Political scientist Anna Grzymala-Busse finds that authoritarians face a choice in the face of change: try to cling to power, exit governing or reinvent themselves as democrats. It’s those who reinvent themselves as newly minted democrats who fare the worst in the long run.

In the years since World War II, as the global geopolitical map was drawn and redrawn along ideological lines, the world witnessed ascension of many authoritarians. They often ruled for long stretches, but eventually most faced a political reckoning. The people they governed no longer accepted their authority and demanded change.

Ironically, Grzymala-Busse found that the best choice for authoritarians is simply to cling to power “counting on a loyal if unhappy electorate,” even if it means ceding much of their once-monopolistic grip on power to democratic reforms.

81 governments studied

For her study, Grzymala-Busse examined and quantified the resulting political denouements of 81 authoritarian governments spanning the period from 1945 to 2015. Countries studied include the former Soviet Bloc, China, Cuba, several in Southeast Asia, many African nations and Mexico. The governing systems ranged from the communism of the Soviet Bloc and socialism to secular state-building and rule for the sake of national security.

The success of the reinventors can be rapid and remarkable, but so too can be the demise. Grzymala-Busse noted that the Hungarian Socialist Party won 43 percent of the vote and 49 percent of the seats in 2006, only to succumb to allegations of deception, mismanagement and fraud soon afterward. In Poland, the Democratic and Left Alliance (SLD), which won 41 percent of the vote in 2001, watched as its power steeply declined in the subsequent decade until the party dissolved entirely in 2011.

“Those who reinvented shone more brightly for a brief time, but burned out. Those who chose orthodoxy never enjoyed the great success of the reinventors, but they survived,” she said.

And what of those authoritarians who choose neither to remain nor to reinvent? Grzymala said that they simply dissolve back into society where former members often capitalize on their connections to become captains of industry.

“Some become oligarchs,” she said, “retaining power by other means.”

Lessons on change

The takeaway of her study for at-risk authoritarians, Grzymala-Busse said, is that reinvention alone is not enough to carry the party. New parties cannot survive as the remnants of their former selves. They must become entirely new organizations with viable programmatic approaches. Likewise, she said, when newly minted democrats hail competence as a competitive advantage, they must make good on the promise. If they fall short, they face exceptionally harsh outcomes at the polls.

“The irony is, without real change, the parties that built democracy by supporting free elections fall victim to those same democratic forces they championed.”

Anna Grzymala-Busse is the Kevin and Michelle Douglas Professor of International Studies and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

The study was made possible by financial support from the Carnegie Foundation.

Family planning programs in developing countries that offer contraceptives and reproductive health advice apparently do more than prevent pregnancies — they can keep girls in primary school for up to a year longer, even before the youngsters start to think about marriage and babies.

New research by Stanford Health Policy’s Grant Miller and Kim Singer Babiarz indicates that the availability of modern contraceptives alone can keep young girls in the classroom longer, likely because their parents develop greater expectations for their daughters’ long-term health outcomes and economic opportunities.

“What we find is that family planning exposure at a young age is linked to greater opportunities later in life – including economic empowerment,” said Babiarz, an SHP research scholar with a PhD in agricultural economics who focuses on women and children in development. “The fertility effects were modest; the most striking findings were the incentives created to keep girls in school and improvements in the types of jobs women have later in life.”

Babiarz and Miller, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director of the Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development, unveiled their study at the annual meeting of the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 7.

They conducted research with Christine Valente, an associate professor in the department of economics at the University of Bristol and Tey Nai Peng, the principal investigator for the Malaysia Family Life Survey. The Southeast Asia nation was one of the first low-income countries to provide modern contraceptives on a large scale, first in 1954 and then establishing a National Family Planning Board in 1966.

The government then scaled up its national program between 1966 and 1974 and conducted robust surveys with retrospective life histories and detailed community-level information about the timing of family planning availability. The use of contraceptives such as the pill, condoms and IUDs, went from 3 percent in 1961 to 39 percent in 1975. The country also experienced a decrease in the fertility rate of 6.2 children to 4.3 during the same period.

The researchers were able to compare what happened to Malaysian girls who were very young when contraceptives became available in their communities to those who were adolescents when they first gained access to modern contraception. They were not surprised by the effects on fertility; that has generally been the case in countries that adopt large-scale family planning programs.

But they also found unintended incentives: that girls in communities with family planning clinics stayed in school six months longer, increasing to more than an additional year for the girls who were born after the family planning programs began. And it didn’t matter if the girls had fewer younger siblings at home.

Other benefits later in life included better jobs when they became adults. When the Malaysian girls were grown, they were more likely to take in their own elderly parents (relative to their husbands’ parents), a signal of increased status in their households. In fact, they found that the incentives for investing in girls created by family planning may actually outweigh its direct effects, which work through reductions in fertility and changes in birth timing.

“The existence of family planning and contraceptives may lead parents to believe their daughters can participate in the labor force and that more schooling will therefore benefit them,” Miller said. “In other words, it can change their expectations about the world their daughter will live in one day.”

Few studies explicitly distinguish the incentive effects of family planning on women’s education from its direct effects on fertility. Miller said he hoped the new findings might lead policymakers to consider the broader beneficial consequences of family planning beyond those that work directly through changes in pregnancy and fertility.

“A central contribution of this working paper is that it studies the possible incentive effects of family planning programs for human capital investment in girls,” the authors wrote,” which could then translate into improvements in women’s economic status throughout their lives.”

Food security experts identify government support, policy implementation, private sector engagement and investment in smallholder farmers as keys to Africa’s agricultural future.

Food security experts from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) gathered to discuss transforming food production in Africa at Stanford on Nov. 29. The symposium, hosted by the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) examined the challenges, strategies, and possible solutions for catalyzing and sustaining an inclusive agriculture transformation in Africa. 

Moderator Ertharin Cousin, FSE visiting fellow and previous World Food Programme director with more than 25 years of experience on hunger, food, and resilience strategies, launched the panel by outlining Africa’s plight. “Today some 100 million of the farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa farm less than 2 hectares of land. Some 80 percent of those living in rural areas are poor. More than 30 percent of the rural population is chronically hungry and 35 percent of the under-five-year-olds are stunted. By 2050, the bulk of the world's population growth will take place on the continent. In fact, some project that 1.3 billion will be added to the continent, and Nigeria’s [population] will grow larger than the size of the United States between now and 2050,” Cousin said

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While Africa continues to experience the highest occurrence of food insecurity worldwide, the continent also contains over 60 percent of the worlds uncultivated but fertile land. AGRA formed in 2006 to fulfill the vision that Africa can feed itself and the world. Panelists included Agnes Kalibata, AGRA President and former Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources of Rwanda; Kanayo F. Nwanze, AGRA board member and immediate past president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development; Usha Barwale Zehr, AGRA board member and Director and Chief Technology Officer of Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company Private Limited; and Rajiv Shah, AGRA board member, Rockefeller Foundation President and former Administer of USAID.

Kanayo F. Nwanze stressed the importance of agricultural transformation for Africa’s future. “No country in the world ever transformed itself without going through an agrarian change. No country. Europe, 17th; Japan, 18th century; 19th century was the US, your country; China, 20th century. Why should they be different from Africa? So, first and foremost, we have to have total agricultural transformation,” Nwanze said.

AGRA president, Agnes Kalibata, also spoke to the need for policy implementation and government support in helping drive change. “AGRA as an institution can only do so much. But these governments have the potential and the capacity to reach every corner of their countries. The problem is they are challenged by capacity to do that, by capacity to design proper programs, and by capacity to implement these programs,” Kalibata said.

Expanding on governments' ability to impact and drive change, Usha Barwale Zehr highlighted Asia’s success, specifically with strategic partnerships. “…we've done a lot of talking about public/private partnership. Not so much on the ground on implementing it in a manner, which happened in Asia, for instance, where there was policy, and, most importantly, government will. The government was willing to do whatever it took to make sure that agriculture was transformed at the end of it,” Zehr said.

Beyond government and policy support the panelists also addressed the need for innovation and access to seed technologies. “Why is it that the African farmer and the Indian farmer should not have access to what the American farmer has access to today and reaps benefit from it? …So it's the hybrids, the varieties, the GM technology. Tomorrow it'll be the gene-edited products. And after that we will talk about the satellite-based imaging data that we will use for developing drought-tolerant crops for that very, very small micro environment that existed in the one district in Nigeria,” Zehr said.

"By 2050, who is going to feed Africa? … It's the youth of today. But they're not going to be using the same technologies that exist today. Just think of what IT can do, aggregation, organization of farmer's groups. So, the elements are there. I see the agriculture of tomorrow meeting the challenge – for Africa meeting that challenge is Africa being at the forefront of feeding the world. Africa has to be able to feed itself first. And we have all the opportunities there,” Nwanze said.

This is the first installment of the Global Food Security Symposium series hosted by Stanford University's Center on Food Security and the Environment and generously supported by Zach Nelson and Elizabeth Horn. FSE is a joint initiative of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

There is plenty of research on how the rapid warming of the planet is going to have growing adverse impacts on global economies, health, food supplies and natural disasters.

A new study now suggests that as temperatures continue to rise — particularly with more and more 90-plus-degree days — more fetuses and infants will experience economic loss by age 30.

“There is a growing body of evidence that finds that shocks to the fetus and young child — whether nutritional, environmental, economic or stress-related — have long-term consequences on health, education and economic outcomes throughout the life cycle,” said Maya Rossin-Slater, an assistant professor of health research and policy at Stanford Medicine and a faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Rossin-Slater published her study Dec. 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicating early-life exposure to extreme temperatures is linked to potential losses in human capital. Her co-authors are Adam Isen, an economist with the U.S. Department of Treasury, and Reed Walker, an assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley.

The researchers used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamic Files, which contain information on adult labor market outcomes linked to county and exact date of birth. They looked at weather in counties in 24 states on any given day, and then measured how many days with average temperatures above 90 degrees a child born on that day in that county would have experienced during gestation and during the first year of life. They then compared the earnings of individuals who were exposed to different numbers of such hot days, but who were of the same race and gender, and born in the same county and on the same day of the year (but in different years).

Each day a fetus or infant experiences 90-plus-degree temperatures, Rossin-Slater and her co-authors found that he made $30 less a year on average, or $430 over the course of his lifetime. While that may not seem like a huge loss of income, the authors point out that their study is best understood from a population-level perspective rather than from an individual one.

“There is a lot of research already showing that extreme heat has immediate effects on labor market productivity and GDP,” she said. “What we are saying is that there is another wrinkle to this — that there can be consequences many years later, on cohorts who are still in the womb.”

Most Americans today only experience one day a year that is 90 degrees or hotter. But the Climate Impact Lab has indicated that if countries continue to take only moderate action on climate change, by the end of this century there will be about 43 such days a year.

So, if you multiple a $30 annual loss a day by 43 days, you come up with an average $1,290 a year — and compounded in large populations of pregnant women in hot climates.

“Prior research shows that exposure to extreme heat in utero leads to lower birth weight and increases infant mortality,” said Rossin-Slater, who is also a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy. She said poor fetal and infant health could impact adult earnings in three ways: cognitive impairment, poor health that causes people to miss school or work, and less non-cognitive skill development such as self-control.

“With regard to exposure to heat specifically, fetuses and infants are especially sensitive because their thermoregulatory systems are not fully developed and they have less capacity to self-regulate when their bodies are exposed to extreme temperatures,” Rossin-Slater said.

Hot Zones and Air Conditioners

The obvious questions that arise from such research: What happens to the babies of women who already live in very high temperatures? And why not just ensure that all pregnant women have air conditioners, at least in the developed world where it would be more affordable?

Women in warm zones such as parts of Africa and South Asia, as well as U.S. cities like Phoenix and Washington, D.C., shouldn’t worry too much. The loss of income is relatively little and people living in hot climates may actually adapt over time to exposure to extreme heat.

“Our study is not saying that individual people should be doing something differently to avoid exposure to extreme heat,” Rossin-Slater said. “Instead, we think we are providing additional evidence for the possible population-level consequences of climate change and the projected increase in the number of days with extreme temperatures.”

And what about those air conditioners? The cohorts in the study are actually born in the 1970s, during a period of rapid expansion in air conditioning across American households. The researchers found the earning losses went away in areas where most people got air conditioners installed.

“If we think that there is something biological going on as a result of the fetus being overheated, then it makes sense that AC, which prevents the overheating, can mitigate this negative effect,” Rossin-Slater said.

But it’s important to recognize, she said, that air conditioners come with costs, both financial from the perspective of individuals and households who can and can’t afford such systems, and environmental from the perspective of the country or planet as a whole.

“So this is not a `free’ solution and any cost-benefit calculations related to climate change should take into account this adaption response,” Rossin-Slater said. “But we ought to think about what these results imply at the global level — in many countries that are much hotter than the United States and still don’t have AC. So if we are trying to understand global inequality and the impacts of climate change on developing countries, our results suggest that climate change could play a role in perpetuating global inequality across generations.”