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.
For many years, it seemed as if the German party system was immune to the temptations of right-wing populist parties. This picture changed with the emergence of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). With its initial anti-European, and later strongly anti-Islamic rhetoric, the AfD has become the most successful emerging party in Germany. Just a few months after its foundation in 2013, the AfD received nearly 5% of the votes in the Federal Election and failed to enter the German Bundestag by only a few thousand votes. Today, the AfD is represented in ten out of sixteen German state parliaments, entered the European Parliament and gained several seats in both regional and local elections.
This talk will discuss how the emergence and establishment of the AfD is likely to alter Germany’s party system. Various resources (candidate surveys, election data and party manifestos) are analyzed to shed some light on the AfD’s ideological positioning, its political personnel, and the unequal regional distribution of its electoral success. The talk will conclude with a brief outlook toward the upcoming German Federal Election in 2017 and how a permanent extension of the party system to the extreme right-hand side of the ideological spectrum will narrow the scope for the formation of future government coalitions.
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Markus Tepe is a professor of Political Science (Political System of Germany) at the University of Oldenburg. He holds a doctoral degree from the Free University of Berlin (FU Berlin) and an MA in Political Science, Public Law and Economic Policy from the University of Münster. His research centers on public policies, political economy, and laboratory experiments in social science research. Currently, he is conducting a research project on need-based justice and redistribution (FOR2104) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Markus is a Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center for 2016-2017.
Markus Tepe
Professor of Political Science
Speaker
University of Oldenburg
David Cameron's promise to renegotiate the terms of British membership and organise an in/out referendum rested on a double gamble. The first one was that he would achieve a successful negotiation in Brussels, which he made possible by watering down his demands and relying on his partners' good will. The second is a more challenging one, which is to convince a majority of British voters to support staying in the EU. This is made particularly difficult by the long-standing anti-EU political culture in the UK, the divisions in the Conservative Party and an underlying crisis of British democracy, which finds expression in the rejection of the political elites, the rise of populist parties (UKIP) and the strains in the union between the component nations of the UK. This makes the outcome of the referendum, with massive consequences in case of a negative vote, hard to predict.
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Pauline Schnapper is professor of British Studies at the Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle University and a former fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the author (with David Baker) of Britain and the Crisis of the European Union, 2015, Palgrave Macmillan.
Pauline Schnapper
Professeur de civilisation britannique
Speaker
Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle
On January 13, 2016 for the first time in its history the European Union launched an investigation against one of its full member states, i.e. Poland. The dispute is about new Polish laws that allegedly disempower the national constitutional court and the public media thus breaching EU democracy standards. The newly elected Polish government in charge since November 2015 denies this and calls its “reforms” legitimate, even necessary to achieve a government better capable of acting in order to renew the economy and the political and social system. The dispute reaches far beyond Poland and questions the state and perspectives of integration of the Central Eastern European (CEE) nations into the EU. It is both effect and motor of the current pluri-‐dimensional European crisis.
In essence, the EU-‐Poland dispute is the outcome of the combination of the specific problems of governance in the Central Eastern European (CEE) nations with a superficial institutionalism of the EU that long neglected the area’s developmental issues. Poland’s democracy problems show that new attention of the EU to its CEE member states is needed which were for many years ignored because of other concerns such as the economic and financial crises since 2007 and the subsequent debt crisis since 2012, latest because of the threat of a “Brexit”, of Britain leaving the EU. In order to save the European integration project, it will be crucial for the credibility and acceptance of the EU to help the CEE nations to reform their socio-‐economic systems. The case of Poland is the chance for a debate about how the EU and its CEE member states can cooperate better instead of arguing. This debate will be an important pillar of the ongoing overall discussion about the future of the European Union in the coming years.
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
Most people in the world today think democracy and gender equality are good, and that violence and wealth inequality are bad. But most people who lived during the 10,000 years before the nineteenth century thought just the opposite. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, biology, and history, Ian Morris, author of the best-selling Why the West Rules--for Now, explains why. The result is a compelling new argument about the evolution of human values, one that has far-reaching implications for how we understand the past--and for what might happen next.
Fundamental long-term changes in values, Morris argues, are driven by the most basic force of all: energy. Humans have found three main ways to get the energy they need--from foraging, farming, and fossil fuels. Each energy source sets strict limits on what kinds of societies can succeed, and each kind of society rewards specific values. In tiny forager bands, people who value equality but are ready to settle problems violently do better than those who aren't; in large farming societies, people who value hierarchy and are less willing to use violence do best; and in huge fossil-fuel societies, the pendulum has swung back toward equality but even further away from violence.
But if our fossil-fuel world favors democratic, open societies, the ongoing revolution in energy capture means that our most cherished values are very likely to turn out--at some point fairly soon--not to be useful any more.
Originating as the Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University, the book includes challenging responses by novelist Margaret Atwood, philosopher Christine Korsgaard, classicist Richard Seaford, and historian of China Jonathan Spence.
Massimo Mannino is a Visiting Student Researcher from the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland, under the supervision of Michael Bechtel (University of St.Gallen) and Jens Hainmueller (Stanford University). His dissertation explores the political economy of natural disasters and is part of a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
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.
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. 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
Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy Program, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.
Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, was published in the spring of 2022.
Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.
Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), and the Pardee Rand Graduate School. He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.
(October 2024)
Global Populisms
A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI); Resident in FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law; Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
Speaker
Stanford University