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.

Why has the EU - which professes to be a Union of democracies committed to rule of law values - allowed autocratic regimes to emerge in its midst? Can the EU escape the autocracy trap it has created for itself?

The European Union has long presented itself as a Union of democratic states based on the rule of law and other common democratic values. Recent EU initiatives designed to defend democracy in the Union - like the Democracy Shield - depict the threats as mostly external, stemming from dangers like foreign election interference. However, the greatest threats to democratic values in the EU - and indeed to the functioning of the Union itself - stem not from external threats, but from the rise of autocratic member state governments such as Hungary’s.  The EU’s failure to stem the rise of autocratic member governments poisons the European Union from within. Using the metaphor of the "Upside Down" from the Netflix series Stranger Things, this talk explores the phenomenon of democratic backsliding as a parasitic dimension growing within the very fabric of the Union. This parasitic, upside down dimension draws on the rightside-up, democratic EU’s resources in an effort to dismantle and supplant it.

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).

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.