Taiwan lies at the heart of the growing confrontation between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and it remains the only issue that could plausibly trigger a war between the two countries. Taiwan is claimed by the PRC as Chinese territory, and its government is unrecognized by all but a handful of states today. But it is also a prosperous liberal democracy of more than 23 million people, a major trading partner of both the U.S. and the PRC, and the source of more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips.

This talk will cover how the US-PRC-Taiwan relationship got to this point, what each side’s foremost interests and long-term strategies are, and how those have changed in recent years with Xi Jinping’s centralization of power and the shifting balance of economic and military power in the region. It will also touch on the current debates in Washington over Taiwan policy and how best to ensure that peace can be maintained across the Taiwan Strait for the indefinite future. 

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Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

According to U.N. projections, 86% of global population growth over the next two decades will occur in cities of low and middle-income countries. While social science scholarship typically focuses on megacities, most population growth will occur in small- and medium-sized urban centers. Meanwhile, many countries have decentralized significant policy responsibilities to municipal governments over the last three decades. Expectations derived from the literature on fiscal federalism suggest that this is a cause for concern, as larger cities are thought to deliver public goods more effectively than smaller ones owing to economics of scale. This book project examines the relationship between city size and the types of political demands citizens make of local governments, the ways in which local elected officials respond to these demands, and public service access and quality. Analysis focuses on four large, highly decentralized democracies: Argentina, Brazil, India, and Indonesia. 

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Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors from any university department who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL). 

On Wednesday, January 17 at 12:00 pm PT, join CDDRL faculty and current honors students to discuss the program and answer questions.

The application period opens on January 8, 2024, and runs through February 9, 2024.

For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.

What effect do gender quotas have on political responsiveness? We examine the effect of randomly imposed electoral quotas for women in Mumbai’s city council, using a wide variety of objective and subjective measures of constituency-level public service quality.

The perceived quality of local public goods is higher in constituencies with quota members, and citizen complaints are processed faster in areas with more quota members. One mechanism for this effect is differences in the focus of legislator effort. In their legislative participation, quota members focus on public goods distribution, while nonquota members focus on individual goods, member perks, and identity issues. We suggest that men’s more extensive engagement with extralegal and rhetorical forms of political action has led to men and women cultivating different styles of political representation.
 

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Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

This seminar will present the first evidence of systematic ethnic discrimination in Artificial Intelligence (AI) used to assist judges in criminal sentencing. Using audit experiments on a commercial criminal sentencing software, we find that AI predicts longer sentences for defendants with ethnic minority status and names that convey minority cues. The magnitude of discrimination is similar to existing findings from sentencing decisions of judges. Additionally, we find that AI may introduce new forms of discrimination not seen in human judgment.

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Eddie Yang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at UC San Diego and a predoctoral fellow at CDDRL and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. His research focuses on repression and the politics of Artificial Intelligence. His dissertation studies how existing repressive institutions limit the usefulness of AI for authoritarian control, with a focus on China. His work has been published in both computer science and political science. 

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that power begets power, this paper argues that political gains for marginalized groups can create the very conditions for their political demise. When a marginalized group comes to power without institutional protections such as quotas or reservations, it can divide the marginalized group and unite the dominant group. I study this process, which I call the representation trap, in the context of one of the largest marginalized groups in the world's largest democracy: Indian Muslims. While India has made strides toward the political inclusion of many marginalized groups, Muslims stand in stark contrast, experiencing poor political representation, low socioeconomic status, and communal violence.

Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that a Muslim political win leads to an almost 30 percent lower likelihood of subsequent Muslim victory. I document the mechanisms for marginalized group divisions and dominant group consolidation through additional election analyses, experimental evidence from an original, in-person survey of about 5000 Muslim and Hindu voters, and qualitative evidence drawing on about 150 elite and voter interviews. Taken together, the theory and findings challenge the perspective that representation necessarily catalyzes the political empowerment of marginalized groups.

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Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.