Abstract:

Political polarization has paralyzed the functioning of democracy in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Taiwan, where students have recently occupied the parliament building.  Civil liberties and political opposition are under intensified assault by an abusive prime minister in Turkey.  Indian democracy is increasingly diminished by brazen corruption and rent-seeking. Several African democracies have failed, and others are slipping.  The Arab Spring has largely imploded, and Egypt is in the grip of military authoritarian rule more repressive than anything the country has seen in decades.  After invading and swallowing a piece of Ukraine, Russia now poses a gathering threat to its democratic postcommunist neighbors.  For the eighth consecutive year, Freedom House finds that the number of countries declining in freedom have greatly exceeded the number improving.  And most of the advanced industrial democracies, including the United States, seem unable to address their long-term fiscal and other policy challenges.  Is there an emerging global crisis of democracy?  And if so, why?

Speaker Bio:

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he directs the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Diamond also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Co-Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant (and previously was co-director) at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. During 2002-3, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has also advised and lectured to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental agencies dealing with governance and development. His latest book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (Times Books, 2008), explores the sources of global democratic progress and stress and the prospects for future democratic expansion.

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Yulia Marushevska is a Ukrainian activist who was featured in a recent viral video on the revolution in Ukraine. Her video entitled “I Am a Ukranian” has generated over 7 million views since its debut in early February. Marushevska is currently a PhD student at Taras Shevchenko University and a native of Kiev. She will speak on her experiences with the video and her thoughts on the future of Ukraine.  

See below to view her video.

This event is sponsored by Stanford in Government.

Abstract:

Why do some ruling parties last in power for decades despite facing regular, contested elections?  Well-known examples include the PRI in Mexico, the LDP in Japan, the PAP in Singapore, and the ANC in South Africa. The existence of these long-lived “dominant parties” raises normative concerns: can we really call these regimes democratic if there is never, or rarely, ruling party turnover? They also present a theoretical puzzle: if opposition parties are able to contest elections that decide who rules, why do they consistently fail to win? In this talk, I approach these questions by focusing on variation in ruling party duration.  Drawing on a combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence, I show that “dominant” parties are typically the first to hold office in a new regime, and often have played a central role in founding it.  As a consequence, these ruling parties frequently start out with enormous electoral advantages over their competitors in the party system, including a strong party “brand,” a disciplined and well-resourced party organization, and the ability to shape and manipulate the rules of competition. These advantages allow them to endure in power by winning consecutive elections for a generation or more.  Only with the erosion of these advantages do elections become more competitive, and the risk of ruling party defeat increases. Once dominant parties are defeated, subsequent partisan competition becomes much more even, and regular rotation in power becomes the norm.  Thus, one-party dominance is best thought of as a kind of temporary “adolescence” on the way to fully consolidated democracy.  

Speaker Bio:

Kharis Templeman received a BA (2002) from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in political science (2012) from the University of Michigan. A fluent Mandarin speaker, he has lived, worked, and traveled extensively in both Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China.  As a graduate student, he worked in Taipei at the Election Study Center, National Cheng Chi University, and later was a dissertation research fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy.  His dissertation examined the development of Taiwan’s competitive party system from a comparative perspective, including a large study of the origins and decline of dominant party systems around the world over the last 60 years.

Current research interests include democratization, party system development in newly-contested regimes, and political institutions, with a regional focus on the new and transitioning democracies of Pacific Asia.  He is currently a regional manager for the Varieties of Democracy project.  Other ongoing collaborations include research on constitutional design for divided societies, on the arms-allies tradeoff in client states, and on intra-tribal voting coordination in elections in Jordan.

Abstract:

Public health is widely understood to be both inherently political and easily politicized, yet few studies have examined how global health interventions actively, if unintentionally, co-constitute local political systems and practices of governance in the developing world. Three examples from rural Malawi offer insight into how health promotion campaigns in the areas of sanitation, reproductive health, and immunization have helped to make and expand local structures of authority from village heads to police. The consequences of these intersections are explored with respect to key normative development constructs including community participation, human rights, and women’s empowerment. Ms. West’s talk draws on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with community outreach workers and rural households in Malawi, as well as archival research on colonial public health and the development of the national health system in the early post-independence period.

Bio:

Anna West is a 2013-14 pre-doctoral fellow at CDDRL and a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford. Her dissertation research in Malawi examines how modular global health interventions engage local power structures, patronage systems, and political cultures. Anna combines ethnographic fieldwork and archival research on encounters between government outreach workers, village heads, and rural households to trace the salience of health promotion strategies for the formation and consolidation of ideas, values, and processes of governance and democracy in Malawi. Her work focuses in particular on traditional authorities' involvement in rural health promotion and the significance of chiefly governance for local and national discourse on community participation, human rights, and citizenship. Anna's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, a U.S. State Department FLAS Fellowship, and Stanford's Center for African Studies.

Description:

Arab screens along with social networks have been flooded over the past three years with words, images and videos that were meant to shed light on the revolts and uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain Libya and Syria. What started as a celebrated influx of information soon turned into means for disseminating sectarian and ethnic hatred, mainly in the cases of Syria and Egypt. Dr. Zahera Harb will discuss ethical boundaries that have been applied in Arab media coverage of the Arab revolts and uprisings, drawing on journalism epistemologies in the Arab world and focusing on recent developments in Syria and Egypt.

Speaker Profile:

Dr. Zahera Harb is a Lebanese journalist and academic. She is currently a senior lecturer in international journalism at City University London. Her recent publications include a co-edited collection titled Narrating conflict in the Middle East: Discourse Image and Communications Practices in Lebanon and Palestine (I.B. Tauris, 2013) and a monograph titled Channels of Resistance: Liberation propaganda Hezbollah and the Media (I.B. Tauris, 2011). She is a review editor for the Journal of Media Practice.

Dr. Harb has 11 years' experience as a journalist in Lebanon working for Lebanese and international media organizations. She started as a news reporter and distinguished herself in particular in the coverage of war operations in the battlefield of South Lebanon. She was then co-producer and presenter of a popular socio-political program (Khamseh Ala Sabaah, 5/7) before becoming one of the main news anchors at Tele Liban (the public service TV in Lebanon). At New TV she was appointed to a news anchor-editor post and hosted the main daily political show (Al Hadath). At Future TV (Pan Arab satellite channel) she produced and presented her own socio-political program (Ala Madar Assaa) while assigned as satellite news editor. She also produced several political and social documentaries for Lebanese TV stations and completed reporting assignments for BBC Arabic service (radio), CNN world report and Dutch TV. She hosted live coverage of distinguished political events inside and outside Lebanon.

Dr. Harb was trained in Lebanon, Holland and the UK and has a BA in Journalism, a Diploma in Broadcasting News and an MA and PhD in Journalism Studies and Political Communications.

She has been on the consultancy board of the Thomson Foundation UK for 7 years conducting media training in the UK and other parts of the world including Egypt, Tunisia, Kuwait, UAE, Malta, Spain, Armenia, Ukraine and Brussels.  

This event is sponsored by the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and Mediterranean Studies Forum and in partnership with the Stanford Humanities Center and Arab Studies Table. 

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On March 14-15, the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, held a workshop on electoral system alternatives in the United States. The workshop brought together a number of scholars of American electoral institutions, practitioners working to implement electoral reforms, and experts on electoral systems reforms in advanced democracies. The workshop examined how different electoral systems options have worked in other countries, and what the implications of similar reforms might be in the United States.

Among other things, the workshop asked:

• How might plurality elections in single-member districts in the United States skew democratic outcomes? Is there a relationship between the electoral system and the problems we see today, such as ideological and political polarization?
• What lessons might be drawn from reforms in other countries? Examples include the single-transferable vote (STV) in Ireland, the alternative vote (AV) in Australia, and mixed-member systems in Italy, Japan, and New Zealand;
• How might we go about reforming American electoral systems -- through local, state, or federal means, and through engagement with which types of political and civil service actors?
• How has ranked-choice voting (RCV) worked in local experiments in the United States, including in Minneapolis, MN; San Francisco, CA; Oakland, CA; and Cambridge, MA?
• How might electoral systems reforms interact with other proposed political reforms in the United States, including the National Popular Vote for the Electoral College, top-four primaries, and the adoption of redistricting commissions? 

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