Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening to you wherever you may be.

I'd like to welcome you to this Coursera course on Democratic Development. This is an open online course that explores how democracies emerge, succeed, and fail around the world. This is a course that's taught to Stanford University students, and we're very delighted to be able to take it globally online to an international community. We're coming to you from Stanford University, which is a undergraduate and graduate university in the United States that is slightly south of San Francisco on the California West Coast. founded in 1891 with some 14,000 students. and, with great strength in both the humanities and social sciences, as well as the arts and natural sciences. This is some images of our university campus and our famous memorial church. Why this course? this course is a course I have taught to Stanford University students undergraduate and graduate for nearly 30 years now. But pieces of this course I have been very happy and delighted to share with international audiences very recently in Burma in 2012 as you see here. and I have found, and this may help to explain perhaps why you are taking this course, that there is a strong demand among young people, among students of all ages, among development professionals, among practitioners and NGO leaders. Among people in politics and government and outside of it, to understand how democracy works, how democracies vary, how democracy develops, how it can be made deeper, more stable, and of higher quality. How democracies run into problems and fails so that perhaps those problems can be avoided. Specifically, we're going to look at some core theoretical and empirical challenges that relate to the development and functioning of democracy. None of these is more decisive for the fate of democracy. and none of these speaks more powerfully to the motivating principals and aspirations behind popular movements for democracy.

Then, the broadly felt, and I would say now, really universal societal aspiration and felt need to constrain the exercise of political power, to put some constitutional limits around it. To hold those who exercise power accountable, and to protect individual rights. We have everywhere in the world virtually something called a state. and those officials within the state exercise political power over the lives of those within the domain of sovereignty of the state and they have the power to to tax, they have to power to command. They have the power to impose punishments. They have the power to deprive people of their property and their rights potentially using the power of the state. So, how can the potentially enormous power of the state, at different levels of state authority, be constrained and held accountable? Now, I speak of this problem from American experience. I was born in the United States. I've lived most of my life in the United States. Though, I've had the privilege of traveling extensively around the world. and teaching for a year in Nigeria, in the early 1980s, in Northern Nigeria, in Cono. researching for a year, in the mid-1990s in Taiwan as it was begining to consolidate its democracy. These experiences have had a very powerful impact on my life and my thinking, as well as the traveling I have done throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, parts of Latin America and the Middle East. as well as some of the former communist countries. But, my interest in democracy emerges from American experience and initially from my young citizenship as an American. Watching the rhythm of American democratic politics, and the exercise of national power. And of course, one of the earliest questions that can be asked is, how the individual who resides in this hallowed place in the American political landscape, our White House, the equivalent of the presidential palace elsewhere in the world. How this individual, with so much power can be constrained and held accountable,

and what binds him, or hopefully someday, her, to the Constitution and the rule of law, and to respect for the law and the rights of individual citizens? To attend an American Presidential Inaugural as I did on January 20 of 2009 when Barack Obama was first inaugurated President of the United States, is truly an awesome experience. To see the weight and power of perhaps the most powerful country in the world shifting from one person to another. And in this case, from one party to another. And to see the enormous expectations difference, aspirations that are invested in a single individual who is being sworn in to a 4-year term in office, which as most of you know is renewable only once. To see the trappings of Presidential power the plane, the car, the house the security detail the enormous symbolic envelope of prestige, security. and elevated status that surrounds the President of the United States. Possibly the most powerful person in the world and almost certainly the most powerful elected official anywhere in the world. and to know that this individual, this incumbent of this enormously powerful position is equal under the law to anyone else. And here we stand and look at the White House from the very famous perspective of Lafayette Park. A park that sits directly across the street from the home and working residence of the President of the United States. The location of the epicenter of the executive branch of government. And to know that the immediate foreground you're looking at across the street from the White House is a virtually permanent protest site for any American citizen. To set up a placard or a a tent and a podium and a petition center. And advance whatever protest that they might have, whatever appeal to their fellow Americans they might want to make. However forceful, however irreverent. and this march of freedom, of tolerance, of restraint, of the rule of law, is something that makes a very deep impression on us as citizens. And I think, on many visitors from around the world, and is not to be taken for granted is something that is deeply embedded in our institutions.

And in our Constitutional framework and in the framework of Democracy as a system of government of limited power, in which different branches are able to check and scrutinize one another. In which, in the American system, and this is only one kind of democracy. As we will talk about, there are other forms of democracy. Parliamentary and more consensual that evoke the balance of power in different ways. But many political scientists have described the American system of government really not so much as a presidential form of government, but a congressional form of government. In which an independent legislative branch has enormous power to determine the budget of the United States. and to constrain and monitor the action of not just the President but all executive branch agencies. And here, you see the peak of the third branch of American government. The judicial branch, the home of the supreme court of the United States which is frequently constrain the actions of both the Congress and the President of United States. And which is the final arbiter of what the law and the Constitution say. And just does one famous dictator once asked, how many divisions does the Pope have? We can ask, how many divisions, how much force can nine Supreme Court justices mobilize when after all, they have no army, they have no police they have no independent course of power? And yet, we have, in a democracy, the extraordinary phenomenon of this court and this symbol of the seal of the Supreme Court of the United States and the rulings of the justices. Here, you see the portrait of one of the most powerful Chief Justices of the United States, Earl Warren the former Governor of California. Who led for well over a decade a Supreme Court that compelled the integration of the American schools and reinterpreted the Constitution in a way that dramatically expanded civil liberties. And protected individual rights, including the now famous and much taken for granted, right of individuals to have a lawyer before they are questioned in, on suspicion of a crime. These are things that the courts have

established that were not clearly written down in the law not ordered by a President, not explicitly mandated by the Congress. That the courts acted upon as an interpretation of the constitution. To have a political system in which the rulings of the judiciary can be so forward leaning. And, of course, it's a matter of controversy is whether the courts should have so much power. But so consensually accepted by individuals who might, under other circumstances, mobilize force or resistance against them. Speaks not only of the balancing power of different branches of government, but of a set of norms, of values, of expectations. That seat deeply into the public consciousness of a society and undergird the stabiltiy of democracy. And of course, these norms and institutions are not unique to the United States, but have diffused broadly around the world. I've had the privilege of visiting several dozen emerging and other established democracies around the world. Sometimes lecturing sometimes advising sometimes having the stimulating and uplifting experience of teaching. and very often, simply being, what I call a political tourist. Here, we see the parliament and the very beautiful great hall that was built attached to it of Mongolia, with the statue of the founder of the modern Mongolian state, Genghis Khan at the center in the distance. How could it be that a small in population country, with very little experience in terms of modern democracy, and seeming to suffer from what we call in the social science, literature, the resource curse. How could it be so, that such a small and vulnerable country surrounded by two extraordinarily large and powerful authoritarian regimes, could have become a thriving and successful? Though, not without controversy and conflict of course, electoral democracy this is the kind of question that I hope this course can help us understand. Here, we see the executive branch home of the South African Government, the Union Buildings in Pretoria. A symbol of British colonialism, you will

find in India buildings, that look very similar build by the British Rogue. Why was it that democracy was able to emerge and take root in the 1990s in South Africa. On the legacy, very violent and repressive legacy, of apartheid. What were the colonial legacies of British colonial rule and other European colonial heritages that left foundations, in some cases deeply hostile, in some cases with important elements of familiarity. and kernels of democratic and rule of law consciousness on which to build. I hope the course will help us understand these questions. And most of all, I hope this course will help us to see democracy as a multinational, universal aspiration. An ongoing experiment in which no country has a monopoly of truth and wisdom. And in which every country is constantly striving to improve and must constantly confront challenges to fundamental principles of the quality of democracy that we will soon address in the course. Such as equality, rule of law, integrity, transparency, accountability, and justice.