Stanford University

Reorganizing U.S. Government Democracy Promotion Efforts Project

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Comparing American and European Strategies for Democracy Promotion

Conventional wisdom holds that the United States and the European Union pursue vastly different strategies to promote democracy around the globe. The U.S. is often perceived to rely on coercion, while the EU employs "soft power." This project completed a book demonstrating that American and European strategies to spread democracy display far more similarities than differences. For the first time, leading European and American experts systematically compare U.S.

Obama advisor, CDDRL Director McFaul to square off against McCain advisor, former CIA Director Jim Woolsey

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On October 14, at a special Commonwealth Club of California event in San Francisco, CDDRL Director Michael McFaul will debate former CIA Director James Woolsey on international security and how it factors into each presidential campaign's plans for the country. McFaul is a foreign policy advisor to Sen. Barack Obama; Woolsey is an advisor to Sen. John McCain.
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Divided Memories: History Textbooks and the War in Asia

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The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, the Center for Pacific and Asian Studies at The University of Tokyo and the Department of Area Studies at The University of Tokyo will present a 3 part discussion comparing the formation of divided memories in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States.

The aim of this research is that it puts Japanese textbooks in a comparative framework, and changes the nature of the dialogue about these issues as a result. We will NOT focus on Japanese textbooks per se but rather on the comparative analysis.

Part 1. Comparative Analysis of High School History textbooks in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States

  • Professor Gi-Wook Shin (Director, Shorenstein APARC): an overview of our project
  • Professor Peter Duus (Stanford University): the comparative analysis of historical narratives presented in the textbooks of China, Japan and the U.S.
  • Professor Jae-Jung Chung (The University of Seoul) : the comparative analysis of textbooks in South Korea and Japan
  • Dr. Weike Li (Editor, Peoples Education Press, Beijing): on Chinese textbooks
  • Professor Haruo Tohmatsu (Tamagawa University): the comparative analysis of Japanese textbooks with other textbooks

Part 2. Textbooks as an International Relations issue

  • Dr. Daniel Sneider (Shorenstein APARC): the history of textbooks as an international issue and the different approaches to solving it
  • Professor Hiroshi Mitani (The University of Tokyo): the personal experiences with Sino-Japanese and Korean-Japanese historical Dialogue
  • Professor Shinichi Kitaoka (The University of Tokyo, former ambassador to UN): the experience of official joint committee between Japan and China

Part 3. General Discussions

  • Professor Tatsuhiko Tsukiashi (The University of Tokyo, Korean history)
  • Professor Shin Kawashima (The University of Tokyo, Chinese history)

The University of Tokyo
Komaba Hall 1F, 18th bldg.

Gi-Wook Shin Speaker
Daniel C. Sneider Speaker
Conferences

Expert Information, Public Deliberation and Electoral Support for Good Governance; Experimental Evidence from Benin

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Leonard Wantchekon, PhD is a Professor of Politics and Economics at the New York University. Wantchekon's areas of interest include political economy, development, applied game theory, and comparative politics.

He is the author of several articles on post-civil war democratization, resource curse, electoral clientelism and experimental methods in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Political Science Review, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Constitutional Political Economy, Political Africaine and Afrique Contemporaine.

Some of his recent publications include "The Paradox of 'Warlord' Democracy: A Theoretical Investigation", American Political Science Review, (Vol. 98, No1, 2004); and "Resource Wealth and Political Regimes in Africa" (with Nathan Jensen), Comparative Political Studies, (Vol. 37, No. 7, 816-841, 2004).

Wantchekon is the editor of the Journal of African Development (JAD), formally known as Journal of African Finance and Economic Development (JAFED). He is the founding director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Political Economy, which is based in Benin (West Africa) and at New York University. He is currently serving on the APSA international committee as well as the APSA Africa initiative committee. He was also a division chair at the 2005 APSA Annual meetings in Washington DC.

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Leonard Wantchekon Professor of Politics and Economics Speaker New York University
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Shaping Democratic Practice and the Causes of Electoral Fraud

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Why is there so much alleged electoral fraud in new democracies? Most scholarship focuses on the proximate cause of electoral competition. This article proposes a different answer by constructing and analyzing an original dataset drawn from the German parliament’s own voluminous record of election disputes for every parliamentary election in the life of Imperial Germany (1871-1912) after its adoption of universal male suffrage in 1871. The article analyzes the election of over 5,000 parliamentary seats to identify where and why elections were disputed as a result of “election misconduct.” The empirical analysis demonstrates that electoral fraud’s incidence is significantly related to a society’s level of inequality in landholding, a major source of wealth, power, and prestige in this period. After weighing the importance of two different causal mechanisms, the article concludes that socio-economic inequality, by making new democratic institutions endogenous to preexisting social power, can be a major and underappreciated barrier to democratization even after the adoption of formally democratic rules.

Daniel Ziblatt, PhD is an Associate Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University, focusing his research and teaching on comparative politics, state-building, democratization, and federalism. His main intrests lie in contemporary Europe and the political development of the area, as well as electoral reform, voting rights, and the politics of public goods.

Ziblatt writes copious articles, but is also the author of the book Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy, Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton University Press, 2006), awarded in 2007 the American Political Science Association's prize for the best book in European Politics. The book is based on a dissertation that received two additional awards from the APSA (the Gabriel Almond award in comparative politics and the European Politics Division award).

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Daniel Ziblatt Assoc. Prof. of Government and Social Studies Speaker Harvard University
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Is Ethnic Conflict Inevitable? Parting Ways Over Nationalism and Separatism

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Jeremy Weinstein, Ames Habyarimana, assistant professor at Georgetown, Macartan Humphreys, assistant professor at Columbia, Daniel Posner, associate professor at UCLA, Richard Rosecrance, adjunct professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and senior fellow at the Belfer Center, and Arthur Stein, professor of Political Science at UCLA collectively respond to an article titled, "Us and Them," by Jerry Muller, professor at the Catholic University of America in Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008.

According to the authors, Muller's article "tells a disconcerting story about the potential for ethnic diversity to generate violent conflict. He argues that ethnic nationalism--which stems from a deeply felt need for each people to have its own state--"will continue to shape the world in the twenty-first century."

In fact, Weinstein and his co-authors argue, ethnic differences are not inevitably, or even commonly, linked to violence on a grand scale.

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Taiwan's 'Nuclear Option'? Security Imperatives and Normative Transformation

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This is a CDDRL's seminar within our Democracy in Taiwan Program.

Vincent Wei-cheng Wang is Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Richmond. He was a former Coordinator of the American Political Science Association Conference Group on Taiwan Studies and a board member of the American Association for Chinese Studies. He has published over fifty scholarly articles and book chapters on Asian politics and international relations, Taiwan’s domestic politics and external relations, United States-Asian relations, and comparative political economy of East Asia and Latin America. His most recent publication is “Taiwan: Conventional Deterrence, Soft Power, and the Nuclear Option,” in Muthiah Alagappa, ed., The Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21st Century Asia (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2008). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

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Vincent Wei-cheng Wang Chair and Associate Professor Speaker Department of Political Science at University of Richmond
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McFaul testifies to Congress on future of US-Russian relations

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Russia's invasion of Georgia last month seriously undermined peace and security in Europe for the first time in years, CDDRL Director Michael McFaul told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on September 9. Russia's military actions and subsequent decision to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, McFaul said, represent a fundamental challenge to the norms and rules that help to promote order in the international system.

"Instead of business as usual or isolation, the United States must navigate a third, more nuanced, more complicated, and more comprehensive strategy that seeks to bolster our allies and partners, check Russian aggression, and at the same time deal directly with the Russian government on issues of mutual interest. The long term goal of fostering democratic change and keeping the door of Western integration open for countries in the region, including Russia, must not be abandoned. American foreign policy leaders have to move beyond tough talk and catchy phrases and instead articulate a smart, sustained strategy for dealing with this new Russia, a strategy that advances both our interests and values."

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