Join us in celebrating the launch of the Democracy Action Lab (DAL) at Stanford University.

The Center for International Studies at El Colegio de México and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University are pleased to host keynote lectures by:

• Dr. Adam Przeworski, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, New York University
• Dr. Beatriz Magaloni, Graham H. Stewart Professor of International Relations, Stanford University

The session will explore urgent questions at the heart of today’s global democratic challenges:

• What have we learned — through political science and lived experience — about how democracies emerge, erode, and can be renewed?
• What knowledge, strategies, and collective action are needed now to halt democratic backsliding and spark a new wave of democratization worldwide?

Open to the public. Especially geared toward those dedicated to strengthening democracy.
 

Únete a nosotros para celebrar el lanzamiento del Laboratorio de Acción en Democracia (LAD) de la Universidad de Stanford.

El Centro de Estudios Internacionales de El Colegio de México y el Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) de la Universidad de Stanford tienen el gusto de invitarlos a las conferencia magistrales a cargo de:

• Dr. Adam Przeworski, Profesor Emérito de Ciencia Política, Universidad de Nueva York
• Dra. Beatriz Magaloni, Profesora Graham H. Stewart de Relaciones Internacionales, Universidad de Stanford

El evento abordará preguntas urgentes sobre los desafíos democráticos globales actuales:

• ¿Qué hemos aprendido —a través de la ciencia política y de la experiencia vivida— sobre cómo surgen, se erosionan y pueden renovarse las democracias?
• ¿Qué conocimientos, estrategias y acciones colectivas se necesitan hoy para detener el retroceso democrático e impulsar una nueva ola de democratización en el mundo?

Evento abierto al público. Especialmente dirigido a quienes se dedican a fortalecer la democracia.

Adam Przeworski is the Carroll and Milton Professor Emeritus of Politics and (by courtesy) Economics at New York University. Previously, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he was the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor, and held visiting appointments in India, Chile, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. He is a member of the US National Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his numerous awards, in 2010, he received the Johan Skytte Prize for "raising the scientific standards regarding the analysis of the relations between democracy, capitalism, and economic development."  He has studied political regimes, democracy, autocracy, and their intermediate forms, as well as the conditions under which regimes survive and change, and their consequences for economic development and income equality. His focus is on the role of elections as a mechanism of managing societal conflicts. His current projects concern the phenomenon of "democratic backsliding" and the historical evolution of constitutional rules for electing chief executives.

Adam Przeworski es Profesor Emérito Carroll and Milton de Ciencia Política y (por cortesía) de Economía en la Universidad de Nueva York. Anteriormente, fue profesor en la Universidad de Chicago, donde ocupó la cátedra distinguida Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor, y tuvo nombramientos visitantes en India, Chile, Francia, Alemania, España y Suiza. Es miembro de la Academia Nacional de Artes y Ciencias de Estados Unidos. Entre sus numerosos premios, en 2010 recibió el Premio Johan Skytte por "elevar los estándares científicos en el análisis de las relaciones entre democracia, capitalismo y desarrollo económico." Ha estudiado los regímenes políticos, la democracia, la autocracia y sus formas intermedias, las condiciones bajo las cuales los regímenes sobreviven y cambian, así como sus consecuencias para el desarrollo económico y la igualdad de ingresos. Su enfoque se centra en el papel de las elecciones como mecanismo para gestionar los conflictos sociales. Sus proyectos actuales se refieren al fenómeno del "retroceso democrático" y la evolución histórica de las normas constitucionales para la elección de jefes de ejecutivo.

Beatriz Magaloni is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (PovGov) and co-directs the Democracy Action Lab. In 2023, she was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for her research on police violence and how it can be reduced, and in 2024, she received the Boris Mints Institute (BMI) Prize for her work on authoritarianism and its return as a global challenge. Her research focuses on the study of authoritarian regimes; violence, public security, and human rights; “non-state” forms of governance; distributive politics and the provision of public goods in Latin America.

Beatriz Magaloni es Profesora Graham Stuart de Relaciones Internacionales en el Departamento de Ciencia Política y Senior Fellow en el Freeman Spogli Institute, donde mantiene afiliaciones con el Centro sobre la Democracia, el Desarrollo y el Estado de Derecho (CDDRL) y el Centro para la Seguridad Internacional y la Cooperación (CISAC). Dirige el Laboratorio de Pobreza, Violencia y Gobernanza (PovGov) y co-dirige el Laboratorio de Acción en Democracia. En 2023 fue galardonada con el Premio de Estocolmo en Criminología por su investigación sobre la violencia policial y cómo puede reducirse, y en 2024 recibió el Premio del Instituto Boris Mints (BMI) por su trabajo sobre el autoritarismo y su retorno como desafío global. Su investigación se centra en el estudio de los regímenes autoritarios; la violencia, la seguridad pública y los derechos humanos; las formas de gobernanza "no estatales"; la política distributiva y la provisión de bienes públicos en América Latina.

Why do low-income, lower-educated voters vote against their economic interests by supporting conservative and radical right parties and candidates? I propose a new explanation arguing that these voters' misperceptions of the policy priorities of economically progressive parties drive them to parties on the right. In two population surveys in the Netherlands and Unites States, I show that many low-income, lower-educated voters believe that economic issues are not a policy priority for the left, and that holding such perceptions influences vote intention for the left. Using `prior-updating' survey experiments, I test the effect of presenting voters with the actual policy priorities of the (Social) Democrats, as measured in an original survey with Dutch politicians and based on US House roll calls. The results indicate that updating misperceptions of the salience of economic issues to the left can significantly alter voting patterns.

Jonne Kamphorst is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University’s Politics and Social Change Lab and the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the European University Institute (EUI) in 2023. In January 2026, he will join Sciences Po in Paris as an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Quantitative Social Science Methods.

His research focuses on the politics and societies of advanced democracies, lying at the intersection of comparative politics and political behavior. Two questions guide his research agenda: (1) What are the origins of contemporary political divisions? and (2) How can democracy be strengthened by re-engaging voters and bridging political divides? He explores these questions using quantitative methods that employ an experimental logic, including field and survey experiments, causal inference, and novel computational approaches leveraging large language models. Alongside his substantive research, he studies the use of large language models in social-scientific research methods. His work has been published in PNAS, the American Political Science Review, and the Journal of Politics, among other outlets.

As part of Stanford Democracy Day, several Stanford scholars share their perspectives on domestic and comparative erosion of democracy, providing context for current elections in the United States and around the world.

Speakers:

Christophe Crombez, Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, lobbying, party politics, and parliamentary government.

Anna Grzymała-Busse, Professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.

Hakeem Jefferson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Center for American Democracy. His research focuses primarily on the role identity plays in structuring political attitudes and behaviors in the U.S., with a special interest in understanding how stigma shapes the politics of Black Americans, particularly as it relates to group members’ support for racialized punitive social policies. 

Hesham Sallam, Senior Research Scholar at CDDRL, where he serves as Associate Director for Research. He is also Associate Director of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. Sallam is co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine and a former program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His research focuses on political and social development in the Arab World. Sallam’s research has previously received the support of the Social Science Research Council and the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and teaches in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

In its early days, the European Union was accused of having a democratic deficit because its central institutions were not elected.  The response was to increase the democratic responsiveness of the European Parliament and to give it a greater role in lawmaking.  As for the Commission and the Council, however, the argument was that Member States populated these bodies and the governments of those states were democratically elected so those institutions were indirectly democratically accountable.   But what happens if some Member States are no longer reliably democratic?   This talk traces the way that the EU responded to first Hungary and then Poland taking an autocratic path, and assesses the successes and failures of those EU efforts.

Speaker: Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University and visiting professor of law at Stanford Law School. Scheppele's work focuses on the rise and fall of constitutional democracy. After 1989, Scheppele studied the new constitutional courts of Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. After 9/11, she researched the effects of the international "war on terror" on constitutional protections around the world.   Since 2010, she has been documenting attacks on constitutional democracy by legalistic autocrats. Her book Destroying (and Restoring) Democracy by Law is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. 

Scheppele is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the International Academy of Comparative Law. In 2014, she received the Law and Society Association’s Kalven Prize for influential scholarship in comparative constitutional law and in 2024, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on democratic backsliding. She started her career in the political science department at the University of Michigan before moving to a full-time law teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the founding director of the gender program at Central European University Budapest and has held visiting faculty positions in the law schools at Yale, Harvard, Erasmus/Rotterdam, and Humboldt/Berlin. She was President of the Law and Society Association from 2017-2019. 

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

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This event is expected to be at full capacity. Seating is available on a first-come basis.

Join us for a book talk and signing with Professor Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, New York Times bestselling author, and former U.S. ambassador to Russia. 

Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder is a clear-eyed look at how the rise of autocratic China and Russia are compelling some to think that we have entered a new Cold War—and why we must reject that thinking in order to prevail. 

Amid the constant party divisions in Washington, DC, one issue generates stunning consensus—China—with Republicans and Democrats alike battling over which party can take the most hawkish stance toward the ascendant superpower. Indeed, far from trying to avoid a new Cold War with China, many have embraced it, finding comfort in the familiar construct, almost willing it into existence. And yet, even as politicians and intellectuals race to embrace this Cold War 2.0, many of the perils we face today are distinctly different from those of the Cold War with the Soviets. The alliance between the autocracies of China and Russia, the nature of the ideological struggle, China’s economic might, the rise of the far right in the United States and in Europe, and the growing isolationism and polarization in American society—taken together these represent new challenges for the democratic world. Some elements of the Cold War have reappeared today, but many features of the current great power competition have no analogy from the past century.

For decades Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia and international affairs analyst for NBC News, has been one of the preeminent thinkers about American foreign policy. Now, in this provocative work, he challenges the encroaching orthodoxy on Russia and China, arguing persuasively that the way forward is not to force our current conflict into a decades-old paradigm but to learn from our Cold War past so that democracy can again emerge victorious. Examining America’s layered, modern history with both Russia and China, he demonstrates that, instead of simplistically framing our competition with China and Russia as a second Cold War, we must understand the unique military, economic, and ideological challenges that come from China and Russia today, and the develop innovative policies that follow from that analysis, not just a return to the Cold War playbook.

At once a clarion call for American foreign policy and a forceful rebuttal of the creeping Washington consensus around China, Autocrats vs. Democrats demonstrates that the key to prevailing in this new era isn’t simply defeating our enemies through might, but using their oppressive regimes against them—to remind the world of the power and potential that our democratic freedoms make possible. 

Anna Grzymała-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics. Anna's most recent book, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation.

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

Beatriz Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a faculty affiliate at Stanford’s King Center for Global Development. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (PovGov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, PovGov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, PovGov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas aimed at reducing violence and poverty and promoting peace, security, and human rights.

Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford and she teaches in the Department of Political Science, and in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

María Ignacia Curiel is a Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Research Affiliate of the Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab at Stanford University. Curiel is an empirical political scientist using experimental, observational, and qualitative data to study questions of violence and democratic participation, peacebuilding, and representation.

Her research primarily explores political solutions to violent conflict and the electoral participation of parties with violent origins. This work includes an in-depth empirical study of Comunes, the Colombian political party formed by the former FARC guerrilla, as well as a broader analysis of rebel party behaviors across different contexts. More recently, her research has focused on democratic mobilization and the political representation of groups affected by violence in Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela.