Stanford University

State-building

Saumitra Jha

Graduate School of Business 655 Knight Way Stanford, CA 94305
(650) 721 1298
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Associate Professor of Political Economy, GSB
Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Economics and of Political Science
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Along with being a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Saumitra Jha is an associate professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab. 

Jha’s research has been published in leading journals in economics and political science, including Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Development Economics, and he serves on a number of editorial boards. His research on ethnic tolerance has been recognized with the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in Political Economy from the American Political Science Association in 2014 and his co-authored research on heroes with the Oliver Williamson Award for best paper by the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics in 2020. Jha was honored to receive the Teacher of the Year Award, voted by the students of the Stanford MSx Program in 2020.

Saum holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to rejoining Stanford as a faculty member, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a fellow of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Jha has consulted on economic and political risk issues for the United Nations/WTO, the World Bank, government agencies, and for private firms.

 

Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Dan C. Chung Faculty Scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
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Olexandr Starodubtsev

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Visiting Scholar, Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program 2017-18
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Olexandr Starodubtsev is a Ukrainian reformer who is deeply involved in the creation of a new electronic public procurement system Prozorro, which is one of the most famous reforms in the country. Currently Starodubtsev is the Head of the Public Procurement Regulation Department in The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine, and is an official policy maker in the spheres of public procurement and economic development in Ukraine.

The Prozorro system is famous for its different approaches to bottom-up reform based on the close collaboration between government, business and civil society. In 2016, the Prozorro system won several distinguished international awards, such as the Open Government Partnership Award, the Public Procurement Award, and was also recognized by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and Open Contracting Partnership. Moreover, Prozorro and its principles became an inspirational example for other Ukrainian reforms.

Starodubtsev was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1979. He graduated from Kharkiv National University in 2002. Previously he worked on the stock market where he made his career as a back-office specialist up to a managing partner of a Ukrainian branch of a multinational financial institution. He received an MBA degree from the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School and became Alumnus of the Year in its first competition in 2015. He is married and has a son and a daughter.

 

Theories of Development and External State-Building

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Abstract: Both the academic and policy making worlds have been dominated by three explanations for development, understood broadly as democratization and rising levels of per capita income. The first argument is modernization theory which assumes that if polities are provided with adequate resources, especially investment, they will develop. The second argument is institutional capacity approaches which focus on the ability of the state to maintain order. The third argument is rational choice institutionalism which sees deveopment as a rare event resulting from the self interested calculations of elites.  Happenstance and path-dependence play major roles for rational choice instititoinalism. All three of these approaches suffer from major gaps. All three, however, are consistent with the view that external state-building efforts will only be successful if the objectives of external and internal elites are complmentary. This suggests that for most polities the best that external actors can accomplish is Good Enough Governance: security, some service provision, some economic growth.

About the Speaker: Stephen Krasner is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, the Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences, School of Humanities & Sciences, and the deputy director of FSI. A former director of CDDRL, Krasner is also an FSI senior fellow, and a fellow of the Hoover Institution.

From February 2005 to April 2007 he served as the Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department. While at the State Department, Krasner was a driving force behind foreign assistance reform designed to more effectively target American foreign aid. He was also involved in activities related to the promotion of good governance and democratic institutions around the world.

At CDDRL, Krasner was the coordinator of the Program on Sovereignty. His work has dealt primarily with sovereignty, American foreign policy, and the political determinants of international economic relations. Before coming to Stanford in 1981 he taught at Harvard University and UCLA. At Stanford, he was chair of the political science department from 1984 to 1991, and he served as the editor of International Organization from 1986 to 1992.

He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (1987-88) and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2000-2001). In 2002 he served as director for governance and development at the National Security Council. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Encina Hall, 2nd floor

Stephen D. Krasner

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 723-0676 (650) 724-2996
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Emeritus
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Emeritus
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MA, PhD

Stephen Krasner is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations. A former director of CDDRL, Krasner is also an FSI senior fellow, and a fellow of the Hoover Institution.

From February 2005 to April 2007 he served as the Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department. While at the State Department, Krasner was a driving force behind foreign assistance reform designed to more effectively target American foreign aid. He was also involved in activities related to the promotion of good governance and democratic institutions around the world.

At CDDRL, Krasner was the coordinator of the Program on Sovereignty. His work has dealt primarily with sovereignty, American foreign policy, and the political determinants of international economic relations. Before coming to Stanford in 1981 he taught at Harvard University and UCLA. At Stanford, he was chair of the political science department from 1984 to 1991, and he served as the editor of International Organization from 1986 to 1992.

He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (1987-88) and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2000-2001). In 2002 he served as director for governance and development at the National Security Council. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

His major publications include Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investment and American Foreign Policy (1978), Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism (1985), Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999), and How to Make Love to a Despot (2020). Publications he has edited include International Regimes (1983), Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics (co-editor, 1999),  Problematic Sovereignty: Contested Rules and Political Possibilities (2001), and Power, the State, and Sovereignty: Essays on International Relations (2009). He received a BA in history from Cornell University, an MA in international affairs from Columbia University and a PhD in political science from Harvard.

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Stephen D. Krasner Professor of International Relations Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University
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The New Yorker: Reforming Ukraine after the revolutions

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Joshua Yaffa writes in the September issue of The New Yorker magazine about the phenomenon of Ukrainian journalists Sergii Leshchenko and Mustafa Nayyem becoming politicians. Leshchenko and Nayyem participated in the Draper Hills Summer Fellows program that is hosted annually at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). The story touches on how the program and Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama was instrumental in helping them decide to transition from journalism to politics. The story asks whether the two hacks-turned-MPs can really let go of their journalistic ethics and play in the rough-and-tumble world of Ukrainian politics.

Read more about it here.

Sergii Leshchenko at CDDRL 2013

Sergii Leshchenko introduces himself at the welcoming reception for Stanford’s Draper Hills Summer Fellows in July 2013.

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Introducing CDDRL's incoming pre- and postdoctoral fellows

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Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is proud to announce our four incoming fellows who will be joining us in the 2016-2017 academic year to develop their research, engage with faculty and tap into our diverse scholarly community. 

The pre- and postdoctoral program will provide fellows the time to focus on research and data analysis as they work to finalize and publish their dissertation research, while connecting with resident faculty and research staff at CDDRL. 

Fellows will present their research during our weekly research seminar series and an array of scholarly events and conferences.

Topics of the incoming cohort include electoral fraud in Russia, how the elite class impacts state power in China, the role of emotions in support for democracy in Zimbabwe, and market institutions in Nigeria. 

Learn more in the Q&A below.

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Natalia Forrat

CDDRL Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Hometown: Tomsk, Russia

Academic Institution: Northwestern University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: Sociology, April 2017

Research Interests: authoritarianism, state capacity, social policy, civil society, trust, Russia and post-communist countries

Dissertation Title: The State that Betrays the Trust: Infrastructural State Power, Public Sector Organizations, and Authoritarian Resilience in Putin's Russia

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? I study the connection between state capacity and political regimes - the topic that is at the core of many research initiatives at CDDRL. Learning more about this work and receiving feedback for my dissertation will enrich and sharpen my analysis, while helping me to place it into a comparative context. I am looking forward to discussing my work with the faculty who study the post-Soviet region. I also will explore policy implications of my work with the help of policy experts at CDDRL.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? Besides finishing writing my dissertation, I will workshop three working papers to prepare them for publication. The first one argues that Putin's regime used the school system to administer a large-scale electoral fraud in 2012 presidential elections; the second one shows how the networks of social organizations were used by subnational autocrats to strengthen the regime; and the third one will look at the factors that make the abuse of such organizations more difficult in some regions. In addition to these papers I will continue developing my post-graduation research project exploring the relationship between social trust and distrust, institutions, political competition, and democratization.

Fun fact: I have spent 25 years of my life in Siberia, and I can tell you: Chicago winters are worse!

 
 

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Shelby Grossman

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Reading, MA

Academic Institution: Harvard University

Discipline & Graduation Date:  Government, Summer 2016

Research interests: political economy of development, private governance, market institutions, Sub-Saharan Africa, survey methods

Dissertation Title: The Politics of Order in Informal Markets: Evidence from Lagos

What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? I was attracted to CDDRL largely for its community of scholars. Affiliated faculty work on the political economy of development and medieval and modern market institutions, topics that are tied to my own interests.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? I plan to prepare a book manuscript based on my dissertation, a project that explains variation in the provision of pro-trade institutions in private market organizations through the study of physical marketplaces in Nigeria. In addition, I will continue to remotely manage an on-going project in Nigeria (with Meredith Startz) investigating whether reputation alleviates contracting frictions. I also plan to work on submitting to journals a few working papers, including one on the politics of non-compliance with polio vaccination in Nigeria (with Jonathan Phillips and Leah Rosenzweig). 

Fun fact: Contrary to popular belief, not all cheese is vegetarian. I have a website to help people determine if a cheese is vegetarian or not: IsThisCheeseVegetarian.com. 

 
 

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Daniel Mattingly

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Oakland, California

Academic Institution: University of California, Berkeley

Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science, Summer 2016

Research Interests: Governance, rule of law, state building, authoritarian politics, Chinese politics

Dissertation Title: The Social Origins of State Power: Democratic Institutions and Local Elites in China

What attracted you to CDDRL?  The Center has a fantastic community of scholars and practitioners who work on the areas that I'm interested in, including governance and the rule of law. I'm excited to learn from the CDDRL community and participate in the Center's events. The fellowship also provides me with valuable time to finish my book manuscript before I start teaching.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? While at CDDRL, I plan to prepare my book manuscript and to work on some related projects on local elites and state power in China and elsewhere. 

Fun fact: I grew up on an organic farm in Vermont.

 
 

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Lauren E. Young

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Saratoga, CA

Academic Institution: Columbia University 

Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science (Comparative Politics, Methods), May 2016 (defense), Oct 2016 (degree conferral)

Research Interests: political violence, political economy of development, autocratic persistence, democratization, protest, electoral violence

Dissertation Title: The Psychology of Repression and Dissent in Autocracy

What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? As a graduate of the CISAC honors program when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, I have seen first-hand how intellectually stimulating, collaborative, and plugged into policy CDDRL is. While at the center I will be revising my dissertation work on the political psychology of participation in pro-democracy movements in Zimbabwe for submission as a book manuscript, and moving forward new projects that similarly seek to understand how different forms of violence by non-state actors affects citizens' preferences and decision-making. Because of its deep bench of experts on autocracy, narco-trafficking, and insurgency, CDDRL will add enormous value to these projects.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL?  During my fellowship year, my primary goal is to revise my research on Zimbabwe into a book manuscript. I defended my dissertation as three stand-alone articles, including two experiments showing that emotions influence whether opposition supporters in Zimbabwe express their pro-democracy preferences and a descriptive paper showing that repression has a larger effect on the behavior of the poor. To prepare the book manuscript during my fellowship, I will bring in additional quantitative and qualitative descriptive evidence and tie the three papers together into a cohesive argument about how opposition supporters make decisions about participation in protest, why emotions have such a large effect on these decisions, and how this affects variation across individuals and the strategic choices of autocrats and activists.

Fun fact: During my fieldwork I took an overnight train from Victoria Falls to a southern city in Zimbabwe and hitch-hiked into a national park. It got a little nerve-wracking when night started to fall, but ended with  an invitation to a barbecue! 

 

 
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Shelby Grossman

Encina Hall, C433 616 Jane Stanford Way Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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PhD

Shelby Grossman is a research scholar at the Cyber Policy Center. Her research focuses on online safety. Shelby's research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, PNAS Nexus, Political Communication, The Journal of Politics, World Development, and World Politics. Her book, "The Politics of Order in Informal Markets," was published by Cambridge University Press. She is co-editor of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, and teaches classes at Stanford on open source investigation and online trust and safety issues. 

Shelby was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Memphis from 2017-2019, and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law from 2016-17. She earned her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2016.

Research Scholar
CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow, 2016-17
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The potential and challenges of customer feedback in the public sector

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This talk will present the Pakistan Citizen Feedback Monitoring Program (CFMP), which, leveraging the ubiquitous presence of ordinary cell phones, aims to fight petty corruption, improve service delivery and improve trust in the state. Replicated in Albania and Romania, such proactive universal surveying of beneficiaries, already widely practiced in the private sector, is implementable in in a wide variety of public sector setting at a relatively low cost. A historical case study on CFMP was recently published by Princeton University.  

Bio

Zubair K. Bhatti is a Senior Public Sector Management Specialist at the World Bank. He is the co-author of Logged On: Smart Government Solutions from South Asia.

 

The event is sponsored by the Center for South Asia, and would be of interest to the LibTech community.
 

 

The potential and challenges of customer feedback in the public sector

Encina Hall West, Room 219

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Baghdad's Deep Dilemma: Sectarianism and Urban Segregation under Occupation

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Abstract

The sectarian-based segregation that has shaped urbanism in Baghdad is a direct outcome of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. The "post"-occupied city is characterized by the normalization of concrete “security” blast-walls that choke urban circulation and sever communities. The notorious blast walls -- or "Bremer Walls" -- perpetuate and intensify conditions of urban segregation. As the summer's surge of anti-government protests in Baghdad demonstrate, the short-sighted nature of this militarized solution to sectarian-based violence has proven to be a superficial and unsustainable fix to the deep dilemma of sectarian segregation codified in Iraq’s political system. This presentation will examine the context for recent public dissent on the streets of Baghdad through the story of the capital city's fragmentation between 2006 and 2007. 

Speaker Bio

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Mona Damluji is Associate Dean and Director of The Markaz: Resource Center at Stanford University. She is a liberal arts educator, cultural activist and scholar with expertise in the Arab Middle East and broader Muslim World. Mona received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian & Islamic Visual Culture at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Mona regularly curates and organizes exhibits and programs featuring the work of artists and activists linked to Muslim and Arab communities and countries. Major recent projects have included "Open Shutters Iraq" at UC Berkeley and "Arab Comics: 90 Years of Popular Visual Culture" at Brown University. Mona has worked as the educational outreach director for the Arab Film Festival, organizing an annual festival screening for students and teachers in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley. Her exhibition and book reviews appear in Jadaliyya, AMCA and the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. Mona's publications also appear in the Journal of Urban History, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and Subterranean Estates: the Life Worlds of Oil and Gas.

 

This event is co-sponsored by the Sara and Sohaib Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and The Markaz: Resource Center.

 

 

 

CISAC Central Conference Room
Encina Hall, 2nd Floor
616 Serra St
Stanford, CA 94305

Mona Damluji
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Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

Liberal Taiwan versus Illiberal South Korea: The Divergent Paths of Electoral Campaign Regulation

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Abstract:

Both South Korea and Taiwan are considered consolidated democracies, but the two countries have developed very different sets of electoral campaign regulations. While both countries had highly restrictive election laws during their authoritarian eras, they have diverged after democratic transition. South Korea still restricts campaigning activities, including banning door-to-door canvassing, prohibiting pre-official period campaigning, and restricting the quantity and content of literature. Taiwan has removed most campaigning restrictions, except for finance regulations. This study explores the causes of these divergent trajectories through comparative historical process tracing, using both archival and secondary sources. The preliminary findings suggest that the incumbency advantage and the containment of the leftist or opposition parties were the primary causes of regulation under the soft and hard authoritarian regimes of South Korea and Taiwan. The key difference was that the main opposition party as well as the ruling party in South Korea enjoyed the incumbency advantage but that opposition forces in Taiwan did not. As a result, the opposition in Taiwan fought for liberalization of campaign regulations, but that in South Korea did not. Democratization in Taiwan was accompanied by successive liberalizations in campaign regulation, but in South Korea the incumbent legislators affiliated with the ruling and opposition parties were both interested in limiting campaigning opportunities for electoral challengers.

 

Bio:

Dr. Jong-sung You is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University. His research interests include comparative politics and the political economy of inequality, corruption, social trust, and freedom of expression. He conducts both cross-national quantitative studies and qualitative case studies, focusing on Korea and East Asia. He recently published a book entitled Democracy, Inequality and Corruption: Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines Compared with Cambridge University Press. His publications have appeared at American Sociological Review, Political Psychology, Journal of East Asian Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Asian Perspective, Trends and Prospects, and Korean Journal of International Studies. He obtained his Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University and taught at UC San Diego. Before pursuing an academic career, he fought for democracy and social justice in South Korea.

 

 

Jong-sung You Senior Lecturer College of Asia and the Pacific, Australia National University
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