Another turn to the right or more of the same?

Voters in the twenty-seven member states of the European Union head to the polls in early June to elect a new European Parliament for the next five years. Can we expect another victory for the populist right, as we have witnessed in so many recent elections throughout the world? In this talk we discuss the balance of power and policy achievements of the outgoing Parliament, and look ahead at the results we can expect in June. We further consider the implications of the widely expected sharp turn to the right for the functioning of the Parliament and EU policy making. 

Christophe Crombez is a political economist who specializes in European Union (EU) politics and business-government relations in Europe. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, lobbying, party politics, and parliamentary government. 

Crombez is Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (since 1999). He is also Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium (since 1994). Crombez obtained a B.A. in Applied Economics, Finance, from KU Leuven, and a Ph.D. in Business, Political Economics, from Stanford University.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by May 2, 2024.

Ukraine's EU accession depends greatly on success in tackling corruption. Since 2014, Ukraine has built an extensive anticorruption institutional architecture, which has produced significant policy outcomes, but perception indices still show Ukraine as trailing most other European countries. This article summarizes Ukraine’s post-Euromaidan anticorruption reforms in the context of similar reforms pursued by other post-Communist EU candidate states pre-accession. The article then examines Ukraine’s corruption perceptions’ indices trajectory in comparative terms and wades into the debate over whether different types of perception indices proxy well for corruption incidence. The comparative look suggests that Ukraine is better prepared for EU accession in terms of control of corruption than is widely assumed.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Maria Popova is an Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and Scientific Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal. She also serves as Editor of the Cambridge Elements Series on Politics and Society from Central Europe to Central Asia. Her work explores the rule of law and democracy in Eastern Europe. Her first book, Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies, which won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies book prize in 2013, examines the weaponization of law to manipulate elections and control the media in Russia and Ukraine. Her recent articles have focused on judicial and anticorruption reform in post-Maidan Ukraine, the politics of anticorruption campaigns in Eastern Europe, conspiracies, and illiberalism. Her new book with Oxana Shevel on the roots of the Russo-Ukrainian war entitled Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States is now available from Polity Press.

What drives Russia's violence in and against Ukraine from the 19th century to 2024?

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the single most important event in Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is also arguably the major global geopolitical development since 9/11. My main argument is that violence and repression are deeply rooted in the history of Russo-Ukrainian relations. Since the mid-19th century, dominating Ukraine and denying Ukrainians an independent identity, let alone a state, has been the cornerstone of Imperial, Soviet and eventually, post-Soviet Russian policies.

More specifically, I show that Russian and Soviet policies were driven by two factors: identity and security. The idea of the shared origin and fraternity of Russians and Ukrainians is a staple of Russian self-perception and historiography. The second key factor is security. Western powers often passed through Ukraine to attack Russia; Ukraine’s fertile soil was crucial to feeding and funding the Russian and Soviet Empires. Even more than geopolitics, it was regime stability that drove Moscow and St. Petersburg’s obsessive focus on Ukraine. Nothing scares a Russian autocrat more than a democratic Ukraine, because if Ukrainians can build a democracy, then the supposedly fraternal Russian people might too. Thus, combined, identity, security, and the interaction between the two drive Russia’s policies towards Ukraine since the 19th century.

Eugene Finkel is the Kenneth H. Keller Associate Professor of International Affairs, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on how institutions and individuals respond to extreme situations: mass violence, state collapse, and rapid change.

Finkel's most recent book is Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024). He is also the author of Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017), Reform and Rebellion in Weak States (Cambridge University Press, 2020, co-authored with Scott Gehlbach) and Bread and Autocracy: Food, Politics and Security in Putin’s Russia (Oxford University Press, 2023, co-authored with Janetta Azarieva and Yitzhak M. Brudny). His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, East European Politics and Societies, Slavic Review, and several other journals and edited volumes. Finkel has also published articles and op-eds in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Spectator and other outlets.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by April 11, 2024.

How do parliamentary norms break down?

How does the presence of extremist parties in parliaments modify parliamentary norms? In this talk, I draw on two recent papers to examine the responses of mainstream politicians to the disruptive strategies of extremist legislators. A first study will examine the dynamics of parliamentary erosion during the Weimar parliament. Using a novel dataset of all calls-to-order, I document the existence of a cycle of provocation-counter provocation that led to the erosion of parliamentary norms in the last years of the Weimar Republic. 

A second paper (co-authored with Qixuan Yang) studies informal interactions in the contemporary German Bundestag during the period between 2017 and 2021. Using a novel dataset of over 25,000 parliamentary speeches, we document a significant erosion of parliamentary norms, as measured by an increase in the number of verbal and nonverbal interruptions. Both legislators from mainstream and extremist parties contribute to this erosion of parliamentary norms. We argue that legislators from mainstream parties use informal attacks on legislators from non-proximate extremist parties to appeal to voters on their extremes and signal a more extreme policy position. We show that the incentives of legislators from mainstream parties to engage in these informal attacks on extremist legislators can be explained by partisan and district-level conditions.

Isabela Mares is the Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She specializes in the comparative politics of Europe. Professor Mares has written extensively on labor market and social policy reforms, the political economy of taxation, electoral clientelism, reforms limiting electoral corruption. Her current research examines the political responses to antiparliamentarism in both contemporary and historical settings.

Professor Mares is the author of five books. These include The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003), Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006), From Open Secrets to Secret Voting (New York: Cambridge University Press 2015), Conditionality and Coercion: Electoral clientelism in Eastern Europe (co-authored with Lauren Young, Oxford University Press 2018) and Protecting the Ballot: How First Wave Democracies Ended Electoral Corruption (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2022)."

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by May 16, 2024.

Why are far-right movements on the rise virtually everywhere in Europe? Which implications could this have for US interests overseas?

Capitalizing on various forms of societal distress, far-right groups have been on the rise in virtually every European country. But why is Europe witnessing such a resurgence? How are these Neo-Fascist, Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups organized? What are their main narratives and how may these impact US interests in the region? Which courses of action should Washington and its continental allies undertake to counter the phenomenon in question?

Michele Groppi is lecturer in Defense Studies at the Defense Academy of the UK, where he coordinates the Policy and Strategy Module. Member of the Institute of Directors, Michele is the founder and president of ITSS Verona, an international association dedicated to the study of security. A former varsity athlete, Michele has a BA in IR from Stanford (Honors), an MA in Counter-terrorism and Homeland Security from the IDC, and a PhD in Defence Studies from King's College London. Specializing in terrorism, extremism, and radicalization, Michele has authored various peer-reviewed pieces and regularly appears on international media outlets.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by April 18, 2024.

Chewing gum is neither food nor medicine, but it was administered to American troops as a drug substitute during the two world wars of the 20th century. Journalists and marketing strategists at the time referred to chewing gum as "fuel for fighters,” and the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps classified it as "ammunition" on the supply list. Moreover, Army officials found that providing drinking water, especially on the front lines, was costly and time-consuming, and so chewing gum became a cheap and an effective thirst quencher -- and an indispensable item in the American soldier’s kit.

Without the Caste War (1847-1915) in southeastern Mexico, chewing gum would not have become a wartime supply or a mass-market product: The Maya of the Yucatan rainforest (or Cruzobs, as they were called) resisted the feudal laws of indentured servitude and retreated into the Yucatan rainforest to defy Hispanic landowners. There they extracted chicel from wild trees and smuggled this raw material for chewing gum across the border into Belize in exchange for ammunition. This allowed them to defend themselves for nearly 50 years.

Chicle was eventually mass-produced in the United States via Central America. Then, as American troops fanned out from Europe to Asia after World War I and World War II, they distributed chewing gum to civilian populations as a gesture of friendship, paving the way for Wrigley, today's global leader in chewing gum.

This research offers an innovative window into the complex global connections between chewing gum and war, linking fragmented local and national histories to a global picture.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and partially funded by Stanford Global Studies’ Oceanic Imaginaries

Martina Kaller is a professor of global history with a background in Latin American studies and is currently a Visiting Scholar at FSI. She has researched in Mexico, Guatemala, the United States, and several European countries. As a guest professor, Kaller has taught at Stanford University (Austrian chair), Sorbonne, and Science Po, Paris. She served for two decades on the board of and later as head of an EU-funded international Master’s program in Global Studies and five years as the president of the permanent committee of the International Congress of Americanists (ICA). Her primary research focuses are on global food history and the History of Latin America 19/20th century. She has worked extensively on the history of international development with particular attention to Mexico and Central America (two books and 27 journal and book contributions). 

Kaller (Dr. Habil) is an Associate Professor of Modern History at the Department of of History at the University of Vienna. She has various ongoing research projects on global food history and the long-term impact of political and economic autonomy of indigenous people, comparing cases in Latin America, Europe, and Canada. Her books and book chapters have been published or are forthcoming at Palgrave McMillan, Routledge, Global South Press, Bloomsbury, et al.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by February 15, 2024.

Event Details: The Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is proud to present:

“How Multiracial Identity Shapes Citizenship“, part of the 1891 Lectures in the Humanities. Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor in Feminist and Gender Studies, Rachel Jean-Baptiste will be speaking on her book Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa, (Cambridge UP, 2023).

Please join us for what will be a lively and eventful talk at the Stanford Humanities Center on February 26th, 2024 at 4:30 PM PST at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center.

There will be a reception to follow! We encourage you to RSVP with this form for logistics and planning purposes by February 19th! RSVP’s are encouraged but not required!

This event is sponsored by The Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and is cosponsored by Stanford Humanities Center, Department of African & African American Studies, Center for African Studies, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and The Europe Center Freeman Spogli Institute Stanford Global Studies.

More about the author and book: 

Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa is a groundbreaking history of EurAfricans or métis, people of African and European parentage, and how their conceptions of racial identity shaped notions of citizenship and childhood in Africa and Europe. Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted – mainly between African women and European men – and resulted in the births of thousands of children in West and Equatorial Africa. Drawing on public and private archives, photos, and oral history research in Senegal, France, Gabon, Germany, and Congo Jean-Baptiste traces the little-explored history of francophone métis. Crucially, this history analyzes how multiracial people made claims to access French social and citizenship rights amidst the refusal by European fathers to recognize their children and in the context of changing racial thought and practice in varied African societies. In this innovative and transcontinental history of race-making, belonging, and family Jean-Baptiste reveals the complexities and interconnected nature of identity-making in Africa and Europe. 

Do citizens' perceptions of parties' multidimensional issue positions shape partisanship? Dassonneville, Fournier and Somer-Topcu use survey data from 11 countries to study this question.

There is a growing consensus in the field of party politics that new political fault lines are emerging and scholars increasingly characterize party competition as multidimensional. However, the level and nature of change differ widely between countries, resulting in variation in the extent to which new ideological dimensions structure oppositions between parties, and important differences in the extent to which new fault lines cross-cut existing ideological oppositions. It has been argued that such differences are important, because the cross-cuttingness of parties’ positions on different ideological dimensions determines the clarity of parties’ brands and in this way shapes party attachments (Dassonneville, Fournier and Somer-Topcu 2022). 

Most of what we know about the connection between parties’ position, brand clarity and partisanship relies on expert- or manifesto-based estimates of the positions that parties take, forcing scholars to assume that voters are perfectly informed about parties’ positions on multiple dimensions and about the oppositions between parties. To address this limitation, we rely on an original data collection of surveys in 11 countries in which we asked respondents to position parties on six different issues, capturing economic, social, and cultural divisions. Our design allows connecting citizens’ perceptions of the space of party competition in their country to their views about the clarity of parties’ ideological brands and measures of partisanship. Using this novel dataset, we provide unique individual-level insights into the ways in which party positions and the restructuring of party competition shape party attachments.

Ruth Dassonneville is an Associate Professor in the political science department at the Université de Montréal, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Electoral Democracy.

Her research interests include electoral behaviour, dealignment, economic voting, compulsory voting, and women and politics. Her work on these topics has been published in, amongst others, the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research and the Journal of Politics. In 2023, she published Voters Under Pressure with Oxford University Press.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by February 29, 2024.