Deliberative Polling®, a process pioneered by Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab (DDL), housed within the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, has been used successfully for the second time to help change the Constitution of Mongolia.

Following a 2015 city-wide Deliberative Poll for the Capital City Ulaanbataar, conducted with support from DDL (then called the Center for Deliberative Democracy), the national Parliament in Mongolia decided to pass the “Law on Deliberative Polling.” This law, approved in 2017, requires that deliberative polling be conducted on potential amendments to the Mongolian Constitution before they can be considered by the Parliament.

The first national Deliberative Poll following the new law was convened in 2017. After extensive parliamentary debate, Mongolia amended its constitution by a two-thirds vote on November 14, 2019. Gombojavyn Zandanshatar, Chairman of the State Great Khural (the Parliament of Mongolia) and a 2014-16 visiting scholar at CDDRL, noted in a letter to Professor James Fishkin, Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab, that Deliberative Polling “was a critical part of the process of consultation and discourse that helped shape the final amendments. You will see that most of the major changes made in these latest amendments can be traced back to the key issues the citizens discussed during the Deliberative Poll.”

In February of 2023, a new national sample of nearly 800 people — a stratified random sample of citizens from throughout the country — gathered in the Government Palace (the seat of government in Ulaanbaatar) for a long weekend to deliberate about proposed amendment topics. The new sample was selected by the National Statistical Office, the governmental body also responsible for conducting Mongolia’s National Census. The topics were gathered from nearly 1,100 suggestions from experts, the public, civil society, and professional organizations around the country. They were then screened by the Deliberative Council, an independent non-partisan body required by the “Law on Deliberative Polling.”

A method of public opinion-gathering developed by a Stanford communication professor has been adopted by the Mongolian government, which now requires that “deliberative polling” be conducted prior to amending the country’s constitution.

Janet M. Peck Professor of International Communication James Fishkin created deliberative polling three decades ago. His in-depth technique involves gathering randomly sampled members of a population together to discuss an issue in small groups with moderators. Polling participants are guided through balanced briefings and can also ask questions of experts on hand. The process, which generally spans two days, seeks to gauge more informed views than would normally be possible.

Read the full article in The Stanford Daily.

Can indigenous communities ruling through politically autonomous institutions better protect against cartel takeover? In a CDDRL seminar series talk, Beatriz Magaloni, the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Director of CDDRL’s Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab argued that in Mexico, indigenous communities ruled by traditional governance have proven more resilient against cartel takeovers than comparable municipalities relying on state-backed security provision. 

Existing literature typically frames violence in developing countries as a manifestation of state weakness. But, in many areas of the world, organized criminal groups infiltrate the state, buying off intelligence, protection, and impunity. 

In Mexico, cartels infiltrate local governments by funding political campaigns, killing those who refuse to be bought off. In this context, the selection of leaders through conventional Western multi-party elections is an effective vehicle through which cartels can extend their influence. 

The capture of municipal political bodies is advantageous to cartels as it allows them to diversify their revenue generation. Access to intelligence, resources, and territory makes demanding regular payments and extracting natural resources far easier. It also allows cartels to gain discretionary power in the decision of who the state grants protection to or not. This bleak reality in which the borders between the state, organized crime, rule of law, and impunity are blurred elevates the urgency of investigating to what extent “opting out” of the state represents a viable alternative in the provision of security. 

In Oaxaca and other regions across Mexico, indigenous communities have the right to govern autonomously. In their traditional form of governance, known as “usos y costumbres,” local elections and political parties are banned. Authorities are instead selected through community assemblies, in which decision-making is highly participatory. Based on this traditional governance, a growing number of indigenous communities have established community police groups, which are detached from the state and constituted by local community members with little or no professional police training. 

Importantly, autonomous indigenous municipalities still receive state transfers and cannot be punished for opting out of the party system. In conducting extensive qualitative fieldwork, Magaloni sought to understand whether this traditional governance structure prohibits cartel infiltration and keeps communities safer. 

The team hypothesized that higher levels of cartel presence would increase violence – which they proxied with homicide rates. They expected less cartel presence and less violence in Usos (autonomous indigenous communities) relative to party-controlled municipalities. Lower levels of police corruption and better deterrence against criminal cells were also expected for communities ruled by Usos. 

The initial exploratory analysis showed that following the autonomous governance reform, Usos communities experienced a sharp decrease in violence. When the drug war began in 2006, these communities continued to see low levels of violence, whereas comparable municipalities suffered a sharp increase. 

Magaloni employed a variety of difference in difference analyses to control for possible confounders. Usos communities were compared to similarly sized, similarly indigenous communities. Using a geographic discontinuity design, Usos were also compared to municipalities just 1 km from the border of Oaxaca – those ruled by multi-party elections. The analysis controlled for opium poppy suitability and history of ancestral governance practices. 

The analysis confirmed that the more cartel presence, the more violence a community experienced. Across all models, the team was able to conclude that Usos communities saw significantly less cartel presence, fewer homicides, and less violence. 

Magaloni’s work highlights the state's limitations in creating order in circumstances where criminal groups have compromised it. It also suggests that in the context of these predatory regimes, indigenous political autonomy can serve as a powerful rampart to the corrosive presence of organized crime.

It was 5 p.m. Pacific Time on a Wednesday. While Silicon Valley was ending its workday, dozens of tech professionals from around the world were logging on to Zoom to participate in Ethics, Technology + Public Policy for Practitioners. The seven-week course was taught digitally in fall 2023 by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy M. Weinstein, three professors whose disciplinary grounding spans philosophy, computer science, and public policy, at Stanford University, supported by the course’s managing director, Megan Mellin, MSM ’19.

Read the full article from Stanford Digital Education.

Why do politicians invest in infrastructure projects that will not be completed during their time in office? In a CDDRL seminar series talk, Harvard University Professor of Government Alisha Holland addressed the question, shedding light on how the advent of public-private partnerships (PPPs) has shifted politicians’ orientation toward infrastructure projects.  

According to Holland, infrastructure investment has been on the rise in the developing world despite witnessing a steady decline in advanced industrial democracies. Why? The influx of PPPs has made infrastructure projects appealing to politicians, who have utilized such contracts to raise funds for electoral campaigns and delay project costs.

In the past, infrastructure projects were largely aimed at creating jobs for a given politician’s base of supporters and would-be voters. Thus, politicians were keen on seeing the successful completion of such projects. In contrast, today, infrastructure projects have become vehicles, not for securing votes, but for campaign finance, thanks to the PPP framework and the campaign donations it has helped generate for politicians, albeit indirectly. Thus, the mere launching of such projects (regardless of their completion) has become a political end in and of itself.

Infrastructure, Holland indicated, is at the heart of salient questions surrounding democracy, development, and state capacity. It also plays a central role in campaign finance in many developing democracies.  

Conventional wisdom suggests that politicians want to inaugurate infrastructure projects that employ constituents and future voters. If true, politicians should be signing contracts for such projects early in their terms to allow time for job creation before reelection rolls around. But this does not appear to be the case. In Latin American countries where presidents can run for reelection, two-thirds of contracts occur in the last 18 months before an election. 

Holland argued that this trend is rooted in governments’ shifting role in infrastructure. Whereas the state had long led infrastructure projects and hired directly with the goal of job creation, neoliberal reforms in the 1990s made governments rely more heavily on private contractors. Accordingly, the incentive structure facing politicians has changed. They have become less interested in creating jobs for supporters and more interested in securing campaign donations through the process of contracting private sector entities. The partnership with the private sector, moreover, has allowed politicians to hide project costs and shift liabilities to future administrations. The result is an influx of high-cost infrastructure projects with limited utility.

On a broader level, Holland’s findings help explain the widespread shift from political patronage to vote-buying in many countries. The advent of state-private sector partnerships has enabled politicians to raise the cash needed to fund vote-buying machines at a large scale.

How can the problem be mitigated? Much of the answer revolves around “inhibitory institutions.” These institutions could veto unwieldy projects before their commencement, as distinct from traditional mechanisms of horizontal accountability, like audit courts, which can only intervene after the damage is done.