The Fisher Family Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is now accepting applications for our summer 2027 program, which will run from Sunday, July 18, to Friday, August 6, 2027. The deadline to apply is 11:59 pm PST on Tuesday, January 12, 2027.

The program brings together an annual cohort of approximately 30 mid-career practitioners from countries in political transition who are working to advance democratic practices and enact economic and legal reform to promote human development. Launched by CDDRL in 2005, the program was previously known as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program. The new name reflects an endowment gift from the Fisher family — Sakurako (Sako), ‘82, and William (Bill), MBA ‘84 — that secures the future of this important and impactful program.

From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, we select our program participants from among hundreds of applicants each year for the significant contributions they have already made to their communities and their potential to make an even greater impact with some help from Stanford. We aim to give them the opportunity to join a global network of over 500 alumni from 96 countries who have all faced similar sets of challenges in bringing change to their countries.

The Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program provides an intensive 3-week on-campus forum for civil society leaders to exchange experiences and receive academic and policy training to enrich their knowledge and advance their work. Delivered by a leading Stanford faculty team composed of Michael McFaul, Kathryn Stoner, Francis Fukuyama, Larry Diamond, Erik Jensen, and more, the program allows emerging and established global leaders to explore new institutional models and frameworks to enhance their ability to promote good governance, accountable politics, and find new ways to achieve economic development in their home countries.

Prospective fellows from Ukraine are also invited to apply for our Strengthening Ukrainian Democracy and Development (SU-DD) Program, which runs concurrently with the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program. The SU-DD program provides a unique opportunity for mid-career practitioners working on well-defined projects aimed at strengthening Ukrainian democracy, enhancing human development, and promoting good governance. Applicants to the SU-DD program will use the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program application portal to apply and indicate their interest there. You will then be directed to a series of supplemental questions specific to the SU-DD program, including requiring a detailed description of your proposed project.

The world is in a persistent, multi-decade decline in democratic governance. Yet a few cases point the other way. Brazil’s courts held Jair Bolsonaro to account, and Hungarian voters ended Viktor Orbán’s sixteen-year rule in April 2026.

On October 14, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Senior Fellow at FSI and Co-Director of the Democracy Action Lab, joined moderators Larry Diamond and Debra Satz for the second session in Stanford Continuing Studies' Reimagining Democracy speaker series produced in partnership with the Office of Community Engagement, the Stanford Democracy Hub, and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). They asked what these rebounds teach about democratic resilience, and how they might inform efforts to reimagine democracy in the United States.

Latin America: crime, inequality, and the question “What have you done for me lately?”

Diamond opened the discussion with a skeptical reading of the region. El Salvador under Nayib Bukele has become a byword for human rights abuses, but it is a small country. In Brazil, Flávio Bolsonaro is favored in this month’s presidential runoff and is widely expected to pardon his father. In Mexico, critics worry that Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena party is rebuilding the one-party hegemony of the old PRI.

Díaz-Cayeros did not dismiss those concerns. “No party in any country should have a majority like the one Morena has,” he said, adding that such a majority “has been tremendously damaging for democracy.” Still, he cautioned against assuming the worst. Despite the temptations such a majority creates for Sheinbaum, he noted, many democratic spaces in Mexico have not closed. Even newly elected populists, such as Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia and Keiko Fujimori in Peru, face real checks and balances on what they can do.

The deeper drivers, he argued, are crime and unmet expectations. Criminal organizations are well armed, increasingly sophisticated — “even into the realm of drones” — and their violence spills across borders, as Ecuador learned when groups displaced from Colombia moved south. “Nobody really knows how to solve this, and anyone who claims they do is lying,” Díaz-Cayeros said. “But the right has been particularly successful in making a claim that they know how to do it better,” promising that mano dura will control the violence.

He also pointed to what Latin American democracies have achieved. Over the past two decades, countries across the region reduced extreme inequality through conditional cash transfers embraced by governments of both left and right. And when roughly eight million Venezuelans fled the Chavista regime, neighbors absorbed them: the Dominican Republic took in two to three hundred thousand, and Ecuador about half a million.

Yet governments have failed on basic health services and decent education, and citizens notice. On Brazil, Díaz-Cayeros contrasted Lula’s transformative first presidency, which opened universities to Afro-descendant Brazilians and expanded poverty programs, with a current term that has “not a lot to show.” Many Brazilians, he said, are rightly asking what democracy has brought them in the last four years. “Can’t a political system find a younger politician that appeals to voters?” he asked, a question he said applies to the United States as well.

Finally, he warned against reading authoritarianism through a Cold War lens. Venezuela under Delcy Rodríguez and Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega show that “authoritarianism doesn’t seem to have a political color. The destruction of democracy is equally possible by someone on the right and someone on the left.”

Europe: volatility, the cordon sanitaire, and a representation gap on immigration

Why do voters who feel unheard turn to leaders who are often corrupt and fail to deliver, Satz asked. Grzymala-Busse noted that no politician advertises themselves as corrupt. Populists run on a critique of the elites who came before, and in Europe they have often been able to deliver material gains. Fidesz “very ably targeted” vast EU subsidies to rural Hungary and made good on its promise to raise living standards. “That house of cards collapsed because the government was so corrupt. But for 16 years, it worked.” Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) government benefited from EU funds in the same way.

Asked whether Europe faces a long period of alternation between liberal and illiberal governments — as with Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic and Robert Fico in Slovakia, both of whom lost power and returned — Grzymala-Busse distinguished between East and West. Since 1989, post-communist Europe has had the highest electoral volatility of any region, including Latin America, so today’s swings partly continue an old pattern.

Western Europe faces a different problem: the elite cordon sanitaire. Outside Italy, where Giorgia Meloni governs, mainstream parties in Austria, Germany, and France have agreed to keep far-right populists out of power. “That bargain has held so far,” she said, “but when you have 30, 40 percent of the population voting for the AfD, how sustainable is that? How democratic is it to keep out of power the party that won the plurality of the vote?” The Alternative for Germany began in the early 2010s as an economists’ party opposed to the Greek bailout before an internal coup turned it into a nationalist, anti-immigrant force.

On immigration, she cited polling conducted with the Hoover Institution this summer. The top issue for European voters is not immigration but “public services and the economic situation — they care about the same stuff that voters everywhere care about.” Immigration, however, is the issue on which voters feel least represented. Supporters of center-right and center-left parties alike see their parties as far to their left; only right-wing populist voters feel aligned with their party.

She added that disinformation, much of it seeded by Russia, China, and Iran, takes hold because “the uptake is domestic.” In Europe, populists in power can also capture public broadcasters, as in Poland, where the equivalent of NPR “became a government propaganda channel.”

Rebuilding democracy is possible

How do democrats rebuild once they return to power? Grzymala-Busse contrasted Poland and Hungary. In Poland, Donald Tusk’s coalition defeated PiS in 2023, but a president from the illiberal camp has vetoed reform after reform. The sharpest problem is the judiciary, where the previous government appointed roughly a third of the judges. “They need to be dealt with democratically,” she said. “You cannot reestablish democracy through anti-democratic means.”

Hungary is “a much simpler story.” Péter Magyar and the Tisza party won a landslide and a parliamentary supermajority, and they are reversing Fidesz’s institutional changes while the EU releases more funds. “But that’s not really a lesson for other countries,” Grzymala-Busse cautioned, “because very few of them enjoy that kind of absolute landslide victory.”

Asked what citizens and institutions can do, she offered two lessons:

• Citizens must keep demanding and participating. “Autocrats really benefit from popular indifference, from popular alienation, and above all from popular despair.” Illiberal incumbents are defeated through landslides that cannot be denied.
   
• Oppositions must make corruption concrete. Calling a government anti-democratic “doesn’t get us very far.” What works is telling citizens that “this government’s corruption is costing you” better schools, better roads, and a better life.

Satz pressed further: democracy is not only an instrument for delivering goods but has value in itself, because it gives people control over their lives. Díaz-Cayeros agreed that this liberal dimension is what has been lost. Majoritarian impulses have eroded the sense that an independent judiciary or electoral authority matters “just because the people have voted.”

Grzymala-Busse said European democrats have succeeded by framing liberal values in patriotic terms: abandoning checks and balances is a betrayal of national history, and attacking the free press is an outrage “in the birthplace of the freedom of speech.” In the American context, she suggested, the equivalent message is that dismantling checks and balances or going after the media is un-American.

Díaz-Cayeros raised a further concern for the United States: its outsized influence on Latin American elections. In Peru and Colombia, he said, voters described how President Trump’s endorsements on Truth Social created echo chambers around favored candidates. He also warned about unregulated platforms. In Brazil, evidence suggests that anti-Bolsonaro outlets were disproportionately left exposed to cyberattacks, and the Facebook page of one of the last human rights organizations operating in El Salvador has been down for weeks.

How bad could it get?

To close, Diamond asked both speakers to look over the horizon. What if Marine Le Pen wins the French presidency and the AfD performs nationally as it has in eastern German states? What if Flávio Bolsonaro returns to power, pardons his father?

Grzymala-Busse was cautiously optimistic that Europe will not repeat the 1930s. Then, voters faced a choice between anti-democratic options on the far right and the far left, and the economic situation was far worse. Today, parties legitimate themselves through elections. Meloni also offers another path: “someone who makes very extreme statements while campaigning, but then once in office” governs as a conservative without violating democratic norms.

Díaz-Cayeros likewise doubted that Latin America would return to the era of military dictatorships and mass disappearances. The Bukele regime in El Salvador “is as bad as it can get,” he said, but Brazil’s federalism, vibrant civil society, and fifty-year human rights legacy make that model unlikely there. His greatest concern was global rather than national: “The Amazon is a humanity commons,” he said, and the world “should not let Flávio Bolsonaro burn the Amazon.”

Satz closed by returning to Grzymala-Busse’s call to demand and participate. Reining in illegitimate power, she said, depends on citizens who know their rights and refuse to feel hopeless or helpless.

The Reimagining Democracy series continues next week, when Brandice Canes-Wrone of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions and Didi Kuo of CDDRL will discuss money, parties, and political reform.

Key takeaways

Listening to Grzymala-Busse and Díaz-Cayeros side by side, I came away with a few lessons that cut across both regions and that are extremely informative for those fighting for democracy anywhere.

1. Backsliding grows out of three gaps. Democracies falter when they fail to deliver, when mainstream parties ignore the issues voters care about most, such as immigration in Europe and crime in Latin America, and when majorities stop valuing courts, electoral bodies, and a free press. Illiberal leaders don’t create these gaps; they exploit them.
    
2. Illiberal governments can deliver, for a while. Orbán held power for sixteen years in part because EU money let him raise living standards. Warning that he was undemocratic did little. What finally hurt him was corruption that voters could see and feel.
    
3. Reversal requires decisive wins. Hungary is rebuilding quickly because Tisza won a supermajority. Poland is stuck because the illiberal camp still holds the presidency. A narrow victory may be enough to take office, but not to repair institutions, and repair has to happen by democratic means.
    
4. Society sets the floor. Díaz-Cayeros believes Brazil will not become El Salvador because of its federalism, its vibrant civil society, and its strong human rights tradition. These structures decide how far a democracy can fall. They can’t be built in a crisis, though, so the time to raise that floor is while democracy is still healthy.
    
5. Recovery is not permanent. Babiš, Fico, and possibly Flávio Bolsonaro show that defeated illiberal movements return when restored governments disappoint. Lula’s second term is a warning: democrats must keep delivering and renewing their leadership.
    
6. Democracy must be argued for, not assumed. The speakers pointed to strategies that work: making the costs of corruption concrete, framing checks and balances in patriotic terms as part of national identity, and taking on hard issues without abandoning liberal principles.

In summary, democracy came back when broad coalitions won convincingly on concrete grievances and then governed well enough to keep their majorities. Above all, as Grzymala-Busse put it, autocrats benefit from indifference and despair. Democracy's most important resource is citizens who keep demanding and participating.

Days before Serbia’s early parliamentary election, the Democracy Action Lab (DAL) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) convened a panel on the conditions under which citizens of Serbia will vote. The webinar, “A Captured Field, an Open Contest: Serbia’s Upcoming Elections,” held on October 16 and co-sponsored by Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES), brought together Raša Nedeljkov, Dragana Žarković Obradović, and Gazela Pudar Draško. Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy, moderated the event.

Nedeljkov serves as program director of the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) in Belgrade and has led its election observation mission since 2016. Žarković Obradović is the director of BIRN Serbia, part of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Pudar Draško, a political sociologist, is a senior research fellow and director at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (IFDT) at the University of Belgrade.

Serbia will hold a parliamentary election on October 25 after nearly two years of sustained protest that began after the collapse of the canopy of the railway station in Novi Sad on November 1, 2024, which killed 16 people. The main opposition challenge comes from an electoral list formed by the student movement, which has gained broad support from most opposition parties and stands against Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Approaching his two-term limit, Vučić stepped down as president in September to run for prime minister, and a presidential election is due by the end of the year.

Fukuyama opened the conversation by calling the Balkans “one of the important testing grounds for the resilience of democracy and its ability to fight back against a rising tide of authoritarian government,” and singling out Serbia as “the most important test case.” The election itself, in his view, is “more like a plebiscite… an up-or-down vote on Vučić and his leadership.”

An Uneven Playing Field

Nedeljkov said that CRTA’s findings on the conditions of the vote are clear. “These elections are far from democratic. They are not happening on an equal playing field. They are not happening in a free atmosphere,” he said.

“It’s quite clear that the election day is not the one that is the most problematic,” Nedeljkov said. Over a decade of observation, he has seen conditions worsen with each cycle: pressure on public-sector employees and private companies that do business with the state, abuse of public resources and office, media capture, and attacks on civic rights. “Each of these practices may look small on its own; however, together they are definitely creating a completely uneven playing field.”

He pointed to CRTA’s media monitoring, which found that Vučić personally accounted for every other second of prime-time political coverage on national television news, while 88% of coverage of the Student List was negative in tone. He also described the recent one-off payments to large swaths of the electorate, close to €1 billion against a 2026 budget of €25 billion, as “helicopter money,” and warned that the voter register goes into the election “completely unchecked and unverified.”
The most troubling feature of the campaign, Nedeljkov said, is impunity of public officials and supporters of the ruling party. “Those who abuse their power, they’re no longer fearing that they’re going to have any kind of consequence,” he said. “[The only ones] who can fear and should fear are those who speak up.”

At a CDDRL research seminar held on October 15, 2026, Christopher Dann, a pre-doctoral fellow at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford, presented his research on legitimacy and large-scale infrastructure in 21st-century autocracies.

His research centered on a puzzle: how have autocracies modernized so successfully in the 21st century while sustaining authoritarian rule? Dann argued that a sizable number of today’s autocracies cultivate reputations for delivery to build mass support for the regime. They do so by organizing development around large-scale infrastructure, which is unusually visible, durable, and difficult to reverse. These qualities make infrastructure a costly and lasting signal of a dictator’s developmental intent, and they give citizens credible reason to believe the regime is committed to the majority’s future welfare.

Dann began by noting that modernization theory expected economic development to bring democracy. Instead, the world has seen a democratic recession, and many regimes, including Vietnam, Rwanda, Serbia, and Türkiye, have modernized while remaining authoritarian. He explained that 20th-century dictatorships were relatively poor and fear-based, relying on repression, coercion, and ideology, and that they bought support cheaply through patronage and targeted transfers. Today, however, autocrats have moved from fear to competence. They favor a rhetoric of economic performance and public services, and the countries with the highest confidence in national government are fast-growing autocracies.

To test this, Dann used data, following a recently released World Bank report, on approximately 150,000 large-scale construction projects worldwide from 2005 to 2024, each costing at least $25 million. The data show that autocracies build more than democracies, spend roughly twice as much per year, and complete and cancel more projects. They also build more new infrastructure rather than maintain old stocks, and they concentrate on transport and energy while democracies put relatively more into education and healthcare. In addition, autocracies build at about a third of the cost per kilometer for transport projects. As Dann explained, these differences arguably stem from longer political time horizons, fewer institutional constraints such as veto points and regulatory hurdles, thus providing a comparative advantage for wealthy, stable autocracies.

To measure the political return, Dann combined nine existing survey datasets covering about 2.5 million respondents in more than 2,300 districts. He then compared districts within the same country that received infrastructure at different times. Using this approach, he found that in autocracies and backsliding regimes, about 40 additional completed projects in a district raised confidence in government by roughly one percentage point, about a quarter of the gap in confidence between Singapore and the neighboring Malaysian state of Johor. Democracies showed no significant effect. Infrastructure also raised leadership approval and lowered perceptions of corruption, and newly built transport projects with government funding drove most of the effect.

Ultimately, Dann’s research offers a new account of authoritarian resilience, one that explains how autocracies govern more educated, urban, and wealthier societies through broad-based, performative distribution. He closed by questioning whether the more well-to-do a nation is in the 21st century, the greater its chances of sustaining autocracy.