The rise of far-right populism in European Union (EU) member states such as Poland and Hungary has posed challenges to democracy and the rule of law few had anticipated as recently as a decade ago. European Commission action to counter rule of law violations has been weak. This panel will discuss the recent democratic backsliding in Poland and Hungary and the EU's (lack of) response to it. Particular attention will be paid to the April 3 Hungarian elections and the impact of the war in Ukraine.

Panel

Anna Grzymala-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics. Anna's most recent book project, "Nations Under God," examines why some churches have been able to wield enormous policy influence. Others have failed to do so, even in very religious countries. Where religious and national identities have historically fused, churches gained great moral authority, and subsequently covert and direct access to state institutions. It was this institutional access, rather than either partisan coalitions or electoral mobilization, that allowed some churches to become so powerful.

R. Daniel Kelemen is Professor of Political Science and Law, and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University. An internationally renowned expert on European Union politics and law, he is author or editor of six books including Eurolegalism: The Transformation of Law and Regulation in the European Union (Harvard University Press), which won the Best Book Award from the European Union Studies Association, and author of over one hundred articles and book chapters. Kelemen is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and he is a frequent commentator on EU affairs in US and international media. Prior to Rutgers, Kelemen was Fellow in Politics, Lincoln College, University of Oxford. He has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, visiting fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) at Princeton University, and a Fulbright Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels.

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. Scheppele's work focuses on the intersection of constitutional and international law, particularly in constitutional systems under stress. After 1989, Scheppele studied the emergence of constitutional law in Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. After 9/11, she researched the effects of the international "war on terror" on constitutional protections around the world. Since 2010, she has been documenting the rise of autocratic legalism first in Hungary and then in Poland within the European Union, as well as its spread around the world. Her many publications in law reviews, in social science journals and in many languages cover these topics and others. She is a commentator in the popular press, discussing comparative constitutional law, the state of Europe, the rule of law and the rise of populism.

Moderator

Christophe Crombez is Interim Director and Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium. He specializes in European Union (EU) politics and business-government relations in Europe.

Experts from Ukraine, all former visiting scholars at Stanford, will share their professional perspectives and personal experiences on the current war.

• Sofia Dyak, Director, Center for Urban History, L’viv
• Andriy Kohut, Director, Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine
• Dmytro Koval, Associate Professor of Law, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy; Program and Legal Officer, Democracy Reporting International
• Dariya Orlova, Senior Lecturer, Mohyla School of Journalism, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, The Europe Center, and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.
 

This event is open Stanford affiliates online via Zoom.

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The Russia-Europe Working Group and The Europe Center are hosting a conversation with panelists from the Kyiv School of Economics regarding the unfolding events in Ukraine. 

Nataliia Shapoval is the Chairman of KSE Institute and Vice President for Policy Research. She guided and conducted policy research on public procurement, cost of HIV disease, the financial burden of health care costs, private-sector driven growth strategies. She served as a contributor to the Ukraine reform monitoring project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Also, Shapoval is a member of the Editorial Board of VoxUkraine.

Tymofiy Mylovanov is a President of Kyiv School of Economics and an advisor to Ukraine's presidential administration. During his professional career, he has taught at a number of European and American universities, including Rheinische Friedrich–Wilhelms–Universität Bonn, the University of Pennsylvania, and University of Pittsburgh. Tymofiy’s research interests cover such areas as theory of games and institutional design. He has been published in leading international academic journals including Econometrica, American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies.

Tymofii Brik is the Head of Sociological Research at the Kyiv School of Economics. In 2018, he received the N. Panina “best young sociologist of Ukraine” award. He received his Ph.D. in social science at the University of Carlos III (Madrid) and obtained a Master’s degree in Sociology and Social Research from Utrecht University. In 2018 and 2019-2020 he was a visiting researcher at Stanford University and New York University, respectively.

Anna Bulakh is an expert and advisor on international security and technologies. Currently she is part of the Hybrid warfare Task Force at Kyiv School of Economics and Ukrainian tech community. Anna has 10 years of experience in security and defence policies. She is a former Research Fellow at the International Centre for Defence and Security in Tallinn and Prague Security Studies Institute. Since 2019 she has also be part of the IT community in AI, cyber and information security. Anna was a policy adviser to Reface, an AI powered app on synthetic media. Anna is a Co-Founder of Cappture.cc, a start-up funded by the Startup Wise Guys accelerator program, and former Program director at Disinfo.Tech. Both companies focused on developing solution to help combat online threats and disinformation. In her work she is dealing with issues such as tech impact of national security, information and cyber security, broader national security policies and resilience building.

This paper examines the post-financial crisis decline in the electoral success of social democratic parties. It argues that two core shifts in the economy have put pressure on social democratic economic policy: social, economic and geographic sorting by high productivity workers in a context of increasing stagnation created by declining birth rates and generic economic slowdown, have created sharper tradeoffs between skill groups and geographic areas. This sorting has a well-known geographic component, with high-skilled work increasingly concentrated in cities, and a social component, as high productivity workers not only co-locate, but make social choices (schooling, marriage) that are increasingly homogamous. This paper argues that these two features of the contemporary economic structure create (yet another ) set of tradeoffs for social democrats aiming to create an electoral coalition around equity producing policy. While Kitschelt’s (1994) seminal contribution theorized the divergence of class based preferences in part through the lens of increasing productivity divergence across firms, increasing geographic and social sorting next to diverging paths of stagnation hardens these tradeoffs, by increasingly creating not just a social conflict - but also an economic conflict - between new urban voters and suburban and rural voters. The paper develops these arguments theoretically, showing that growing geographic divergence matters for electoral outcomes, even in proportional electoral systems. It then shows that these changes create regional and skill based tradeoffs for social democratic parties in terms of their competitive stances. It tests these propositions using fine grained electoral data in 20 countries, and an analysis of thirty years of combined individual level election studies in 16 countries.

Jane Gingrich is a professor of comparative political economy in the department of politics and international relations at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses broadly on the politics of education and welfare policies, examining the politics of shifting policy in response to changing economic and political alignments. She is the PI of the ERC research project SCHOOLPOL, and is completing a book length project on social democratic parties. She is a member of the CIFAR Innovation, Equity and the future of Prosperity working group.

Incumbent president Emmanuel Macron is favorite to win reelection on April 24, but the outcome remains uncertain; it will largely depend on the results of the first round of voting on April 10. Three candidates, all on the Right and far Right, can still potentially defeat Macron. Even if Macron he is reelected, this should not be construed as an endorsement of the status quo. French politics is in the midst of a major partisan and ideological realignment.

Patrick Chamorel teaches transatlantic relations and comparative US and European politics at Stanford in Washington as well as, occasionally, at FSI's Ford Dorsey master in international policy. His research focuses on elections, political elites and democratic institutions in both the US and Europe. He is a frequent commentator on French, European and US media. Chamorel is a member of the editorial board of "American Purpose". At Stanford, he has been a Research scholar at CDDRL as well as a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was an adviser to the French minister of industry as well as the Prime Minister. Chamorel holds a PhD in political science from Sciences-Po in Paris and a masters in public law from the university of Paris.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact: Shannon Johnson (sj1874@stanford.edu) by March 24, 2022.

This event is open to the public online via Zoom, and limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford affiliates may be available in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines.

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Recent elections in the advanced western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges -- from both the left and the right. The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. In Anti-System Politics, Jonathan Hopkin traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the post-war model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s. That shift entailed weakening the democratic process in favor of an opaque, technocratic form of governance that allows voters little opportunity to influence policy. With the financial crisis of the late 2000s these arrangements became unsustainable, as incumbent politicians were unable to provide solutions to economic hardship. Electorates demanded change, and it had to come from outside the system.

Using a comparative approach, Hopkin explains why different kinds of anti-system politics emerge in different countries and how political and economic factors impact the degree of electoral instability that emerges. Finally, he discusses the implications of these changes, arguing that the only way for mainstream political forces to survive is for them to embrace a more activist role for government in protecting societies from economic turbulence. A historically-grounded analysis of arguably the most important global political phenomenon at present, Anti-System Politics illuminates how and why the world seems upside down.

 

Jonathan Hopkin is Professor in the European Institute and the Department of Government of the London School of Economics and Political Science. He obtained his PhD at the European University Institute in Florence. He is the author of Party Formation and Democratic Transition in Spain (1999, Macmillan) and Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies (2020, Oxford University Press). Previously he taught at the Universities of Bradford, Durham and Birmingham, and held visiting positions at Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, the University of Bologna, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He has published widely on the party politics and political economy of Europe in peer-reviewed journals as well as for a wider audience.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson (sj1874@stanford.edu) by February 24, 2022.

The focus of religion & politics research has been predominantly on the impact of religious actors on democratic and non-democratic political systems and religion-inspired political behavior. But to better understand the political significance of religion, it is necessary to look below this institutional level and adopt a micropolitical perspective which incorporates insights from fields such as behavioral ecology, social psychology or cognitive science to study the internal politics of religious communities.

Why is religion, despite its costly requirements and uncertain rewards, such a potent factor of mobilization? How does it legitimize claims for power and status? Why do religious groups significantly outlast secular ones? To address some of these questions, I examine political systems of communitarian religious groups – including the American Shakers and Russian Skoptsy – through the lenses of costly signaling theory of religion. This evolutionarily-informed theoretical framework contributes to the explanation of seemingly irrational and costly ascetic and ecstatic religious behavior not only as signals of commitment, but also as bids for power and status. The added value of such micropolitical study of religious communities is that it may shed light on the complex relationship between religion and political power in the early stages of human social development. But it also contributes to our understanding of some modern religio-political phenomena, such as various form of political sacrifice, including suicidal terrorism.
 

Maciej Potz is a professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Systems, Faculty of International and Political Studies, University of Łódź, Poland. He earned his Ph.D. in 2006 from the Silesian University in Katowice and his post-doctoral degree from the University of Łódź in 2017, both in Political Science. His primary area of interest is religion and politics, with special focus on theocracies (as a Foundation for Polish Science scholar, he studied Shaker and Mormon theocracies in the USA in 2009 and 2012) and political strategies of religious actors in contemporary democracies, especially in Poland and the USA. His other research interests include political theory (especially theory of power and democratic theory), comparative politics and, most recently, evolutionary political science.

Maciej Potz published three monographs: (i) Granice wolności religijnej [The Limits of Religous Liberty] 2008 (2nd ed. 2015), Wrocław: FNP, on religious freedom, church-state relations and confessional politics in the USA; (ii) Amerykańskie teokracje. Źródła i mechanizmy władzy usankcjonowanej religijnie [American Theocracies. The Sources and Mechanisms of Religion-Sanctioned Power] 2016, Łódź: UŁ, theorizing theocracy as a type of a political system and emprically exploring North American theocracies; (iii) Political Science of Religion: Theorizing the Political Role of Religion, 2020, London: Palgrave MacMillan – a theoretical framework for the analysis of religion’s impact on politics. He also authored several journal articles, including in Religion, State and Society, Journal of Political Power, Politics and Religion and Studia Religiologica.

Maciej Potz has taught political science-related courses in the University of Lodz and, as guest lecturer, at other European universities, including University of the West of Scotland in Glasgow, Buskerund College and NTNU (Norway), University of Joensuu (Finland), University of La Laguna (Spain). He participated in a number of international conferences, including “XXI World IAHR Congress in Erfurt (2015), IPSA World Congresses of Political Science in Santiago (2019), Madrid (2012) and Poznań (2016), APSA Annual Meeting (forthcoming in 2021).  

The research project he will be pursuing at Stanford, entitled Costly signaling Under His Eye: explaining the commune longevity puzzle, uses costly signaling theory of religion to explore the determinants of cohesion and longevity of (communitarian) religious groups. It also proposes a novel political interpretation of signaling behavior. Over the next three years, he will head a research team undertaking an empirical study (funded by National Science Centre of Poland) of power and status in Catholic religious orders.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact: Shannon Johnson (sj1874@stanford.edu) by February 3, 2022.

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The rule in international law which prohibits forcible seizure of territory has lately come under pressure, for example when Russia seized and annexed Crimea in 2014. In the presentation, we will take a look back at the history of this rule, including the Western non-recognition of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States in 1940-1991, of which Mälksoo has written a leading monograph. Current threats to the rule will be discussed such as the ideas that great powers are entitled to historic justice which may differ from what international law dictates or there is a regional international law dictated by the leading great power in the region. With President Putin's demands to the US and NATO, these international legal questions have again become utterly topical.

Lauri Mälksoo is Professor of International Law at the University of Tartu in Estonia, member of the Institut de Droit International and of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. He has published widely on Russian and Soviet approaches to international law and human rights, including the monograph "Russian Approaches to International Law" (OUP, 2015).

 

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by January 13, 2022.

Co-sponsored by Stanford University Library.