A wealth of recent political science research focuses on how media consolidation under state rule can exacerbate democratic erosion, among other things by limiting access to narratives that counter the government's viewpoint. Hungary is one of the most frequently cited examples of this corrosive media effect. We disagree with the corrosion hypothesis, and seek to test the individual-level effects of providing information that counters the government narrative through a survey experiment. This lecture will describe the problem, our proposal, and what we expect to discover.

Jason Wittenberg is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. A former Academy Scholar at Harvard University, he has been a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, and a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. Professor Wittenberg’s broad area of focus is the politics and history of Eastern Europe. He has published widely on topics including electoral behavior, ethnic and religious violence, historical legacies, and empirical research methods. His first book, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary (Cambridge, 2006), won the 2009 Hubert Morken award for the best political science book published on religion and politics. He is the co-author, most recently, of Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell, 2018), winner of the 2019 Bronislaw Malinowski Award in the Social Sciences. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current projects explore liberal democratic erosion and the logic of historical persistence.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by March 2, 2023.

For the past few decades political scientists of electoral politics in Europe have focused on the emergence of 'left-libertarian' values in the European electorate, particularly amongst younger voters. What has largely been ignored, though, is the growing size of voters in many countries who have 'right-libertarian' values. Using European Social Survey data, I estimate the change in the size of this proportion of the electorate across time and across country. I also find these voters with these values tend to be younger, more highly educated, and employed in the private sector. I also look at their vote-choice, and find that they are increasingly pivotal, as they switch their votes away from mainstream centre-right parties to Liberal, Green and even Social Democratic parties.

Simon Hix is the Stein Rokkan Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute, in Florence, Italy. Before taking up this position in September 2021, he was the Harold Laski Professor of Political Science and the Pro-Director (Vice President) for Research at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Simon is a leading researcher, teacher, and commentator on comparative European and EU politics, and his research has focused on comparative democratic institutions, voting and party behaviour, and legislative behaviour. Simon also has extensive experience of consulting policy-makers and parties on electoral system and parliamentary reforms and party strategies.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by March 30, 2023.

Voter-endorsed challenges to international institutions present a growing problem for international cooperation. This talk discusses the challenges that unilateral, voter-endorsed attempts by one member state to withdraw from or renegotiate the terms of existing international institutions create for the institution’s other member states. It argues that such voter-endorsed “cooperation challenges” tend to reverberate abroad: First, they influence public and elite views about the merits of the international institution and thus can create contagion effects, but can also have stabilizing effects depending on how the they highlight the risks and opportunities associated with exit and renegotiation. Second, the loss of, or change in the distribution of, cooperation gains can have considerable effects on the institutions’ other member states.

Finally, these reverberations abroad influence how member states respond to unilateral voter-endorsed “cooperation challenges.” Drawing on comparative case studies of a diverse set of voter-endorsed challenges to international institutions and on survey evidence from the EU-27 as well as a panel of Swiss respondents, the talk shows that this framework can help us better understand the (non-)existence of contagion effects across member states, variation in the responses of the remaining member states to voter-endorsed challenges to international institutions, and the ultimate outcomes of such cooperation challenges.

Stefanie Walter is Full Professor for International Relations and Political Economy at the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich. Her research examines distributional conflicts, political preferences and economic policy outcomes related to globalization, European integration, and financial crises. Current projects examine the backlash against globalization, and challenges to international cooperation.

Stefanie Walter’s work has been published in journals such as the Annual Review of Political Science, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and International Organization. She is the author of “Financial Crises and the Politics of Macroeconomic Adjustments” (2013, Cambridge University Press) and co-author of “The Politics of Bad Options” (2020, Oxford University Press).

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by January 12, 2023.

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This conference focuses on medieval women married to or living with priests, with the goal of restoring priests’ wives to scholarship on gender, spirituality, family life, and the church, particularly in western Europe. Speakers will explore the lives and circumstances of priests’ women, the sources that can reveal or shed light on their status or experiences, and the various roles—social as well as cultural—that they played within the family, their local communities, and the church more broadly.  More information about the project can be found here. 

Organized by the Department of History with generous funding from France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. Cosponsored by Department of Religious Studies, Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Language, and The Europe Center.