Investigators
Beatriz Magaloni (Principal Investigator) - Program Leader at CDDRL
Larry Diamond - CDDRL
Seema Jayachandran - CDDRL
Terry L. Karl - CDDRL
Jeremy M. Weinstein - CDDRL
Alberto Diaz-Cayeros - University of California, San Diego

One of the most serious challenges to the viability of democracy is the persistence of extreme social and economic inequality, and along with it substantial levels of absolute poverty. In its broadest sense, development requires not simply sustained, robust levels of overall economic growth, but also 

• reducing inequalities of income and wealth,
• achieving a fairer and more socially just society (in part by eliminating discrimination against women and racial and ethnic minorities), and
• diminishing (and ultimately eliminating) absolute poverty, so that all members of society can live a dignified and minimally decent life. 

These dimensions of broad-based development are normatively compelling in themselves, but they are also necessary if democracy is to endure over time.  Unless a democratic political system can demonstrate its capacity to create a fairer, more just and prosperous society, less advantaged groups in society will lose faith in it and political competition may become destructively polarized along class and racial or ethnic lines.  This is part of the reason for the current crises of democracy in the Andes.

Despite the expansion of competitive markets and a world-wide wave of democratization during the last decades, the absolute number of people living beneath the poverty line has remained large or even increased in most of Africa and Latin America. Poverty in most of the developing world seems to be persistent rather than transitory and is accompanied by malnutrition, ill health, lack of access to public goods and services, and rudimentary production technologies.  

The Program on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy will, through social science research and comparative policy analysis, explore the linkages between democratic politics, socioeconomic inequality, and poverty reduction. The Program on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy will seek to provide a deeper understanding of what accounts for persistent poverty; what types of policies and institutions are most effective at improving the lot of the poor; and the conditions under which government failure to reduce poverty and extreme inequalities and to deliver public goods might undermine political stability and the viability of fragile democracies in the developing world. 

This program will build on research currently in progress (by Beatriz Magaloni and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros) to study and assess recent policy initiatives to reduce extreme poverty in Latin America. One line of research will assess how these poverty reduction schemes are affected by long-entrenched patterns of patron-client relations in party politics, how different types of party systems may affect the quality and impact of poverty reduction programs, and how clientelism ever gets replaced by other forms of political linkage capable of enhancing the accountability of elected officials to the poor.

Another line of research will examine the impact of specific poverty reduction programs, such as the conditional cash transfer programs that have been developed in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru, among others, to determine what types of policies work, and under what social and political conditions. This work has been aided by the presence at CDDRL of former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo, who introduced one such program during his presidency (2001-2006). Variables of interests include how different policy initiatives shape health, nutrition, and education; the determinants of wealth accumulation and upward mobility; the provision of public goods for development at the local level; and improvement in other indicators of human well-being. The program will also study policy interventions to enhance accountability of local governments, reduce corruption, check the power of public officials, and improve the delivery of public goods to local communities.  

Another line of work examines how specific institutional arrangements affect poverty, inequality and discrimination. Institutions can range from broad historical legacies, such as types of colonial institutions; electoral quotas to promote equality of representation of excluded groups such as women, lower castes, or indigenous groups; judicial reforms to end legal discrimination; and different types of community-level institutions and social norms for the provision of public goods or the administration of common-pool resources. 

The program will have several dimensions:

1. Occasional seminars, workshops, and conferences, where leading scholars and practitioners of these policies report on what they are learning and doing.  These meetings will result in reports, working papers, and academic publications, and will inform the community of affiliated scholars with the program about the latest developments in the field.
2. Hosting of visiting and postdoctoral fellows, who will advance the work of the program with their own scholarly research and their energy and ideas.  It is envisioned that each year the program will be bring at least one postdoctoral fellow or visiting scholar for some period of time. 
3. Faculty research support, to enable affiliated faculty and staff to conduct research on these problems. We are particularly interested in evaluations of policy interventions involving quasi-experimental or experimental methods to assess causality. 
4. Support of undergraduate and graduate student research, internships, and conferences, to fund Stanford students pursuing thesis research in this area, or wishing to serve in a summer internship in a government, non-governmental, or international agency dealing with this policy challenge.

Contact
Beatriz Magaloni