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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.
 

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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.

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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.