The Europe Center is jointly housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Global Studies Division.
Why did rural areas recover from the great recession much more slowly than metropolitan areas? Due to declining tax revenues and intergovernmental aid, employment in the American local government sector fell substantially after the great recession. Cuts to local public employment were especially large, long-lasting and consequential in rural areas, which have become relatively dependent on public-sector employment and intergovernmental transfers. The public sector is relatively inconsequential in urban America, but in many rural places, a decade after the great recession, the public sector was the slowest category of employment to recover and the leading source of long-term job losses.
The European Parliament elections that took place last June, recent legislative elections in France and other EU member states, and regional elections in Germany, have led to big gains for far-right parties throughout Europe. In this talk we discuss the recent election results and their implications for democracy in Europe. Will we witness a rightward shift in EU and member state policies, in such policy areas as immigration and the environment? Will the rise of the far right enable it to slow down or even bring to a halt EU policy-making and further integration? Will more member states follow Hungary's path and move away from democracy toward authoritarianism?
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 September 29, 2024.
William J. Perry Conference Room
Encina Hall, Second Floor, 616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
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 teaches Introduction to European Studies and The Future of the EU in Stanford’s International Relations Program, and is responsible for the Minor in European Studies and the Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe.
Furthermore, Crombez is Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium (since 1994). His teaching responsibilities in Leuven include Political Business Strategy and Applied Game Theory. He is Vice-Chair for Research at the Department for Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation.
Crombez has also held visiting positions at the following universities and research institutes: the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, in Florence, Italy, in Spring 2008; the Department of Political Science at the University of Florence, Italy, in Spring 2004; the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, in Winter 2003; the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, Illinois, in Spring 1998; the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Summer 1998; the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in Spring 1997; the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in Spring 1996; and Leti University in St. Petersburg, Russia, in Fall 1995.
Crombez obtained a B.A. in Applied Economics, Finance, from KU Leuven in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Business, Political Economics, from Stanford University in 1994.
Piotr Jabkowski is associate professor of sociology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (Poland) and member of the European Social Survey Sampling and Weighting Expert Panel. At the Adam Mickiewicz University, he teaches statistics, advanced quantitative methods and survey methodology to undergraduate and postgraduate students. His research and publications focus on sample quality in cross-country comparative surveys, the total error paradigm and sampling theory.
Mariusz Baranowski, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (Poland), Faculty of Sociology, Department of Sociology of Social Stratification, and chairman of Sociological Committee within the Poznan Society of Friends of Arts and Sciences. Doctor of Economic Sociology and MA in Sociology (Adam Mickiewicz University), Philosophy (Adam Mickiewicz University) and postgraduate diploma in Human Resource Management (Economic Development Agency).
Baranowski's research work is focused on economic sociology, social inequality, welfare state and environmental issues.
Lukas Herndl is a post doc researcher at the Faculty of Law of the University of Vienna, Austria. He received a PhD from the University of Vienna and an LL.M. degree from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law ('19).
Lukas has a wide-ranging teaching background in academia and published articles in diverse fields of private law. His current research focuses on banking law, particularly exploring its ESG dimensions (“Green Finance”). At Stanford, he pursues a research project on subordination agreements in financing contracts under US law and European legal systems.
Yoshiko Herrera considers the relationship between national or imperial identities and conflict using the case of Russia’s war on Ukraine
One of the challenges for International Relations theory that has been brought up by Russia’s war on Ukraine is that we need to do a better job of understanding the role of identity in conflict and political violence. Identity is not the only factor in the causes of the war, and changes in identities are not the only, nor most important consequences, but for theories of war, the Russian invasion and war in Ukraine forces us take another look at how we understand the relationship between identity and conflict. In this paper I map out a theoretical framework for identity and conflict, and then I discuss relevant aspect of identity in both Ukraine and Russia, with an emphasis on how identities might have contributed to the war and been changed as a consequence.
Yoshiko M. Herrera is Professor of Political Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on Russian & Eurasian politics, identity, and political economy. Herrera teaches courses on comparative politics, social identities and diversity, and a new course on the Russian war on Ukraine. In 2021, she was a recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award at UW-Madison. Her most recent article (with Andrew Kydd) is “Don't look back in anger: cooperation despite conflicting historical narratives” published in the American Political Science Review.
The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.
REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.
Bryn Rosenfeld discusses how citizens approach political risks in repressive environments like Putin’s Russia
In nondemocracies, such varied political acts as protest participation, voting for the opposition and abstaining from supporting regime candidates entail risks. Yet citizens' attitudes toward risk-taking have seldom been studied directly in authoritarian settings. This talk considers how citizens’ attitudes toward risk shape political participation under authoritarian rule. It proposes a theory of how affective factors interact with an individual’s baseline tolerance for risk to explain risky political behavior—even when the strong organizational ties emphasized by exiting literature on high-risk participation are absent. I test this argument using survey data from Russia on expressions of regime support (and evasive responding), voting behavior (including non-voting and opposition voting); and a survey experiment on willingness to protest after regime repression. This research on which this talk is based is the first to benchmark the predictive power of risk attitudes relative to other known determinates of regime support and voting in an autocracy. It also contributes to our understanding of how ordinary citizens in repressive environments overcome their baseline aversion to political risk-taking.
Bryn Rosenfeld is an Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University and a co-Principal Investigator of the Russian Election Study, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Her research interests include comparative political behavior, with a focus on regime preferences and voter behavior in nondemocratic systems, development and democratization, protest, post-communist politics, and survey methodology. Her first book, The Autocratic Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2021), explains how middle-class economic dependence on the state impedes democratization and contributes to authoritarian resilience. It won the 2022 Best Book award from the APSA's Democracy & Autocracy section, the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize for outstanding publication on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and an Honorable Mention for the APSA's William H. Riker award for best book in political economy. She is also the recipient of a Frances Rosenbluth best paper prize, as well as a Best Article Award honorable mention and Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation, both by the APSA's Democracy & Autocracy section. Her articles appear in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Sociological Methods & Research, among other outlets. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California and a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She is also a former editor of The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and has worked for the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Opinion Research, where she designed and analyzed studies of public opinion in the former Soviet Union. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.
*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by November 7, 2024.
The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.
REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.
Philippines Conference Room
Encina Hall, Third Floor, 616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Prof. Dr. Thomas Olechowski holds a chair for Austrian and European Legal History at the University of Vienna, where he heads the Legal Sources Research Center. He is a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and is chair of its Commission for Austrian Legal History. He is also managing director of the Hans Kelsen Institute, a foundation set up by the Austrian Federal Government.
Olechowski has authored or co-authored six monographs and well over a hundred academic articles. His most important areas of research are the life and work of the Austro-American legal philosopher Hans Kelsen, the Austrian constitutional history of the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of constitutional justice and administrative justice, and the Paris Peace Treaties 1919/20. Olechowski has taught regularly in Vienna and Bratislava (Slovakia). He gave lectures in Austria as well as in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, and Uruguay.
At Stanford, he will teach Fundamentals of European Constitutional History in Winter Quarter 2025.
The starting point for many analyses of European state development is the historical fragmentation of territorial authority. The dominant bellicist explanation for state formation argues that this fragmentation was an unintended consequence of imperial collapse, and that warfare in the early modern era overcame fragmentation by winnowing out small polities and consolidating strong states. Using new data on papal conflict and religious institutions, I show instead that political fragmentation was the outcome of deliberate choices, that it is closely associated with papal conflict, and that political fragmentation persisted for longer than the bellicist explanations would predict. The medieval Catholic Church deliberately and effectively splintered political power in Europe by forming temporal alliances, funding proxy wars, launching crusades, and advancing ideology to ensure its autonomy and power. The roots of European state formation are thus more religious, older, and intentional than often assumed.
Awarded the Best Article Prize by the Comparative Politics section of the American Political Science Association in June 2024.
Awarded the Heinz I. Eulau Award for Best Article Published in American Political Science Review in July 2025.