Six years after the people of Catalonia exercised their right to self-determination, the Catalan challenge still keeps the Spanish institutions in a gridlock, posing a major challenge to the democratic principles of the European Union.

It has been six years since the people of Catalonia exercised their right to self-determination in a referendum of independence, despite Spain’s attempt at stopping it with riot police. Spain has so far blocked the implementation of the democratic decision of Catalans by means of a combination of human rights abuse and political manipulation, and thanks to the complicit approval of the EU institutions. Nevertheless, Catalan self-determination remains the main hurdle that chokes Spanish institutions, and hence poses a major challenge to the democratic principles and practices of the European Union. I will provide background and review the recent political developments and possible future developments of the Catalan case, contextualizing it in the discussions regarding the principle and practices of self-determination. 

Clara Ponsatí is a Member of the European Parliament since February 2020, where she serves in the Industry Technology Reserach and Energy and Economics and Monetary Affairs Committees. From July 2017 until November 2017 she served as Minister of Education in the Catalan Government under President Carles Puigdemont. Prior to entering politics, Ponsatí was an economics professor. She was Chair of Economics at the School of Economics and Finance at the University of St Andrews, where she served as head of the school from 2015 to 2017. Before joining St Andrews she was Research Professor at the Institute for Economic Analysis (CSIC) where she served as director from 2006 to 2012. 

Previously, Ponsatí taught at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. She has had visiting appointments at Georgetown University, the University of California at San Diego, and the University of Toronto. Professor Ponsatí is a specialist in Game Theory and Public Economics, with interest in negotiations, bargaining, and voting. She has worked extensively on strategy, collective decisions, taxes and redistribution, with a distinguished publication record. She has worked on fiscal federalism and has advised the Catalan government on budgetary and tax affairs. Her research explores the links between group formation and majoritarian institutions, to understand the causes and effects of meritocracy and egalitarianism in the performance and stability of democratic organizations.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by October 26, 2023.

Organized by Professor Joan Ramon Resina, Director of the Iberian Studies Program at The Europe Center.

Just how bad is the current danger of democratic backsliding in the US and around the world?

Influential voices contend that democracy is in decline worldwide and threatened in the US. Using a variety of measures, I show that the global proportion of democracies is, in fact, at or near an all-time high. The current rate of backsliding is not historically unusual and is well-explained by the income levels of existing democracies. Historical data yield extremely low estimated hazards of democratic breakdown in the US—considerably lower than in any democracy that has failed. Western governments are seen as threatened by a supposed decline in popular support for democracy and an erosion of elite norms. But the evidence for these claims is sparse. While deteriorating democratic quality in some countries is indeed a cause for concern, available evidence suggests that alarm about a global slide into autocracy is exaggerated.

Daniel Treisman is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles and Interim Director of UCLA’s Center for European and Russian Studies. A graduate of Oxford and Harvard, he has published six books and many articles in leading political science and economics journals, as well as numerous commentaries in public affairs journals and the press. His research focuses on Russian politics and economics as well as comparative political economy, including the analysis of democratization, the politics of authoritarian states, political decentralization, and corruption. 

A former co-editor of The American Political Science Review, he is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has consulted for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and USAID. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), and he is currently an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. In 2023, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest book, co-authored with Sergei Guriev, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century" (Princeton University Press, 2022), has been translated into 13 languages and won the Prix Guido et Maruccia Zerilli-Marimo of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in Paris.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by November 23, 2023.

Given the rise of Euroscepticism, illiberalism, and economic nationalism expressed by populist leaders in Eastern Europe over the past decade, did the EU and NATO enlargement support or detract from establishing and sustaining a commitment to liberalism? How will Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shape the trajectory of liberalism in the region?

EU and NATO accession gave momentum to Eastern Europe’s democratic and capitalist development, despite the many domestic political challenges associated with this dual transition. Given the subsequent rise of Euroscepticism, illiberalism, and economic nationalism expressed by populist leaders over the past decade, and given violations of democratic norms, did the specific process of enlargement support or detract from establishing and sustaining a commitment to liberalism and so-called European values? Moreover, how does the Ukraine war fit into a trajectory of liberal development in Eastern Europe? These are the questions addressed in this presentation.

Hilary Appel is Podlich Family Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. Professor Appel has published numerous books and articles on the politics of economic reform in Russia and Eastern Europe in leading scholarly journals like World Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Review of International Political Economy, Post-Soviet Affairs, East European Politics and Societies, and others.

Her co-authored book with Mitchell A. Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Post-Communist Countries (Cambridge University Press, 2018), won the Silver Medal Laura Shannon Prize for Best Book in European Studies 2018-2019. Prof. Appel has received national fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Institute for the Study of World Politics.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by October 5, 2023.

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In this talk, Abbiati will explore how contemporary novels that depict the pain of IRA terrorism represent the perspective of victims. The talk will use computational methods to investigate the structural representation of pain in literary works dealing with "The Troubles", to then consider the emotional impact of using these methods to study politically engaged fiction. By analyzing the aesthetic experience of reading literature having it processed by algorithms, the presentation aims to shed light on the impact of computational literary analysis on the reader's empathetic response.

The presentation will include lunch and take place at the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis in Wallenberg 433A. A Zoom link is available upon request from Center Manager, Jonathan Clark (jclark93@stanford.edu).

Simone Abbiati is a third-year PhD student in Transcultural studies in the humanities at University of Bergamo. His work relates to the hermeneutic rethinking of DH methodologies regarding fictional space, and he is particularly interested in combining text mining and digital cartography to reflect on politically debated spaces in literature. He is currently working on the British-Irish border and the Basque Country, with the aim of identifying how literature mirrored different border conceptions such as complex territorialization processes and terrorism.

Sponsored by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, co-sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and The Europe Center.

Why have the politically, economically, and emotionally significant parcels sent from West Germany to the Socialist East been neglected by social theory? In my talk, I will argue that ideas of modernity on both sides of the Iron Curtain produced a blind spot that is worth reconsidering.

During the time that two German states existed, parcels sent to the Socialist East were politically, economically, and emotionally important. Successive West German government campaigns supported them as symbols of unity through tax releases, school and poster campaigns. Millions of parcels were sent each year and the socialist governments reluctantly learned to rely on their economic value. Increasingly, the exchange included large kinship networks beyond individual relations. After unification, these networks quickly dissolved and the parcels became symbols of difference between relatives, as well as between East and West Germany more broadly. Despite their material and immaterial significance, these kinship practices represent an epistemic void. They play no role in the analyses of family sociologists and students of political transformation. In my talk, I ask why social scientists have not paid attention to these practices and argue that ideas of modernity on both sides of the Iron Curtain produced this blind spot. Taking these exchanges seriously could still eventually lead to new insights into the co-production of state and kinship.

Tatjana Thelen is Professor for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and currently serves as Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair at Stanford. She previously held positions at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and at universities in Zurich, Bayreuth, Halle and Berlin. Her research has centred on postsocialist transformations in Hungary, Romania, Serbia and eastern Germany with a focus on property, welfare, kinship and state. Her latest co-edited book is The Politics of Making Kinship. Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Berghahn 2023).

At Stanford, Tatjana is teaching the course ANTHRO 124C: Anthropology of the State in Winter 2023.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by May 4, 2023.

How much and in what form do politicians accept economic inequality? The talk explores the attenuated response of governments to rising economic inequality in Europe and North America. Political interventions in the economy depend on how elected representatives learn and reason about various forms of inequality and, ultimately, and how they decide when political action is required. Regardless of actual changes in inequality, legislators with leftist identity perceive inequality as rising and unfair, while rightist politicians hold the opposite views. When legislators then think about public demand for redistribution, they rely on their own redistributive preferences as a heuristic: the more supportive politicians are about redistribution, the higher their estimation of support for redistributive policies. Politicians thereby display a false consensus effect in their assessment.

Surveys and interviews with over 800 politicians in five democracies—Belgium, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland—elicit politicians' perceptions of economic inequality, their redistributive preferences as well as their estimates of public support among citizens. Politicians belonging to conservative parties perceive inequality to be smaller than those on the left. They also attribute less unfairness to inequality. Similarly, politicians who strongly oppose a redistributive policy do not believe that a majority of citizens favor it; however, when politicians are supportive of the measure by themselves, they believe that over 60% of citizens prefer a redistributive policy. These perceptions have behavioral consequences: legislators who believe that inequality is rising and unfair raise this issue in their parliamentary speeches. The talk probes into the intentions of elected representatives when dealing with economic inequality, unequal representation and economic policymaking in European democracies.

Christian Breunig is Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics & Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Before coming to Konstanz, he was associate professor in political science at the University of Toronto and held a post-doc position at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. He received my doctorate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington in Seattle. His research concentrates on representation and public policy in advanced democracies and has been published in the leading journals of political science. He is a PI at the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality" and directs the German Policy Agendas project which is part of the Comparative Agendas Project. In 2022-23, he is fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by April 20, 2023.

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.