The Europe Center is jointly housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Global Studies Division.
FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.
The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.
Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.
Mark Blyth is the William R. Rhodes ’57 Professor of International Economics at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Blyth graduated Strathclyde University in 1990 and then finished his PhD. in political science at Columbia University in 1999. He then joined the Johns Hopkins University before moving to Brown University in 2009.
Blyth’s research spans several areas. The first focuses on the power of economic ideas as seen in his recent award winning book, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford University Press 2015), which has been translated into 16 languages. He has written extensively on the political economy of Europe, as seen in his recent book, The Future of the Euro (New York: Oxford University Press 2015). His most recent book is Angrynomics (Columbia University Press 2020 - with Eric Lonergan), which deals with the economics underlying the current populist moment. He is currently working on a new joint project on the New Politics of Growth and Stagnation.
Blyth is a regular contributor to the journal of the Council for Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs and he contributes to several Podcasts, including the Financial Times Alphaville podcast.
Co-sponsored by the Global Populisms Project.
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Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself.
FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.
Populist radical right parties are more successful in some areas than others. However, when trying to explain geographical patterns of support for the populist radical right, similar outcomes in otherwise different contexts and different outcomes in otherwise similar contexts can be observed. In this paper, we show that this paradox can be understood when we examine how citizens are affected differently by the context in which they live. Using a unique dataset containing geocoded survey data and contextual data from four countries (DE, FR, NL and UK), we demonstrate that mediating and moderating variables, such a perceptions of local decline and education level shape the relationship between contextual development such as the increasing presence of immigrants, on the one hand, and populist and nativism attitudes and PRR support, on the other hand.
A draft copy of this research paper may be downloaded by using the link provided below under "Event Materials".
Sarah L. de Lange is Professor by special appointment at the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, where she holds the Dr. J.M. Den Uyl chair. Her research interests include societal cleavages, political parties, and extremism, populism, and radicalism. Her recent research projects focus on the emergence of new political oppositions in Europe on that basis of, amongst others, geographical, generational, and educational divides. She has recently concluded the collaborative international project Sub-National Context and Radical Right Support in Europe (supported by an ORA grant) and is currently co-directing the research project Generational Differences in Determinants of Party Choice (supported by an NWO grant). Her co-edited volume Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Into the Mainstream?, which appeared with Routledge in 2016, analyses the extent to which radical right-wing populist parties have become part of mainstream politics, as well as the factors and conditions which facilitate this trend.
Co-Sponsored by the Global Populisms Project.
Online via Zoom: REGISTER
Online via Zoom
In this live webinar, Torin Jones (Stanford) will speak with Camilla Hawthorne (UC Santa Cruz) and Angelica Pesarini (NYU Florence) about the Black Lives Matter movement in Italy, focusing on ethnographic methods and ongoing questions related to the histories of Italian colonialism, immigration, and the Black Mediterranean.
ADMISSION: FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. RSVP: https://stanforduniversity.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9FYoKW3Iu8RGq4l
Co-sponsored by The Center for Global Ethnography, the Department of Anthropology, and The Europe Center.
Zoom Webinar
Does additional shareholder liability reduce bank failure? We compare the performance of around 4,400 state-regulated banks of similar size in neighboring U.S. states with different liability regimes during the Great Depression. We find that additional shareholder liability reduced bank failure by 30%. Results are robust to a diff-in-diff analysis incorporating National banks (which faced the same regulations in every state), and are not driven by other differences in state regulation, FED membership, or differential selection into state and nationally regulated banks. Our results suggest that exposing shareholders to more downside risk reduces bank risk taking.
We develop a model of financial crises with both a financial amplification mechanism, via frictional intermediation, and a role for sentiment, via time-varying beliefs about an illiquidity state. We confront the model with data on credit spreads, equity prices, credit, and output across the financial crisis cycle. In particular, we ask the model to match data on the frothy pre-crisis behavior of asset markets and credit, the sharp transition to a crisis where asset values fall, disintermediation occurs and output falls, and the post-crisis period characterized by a slow recovery in output. We find that a pure amplification mechanism quantitatively matches the crisis and aftermath period but fails to match the pre-crisis evidence. Mixing sentiment and amplification allows the model to additionally match the pre-crisis evidence. We consider two versions of sentiment, a Bayesian belief updating process and one that overweighs recent observations. We find that both models match the crisis patterns qualitatively, generating froth pre-crisis, non-linear behavior in the crisis, and slow recovery. The non-Bayesian model improves quantitatively on the Bayesian model in matching the extent of the pre-crisis froth.
Conjoint experiments enjoy increasing popularity in political and social science, but there is a paucity of research on respondents' underlying decision-making processes. We leverage eye-tracking methodology and a conjoint experiment, administered to a subject pool consisting of university students and local community members, to examine how respondents process information when completing conjoint surveys. Our study has two main findings. First, we find a positive correlation between attribute importance measures inferred from the stated choice data and attribute importance measures based on eye movement. This validation test supports the interpretation of common conjoint metrics, such as Average Marginal Component Effects and marginal R^2 values, as valid measures of attribute importance. Second, when we experimentally increase the number of attributes and profiles in the conjoint table, respondents on average view a larger absolute number of cells but a smaller fraction of the total cells displayed, and the patterns in which they search between cells change conditionally. At the same time, however, their stated choices remain remarkably stable. This overall pattern speaks to the robustness of conjoint experiments and is consistent with a bounded rationality mechanism. Respondents can adapt to complexity by selectively incorporating relevant new information to focus on the important attributes, while ignoring less relevant information to reduce the cognitive processing costs. Together, our results have implications for both the design and interpretation of conjoint experiments.
