Natan Sachs is a CDDRL pre-doctoral fellow and a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His primary research interest is on the formation of political cleavages and especially the politics of religious identity, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He is also interested in the use of experiments in comparative politics and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Indonesia, using experimental methods.

The Hon. Bob Rae is the Liberal Member of Parliament in the federal riding of Toronto Centre and foreign affairs critic for the Liberal Party of Canada. 

Bob Rae served as Ontario's 21st Premier, and has been elected ten times to federal and provincial parliaments.

Mr. Rae has a B.A. and an LLB from the University of Toronto and was a Rhodes Scholar from Ontario in 1969. He obtained a B.Phil degree from Oxford University in 1971 and was named a Queen's Counsel in 1984. Mr. Rae has received numerous honorary degrees and awards from Canadian and foreign universities, colleges, and organizations.

Mr. Rae was appointed to Her Majesty's Privy Council for Canada in 1998 and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2000, and appointed an Officer of the Order of Ontario in 2004.

From 1996 to 2007 he was a partner in the law firm, Goodmans LLP one of Canada's leading international law firms. Mr. Rae's clients included companies, trade unions, charitable and non-governmental organizations, and governments themselves. He has extensive experience in negotiation, mediation and arbitration, and consults widely on issues of public policy both in Canada and worldwide.  He remains connected with the mediation and arbitration firm of ADR Chambers.

Mr. Rae is the past president and founding Chairman, of the Forum of Federations and served as Chairman of the Institute of Research on Public Policy (IRPP).  He was chair of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and is the Chairman Emeritus of the Royal Conservatory of Music, as well as National Spokesperson of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society of Canada. He was the Chief Negotiator of the Canadian Red Cross Society in its restructuring, and also served as a member of the Canada Transportation Act Review and the Security and Intelligence Review Committee for Canada.  He has served on the boards of a number of public companies and charities.  He was Chancellor of Wilfrid Laurier University from 2002 to 2007.

Mr. Rae completed a review of Ontario's Postsecondary School Education for the Ontario Provincial government, with a report entitled Ontario:  A Leader in Learning, which in turn led to significant policy and budgetary change. 

In the spring of 2005, Mr. Rae was appointed a special advisor to the Canadian Minister of Public Safety on the Air India bombing of 1985.  His report, Lessons to be Learned was published in November of 2005 and led to his further appointment as Independent Counsellor to the Prime Minister of Canada.

Mr. Rae's books From Protest to Power, The Three Questions, Canada in the Balance, and Exporting Democracy: The Risks and Rewards of Pursuing a Good Idea are published by McClelland & Stewart.

Mr. Rae is Senior Fellow of Massey College in the University of Toronto.

Taiwan’s special municipality elections have been viewed by many as the “mid-term” for the Ma Ying-jeou presidency, bearing important political significance for the 2012 presidential election. In this special seminar, Professor Yun-han Chu, one of the leading political scientists in Taiwan and also President of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, will analyze the recent special municipality elections and their implications for Taiwan’s future political trends. Professor Chu will provide firsthand information about these recent election campaigns and what they reveal about the state of democracy in Taiwan. In analyzing the election results, he will also shed light on how the race for the presidency in 2012 is shaping up.

Yun-han Chu is Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica and Professor of Political Science at National Taiwan University. He serves concurrently as president of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. Professor Chu received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota and joined the faculty of National Taiwan University in 1987. He specializes in politics of Greater China, East Asian political economy and democratization. He is a three-time recipient of the Outstanding Research Award from Taiwan’s National Science Council. He currently serves on the editorial board of International Studies Quarterly, Pacific Affairs, China Review, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of East Asian Studies and Journal of Democracy. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of eleven books. Among his recent English publications are Crafting Democracy in Taiwan (Institute for National Policy Research, 1992), Consolidating Third-Wave Democracies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), China Under Jiang Zemin (Lynne Reinner, 2000), and The New Chinese Leadership (Cambridge University Press, 2004). His works have also appeared in some leading journals including World Politics, International Organization, China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, and Asian Survey.

Jonathan Zittrain is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and served as its first executive director from 1997-2000.

Zittrain's research includes digital property, privacy, and speech, and the role played by private "middlepeople" in Internet architecture. He has a strong interest in creative, useful, and unobtrusive ways to deploy technology in the classroom. He has wriiten a book  The Future of the Internet- And How to Stop It.

Education: Harvard Law School, J.D.; Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, M.P.A.; Yale University, B.S. Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence

The right to information is the most promising tool to combat corruption in the world today, inspired by which more than 80 countries now have right to information laws and 50 more are considering proposals.  Based on his experience with India's right to information movement, Vivek will discuss ways in which ICT tools could be designed in ways that could strengthen people's movements to combat corruption.

Vivek Srinivasan recently graduated from Maxwell School of Syracuse University.  His work seeks to understand why there is a high political commitment to delivering public services in Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state.  Prior to this, he worked with the Right to Food Campaign and with the National Alliance for the Fundamental Right to Education in India.  He has recently started a project with Intel create online tools to monitor the implementation of India's new right to education law.

He will be starting the position of Program Manager for the Program on Liberation Technology at Stanford University in late January 2011.

Abstract

Drawing on data from summer 2008, I will compare top U.S. political blogs on the left and right. The comparison shows significant cross-ideological variations. Sites on the left adopt different, and more participatory technical platforms; comprise significantly fewer sole-authored sites; include user blogs; maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content; include longer narrative and discussion posts; and (among the top half of the blogs in our sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization. The news producer/consumer relationship is more attenuated  on the left wing of the political blogosphere than the right. The practices of the left are more consistent with the prediction that the networked public sphere offers new pathways for discursive participation by a wider array of individuals; meanwhile, the practices of the right suggest that a small group of elites may retain more exclusive agenda-setting authority online. The cross-ideological divergence indicates that the Internet can equally be adopted to undermine or to replicate the traditional distinction between the production and consumption of political information. Moreover, the findings imply that the prevailing techniques of domain-based link analysis used to study the political blogosphere are misleading. These findings have significant implications for the study of prosumption and for the mechanisms by which the networked public sphere may or may not alter democratic participation relative to the mass mediated public sphere. 

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School, he was Joseph M. Field '55 Professor of Law at Yale. He writes about the Internet and the emergence of networked economy and society, as well as the organization of infrastructure, such as wireless communications. In the 1990s he played a role in characterizing the centrality of information commons to innovation, information production, and freedom in both its autonomy and democracy senses. In the 2000s, he worked more on the sources and economic and political significance of radically decentralized individual action and collaboration in the production of information, knowledge and culture. His work traverses a wide range of disciplines and sectors, and is taught in a variety of professional schools and academic departments. In real world applications, his work has been widely discussed in both the business sector and civil society.

Information and communication technology platforms have transformed many aspects of modern life for many individuals around the world. They have revolutionized the realms of commerce, sociability, and even production. The realm of politics and governance, however, is more resistant to ICT revolutions. In this paper, we argue that there are fundamental dis-analogies between politics and these other realms that make the pace of innovation, and to the incidence of transformative ICT platforms, much lower. Instead of looking for "the next big thing," those who wish to understand the positive contribution of ICT to political problems such as public accountability and public deliberation should focus on incremental rather than revolutionary dynamics. We examine these incremental dynamics at work in six important ICT-enabled political accountability efforts from low and middle-income countries (Kenya, Brazil, Chile, India, Slovakia).

Archon Fung is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research examines the impacts of civic participation, public deliberation, and transparency upon governance. His books include Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency (Cambridge University Press, with Mary Graham and David Weil) and Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton University Press). Current projects examine democratic reform initiatives in regulation, public accountability, urban planning, and public services. He has authored five books, three edited collections, and over fifty articles appearing in journals including American Political Science Review, Public Administration Review, Political Theory, Journal of Political Philosophy, Politics and Society, Governance, Journal of Policy and Management, Environmental Management, American Behavioral Scientist, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Boston Review.

Professor David Kinley holds the Chair in Human Rights Law at University of Sydney, and is the Law Faculty's Associate-Dean (International). He is also an Academic Panel member of Doughty Street Chambers in London, the UK's leading human rights practice. He has previously held positions at Cambridge University, The Australian National University, the University of New South Wales, Washington College of Law, American University, and was the founding Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University (2000-2005). He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in 2004, based in Washington DC, and Herbert Smith Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge in 2008. He is author and editor of eight books and more than 80 articles, book chapters, reports and papers.

He has worked for 15 years as a consultant and adviser on international and domestic human rights law in Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Thailand, Iraq, Nepal, Laos, China, and Myanmar/Burma, and for such organizations as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, AusAID, and the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions, and a number of transnational corporations, and NGOs.  He has also previously worked for three years with the Australian Law Reform Commission and two years with the Australian Human Rights Commission.

His latest publications include the critically acclaimed Civilising Globalisation: Human Rights and the Global Economy (CUP, 2009), Corporations and Human Rights (Ashgate 2009), and The World Trade Organisation and Human Rights: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Edward Elgar, 2009) Another edited collection entitled Principled Engagement: Promoting Human Rights in Pariah States will be published by UNU Publications in 2011.  He is currently working on another book investigating the interrelations between human rights and global finance.

David was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and brought up there during the 1960s and 70s.  He studied in England in the 1980s at Sheffield Hallam University and the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge, and after obtaining his doctorate from the latter in 1990 he moved to Australia.  He now lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.