Please note: the start time for this event has been moved from 3:00 to 3:15pm.

Join FSI Director Michael McFaul in conversation with Richard Stengel, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. They will address the role of entrepreneurship in creating stable, prosperous societies around the world.

Andreas Wiedemann is an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. He studies economic inequality, redistributive politics, and political behavior in rich democracies.

His book, Indebted Societies: Credit and Welfare in Rich Democracies (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics), examines the political causes behind the rise of credit as a private alternative to the welfare state and the political consequences for economic insecurity and social solidarity. Indebted Societies won the William H. Riker Book Award and the Best Book on Class and Inequality Award, both from the American Political Science Association.

Wiedemann’s other work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and the Journal of Politics, among others.

He is currently working on the affordability crisis in housing markets and a new book project about spatial inequalities and democratic politics across rich democracies.

Soledad Artiz Prillaman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research lies at the intersections of comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus in South Asia. Specifically, her research addresses questions such as: What are the political consequences of development and development policies, particularly for women’s political behavior? How are minorities, specifically women, democratically represented and where do inequalities in political engagement persist and how are voter demands translated into policy and governance? In answering these questions, she utilizes mixed methods, including field experiments, surveys, and in-depth qualitative fieldwork. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2017 and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Texas A&M University in 2011.

Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and was previously a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.

Alex’s work focuses on political parties and group identity in Western Europe, in macro-historical perspective. A core theme of her research is understanding how different patterns of political and social organization combine to shape the ‘arena’ of electoral politics and the opportunity space for new competitors.

In her ongoing book project, Alex studies the different ways in which outsider parties articulate group identities and invoke narratives of social conflict in order to gain a foothold in electoral competition. Empirically, the project employs a mixed-methods approach — including qualitative case studies and quantitative text analysis — to compare processes of party-building and entry across five distinct ‘episodes’ of party formation in Western Europe: early twentieth-century socialists, interwar fascists, green and ethno-regionalist parties in the post-war period, and the contemporary far right.

What visions of neutrality did the Kremlin promote in the Cold War and how has the Russian perception of neutrality changed today?

While Russian aggression against Ukraine has prompted Finland and Sweden to abandon their neutral status and to join NATO, some smaller European states continue to uphold their neutral status. Paying special attention to the Austrian case, the talk will analyze various national traditions of neutral policies in the Cold War and their connection to the Soviet theory of neutrality. It will argue that the ups and downs that linked Soviet relations with neutrals to East-West tension have been replaced by different patterns of Russian behavior.

This event is co-sponsored by Department of German Studies, Department of History, CREEES Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford Global Studies

Wolfgang Mueller is Professor of Russian History at the University of Vienna and a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has been a visiting fellow at the Universities of Nice and Bern, at Stanford University, and at the Russian Academy of Sciences. His books include Die sowjetische Besatzung in Österreich 1945–1955 (2005); A Good Example of Peaceful Coexistence? The Soviet Union, Austria, and Neutrality, 1955–1991 (2011); The Revolutions of 1989 (ed. with A. Suppan and M. Gehler 2014); and A Cold War over Austria (with G. Stourzh 2018).

Thomas Olechowski, The Europe Center's Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair, discusses the Austrian-born legal scholar Hans Kelsen, who emigrated to the USA in 1940.

Hans Kelsen (1881-1973), Austria's ‘Founding Constitutional Father’, is still regarded as one of the world's most important legal scholars of the 20th century. His works have been translated into more than 30 languages. Kelsen was one of the most outspoken defenders of democracy and was therefore one of the first professors in Germany to lose his chair in 1933.

In 1940, Kelsen emigrated to the USA and taught first at Harvard and then at Berkeley, where he remained until the end of his life. However, it was here of all places that his teachings on legal theory met with rejection - in stark contrast to Latin America, where they still find enthusiastic supporters today.

Thomas Olechowski holds a chair for Austrian and European Legal History at the University of Vienna, and is managing director of the "Hans Kelsen-Institute", a foundation of the Austrian federal government. In 2020, he wrote a comprehensive biography on Hans Kelsen. In 2025, Olechowski holds the Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair at The Europe Center at Stanford University.

When do imperialism and authoritarianism have long-term political effects? Jan Vogler presents a theoretical framework to answer this question.

The suppression of local self-government is a common feature of imperial rule and centralized authoritarianism. Extant scholarship considers such interventions to be potentially legacy-producing. But under which circumstances do these denials of political autonomy lead to sustained changes in political behavior? We develop a novel framework that elucidates when suppression of local self-rule will or will not produce political legacies. Two factors are crucial: the duration of an intervention and the scope of repression. Enduring interventions characterized by encompassing repression are the most likely to generate persistent changes. Contrariwise, transient episodes characterized by limited repressiveness are unlikely to produce legacies. 

Given our theory's broad character, we conduct empirical analyses in two markedly different settings: Poland, which was split between three major empires, and Brazil, where a military regime installed appointed mayors in certain cities. Our results demonstrate that the suppression of local self-government has varying potential to create legacies.

Jan Vogler is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University. He previously held a position as an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science at the University of Konstanz. His research covers a wide range of topics, including the organization of public bureaucracies, various forms of political and economic competition (in domestic and international settings), historical legacies, structures and perceptions of the EU, and the determinants of democracy and authoritarianism.

Despite its early experiment with manhood suffrage, France was among the last countries in Europe to extend voting rights to women. This talk offers a new parsimonious explanation of French exceptionalism, one that highlights how World War I and its massive death toll contributed to women’s exclusion from politics.

Despite its early experiment with universal manhood suffrage, France was among the last countries in Europe to extend voting rights to women. Existing accounts of this French exceptionalism point to the key role of a group of legislators, the Radicals, who blocked suffrage extension because they believed women would vote for pro-Church parties, undermining Radicals’ vote share and reversing the political victories against the Catholic Church. This account emphasizes legislators’ expected loss under new institutional rules, assuming a pro-Church bias among women. 

In contrast, we emphasize legislators’ expected loss absent a change to the institutional status quo. Doing so highlights the connection between support for women’s suffrage and support for proportional representation, especially among legislators facing electoral loss under existing electoral rules. Not only does our argument better explain legislators’ voting patterns in both the upper and lower chambers, it also highlights how World War I and its massive death toll contributed to women’s exclusion from politics.

Charlotte Cavaille is an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Charlotte’s research examines the dynamics of attitudes towards redistributive social policies at a time of rising inequality, fiscal stress, and high levels of immigration. Building on that work, Charlotte also studies the relationship between immigration, the welfare state, and the rise of populism in Western Europe.