Recent experimental evidence finds that the decision maker in a collective decision making entity with proposal power attracts a disproportionate amount of the blame or reward by those materially affected by these decisions. In the case of coalition governments evidence suggests that voters have heuristics for assigning responsibility for economic outcomes to individual parties and that they tend to disproportionately direct the economic vote toward the Prime Minister party. This essay demonstrates that voters also identify the Finance Minister party as an agenda setter on economic issues depending on whether the coalition context exaggerates or mutes its perceived agenda power. We define cabinet context as the extent to which coalition parties take issue ownership for particular policy areas. We find that when decision making is compartmentalized, voters perceive the finance minister as having agenda power and hence it receives a relatively larger economic vote; in more “diffuse” cabinet contexts it is the PM Party that is attributed responsibility for the economy.

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He draws on theory, experiments and public opinion analysis to understand how citizens solve decision-making challenges. This includes looking at how citizens use information shortcuts to make decisions. For example in ‘Context and Economic Expectations: When Do Voters get it Right?’ (British Journal of Political Science, 2010), he demonstrates how information shortcuts result in quite accurate expectations regarding price fluctuations in 12 European countries. One of his current areas of interest is the micro-foundations of cheating and unethical behaviour. He has run real effort tax compliance experiments designed to understand who cheats at taxes, the results of which are summarized in ‘Why We Cheat?’ (currently under review). An extension of this project examines tax compliance in different tax regimes.

Ray has served as Associate Editor of the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Experimental Political Science. He is one of the founders of the European Political Science Association and the International Meeting on Behavioural Science (IMESBESS), and he is currently Vice President of the Midwest Political Science Association. In 2015, Ray was selected as a member of the UK Cabinet Office Cross-Whitehall Trial Advice Panel to offer Whitehall departments technical support in designing and implementing controlled experiments to assess policy effectiveness. He was recently nominated to the Evidence in Governance and Politics network.

This event is co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution.

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Matteo Renzi was born in Florence in January 1975. In 2004 he was elected president of the province of Florence; five years later, in 2009, he was elected Mayor of Florence. In 2012 he ran in the primary elections for the centre-left, losing in the run-off. In 2013 he stood once again in the primaries, this time for leader of the Italian Democratic Party (Partito Democratico, PD), winning with 67.5% of the vote.

Delphine Red Shirt is a lecturer at the Special Language Program of Stanford University.  She served as the Chairperson of the United Nations NGO Committee on the International Decade of the World's Indigenous People, and as the United Nations Representative for the Four Directions Council: International Indigenous Organization with access to the UN. She received her Master of Arts in Liberal Studies in Creative Writing from Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. from Arizona University. She is the author of Bead on an Anthill: A Lakota Childhood, Turtle Lung Woman’s Granddaughter, and George Sword's Warrior Narratives: Compositional Processes in Lakota Oral Tradition, which has been translated into Chinese for distribution in November 2018. Delphine is dedicated to the historical narrative and promotion of oral literature.

Registration:

http://web.stanford.edu/~lapli/delphineredshirt.fb

Sociologists have struggled to come up with systematic ways of thinking about, and defining, the important concept of taken for grantedness. It remains unclear what exactly gets taken for granted and what this means. A recent theoretical work, Concepts and Categories: Foundations for Sociological and Cultural Analysis, proposes a new approach tied closely to research on cognition. Hannan will discuss how the new line of research builds on a probabilistic notion of concepts, and how people use their concepts to form expectations about what kinds of features an instance of a concept is likely to have. He will also examine the use of concepts to make judgements about individual objects, whether an object is or is not an instance of the concept.

REGISTRATION LINK:     

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Olzak examines how different components of globalization affect the death toll from internal armed conflict. Conventional wisdom once held that the severity of internal conflict would gradually decline with the spread of globalization, but fatalities have remained high. Moreover, leading theories of civil war sharply disagree about how different aspects of globalization might affect the severity of ethnic and non-ethnic armed conflicts. Using arguments from a variety of social science perspectives on globalization, civil war, and ethnic conflict to guide the analysis. Olzak will discuss how economic globalization and cultural globalization significantly increase fatalities from ethnic conflicts, and the sociotechnical aspects of globalization which result in an increase of deaths from ethnic conflict but decrease deaths from non-ethnic conflict, and finally, regime corruption that increases fatalities from non-ethnic conflict, which supports explanations suggesting that the severity of armed conflict is greater in weak and corrupt state. Susan Olzak is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, where she does research on armed conflict, ethnic violence, collective action, and social movement organizations.

REGISTRATION LINK:

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RSVP required by email to biancast@stanford.edu

This lecture is part of the French and Italian Department's Distiguised Lecture Series and will be conducted in French.

Co-sponsored by the Department of French and Italian and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the History Deprtment, the France-Stanford Center, the Center of Medieval and Modern Studies, and The Europe Center.

This event is full. Please email sj1874@stanford.edu to be placed on the Wait List.

To what extent do European citizens have a populist view of politics? Under what conditions are these populist attitudes more prevalent? What are their political consequences in terms of individual behavior? This talk will present an overview of the causes and consequences of populist attitudes in Europe using comparative and longitudinal survey data. The effect of economic conditions (both objective and perceived), emotional reactions of anger and fear, and internal political efficacy are explored. From our evidence populism is more related to sociotropic perceptions than to objective economic hardship, and to anger than to fear. Populist attitudes seem to be also powerful mobilisatory motivations for political engagement, particularly for people with low levels of income and education.

Eva Anduiza is professor of political science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona where she is also ICREA Academia research fellow. She directs the research group on Democracy, Elections and Citizenship, and until recently she directed the Master in Political Science. She is currently 2018-19 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University.

Anduiza' s main areas of research deal with different aspects of citizens’ involvement in politics in advanced democracies. This includes an interest in the causes and consequences of electoral turnout, political protest, digital media and political attitudes. She is also interested in attitudes towards corruption and in survey and experimental methodology. Recently her research has focused on the attitudinal consequences of the economic crisis, with a special focus on populist attitudes. Her next project explores how individuals’ attitudes towards gender equality and feminism change over time.

Sponsored by the Global Populisms Project at The Europe Center

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Drell Lecture Recording: https://youtu.be/NKN6xLhTjIo

Drell Lecture Transcript: 

Speaker's Biography: Alex Stamos is a cybersecurity expert, business leader and entrepreneur working to improve the security and safety of the Internet through his teaching and research at Stanford University. Stamos is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute, a William J. Perry Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution. As a Chief Security Officer at Facebook and Yahoo and a co-founder of iSEC Partners, Alex has investigated and responded to some of the most seminal events in the short history of cybersecurity, and has been called the “Forrest Gump of Info Sec” by friends. He is working on election security via the Defending Digital Democracy Project and advising NATO’s Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. He has spoken on six continents, testified in Congress, served as an expert witness for the wrongly accused, earned a BSEE from UC Berkeley and holds five patents.

On November 24, 2018, Taiwan's electorate will go to the polls to select thousands of ward chiefs, hundreds of council members, and dozens of mayors and county executives. This talk will cover the results of the election and discuss the implications for Taiwan's future, including party politics and cross-Strait relations.

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