Which has more of a “single market,” the United States or the European Union, and why? Most scholars and policy-makers will expect easy answers. Surely interstate exchange faces fewer regulatory barriers in the fluid American arena than between European countries. We argue that this common wisdom profoundly mischaracterizes both polities. The US never attempted to complete a project remotely like Europe’s SMP. Europeans have now removed or mitigated a lengthening list of barriers that Americans retain. Across the “four freedoms” of goods, services, persons and capital, today’s EU unambiguously claims and actively exercises more authority to require interstate openness than the US has ever considered. Existing explanations that privilege economic flows, institutional path dependence, or cultural attitudes struggle with these actual outcomes. Our explanation highlights contingent connections that political movements in each arena forged between ideas about markets and governance, channeling the 20th-century “return to markets” into contrasting varieties of neoliberalism.
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Matthias Matthijs is Associate Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and Senior Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC. Since May 2019, he also serves as the chair of the Executive Committee of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA). He is the author of Ideas and Economic Crises in Britain (2012) and co-editor (with Mark Blyth) of The Future of the Euro (2015). He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in the fields of comparative and international political economy, on the politics of economic ideas, and on European integration. He is currently working on a book-length project that delves into the fall and rise of national elite consensus around European integration.
A prominent contemporary phenomenon is "backsliding'' of democratic countries into (semi-)authoritarian practices. Importantly, such episodes unfold over time, and often involve uncertainty about the ultimate intentions of governments. Building on recent, we present a model in which a government engages in a reform that may allow for subsequent actions that are inconsistent with the rule of law. Citizens must decide whether to replace the incumbent following the reform. Consistent with existing work, the model suggests that polarization is an important factor in democratic backsliding. More importantly, the model demonstrates that in a dynamic setting, citizens may support incumbent governments even if citizens are fundamentally opposed to authoritarianism. One consequence is that citizens may genuinely regret their electoral choices. We illustrate the model's implications using a survey experiment in contemporary Poland.
Monika Nalepa (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. With a focus on post-communist Europe, her research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her first book, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series and received the Best Book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the APSA and the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. She has just completed her second book, Ritual Sacrifices: Transitional Justice and the Fate of Post-authoritarian Elites. She has also published articles in the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Parliamentary Affairs, and Constitutional Political Economy. Monika Nalepa is the Director of the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab, which produces the Global Transitional Justice Dataset.
Why do some parties live fast and die young, but other endure? And why are some party systems more stable than others? Based on a blend of data derived from both qualitative and quantitative sources, in their recently released book Haughton and Deegan-Krause provide new tools for mapping and measuring party systems, and develop conceptual frameworks to analyse the dynamics of party politics, particularly the birth and death of parties. In addition to highlighting the importance of agency and choice in explaining the fate of parties, The New Party Challenge underlines the salience of the clean versus corrupt dimension of politics, charts the flow of voters in the new party subsystem, and emphasizes the dimension of time and its role in shaping developments. Not only do the authors examine party politics in Central Europe in the three decades since the 1989 revolutions, charting and explaining the patterns of politics in that region, they also highlight that similar processes are at play on a far wider geographical canvas. Their talk will conclude by reflecting on what the dynamics of party politics, especially the emergence of so many new parties, means for the health and quality of democracy, and what could and should be done.
Tim Haughton is a Senior Associate Professor of European Politics at the University of Birmingham, where he served as Head of the Department of Political Science and International Studies (2016-18) and the Director of the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies (2012-14). Dr Haughton was educated at the London School of Economics and University College London. He has held Visiting Fellowships at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Institute of International Relations in Prague, Colorado College and was an Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. Dr Haughton has good links with the policymaking community, having briefed inter alia five British Ambassadors to Slovakia before they took up their posts, and given several presentations on Central European politics at the Foreign Office in London and at the State Department in Washington DC.
Tim’s research interests encompass electoral and party politics, electoral campaigning, the role of the past in the politics of the present, the domestic politics of Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic and Brexit. He is the co-author with Kevin Deegan-Krause of The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2020), the author of Constraints and Opportunities of Leadership in Post-Communist Europe (Ashgate 2005), the editor of Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe: Does EU Membership Matter? (Routledge, 2011) and served as the co-editor with Nathaniel Copsey of the Journal of Common Market Studies’ Annual Review of the European Union for nine years (2008-16).
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Kevin Deegan-Krause is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Wayne State University. He received his undergraduate degree in Economics from Georgetown University in 1990 and his doctorate in Government from the University of Notre Dame in 2000. He has spent more than two decades studying how political parties compete against one another, and how that competition shapes what happens in a democracy. He has published what he learned from research on European political parties in several books book (Elected Affinities: Democracy and Party Competition in Slovakia and the Czech Republic published by Stanford University Press in 2006 and The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond, published by Oxford University Press in 2020) and many articles in political science journals and he has been the editor of several other books and the European Journal of Political Research Political Data Yearbook (politicaldatayearbook.com) which provides an annual summary of political developments in European, North American and Asian democracies. His ongoing research focuses on the emergence of new political parties and the transformation of existing ones.
Together with his wife Bridget and his children Elena and Peter, Kevin is also engaged in his local community of Ferndale, Michigan, and in broader public concerns. He received a Truman Scholarship for public service in 1988, and his commitment to public service has included work with the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Commission, election observation with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, as well as service on Ferndale's elected Library Board and School Board. He has also worked with many other local voluntary organizations and nonpartisan advocacy groups including promoting fair district boundaries with Voters Not Politicians and encouraging ranked-choice voting with RankMIVote. His commitment to voter turnout and other forms of civic engagement is also part of his classroom teaching, including his introductory courses on the city of Detroit and engaged citizenship for students in Wayne State University's Honors College.
Populist radical right parties are more successful in some areas than others. However, when trying to explain geographical patterns of support for the populist radical right, similar outcomes in otherwise different contexts and different outcomes in otherwise similar contexts can be observed. In this paper, we show that this paradox can be understood when we examine how citizens are affected differently by the context in which they live. Using a unique dataset containing geocoded survey data and contextual data from four countries (DE, FR, NL and UK), we demonstrate that mediating and moderating variables, such a perceptions of local decline and education level shape the relationship between contextual development such as the increasing presence of immigrants, on the one hand, and populist and nativism attitudes and PRR support, on the other hand.
A draft copy of this research paper may be downloaded by using the link provided below under "Event Materials".
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Sarah L. de Lange is Professor by special appointment at the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, where she holds the Dr. J.M. Den Uyl chair. Her research interests include societal cleavages, political parties, and extremism, populism, and radicalism. Her recent research projects focus on the emergence of new political oppositions in Europe on that basis of, amongst others, geographical, generational, and educational divides. She has recently concluded the collaborative international project Sub-National Context and Radical Right Support in Europe (supported by an ORA grant) and is currently co-directing the research project Generational Differences in Determinants of Party Choice (supported by an NWO grant). Her co-edited volume Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Into the Mainstream?, which appeared with Routledge in 2016, analyses the extent to which radical right-wing populist parties have become part of mainstream politics, as well as the factors and conditions which facilitate this trend.
This talk investigates how unemployment risk within households affects voting for the radical right. Recent advances in the literature demonstrate the role of latent economic threats for understanding the support of radical right parties. We build on these studies and analyze economic risks as a determinant of radical right voting. Crucially, we do not treat individuals as atomistic but investigate households as a crucial context moderating economic risks. Combining large-scale labor market data with comparative survey data, we confirm the relationship between economic risk and support for radical right parties but demonstrate that this direct effect is strongly conditioned by household risk constellations. Voting for the radical right is not only a function of a voters' own but also their partner's risk. We provide additional evidence on the extent to which these effects are gendered and on the mechanisms linking household risk and party choice. Our results imply that much of the existing literature on individual risk exposure underestimates the impact on political behavior due to the neglect of multiplier effects within households.
Tarik Abou-Chadi is Assistant Professor at the department of political science at the University of Zurich. His research focuses on electoral competition, political parties and democratic representation. He is currently the principal investigator of a research project on social status and the tranformation of electoral behavior in Europe. He also hosts the political science teaching and research podcast Transformation of European Politics.
Political scientists have increasingly deployed conjoint survey experiments to understand multi-dimensional choices in various settings. We begin with a general framework for analyzing voter preferences in multi-attribute elections using conjoints. With this framework, we demonstrate that the Average Marginal Component Effect (AMCE) is well-defined in terms of individual preferences and represents a central quantity of interest to empirical scholars of elections: the effect of a change in an attribute on a candidate or party's expected vote share. This property holds irrespective of the heterogeneity, strength, or interactivity of voters' preferences and regardless of how votes are aggregated into seats. Overall, our results indicate the essential role of AMCEs for understanding elections, a conclusion buttressed by a corresponding literature review. We also provide practical advice on interpreting AMCEs and discuss how conjoint data can be used to estimate other quantities of interest to electoral studies.
Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose, the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography.
In the late nineteenth century, support for the left began to cluster in cities among the industrial working class. Today, left-wing parties have become coalitions of diverse urban interest groups, from racial minorities to the creative class. These parties win big in urban districts but struggle to capture the suburban and rural seats necessary for legislative majorities. A bold new interpretation of today's urban-rural political conflict, Why Cities Lose also points to electoral reforms that could address the left's under-representation while reducing urban-rural polarization.
This event is now full and we are unable to take any further reservations. However, if you would like to be added to the waitlist, please email us at sj1874@stanford.edu.
This panel will examine the role of Ukraine and Russia in the Trump impeachment inquiry. Why has Ukraine emerged as central focus of the charges? What are Russia’s goals here, and how has it tried to achieve them? How different is an impeachment process driven by foreign policy concerns, rather than by domestic charges? Bringing together three experts on Ukraine, Russia, and US presidential politics, we will examine this extraordinary moment in American and international politics.
PANELISTS:
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Michael McFaul, '86, MA '86, is the Director and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science; and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He was also the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University from June to August of 2015. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995. Michael McFaul is also an analyst for NBC News and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post.
He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991.
He also served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014). He has authored several books, including most recently the New York Times bestseller, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. He is currently writing a book on great powers relations in the 21st century.
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Terry M. Moe is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has written extensively on the presidency, public bureaucracy, and the theory of political institutions more generally. His most recent book on American national politics is Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming. Coauthored with William G. Howell.)
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Steven Pifer is a William Perry research fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and a nonresident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution. He writes on nuclear arms control, Ukraine and Russia. A retired Foreign Service officer, his assignments included U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and special assistant to the President and senior director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia on the National Security Council.
MODERATOR:
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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.
Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, Department of Political Science
Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
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Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995 and served as FSI Director from 2015 to 2025. He is also an international affairs analyst for MSNOW.
McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).
He is a recipient of numerous awards, including an honorary PhD from Montana State University; the Order for Merits to Lithuania from President Gitanas Nausea of Lithuania; Order of Merit of Third Degree from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University. In 2015, he was the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University.
McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991.
International Working Group on Russian Sanctions
The International Working Group on Russian Sanctions aims to provide expertise and experience to governments and companies around the world by assisting with the formulation of sanctions proposals that will increase the cost to Russia of invading Ukraine, and support democratic Ukraine in the defense of its territorial integrity and national sovereignty.
Steven Pifer is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation as well as a non-resident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution. He was a William J. Perry Fellow at the center from 2018-2022 and a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin from January-May 2021.
Pifer’s research focuses on nuclear arms control, Ukraine, Russia and European security. He has offered commentary on these issues on National Public Radio, PBS NewsHour, CNN and BBC, and his articles have been published in a wide variety of outlets. He is the author of The Eagle and the Trident: U.S.-Ukraine Relations in Turbulent Times (Brookings Institution Press, 2017), and co-author of The Opportunity: Next Steps in Reducing Nuclear Arms (Brookings Institution Press, 2012).
A retired Foreign Service officer, Pifer’s more than 25 years with the State Department focused on U.S. relations with the former Soviet Union and Europe, as well as arms control and security issues. He served as deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs with responsibilities for Russia and Ukraine, ambassador to Ukraine, and special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia on the National Security Council. In addition to Ukraine, he served at the U.S. embassies in Warsaw, Moscow and London as well as with the U.S. delegation to the negotiation on intermediate-range nuclear forces in Geneva. From 2000 to 2001, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Institute for International Studies, and he was a resident scholar at the Brookings Institution from 2008 to 2017.
Pifer is a 1976 graduate of Stanford University with a bachelor’s in economics.
Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
(650) 723-4270
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amgbusse@stanford.edu
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies
Professor of Political Science
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
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Anna Grzymała-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.
In her first book, Redeeming the Communist Past, she examined the paradox of the communist successor parties in East Central Europe: incompetent as authoritarian rulers of the communist party-state, several then succeeded as democratic competitors after the collapse of these communist regimes in 1989.
Rebuilding Leviathan, her second book project, investigated the role of political parties and party competition in the reconstruction of the post-communist state. Unless checked by a robust competition, democratic governing parties simultaneously rebuilt the state and ensured their own survival by building in enormous discretion into new state institutions.
Anna's third book, 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.
Other areas of interest include informal institutions, the impact of European Union membership on politics in newer member countries, and the role of temporality and causal mechanisms in social science explanations.
Global Populisms
A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
We examine the effect on service delivery outcomes of a new information communication technology (ICT) platform that allows citizens to send free and anonymous messages to local government officials, thus reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of communication about public services. In particular, we use a field experiment to assess the extent to which the introduction of this ICT platform improved monitoring by the district, effort by service providers, and inputs at service points in health, education and water in Arua District, Uganda. We find suggestive evidence of a short-term improvement in some education services, but these effects deteriorate by year two of the program, and we find little or no evidence of an effect on health and water services at any period. Despite relatively high levels of system uptake, enthusiasm of district officials, and anecdotal success stories, we find that relatively few messages from citizens provided specific, actionable information about service provision within the purview and resource constraints of district officials, and users were often discouraged by officials’ responses. Our findings suggest that for crowd-sourced ICT programs to move from isolated success stories to long-term accountability enhancement, the quality and specific content of reports and responses provided by users and officials is centrally important.
