This conference aims to further our understanding of the institutional cultures, funding schemes and power structures underlying transnational institutions, with a particular focus on heritage bureaucracies. We bring together scholars working at the intersection of archaeology, anthropology, sociology and law to offer a broader understanding of the intricacies of multilateral institutions and global civic society in shaping contemporary heritage governance. Speakers will provide ethnographic perspectives on the study of international organizations, such as the UN and EU, in an effort to show the entanglement of political and technical decision-making.
A 2-day international conference organized by Claudia Liuzza and Gertjan Plets.
Speakers:
Brigitta Hauser-Shäublin (Institute of Ethnology, Göttingen University) Ellen Hertz (Institute of Ethnology, University of Neuchâtel) Miyako Inoue (Department of Anthropology, Stanford University) Claudia Liuzza (Department of Anthropology, Stanford University) Brigit Müller (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) Elisabeth Niklason (Department of Archeaology, Stockholm University) Gertjan Plets (Stanford Archaeology Center, Stanford University) Cris Shore (Department of Anthropology, The University of Auckland) Ana Vrdoljak (Department of Law, University of Technology, Sydney)
Co-sponsored by Stanford Archaeology Center, Cantor Arts Center, Department of Anthropology, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford Humanities Center, The Europe Center, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, The Mediterranean Studies Forum.
Can a natural disaster shift long-standing party support for the long-term? Studies of political behavior indicate that, as elections approach, voters punish or credit governments based on their responses to severe weather phenomena. It may still be considered an open question, however, if poor crisis response could trigger more durable shifts in long-standing party support. I provide empirical evidence suggesting that it could. I exploit a crucial case for the study of change in party support, Storm Gudrun (Erwin), to examine long lasting punishment effects over crisis response. The estimated effect is of a magnitude that equals the largest block-transfer of voters in Swedish history and can be seen over three parliamentary elections (2006, 2010 and 2014).
Daniel Stegmueller is a Professor of Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences at the Graduate School of Social and Economic Sciences, University of Mannheim. He is also an associate member of Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and of CAGE, University of Warwick.
His research lies at the intersection of political economy and political behavior. He studies political preferences and choices in advanced industrialized societies, specifically individuals' preferences for redistribution and redistributive voting. He is interested in how these are shaped by social structure and institutions, but also by basic individual characteristics, such as cognitive and non-cognitive skills.
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.
Daniel Stegmueller
Professor of Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences
Speaker
University of Mannheim
Torben Iversen is Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard. His research and teaching interests include comparative political economy, electoral politics, and applied formal theory. He is the author of Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare (Cambridge UP 2005), Contested Economic Institutions (Cambridge UP 1999), and co-author (with Frances Rosenbluth) of Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality (Yale UP, 2010). He is also the co-editor of Unions, Employers and Central Bankers (Cambridge UP 2000) and has published more than three dozen articles in leading journals and edited volumes. His work has won numerous American Political Science Association prizes including the Victoria Schuck Award, Best Book on European Politics and Society Award, the Luebbert Best Article Award, and the Gabriel Almond Best Dissertation Award. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is currently completing a book-length project with David Soskice on the political representation of economic interests in historical perspective.
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.
Torben Iversen
Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy
Speaker
Harvard University
States make war, and wars make states. The second clause of Tilly's dictum assumes that the fiscal effort that states exert to wage war persists over time. This paper investigates the effect of war on long-term fiscal capacity as a function of two types of war financing instruments: taxes and loans. Tax-waged wars are argued to exert lasting effects on state capacity, as new taxes require enhancements of the state apparatus as well as complementary fiscal innovations. Loan-waged wars may not contribute to long-term state capacity, as countries might default once the war is over, thus preempting any persistent fiscal effect. Importantly, the way war is waged might be endogenous. To cope with this possibility, I exploit unanticipated crashes in the nineteenth-century international capital markets, which temporarily banned warring states from borrowing regardless of their (un)observed characteristics. The analysis shows that countries that fought wars while the international credit markets were down have today higher fiscal capacity, measured by income tax ratios as well as the size of the tax administration. Altogether, the paper advances the conditions under which wars exert positive and lasting effects on state building.
Didac Queralt is a junior professor at the Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG) in Barcelona. He received his Ph.D. from the NYU Politics Department in September 2012.
His research lies at the intersection of comparative political economy and international relations, with a focus on the political economy of fiscal capacity building in Europe (East and West) and the Americas. Using formal methods, he investigates tax compliance in scenarios of low fiscal capacity, as well as the replacement of old forms of taxation (e.g. trade taxes) by modern extractive technologies (e.g. income taxation) that result from deliberate investment in the tax administration. He analyzes the theoretical predictions using contemporary data from developing economies in Latin America and Eastern Europe, as well as historical data for European powers in the pre-modern era.
In addition, he investigates the origins of direct taxation in the Western World, both with macro- and micro-data, as well as the electoral politics underlying the expansion of the fiscal state. Currently, he is involved in a quasi-experimental test of the legacy of pre-modern wars on state capacity, and an field experiment on tax progressivity in Colombia,
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.
Encina Hall West, Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge)
Didac Queralt
Junior Professor
Speaker
Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG), Barcelona
At a time when Marine Le Pen gained momentum on the political and media scene and has garnered unprecedented electoral results, it is urgent to decipher the logic of her father's speech and the foundations of its rhetorical efficiency. For the first time, a lexical analysis and statistical literature of a corpus of nearly five hundred texts can measure the originality of this new Frontist word. Public speeches, editorials and interviews of two successive presidents of the National Front are screened with a double processing, IT and rhetoric, to identify as close continuities and differences. The battle of words is central to the strategy of "demonization" initiated by the new President of the National Front since 2011.
Yet is the speech of the girl so different from that of the father? Jean-Marie Le Pen is not sure it is enough to adopt the lexicon of the Republic to bring real values. Beyond the lexical dust, deep structures and underlying national novel continue to the sources of a long literary tradition and extreme right politics. This book begins to dismantle the springs of Marinist speech and to enlighten this new tributienne word that meets real needs for meaning and values in a context of deep economic and identity crisis.
"Geography and Gridlock in the United States" is chapter 7 of the book Solutions to Political Polarization in America, edited by Nathaniel Persily and published by the Cambridge University Press.
Political polarization dominates discussions of contemporary American politics. Despite widespread agreement that the dysfunction in the political system can be attributed to political polarization, commentators cannot come to a consensus on what that means. The coarseness of our political discourse, the ideological distance between opposing partisans, and, most of all, an inability to pass much-needed and widely supported policies all stem from the polarization in our politics. This volume assembles several of the nation's top analysts of American politics to focus on solutions to polarization. The proposals range from constitutional change to good- government reforms to measures to strengthen political parties. Each tackles one or more aspects of America's polarization problem. This book begins a serious dialogue about reform proposals to address the obstacles that polarization poses for contemporary governance.
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Solutions to Political Polarization in America, edited by Nathaniel Persily
Sarah Cormack-Patton received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh in August 2015. She is a political economist working at the nexus of comparative politics and international relations with a focus on European politics. Sarah is interested in how the cross-border movement of goods, capital, and people impacts the domestic policy-making process, and how domestic politics affect these cross-border flows. In her current research, Sarah examines these questions through the lens of international migration. Sarah's doctoral dissertation examined the ways in which varying bundles of migrant rights affect domestic preferences over immigration, the effect of these rights on the policy-making coalitions that form over immigration, and how these preferences aggregate in various institutional environments. In addition to her Ph.D., Sarah holds a BS in International Affairs and Modern Languages (French) and MS in International Affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a MA in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh.
Lina M. Eriksson is a Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher from the Department of Government at Uppsala University and the Center for Natural Disaster Science (CNDS), Sweden. Ms. Eriksson is visiting the Europe Center for 9 months, September 1, 2015 – May 31, 2016, to work under the supervision of Jens Hainmueller. Ms. Eriksson holds an MA in Ethnic Conflicts and Conflict Resolutions, Asylum Immigration and Integration from University of Waterloo, Canada and an MSc in Political Sciences, Economics and International Development from Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), Sweden. At the moment, she is working on her dissertation entitled Natural Disasters and National Politics. The focus of her dissertation concerns two natural disasters and three sequential elections. The 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, the 2005 Storm Gudrun and the 2006, 2010 and 2014 Swedish Parliamentary Elections. The overall aim of her dissertation is to investigate accountability in regards to the crises management of these two natural disasters and, specifically, if it has occurred in the form of reduced vote support for the 2006 Social democratic incumbent.
A pioneering textual analysis of French political speeches led by Stanford Professor of French Cécile Alduy reveals how Marine Le Pen, leader of France's surging far-right National Front, has made extremism palatable in a land of republican values.
French politician Marine Le Pen carried her father's right-wing fringe political party to first place in the country's latest elections for European Parliament.
Stanford scholar Cécile Alduy says Le Pen's success at the helm of France's right-wing National Front can be attributed to a combination of sophisticated rebranding and skillfully crafted moderate rhetoric that sells a conservative agenda that borders on extreme.
An associate professor of French at Stanford and a faculty affiliate of The Europe Center, Alduy conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis of more than 500 speeches by Marine Le Pen and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, to find out what has made their party surge in the polls.
Alduy's word-for-word analysis of National Front political speeches, published in the bookMarine Le Pen prise aux mots: Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste (Seuil, 2015) has become a flashpoint of political discourse in France.
The resulting research is the first study of Marine Le Pen's discourse, the first to compile a corpus of this magnitude of political speeches by a French political organization.
After sifting through the data and performing extensive close readings of the corpus, Alduy found that the stylistic polish of Marine Le Pen's language conceals ideological and mythological structures that have traditionally disturbed French voters. Her research reveals how radical views can be cloaked in soothing speech.
"Marine Le Pen's language is full of ambiguities, double meanings, silences and allusions," Alduy said.
This diagram shows the spatial lay out of Marine Le Pen's discursive universe. Using factorial analysis in Hyperbase, one can create a "map" of all the most used words and how they correlate to one another: the closer they are spatially, the stronger their correlation, or how often they appear together.
Courtesy of Cécile Alduy
This diagram shows the spatial lay out of Marine Le Pen's discursive universe. Using factorial analysis in Hyperbase, one can create a "map" of all the most used words and how they correlate to one another: the closer they are spatially, the stronger their correlation, or how often they appear together. Image Courtesy of Cécile Alduy
But in terms of political agenda and ideological content, Alduy said the continuity between the younger and elder Le Pen is striking. "What is different is the words and phrases she uses to express the same agenda," Alduy said.
Alduy, whose research centers on the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the European Renaissance, conducted the research with the help of Stanford graduate and undergraduate students and with communication consultant Stéphane Wahnich. Academic technology specialist Michael Widner of Stanford Libraries and the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, provided technical expertise throughout and trained students in the art of indexing the database.
With a grant from Stanford's Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Alduy and her team transcribed and analyzed more than 500 speeches by Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen dating from 1987 to 2013.
Alduy's team used text analysis software such as Hyperbase or Voyant Tools to measure precisely how Marine's language differs from that of Jean-Marie.
They found, for example, that Marine Le Pen used the word "immigrants" 40 times in speeches, compared to 330 times for Jean-Marie, or 0.6 percent versus 1.9 percent, respectively. Instead, she used the more impersonal "immigration" or "migration policy" to discuss the issue and present this hot-topic issue as a matter of abstract economic policy rather than an ideological anti-immigration stance.
While Jean-Marie paired "immigrants" or "immigration" with words like "danger," "threat" or "loss," yielding phrases that scapegoat or even demonize France's large immigrant population, Marine used more technocratic pairings such as "protection," "cost," "euro" or "pay."
The effect, Alduy contended, is a repositioning of immigration from the racial and cultural problem Jean-Marie claimed it was to an economic one. Yet the actual policy agenda changed little from father to daughter, Alduy observed.
New language, same story
Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the National Front in 1972 to unite under the same political banner several extremist groups, from royalists to conservative Catholics nostalgic of the Vichy régime and the colonial Empire.
Since 1987 and his polemical statement about the Holocaust being a "detail" in the history of World War II, Jean-Marie has employed shock value to get media coverage. When asked about his daughter's new "normalization" strategy, which smoothes out the old xenophobic rhetoric in favor of a mainstream lingua, he routinely declares: "Nobody cares about a nice National Front."
But the party polled in the low double digits until Marine Le Pen took the helm in 2011. As she rose in the polls, Alduy began studying her speeches to understand what powered the politician's steady ascent.
In May 2014, Le Pen's National Front stunned the French political establishment by pulling 25 percent of the vote in European parliamentary elections, becoming the top French vote-getter in a multiparty system. President François Hollande's Socialists came in third. Last month, the party equaled that percentage in elections for local councilors. Such results make Marine Le Pen a credible contender for France's presidency as the country looks ahead to its 2017 presidential cycle.
To demonstrate how Marine Le Pen's language presents formerly unpopular ideas in a new light, Alduy pointed to the party's policy of préférence nationale (national preference,) the cornerstone of its platform since the late 1970s. This policy would give priority for jobs, social services and benefits to French citizens, and would strip from children of legally resident noncitizens the family benefits now available to all children in France.
As touted by Jean-Marie Le Pen, however, Alduy noted, "The phrase préférence nationale has negative connotations in the French mind."
"'Preference' sounds arbitrary, potentially unfair, and goes against the republican principle of equality in the eye of the law," Alduy noted. "So Marine Le Pen has renamed this measure priorité nationale (national priority) or even sometimes patriotisme social (social patriotism). Both new phrases sound positive and don't evoke discrimination as the former did.
"'Priority' evokes action, responsibility, leadership – all the qualities one would like an effective chief executive to embody," Alduy said. "Patriotism is a noncontroversial word that can rally across the political spectrum. Who wants to be called anti-patriotic by opposing 'social patriotism'? Yet both phrases refer to exactly the same measures."
In the same vein, Alduy observed, Marine Le Pen eschews the word "race" while her father stated unequivocally "races are unequal."
"Instead," Alduy said, "Marine Le Pen explains that 'cultures,' 'civilizations' and 'nations' have a right to remain separate and different, or else risk disappearing, overwhelmed by hordes of outsiders with a different, incompatible culture.
"The word 'race' has disappeared, but the same peoples are the target of this fear of the other."
Listening between the lines
Alduy's findings hint at ways voters everywhere can critically evaluate political thought and make sound political decisions in times of stress.
She observed that other far-right European movements, such as Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, have similarly rebranded themselves to expand their base.
"Like the National Front, the Party for Freedom now adopts the posture of a champion of Western liberal values and the defense of 'minorities' – gays and women – against the alleged homophobia and misogyny of Islam," Alduy said. "Yet the Party for Freedom is a typical xenophobic, far-right, anti-immigration, anti-Europe party in every other respect.
"I hope that people will start to pay attention to the meaning of words in political speeches and in the media."
In 2015-16, Alduy said, she hopes to convey to students the nuances of political code words such as laïcité (secularism), "the Republic" or "immigration" in a Stanford course titled How to Think About the Charlie Hebdo Attacks: Political, Social and Literary Contexts.
"We all have to be careful and listen to what is left between the lines," Alduy said.
"When we hear someone speak about equality or democracy, we have to pay attention not just to what we want to hear, or to what we assume these words mean, but to decipher what they mean in the context of this speaker's worldview.
"The positive or negative connotations of certain words can mislead us to think that we share the same definition of them with the politicians that use them to gain our vote."
Marine Le Pen prise aux mots is currently available only in French. Analyses and graphs taken from the book are available in English on the website www.decodingmarinelepen.stanford.edu.
Media Contact
Corrie Goldman, director of humanities communication: (650) 724-8156, corrieg@stanford.edu
This diagram shows the spatial lay out of Marine Le Pen's discursive universe. Using factorial analysis in Hyperbase, one can create a "map" of all the most used words and how they correlate to one another: the closer they are spatially, the stronger their correlation, or how often they appear together.