There is currently a worldwide debate regarding the transformation of democracy. The representative system (political parties, parliamentary bodies, and the executive government) has been weakened and in some cases displaced by non-electoral representative actors (mass media, judicial magistrates, public commissions, etc.) and by intense manifestations of civic empowerment that remain politically active well after elections. As a result, the legitimacy of government decisions is consistently called into question. This evolution of democracy at the beginning of the 21st century is particularly apparent in Latin America, but it is affecting the quality and stability of democracy in many countries around the globe.
One element of the transformation has been the repeated emergence of populist governments, characterized by the informal practice of power. These movements, which frequently include marginalized sectors of society and identify with charismatic leadership, exert substantial power in a number of countries. The expansion of regimes with populist features in the context of electoral democracies has led to several unresolved questions that will be discussed in the seminar.
9:15 Coffee
9:30 Introduction, Isidoro Cheresky, Full Professor, University of Buenos Aires; CLAS Tinker Professor
9:40 “The Global Democratic Recession and Its Implications for Latin America”
Larry Diamond, CDDRL, Stanford
10:15 “Populism and the Politics of the Extraordinary”
Carlos de la Torre, Professor of Sociology, University Kentucky, Lexington
11:15 “Latin America and the Theological, Epistemological and Aesthetic Regimes of Politics,” Martin Plot, School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts
12:15-12:30 Concluding Discussion
Isidoro Cheresky
Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.
Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).
During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.
Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.
Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.
Encina Hall, C149
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Alberto Diaz-Cayeros joined the FSI faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as the director of the Center for US-Mexico studies at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C. in Mexico from 1997-1999. His work has focused on federalism, poverty and violence in Latin America, and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English. His book Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 (reprinted 2016). His latest book (with Federico Estevez and Beatriz Magaloni) is: The Political Logic of Poverty Relief Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. His work has primarily focused on federalism, poverty and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular, with more recent work addressing crime and violence, youth-at-risk, and police professionalization.
The IEI workshop will provide a forum for graduate students and young researchers working in international education to present their research to other graduate students and faculty members.
Brenda Jarillo Rabling from the Program on Poverty and Governance at FSI will present her research on "How the Mexican Drug War Affects Kids and Schools: Evidence of Effects and Mechanisms." Susana Claro from the Center for Education and Policy Analysis will share her work on the "Impact of Teacher Mindset on Student Achievement: Evidence from RCT in Chile."
Lunch will be served.
Open to the public.
Encina Hall East Wing, 5th Floor, Falcon Lounge
Please note new location in the
Reuben Hills Conference Room ("East" Conference Room)
Encina Hall, 2nd floor
Abstract: In 1977, the Carter administration began working to implement a new guiding strategy for US foreign policy, oriented toward the promotion of human rights and the management of economic interdependence among the advanced industrialized countries. Carter’s world order politics reflected both the oversights of the Nixon years and the influence of the Trilateral Commission. To manage economic globalization, the Carter administration promoted policy cooperation, its efforts culminating in the Bonn summit of the G-7 in 1978. To promote human rights, the Carter administration devised guidelines for tethering military and financial aid to foreign nations to human rights standards, and applied them with particular rigor in Latin America. By late 1978, however, Carter’s world order politics was already encountering difficulties: the administration’s human rights policy lacked consistency; policy coordination failed to stabilize the liberal world economy; and Iran, a longtime US ally, was imploding.
About the Speaker: Daniel Sargent is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his BA from Christ’s College, Cambridge in 2001 and his PhD from Harvard University in 2008. He has held fellowships at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University and at International Security Studies at Yale University. He is the author of A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford University Press, 2015) and a co-editor of The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Harvard University Press, 2010). He is now working on two book-length projects: a history of international economic governance in the modern era and a study on the uses of history and historical thinking in U.S. foreign policy. To purchase A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s, please follow this link to Oxford University Press.
Encina Hall (2nd floor)
The Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) are offering an exciting K–5 workshop focusing on strategies to incorporate Latin American and Latino children’s literature into the elementary school classroom.
Featured speakers include Duncan Tonatiuh, author of Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote (2013, Abrams Books for Young Readers) and Tomás Jiménez, Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Stanford’s Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies.
Registration is $25 and includes breakfast, lunch, and a copy of the book Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote by Duncan Tonatiuh. Register for the workshop at http://tinyurl.com/ncks8sf by January 12, 2015.
TBA
Stanford University
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305
Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006), won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association and the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations. Her second book, Strategies of Vote Buying: Democracy, Clientelism, and Poverty Relief in Mexico (co-authored with Alberto Diaz Cayeros and Federico Estévez), studies the politics of poverty relief. Why clientelism is such a prevalent form of electoral exchange, how it distorts policies aimed at aiding the poor, and when it can be superseded by more democratic and accountable forms of electoral exchange are some of the central questions that the book addresses.
In 2010 she founded the Program on Poverty and Governance (POVGOV) within FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. There she pursues a research agenda focused on governance, poverty reduction, electoral clientelism, the provision of public goods and criminal violence. Most of the work at POVGOV is conducted in a team lab-based approach with undergraduate and graduate student trainees and post-doctoral fellows, and most work is jointly published. The projects use a multi-method approach combining observational data, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), surveys, experimental designs, and in-depth ethnographic work.
Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Theoretical Politics and other journals.
Prior to joining Stanford in 2001, Professor Magaloni was a visiting professor at UCLA and a professor of Political Science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). She earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University. She also holds a law degree from ITAM.
Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA
Beatriz Magaloni 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 Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. 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 to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.
Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.
Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.
Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.
She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.
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