Political economist takes on role as new faculty director of the King Center

When Katherine Casey was an undergraduate student at Northwestern University, she spent some time volunteering as part of an after-school program for young people on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

She and her classmates felt good about the experience, but tribal elders weren’t impressed. The students’ time would be better spent, they suggested, trying to help the tribe come up with an economic development plan that could help generate funds that would allow the community to address its problems holistically. The lesson was formative for Casey, who was majoring in English literature and political science at the time.

“The enduring message was, ‘This is an incredibly complex problem,’” she remembers. “And, also, it’s the most important problem you can work on. So, I thought, ‘Let me try to work on that.’”

Casey has been working on the problem of economic development ever since, including in positions at the World Bank, and as a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB). Now, she will do so from the helm of the Stanford King Center on Global Development, a joint venture of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Countries (Stanford Seed). Casey begins her tenure as faculty director of the King Center in September 2024.

“The King Center is the center of international development for the whole university,” she says. “It’s university-wide; it cuts through all disciplinary and school boundaries. And that is what you need to really make an impact on global poverty: you have to bring together a wide variety of  perspectives and expertise.”

Casey’s research lies at the intersection of economic and political forces in developing countries; her work explores ways to improve the democratic processes. Much of her work has taken place in Sierra Leone, where she lived and served the country’s government for two years on secondment from the World Bank. Past and ongoing research has explored how to incentivize candidates in Sierra Leone’s parliamentary elections to participate in debates that would help inform voters; whether encouraging village chiefs to delegate responsibility to higher-skilled individuals leads to improved outcomes for their communities; the long-term effects of so-called community-driven development—a prominent strategy for delivering foreign aid—on infrastructure and democratic processes; and the impact of more democratic candidate selection processes within Sierra Leone’s political parties.

Casey says she and her coauthors “evaluate policy changes” in partnership with country governments and local organizations to answer the question of “why democracy isn’t working better and what can be done to improve it.”

Based on her work in Sierra Leone, the government of Zambia recently asked Casey and her colleagues to collaborate on decentralization efforts in that country.

Neale Mahoney, SIEPR’s incoming director, says Casey brings “a valuable entrepreneurial perspective to the King Center at a time when global development challenges are becoming increasingly economic and political.”

“Her experience working on governance innovations and scalable solutions in lower-income countries will inform the scholarly work and research initiatives that the King Center supports around the world,” he says.

Abou Bakarr Kamara, a senior country economist in Sierra Leone at the International Growth Centre (IGC), has been working with Casey for several years.

“She’s fantastic,” he says. “She’s not the type of person who’s going to impose her ideas. She believes in collaboration and engagement among partners.”

Kamara says Casey has built long-standing relationships in Sierra Leone that have allowed her to test promising, evidence-based interventions designed to improve democratic processes.

One of their projects together, “An Experiment in Candidate Selection,” required the participation of both major political parties in Sierra Leone. Typically, party officials choose who will appear on the ballot in a race. But, in advance of the country’s 2018 parliamentary elections, the parties agreed to test a new selection method that included a policy-oriented convention followed by voter opinion polling. The parties were not required to follow the results of the new method, but, in many cases they did, leading to voters’ preferred candidates appearing on the ballot in 61 percent of races (compared to 38 percent in races where the party maintained the status quo). The chosen candidates also had stronger records of local public goods provision. In other words, the interventions could lead to more representative and competent elected officials.

As the authors put it in their paper, “if party officials select candidates with little input from voters, citizens may well be perfectly enfranchised on paper, entitled to participate in free and fair general elections, but wholly irrelevant in practice, at least for partisan strongholds.”

Just completing the experiment was an accomplishment, Kamara explains. 

“To work with political parties—to get them to engage with and listen to you is a skill by itself,” he says.

Centering the needs and voices of local communities and governments has long been a hallmark of Casey’s work. That’s something she plans to prioritize at the King Center as well.

“We want to use King Center resources and expertise to make sure we’re having broader conversations that include leaders and scholars from low-income countries,” she says. “We want to be a platform that elevates those perspectives.”

Casey also plans to further strengthen the global development community on Stanford’s campus. As an example, she pointed to the center’s new Global Development Seminar Series for faculty across the university.

“Everyone gets together and can see what people are working on and what opportunities for collaboration there are,” she says. “There’s lots of energy and potential to harness by making the King Center a big umbrella across Stanford.”  

Jesper B. Sørensen, the Robert A. and Elizabeth R. Jeffe Professor at the GSB and faculty director at Stanford Seed, says Casey’s work is “ambitious and creative.”

“She has a unique ability to inspire and lead both faculty and students,” he says. “I am eager to have Kate take the helm and lead the King Center to further success through her deep expertise and remarkable energy.”