Join the French Culture Workshop for a conversation with Jérôme Clément on the history of the Alliance Française network, past and present, and of Arte, in person on Wednesday, May 4^th from noon to 1:30pm in Lane History Corner (building 200) room 302. Marie-Pierre Ulloa (DLCL) will moderate our conversation in French. Lunch will be served. Description is below:

This is event is Stanford-only; please use your Stanford email to register.

The rise of right-wing populism has emerged as one of the most significant threats to democracy and liberal values worldwide. While populism is increasingly viewed as a global phenomenon, it takes on many forms and has different causes and consequences in diverse contexts. This presentation addresses the potential of populist civilizationalism to transform political cleavage structures in the Baltic states, notably by downplaying and transcending deeply entrenched post-Soviet political cleavages (geopolitical, mnemopolitical and ethnic ones). Construing ‘self’ and ‘other’ in civilizational, as opposed to narrowly national or ethnic terms, expands the notion of ‘self’ to include various internal others, notably Russian-speaking minorities, and shifts the focus from historical grievances, the Russian threat and the demographic legacies of Soviet occupation to alleged current threats to the European civilization, such as immigration, Islam, and global liberalism.

This transformation of cleavages entails a significant shift in the position assigned to the European Union: instead of being seen as the guarantor of the (post-Soviet) national ‘self,’ the EU is construed as a liberal globalist threat to the civilizational ‘self’. These claims are supported with examples of rhetoric used by the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE). This analysis leads to the conclusion that, paradoxically, the rise of right-wing populism has rendered Estonian politics more global and less post-Soviet.

Piret Ehin is Professor of Comparative Politics and Deputy Head for Research at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu. Her main research interests include democracy, elections and voting behavior, legitimacy and political support, as well as European integration and Europeanization. Her work has appeared in the European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Common Market Studies, Cooperation and Conflict, Politics, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, and the Journal of Baltic Studies. Prof Ehin has been awarded the 2022 Short-Term Research Fellowship at Stanford University for Estonian Scholars, hosted by Stanford University Libraries’ Baltic Studies Program and co-hosted by the Europe Center/Stanford Global Studies.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact: Shannon Johnson (sj1874@stanford.edu) by May 19, 2022.

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This event is part of Global Conversations, a new series of talks, lectures, and seminars focusing on the benefits and fragility of freedom. The series is co-sponsored by Stanford Libraries and Vabamu.

 

 

 

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.

While the number of women in political office around the world is on the rise, men continue to outnumber women at high rates in top leadership positions. There are many reasons why it remains difficult for women to reach, and keep, powerful positions within politics that cover a myriad of electoral, institutional, and individual conditions. Women often become leaders of organizations precisely when leadership conditions are most difficult, and therefore less attractive to powerful men (i.e. the glass cliff). Under these conditions, we might expect women to face greater challenges during their leadership, potentially affecting how long they are able to maintain their leadership roles. Thus, it is impossible to investigate how gender impacts leadership without accounting for selection conditions that place leaders in power. In this paper we take a holistic approach to examining the gendered nature of leadership survival. We investigate how the conditions under which party leaders are chosen, coupled with party performance while in office, impact how long men and women serve as party leaders. In order to do so, we construct a two-stage model that accounts for the endogeneity of the selection process alongside the impact of party performance on the survival of leaders. Using data from 212 leadership terms in eleven industrialized democracies between 1979 and 2018, we find that while women leaders are selected under similar conditions to men, their leadership tenure is more vulnerable to shifts in vote share. Vote share appears to be the main driver of women’s replacement. Men are less susceptible to changes in votes share than women but are also punished for poor poll performance and government loss.

 

Andrea S. Aldrich is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Yale University and her research interests are focused on political representation, gender, and comparative political institutions. Her work examines the relationship between internal political party dynamics and legislative representation. She is particularly interested in investigating the influence of internal party organization on gender equality in elections and party leadership, and her research has recently been published in JCMS: the Journal of Common Market Studies, Party Politics, and Politics & Gender. Before arriving at Yale, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Houston with the Political Parties Database under the direction of Dr. Susan Scarrow, a visiting scholar at Texas A&M University, and Fulbright Scholar at the University of Zagreb in Croatia.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by April 21, 2022.

 

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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.