Roberta Metsola was elected President of the European Parliament in January 2022, becoming the youngest ever person to occupy this role. In July 2024, she was re-elected to lead the institution for another term, as only the second person and first woman to serve as President for two terms.
 

Leading the only directly elected European institution, President Metsola has been very vocal and firm in Europe’s support to Ukraine, following Russia’s brutal invasion. On 1st April 2022, she became the first President of an institution of the European Union to visit Ukraine since the start of the war. As President of the European Parliament, she has led reforms towards a Parliament, which is more modern, efficient and accountable.
 
Since the start of her mandate, President Metsola has also made it a priority to reach beyond Brussels and Strasbourg, by visiting European Union Member States and candidate countries, meeting with people, visiting schools and taking the message of Europe to the various cities, towns and villages. She has also invited EU Heads of State or Government to the European Parliament to discuss current challenges and opportunities for the Union, under the “This is Europe” debates. 

She was first elected to the European Parliament in 2013, becoming one of Malta's first female Members of the European Parliament. President Metsola was re-elected in 2014 and then again in 2019 and 2024.


In 2020, she was elected as the First Vice-President of the European Parliament, becoming the first Maltese national to hold the post. She was responsible for the European Parliament's relations with national parliaments and for the Parliament's participation in the interreligious and non-confessional dialogue (Article 17 TFEU).

Within the European Parliament, President Metsola was the European People’s Party Group's Coordinator in the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, between January 2017 and 2020. President Metsola was the Parliament's rapporteur on the European Border and Coastguard Regulation (FRONTEX) in 2019. She also co-authored the Parliament's own-initiative report on the need to protect journalists in the European Union from Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation (SLAPP).


Prior to her election as a Member of the European Parliament, President Metsola served within the Permanent Representation of Malta to the European Union and later as the legal advisor to the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. In her student years, she campaigned actively for Malta's European Union membership, and was active in various organisations, acting as the Secretary-General for the European Democrat Student organisation between 2002 and 2003. President Metsola credits the referendum on Malta’s accession to the European Union as the catalyst for her political career at such a young age.


Professionally she is a lawyer who has specialised in European law and politics. She completed an Erasmus exchange in France and graduated from the University of Malta and the College of Europe in Bruges.


Born in 1979, Roberta Metsola is married to Ukko Metsola and is the mother of four boys.

We collected monthly data on individual employees over 200 years to understand how wars shaped the evolution of modern bureaucracy.

A large literature has examined the “rise of the state” in early modern Europe, focusing on the increase in the capacity of states due to war. However, state institutions were increasing not only in size but also in their quality, through the creation of “modern” or “Weberian” bureaucracies. To illustrate these distinct processes, our project examines the state in early modern Britain, often cited as the ideal type of a bureaucratic transformation. To do so, we are building a dataset of every central government employee in Britain between 1660 and 1870, capturing not just their numbers but several measures of bureaucratic rationalization: structured career progression, functional specialization, remuneration through salaries rather than user fees, higher salaries, increased time in office, the de-linking of bureaucratic and political careers, and reduced nepotism.

Anil Menon is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Merced. His research focuses on the legacies of political violence and political responses to conditions of vulnerability more broadly. Dr. Menon’s work is published or forthcoming at journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, the Economic Journal, and Lancet Regional Health Europe.

Dr. Menon’s work on Europe concerns both historical and contemporary topics. For instance, he has investigated the long-term electoral legacies of forced migration at the end of World War 2 in Germany. In more recent work, he examines whether citizens are willing to trade off civil liberties for decisive policy action in the domain of immigration.

The 2026 Hungarian parliamentary election marked a historic turning point in European politics, as the Péter Magyar-led Tisza Party secured a landslide victory and a two-thirds supermajority, ending Viktor Orbán’s 16-year tenure. Dan Kelemen will analyze the significant implications for the European Union, focusing on how this shift from illiberalism to a pro-European stance may unfreeze crucial EU funds and reshape the balance of power within the European Council. Hanna Folsz will delve into the domestic political landscape, examining the structural factors and rapid mobilization that allowed the Tisza Party to overcome a skewed electoral system and the long-standing dominance of Fidesz. Together, the speakers will evaluate whether this result represents a restoration of liberal democracy in Hungary or a complex transition within a deeply entrenched political and economic framework.

R. Daniel Kelemen is McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy. He is also Professor of Law (by courtesy) at Georgetown Law. Kelemen has published widely on the politics and law of the European Union, comparative politics and law, and comparative public policy. Prior to joining Georgetown University, Kelemen was Professor of Political Science and Law at Rutgers University. He also served as Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Center for European Studies at Rutgers. Prior to Rutgers, Kelemen was Fellow in Politics at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Kelemen is a Senior Associate (Non-Resident), in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Executive Committee of the European Union Studies Association. Kelemen comments regularly on EU affairs for European and American media. He was educated at UC Berkeley (A.B. in Sociology) and Stanford (M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science).

Hanna Folsz is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on opposition parties in authoritarian dominant-party regimes, with a particular focus on the challenges and opportunities they face in countering autocratization. More broadly, her work examines the causes and consequences of democratic backsliding, populism, media capture, and political favoritism — primarily in East-Central Europe and, secondarily, in Latin America. She uses a multi-method approach, including modern causal inference and text analysis techniques.

Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the American Political Science Association, among others. She is the co-founder and co-organizer of EEPGW, a monthly online graduate student workshop on East European politics, and a co-founder and regular contributor to The Hungarian Observer, the most widely read online newsletter on Hungarian politics and culture. At Stanford, she is an active member of  CDDRL's Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (PovGov).

Russia's shift from informational autocracy toward overt repression has made understanding public sentiment more urgent yet increasingly difficult. One channel remains: appeals systems, through which hundreds of thousands of citizens each year bring grievances directly to the state. What concerns do citizens raise, and how does the regime respond? Drawing on original data from Russia's presidential appeals system, this talk examines what appeals reveal about everyday citizen-state relations, governance challenges, and how autocratic institutions that promise responsiveness actually function under pressure. Appeals offer a unique behavioral measure of citizen concerns, capturing the experiences of those most affected by governance failures—offering insight into a regime that has become increasingly opaque.

Hannah S. Chapman is the Theodore Romanoff Assistant Professor of Russian Studies and an Assistant Professor of International and Area Studies. Previously, she was a George F. Kennan Fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Her research, teaching, and service are in the fields of comparative political behavior with a substantive focus on public opinion, political participation, and political communication in non-democracies and a regional focus on Russian and post-Soviet politics. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in authoritarianism, Russian domestic and international politics, and comparative politics.

Her book project, Dialogue with the Dictator: Information Manipulation and Authoritarian Legitimation in Putin's Russia, examines the role of quasi-democratic participation mechanisms in reinforcing authoritarian regimes. Her work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics,  Democratization, International Studies Quarterly, and the Washington Post.

Social housing has regained public attention amidst rising rent prices. In this paper, we examine how the partisan composition of city councils affects housing policies and permits for social housing. We construct a novel panel of all municipal housing construction permits in Denmark between 1981 and 2021 and combine it with information on local election outcomes. Using a close-elections regression discontinuity design, we find that social housing permits increase when Social Democrats win control of the city council. This effect was particularly strong until the early 1990s but has disappeared since. We then draw on data from administrative registries and electoral precincts to demonstrate that electoral realignment can explain this dynamic. We show that social housing residents have become economically marginalized and turned to far-right populist parties while social democratic voters have become more educated and likely to be homeowners. This maps onto the electoral losses the Social Democrats experienced in precincts with high shares of social housing. Our findings suggest that partisan considerations and electoral rewards help explain changes in social housing policies.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and The Europe Center.

I argue that central banks attempt to build public trust in money and monetary governance through the strategic use of what I call a stability narrative, asserting that they can maintain the value of money, can maintain the security of money, represent the nation, and have grown increasingly professional and sophisticated over time. The talk explores the stability narrative by studying its expression in central bank museums. Museums tell stories; they distill, teach, and privilege the beliefs of their creators. As such, museums represent an excellent vehicle for understanding the ways in which central banks describe and promote their ability to govern money. The research is based on interviews and site visits at over 35 central bank museums and an original database that gathers and systematizes publicly available information on central bank museums worldwide.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Juliet Johnson‘s research focuses on the politics of money and identity. She is Professor of Political Science at McGill University, an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and former President of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She is the author of the award-winning Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World (Cornell 2016) and A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System (Cornell 2000), co-editor of Developments in Russian Politics 10 (Bloomsbury 2024) and Religion and Identity in Modern Russia: The Revival of Orthodoxy and Islam (Routledge 2005), and author of numerous scholarly and policy-oriented articles. She has been Lead Editor of Review of International Political Economy, Network Director of the Jean Monnet network Between the EU and Russia (BEAR), Advisory Council member at the Kennan Institute, Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She received McGill University’s President’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching, the David Thomson Award for Graduate Supervision and Teaching, the Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Faculty of Arts Award for Distinction in Research. She earned her PhD in Politics from Princeton University and her AB in International Relations from Stanford University.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Willliam J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

War is often a driver of macro-institutional change (Tilly 1975), and it has been suggested that the peculiar, partial, and incremental development of the institutions of the European Union have been due to the absence of major inter-state war in Europe post-1945 (Kelemen and McNamara 2022). The return of inter-state warfare to Europe allows us to examine the effect that heightened military threat and territorial revisionism has European political development. Contrary to some expectations that Europe might achieve greater unity and integration in response to a revived Russian external threat, I find that the ongoing war is driving institutional retrenchment of Europe along national lines for three reasons. First, the war has privileged newer, post-enlargement member states, whose governments and polities do not share the elite anti-nationalist principles that have underpinned the European project since the end of WWII. Second, the emerging re-armament of European states has privileged national actors and national systems of military procurement, with incentives counter to deeper European integration of armed forces and military procurement. Military assistance for Ukraine has primarily been provided through US-coordinated bilateralism rather than European multilateralism or supranationalism. Finally, the war itself has increased the salience of national identity and the normative appeal of nationalism in ways that work against European institutions and will likely put limits on deeper European integration even in an environment of greater military threat. These preliminary findings suggest that, as with other macro-institutional processes (e.g. state-building), existential threat interacts with identity variables to produce institutional outcomes.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Keith Darden (Stanford class of ’92) is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, Governance and Economics at the School of International Service at American University. His research focuses on nationalism, state-building, and the politics of Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia. His book manuscript, Resisting Occupation in Eurasia (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), explores the development of durable national loyalties through education and details how they explain over a century of regional patterns in voting, secession, and armed resistance in Ukraine, Europe, and Eurasia. His award-winning first book, Economic Liberalism and Its Rivals (Cambridge University Press, 2009) explored the formation of international economic institutions among the post-Soviet states, and explained why countries chose to join the Eurasian Customs Union, the WTO, or to eschew participation in any trade institutions. Prof. Darden is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press Book Series Problems of International Politics.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.