press. He is also the recipient of multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and an Associate Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT Sloan, and the Director of the Human Cooperation Laboratory and the Applied Cooperation Team. Bridging the fields of behavioral economics and psychology, David’s research combines mathematical/computational models with human behavioral experiments and online/field studies to understand human behavior. His work uses a cognitive science perspective grounded in the tension between more intuitive versus deliberative modes of decision-making, and explores topics such as cooperation/prosociality, punishment/condemnation, perceived accuracy of false or misleading news stories, political preferences, and the dynamics of social media platform behavior. 

Avi Tuschman is a Stanford StartX entrepreneur and founder of Pinpoint Predictive, where he currently serves as Chief Innovation Officer and Board Director. He’s spent the past five years developing the first Psychometric AI-powered data-enrichment platform, which ranks 260 million individuals for performance marketing and risk management applications. Tuschman is an expert on the science of heritable psychometric traits. His book and research on human political orientation have been covered in peer-reviewed and mainstream media from 25 countries. Previous to his career in tech, he advised current and former heads of state as well as multilateral development banks in the Western Hemisphere. Tuschman completed his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in evolutionary anthropology at Stanford.

The Challenges of Reimagining Policing: A Comparative Perspective

-

This event will take place on Zoom. Registration is required: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NzD-GVYjRY-vSxHkLmSzdQ

At a time when protests in the United States and around the world are bringing attention to systemic abuses committed by the police, many are asking important questions about what works in police reform. While significant scholarly attention has focused on how increases in police spending impact crime, far less attention has been paid to the efficacy of institutional reforms that reshape who joins the police, how police are trained, and rules and procedures that govern police-citizen relations. Drawing on comparative evidence from their own micro-level studies of police reform in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Beatriz Magaloni and Jeremy Weinstein will explore the evidence base for prominent reforms now on the policy agenda including: community policing, external oversight, and the use of new technologies (e.g. body-worn cameras). Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, will offer welcome remarks.

Lectures

Anat R. Admati

0
George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Director of the Corporations and Society Initiative, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Director of the Program on Capitalism and Democracy, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Senior Fellow (by courtesy), Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
anat_admati-stanford-2021.jpg

Anat R. Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business (GSB), a Faculty Director of the GSB Corporations and Society Initiative, and a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She has written extensively on information dissemination in financial markets, portfolio management, financial contracting, corporate governance and banking. Admati’s current research, teaching and advocacy focus on the complex interactions between business, law, and policy with focus on governance and accountability.

Since 2010, Admati has been active in the policy debate on financial regulations. She is the co-author, with Martin Hellwig, of the award-winning and highly acclaimed book The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press, 2013; bankersnewclothes.com). In 2014, she was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and by Foreign Policy Magazine as among 100 global thinkers.

Admati holds BSc from the Hebrew University, MA, MPhil and PhD from Yale University, and an honorary doctorate from University of Zurich. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the recipient of multiple fellowships, research grants, and paper recognition, and is a past board member of the American Finance Association. She has served on a number of editorial boards and is a member of the FDIC’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee, a former member of the CFTC’s Market Risk Advisory Committee, and a former visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund.

Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label

Q&A: The Data Delusion

News Type
Q&As
Date
Paragraphs

Marietje Schaake

 

  

DOWNLOAD THE PAPER 

 

The European Union is often called a ‘super-regulator’, especially when it comes to data-protection and privacy rules. Having seen European lawmaking from close by, in all its complexities, I have often considered this qualification an exaggerated one. Yes, the European Union frequently takes the first steps in ensuring principles continue to be protected, even as digitization disrupts. However, the speed with which technology evolves versus the pace of democratic lawmaking leads to perpetual mismatches.  

Even the famous, or infamous, General Data Protection Regulation does not meet many essential regulatory needs of the moment. The mainstreaming of Artificial Intelligence in particular, poses new challenges to concepts of the protection of rights and the sustaining of the rule of law. In its White Paper on Artificial Intelligence, as well the Data Strategy, the European Commission references to the common good and the public interest, as well as societal needs as opposed to an emphasis on regulating the digital market. These are welcome steps in acknowledging the depth and scope of technological impact and defining harms not just in economic terms. It remains to be seen how the visions articulated in the White Paper and the Strategy, will translate into concrete legislation. 

One proposal to make concrete improvements to legal frameworks, is outlined by Martin Tisné in The Data Delusion. He highlights the need to update legal privacy standards to be more reflective of the harms incurred through collective data analysis, as opposed to individual privacy violations. Martin makes a clear case for addressing the discrepancy between the profit models benefitting from grouped data versus the ability of any individual to prove the harms caused to his or her rights. 

The lack of transparency into the inner workings of algorithmic processing of data further hinders the path to much needed accountability of the powerful technology businesses operating growing parts of our information architecture and the data flows they process.  

While EU takes the lead in setting values-based standards and rules for the digital layer of our societies and economies, a lot of work remains to be done. 

Marietje Schaake: Martin, in your paper you address the gap between the benefits for technology companies through collective data processing, and the harms for society. You point to historic reasons for individual privacy protections in European laws. Do you consider the European Union to be the best positioned to address the legal shortcomings, especially as you point out that some opportunities to do so were missed in the GDPR?

Martin Tisné: Europe is well positioned but perhaps not for the reasons we traditionally think of (strong privacy tradition, empowered regulators). Individual privacy alone is a necessary, but not sufficient foundation stone to build the future of AI regulation. And whilst much is made of European regulators, the GDPR has been hobbled by the lack of funding and capacity of data protection commissioners across Europe. What Europe does have though, is a legal, political and societal tradition of thinking about the public interest, the common good and how this is balanced against individual interests. This is where we should innovate, taking inspiration from environmental legislation such as the Urgenda Climate Case against the Dutch Government which established that the government had a legal duty to prevent dangerous climate change, in the name of the public interest. 

And Europe also has a lot to learn from other political and legal cultures. Part of the future of data regulation may come the indigenous data rights movement, with greater emphasis on the societal and group impacts of data, or from the concept of Ubuntu ethics that assigns community and personhood to all people. 

Schaake: What scenario do you foresee in 10 years if collective harms are not dealt with in updates of laws? 

Tisné: I worry we will see two impacts. The first is a continuation of what we are seeing now: negative impacts of digital technologies on discrimination, voting rights, privacy, consumers. As people become increasingly aware of the problem there will be a corresponding increase in legal challenges. We’re seeing this already for example with the Lloyd class action case against Google for collecting iPhone data. But I worry these will fail to stick and have lasting impact because of the obligation to have these cases turn on one person, or a class of people’s, individual experiences. It is very hard for individuals to seek remedy for collective harms, as opposed to personal privacy invasions. So unless we solve the issue I raise in the paper – the collective impact of AI and automation – these will continue to fuel polarization, discrimination on the basis of age, gender (and many other aspects of our lives) and the further strengthening of populist regimes. 

I also worry about the ways in which algorithms will optimize on the basis of seemingly random classifications (e.g. “people who wear blue shirts, get up early on Saturday mornings, and were geo-located in a particular area of town at a particular time”). These may be proxies for protected characteristics (age, gender reassignment, disability, race, religion, sex, marriage, pregnancy/maternity, sexual orientation) and provide grounds for redress. They may also not be and sow the seeds of future discrimination and harms. Authoritarian rulers are likely to take advantage of the seeming invisibility of those data-driven harms to further silence their opponents. How can I protect myself if I don’t know the basis on which I am being discriminated against or targeted? 

Schaake: How do you reflect on the difference in speed between technological innovations and democratic lawmaking? Some people imply this will give authoritarian regimes an advantage in setting global standards and rules. What are your thoughts on ensuring democratic governments speed up? 

Tisné: Democracies cannot afford to be outpaced by technological innovation and constantly be fighting yesterday’s wars. Our laws have not changed to reflect changes in technology, which extracts value from collective data, and need to catch up.  A lot of the problems stem from the fact that in government (as in companies), the people responsible for enforcement are separated from those with the technical understanding. The solution lies in much better translation between technology, policy and the needs of the public.  

An innovation and accountability-led government must involve and empower the public in co-creating policies, above and beyond the existing rules that engage individuals (consent forms etc.). In the paper I propose a Public Interest Data Bill that addresses this need: the rules of the digital highway used as a negotiation between the public and regulators, between private data consumers and data generators. Specifically: clear transparency, public participation and realistic sanctions when things go wrong.

This is where democracies should hone their advantage over authoritarian regimes – using such an approach as the basis for setting global standards and best practices (e.g. affected communities providing input into algorithmic impact assessments). 

Schaake: The protection of privacy is what sets democratic societies apart from authoritarian ones. How likely is it that we will see an effort between democracies to set legal standards across borders together? Can we overcome the political tensions across the Atlantic, and strengthen democratic alliances globally?

Tisné: I remain a big supporter of international cooperation. I helped found the Open Government Partnership ten years ago, which remains the main forum for 79 countries to develop innovative open government reforms jointly with the public. Its basic principles hold true: involve global south and global north countries with equal representation, bring civil society in jointly with government from the outset, seek out and empower reformers within government (they exist, regardless of who is in power in the given year), and go local to identify exciting innovations. 

If we heed those principles we can set legal standards by learning from open data and civic technology reforms in Taiwan, experiments with data trusts in India, legislation to hold algorithms accountable in France; and by identifying and working with the individuals driving those innovations, reformers such as Audrey Tang in Taiwan, Katarzyna Szymielewicz in Poland, and Henri Verdier in France. 

These reformers need a home, a base to influence policymakers and technologists, to get those people responsible for enforcement working with those with the technical understanding. The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence may be that home but these are early days, it needs to be agile enough to work with the private sector, civil society as well as governments and the international system. I remain hopeful. 

 

 

All News button
1
Subtitle

Protecting Individual Isn't Enough When the Harm is Collective. A Q&A with Marietje Schaake and Martin Tisne on his new paper The Data Delusion.

Subscribe to Governance