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Elections

Michael McFaul Testifies Before House Intelligence Committee

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The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a public hearing on Thursday, March 28, 2019, as part of its investigation into Russian influence during and after the 2016 election campaign.

The hearing, "Putin’s Playbook: The Kremlin’s Use of Oligarchs, Money and Intelligence in 2016 and Beyond” included testimony by Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University.

Download Complete Testimony (PDF 263 KB)

EXCERPT

To contain and thwart the malicious effects of “Putinism,” the United States government and the American people must first understand the nature of the threat. This testimony focuses onthe nexus of political and economic power within Russia under Putin’s leadership, and how these domestic practices can be used abroad to advance Putin’s foreign policy agenda. Moreover, it is important to underscore that crony capitalism, property rights provided by the state, bribery, and corruption constitute only a few of many different mechanisms used by Putin in his domestic authority and foreign policy abroad.

This testimony proceeds in three parts. Section I describes the evolution of Putin’s system of government at home, focusing in particular on the relationship between the state and big business. Section II illustrates how Putin seeks to export his ideas and practices abroad. Section III focuses on Putin’s specific foreign policy objective of lifting sanctions on Russian individuals and companies.

Watch the C-SPAN recording of the testimony. 

Media Contact: Ari Chasnoff, Assistant Director for Communications, 650-725-2371, chasnoff@stanford.edu

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Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America

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The strength and prestige of the American presidency has waxed and waned since George Washington. Accidental Presidents looks at eight men who came to the office without being elected to it. It demonstrates how the character of the man in that powerful seat affects the nation and world.

Eight men have succeeded to the presidency when the incumbent died in office. In one way or another they vastly changed our history. Only Theodore Roosevelt would have been elected in his own right. Only TR, Truman, Coolidge, and LBJ were re-elected.

John Tyler succeeded William Henry Harrison who died 30 days into his term. He was kicked out of his party and became the first president threatened with impeachment. Millard Fillmore succeeded esteemed General Zachary Taylor. He immediately sacked the entire cabinet and delayed an inevitable Civil War by standing with Henry Clay’s compromise of 1850. Andrew Johnson, who succeeded our greatest president, sided with remnants of the Confederacy in Reconstruction. Chester Arthur, the embodiment of the spoils system, was so reviled as James Garfield’s successor that he had to defend himself against plotting Garfield’s assassination; but he reformed the civil service. Theodore Roosevelt broke up the trusts. Calvin Coolidge silently cooled down the Harding scandals and preserved the White House for the Republican Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. Truman surprised everybody when he succeeded the great FDR and proved an able and accomplished president. Lyndon B. Johnson was named to deliver Texas electorally. He led the nation forward on Civil Rights but failed on Vietnam.

Accidental Presidents adds immeasurably to our understanding of the power and limits of the American presidency in critical times.

 

Jared Cohen is the founder and CEO of Jigsaw at Alphabet Inc. He also serves as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to Alphabet, he was Google’s first Director of Ideas and chief advisor to Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt. From 2006 to 2010 he served as a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and as a close advisor to both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

Cohen is the New York Times bestselling author of four books, including "Children of Jihad", "One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide", and "The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Business, and our Lives", which he co-authored with Eric Schmidt. His new book, "The Accidental Presidents" examines the eight instances in American history when a president has died in office. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, LA Times, Washington Post, TIME Magazine, and Foreign Policy. He has been named to the “TIME 100” list, Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” and Vanity Fair’s “Next Establishment.” Cohen received his B.A. from Stanford University and his M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

 

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Jared Cohen <i>Founder and CEO of Jigsaw at Alphabet Inc. </i>
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Leah R. Rosenzweig

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CDDRL Postdoctoral Scholar, 2020-21
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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.

A New Age of Reform

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 "For the first time in American history, a U.S. congressional election was determined by “instant runoff,” using the system of ranked-choice voting that Maine had adopted in a 2016 voter initiative, and then reinstated (over the resistance of the state legislature and much of the state’s professional political class) in a June 2018 “people’s veto” initiative," writes Larry Diamond in The American Interest. Read here.

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Eloise Duvillier

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Eloise Duvillier

Eloise Duvillier is the Program Manager of the Program on Democracy and the Internet at the Cyber Policy Center. She previously was a HR Program Manager and acting HR Business Partner at Bytedance Inc, a rapidly-growing Chinese technology startup. At Bytedance, she supported the globalization of the company by driving US acquisition integrations in Los Angeles and building new R&D teams in Seattle and Silicon Valley. Prior to Bytedance, she led talent acquisition for Baidu USA LLC’s artificial intelligence division. She began her career in the nonprofit industry where she worked in foster care, HIV education and emergency response during humanitarian crises, as well as helping war-torn communities rebuild. She graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in Development Studies, focusing on political economics in unindustrialized societies.

Program Manager, Program on Democracy and the Internet

Coalition Inclusion Probabilities: A Dynamic Measure of Party Competitiveness and Cabinet Leverage

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The paper that Mark Kayser will be presenting is co-authored by Matthias Orlowski (Humboldt University, Berlin) and Jochen Rehmert (Hertie School of Governance, Berlin).

Synopsis:  Policies are made with one eye cast to the future. As policy is most strongly influenced from within government, coalition inclusion prospects would seem predictive of the behavior of office- or policy-seeking parties. But, oddly, coalition models are poorly designed for empirical prediction. Most theoretical models rely predominantly on seat shares and ideological distance while empirical work tells us that other variables such as coalition history and anti-system parties matter as much; most empirical models predict coalition composition rather than individual parties’ coalition probabilities; neither calculate bargaining leverage between elections and neither test their predictions out of sample. We do. Combining empirical coalition formation models and a large set of political polls, we estimate coalition inclusion probabilities for parties in a sample of 20 parliamentary democracies at a monthly frequency over four decades. The probability of entering or remaining in an alternative government – i.e., bargaining leverage – serves as a strong predictor of party behavior, markedly superior to polls or expected seat shares. We demonstrate our measure’s utility with applications to no-confidence motions and financial policy reform.

Photo of Mark Kayser, Hertie School of Governance, Berlin.

Mark Kayser teaches applied quantitative methods and comparative politics at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. His research generally centers on elections and political economy.  Current major projects focus on partisan responses to economic crisis, the electoral effects of media reporting of the economy, and the effect of electoral competitiveness on government responsiveness. Before coming to the Hertie School of Governance, he served as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester.  He has also held a postdoctoral Prize Research Fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford and will spend the 2018-19 academic year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford. He is the co-author of a book on the effect of electoral systems on regulation and price levels (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and the author or co-author of articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis and other leading journals. He is a recipient of the 2013 GESIS/Klingemann research award, the 2007 best paper award from the APSA Section on European Politics and Society, the Senior Editor for Political Economy of the Oxford Research Encyclopdia and a member of several editorial boards.
Mark Kayser Professor of Applied Methods and Comparative Politics Speaker Hertie School of Governance, Berlin
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Midterm Election Hacking Concerns

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Midterm elections pose an opportunity for hackers interested in disrupting the democratic process

Voter registration systems provide an additional target for hackers intending to disrupt the US midterm elections; if voting machines themselves are too disperse or too obvious a target, removing voters from the rolls could have a similar effect. in Esquire, Jack Holmes explains that election security experts consider this one of many nightmare scenarios facing the American voting public—and thus, American democracy itself—on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections. (Allison Berke, Executive Director of the Stanford Cyber Initiative, quoted.)

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Parties, Representation, and Governance in the 21st Century

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Has the age of party democracy passed? Parties throughout advanced democracies face challenges of voter distrust, declining associational ties, and the rise of far-right and populist movements. This conference brings together scholars of American and comparative parties and party systems to understand how and why parties have evolved, and to ask what role parties play in twenty-first century governance. 
Browse the conference webpage to learn more. 
 
 
 
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Japan Decides 2017: The Japanese General Election (Book Chapter)

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This third volume in the Japan Decides series remains the premier venue for scholarly research on Japanese elections. Spotlighting the 2017 general election, the contributors discuss the election results, party politics, coalition politics with Komeito, the cabinet, constitutional revision, new opposition parties, and Abenomics. Additionally, the volume looks at campaigning, public opinion, media, gender issues and representation, North Korea and security issues, inequality, immigration and cabinet scandals. With a topical focus and timely coverage of the latest dramatic changes in Japanese politics, the volume will appeal to researchers and policy experts alike, and will also make a welcome addition to courses on Japanese politics, comparative politics and electoral politics.

Chapter 15, Abenomics' Third Arrow: Fostering Future Competitiveness?, was written by Shorenstein APARC Research Scholar, Kenji Kushida.

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Sebastian Dettman

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Sebastian Dettman joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as the 2018-2019 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia.  He researches party building, electoral competition, and political representation in newly democratic and authoritarian regimes, with a focus on Southeast Asia.  His dissertation examines the dilemmas faced by Malaysia’s opposition parties in expanding electoral support and building coalitions, and the implications for regime liberalization. His research has been supported by grants including the NSEP Boren Fellowship, the USINDO Sumitro Fellowship, and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships.

At Shorenstein APARC, Seb will work on developing his dissertation into a book manuscript and make progress on his next project on regime-opposition policy interactions in authoritarian regimes.  He obtained his doctorate in the Department of Government at Cornell University.  Prior to his doctorate, Seb received an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Michigan. He has also worked as a consultant and researcher for organizations including the Asia Foundation, the International Crisis Group, and the Carter Center.

 

2018-2019 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia
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