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.

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.

Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish turn, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, kosher vodka, and festivals of Jewish culture have become popular, while new museums, memorials, Jewish studies programs, and Holocaust research centers reflect soul-searching about Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. Poland's Jewish community is also undergoing a significant revival. Geneviève Zubrzycki examines these processes and asks what it means to try to bring Jewish culture back to life in a country where 3 million Jews were murdered and where only 10,000 now live. 

Drawing on a decade of participant-observation in Jewish and Jewish-related organizations in Poland, a Birthright trip to Israel with young Jewish Poles, and more than a hundred interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish Poles engaged in the Jewish turn, Zubrzycki's book Resurrecting the Jew presents an in-depth look at Jewish life in Poland today. She shows how the revival has been spurred by progressive Poles who want to break the association between Polishness and Catholicism and promote the idea of a multicultural Poland, exploring the limits of performative solidarity and empathetic forms of cultural appropriation.

Geneviève Zubrzycki is the William H. Sewell Jr. Collegiate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia, and the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies. A historical and cultural sociologist, she has published widely on nationalism and religion; collective memory, national mythology and the politics of commemoration; and visual culture and materiality. 

Geneviève is the author of the award-winning monographs The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago 2006), Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec (Chicago 2016), and Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism and Poland’s Jewish Revival (Princeton 2022), and the editor of National Matters: Materiality, Culture and Nationalism (Stanford 2017). In 2021 Zubrzycki was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and was awarded the Bronisław Malinowski Prize in the Social Sciences from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by February 8, 2024.

What explains education-based political divides? Jonne Kamphorst discusses how decreased interactions between higher and lower-educated citizens has widened the political divide between them

Across advanced democracies, education levels are predictive of immigration attitudes and voting for new left or far right parties. What explains education-based political divides? Existing scholarship holds that education causes progressive attitudes, or proposes that being higher educated and holding progressive attitudes can both be explained by socialization during someone’s childhood. This article puts forward an additional explanation. 

We argue that decreased interactions and relationship formation between higher and lower-educated citizens has widened the political divide between them. Using panel and survey data of strong ties, we demonstrate that higher (lower) educated ties make individuals more progressive (conservative). Education divides citizens by providing a distinct worldview for the higher-educated, which is reinforced in increasingly homogeneous education-based networks. Our findings suggest the further crystallization of a cleavage based on education, and highlight the importance of studying networks to understand political behavior.

Jonne Kamphorst is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence and a Senior Research Fellow at the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University. He completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the EUI in 2023. Before starting his Doctoral Degree, Jonne was a Master’s student in Politics and Sociology at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and obtained his Bachelor’s in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam. 

His research, positioned at the intersection between comparative politics and political behavior, explores the roots of political divides in advanced democracies and proposes strategies to bridge them. Two questions define his research agenda: 1) What are the origins of political divisions? And 2) how can democracy be strengthened by re-engaging citizens and building new coalitions of voters that bridge political divides? Jonne answers these questions leveraging quantitative scientific methods. His methodological expertise is in the design, conduct, and analysis of randomized field and survey experiments which he often employs in collaboration with political candidates and parties. He also uses quasi-experimental methods for causal inference. Jonne’s research has been accepted at or been revised and resubmitted to the Journal of Politics, American Political Science Review, and Comparative Political Studies, among other outlets.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by January 25, 2024.