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FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling. 

FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world. 

FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.

Conference to examine Taiwan’s political polarization

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On October 17-18, the Taiwan Democracy Project at CDDRL, with the generous support of the Taipei Economic and Culture Office, will host its annual conference at Stanford University to examine the politics of polarization in Taiwan. The conference will focus on a variety of topics, including the recent Trade in Services Agreement with China that triggered this past year’s protests, an overview of the politics of trade liberalization in Taiwan, prospects for Taiwan’s integration into the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other regional trade agreements, and a consideration of the implications for Taiwan’s long-term democratic future.

For registration and a conference agenda, please visit the event site.

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Tain-jy Chen, president of the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, and Hung-mao Tien, president of the Institute for National Policy Research, share a laugh at the Taiwan Democracy Project and TECO Conference in 2013. | Sadaf Minapara
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Conference Report: Comparative Budget Policy: Lessons for Reform in the United States [May 2014]

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On May 8-9, 2014, the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective at Stanford University hosted a workshop on comparative budget policy. The aim of the workshop was to bring together academics and policymakers from the United States and abroad to understand, and devise ways to improve, American budgetary politics. Representatives from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development spoke about ways to assess the American budgeting framework in comparative perspective, using benchmarks and indices of best practices. Practitioners and political officials from Japan, Canada, Australia, and Italy spoke about budgetary disputes and solutions in their countries. 
 
Policymakers and lawyers from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in the United States reflected on the challenges they faced while in office, and on the potential for meaningful procedural changes to the budget process. Finally, a group of interdisciplinary scholars from history, political science, law, and public policy provided context and analytical frameworks for understanding budgetary politics.

The motivation for the workshop stems from the observation that the United States government routinely fails in one of its foremost tasks: to create, and to pass, budgets. Congress often fails to devise a budget—in many years, it passes Continuing Resolutions to extend the previous year’s budget, punting difficult decisions about which federal programs to cut, maintain, or grow. Even worse, the failure of the President and Congress to reach agreement on the budget has led to 18 government shutdowns since 1978, while shutdowns have remained rare in other advanced democracies.

In 2013, budget negotiations in Congress stalled multiple times as Republicans and Democrats failed to agree on a host of political issues, including the debt ceiling, funding of the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, and tax rates. These negotiations resulted in budget sequestration of many federal programs, and threatened to reduce the United States credit rating. As the fiscal year deadline of October 1 approached, both chambers of Congress tried to pass budget legislation to fund the government. Economists and experts predicted that failing to meet the deadline would have significant consequences, including a potential default on government debt. Despite these dire warnings, however, the parties failed to reach agreement, culminating in a 16- day shutdown of the federal government from October 1-16, 2014.

The objective of this workshop was to think through the causes of, and solutions to, ineffective budgetary politics and policy-making. This report begins by describing the politics of budgeting in the United States, and situates our procedural and political anomalies in the comparative context of budgetary politics around the world. The next section examines a range of suggestions to improve budgeting, from technical and procedural changes to broader institutional reforms. The report concludes by discussing the limitations of proposed reforms, and by thinking realistically about how to mobilize support for improved budgeting outcomes.

 

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Didi Kuo

Policing China: Fragmentation of the Security State

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Abstract:

By design, policing in China is a centralized affair in which local bureaus are ultimately held accountable to the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing. In reality, policing practices vary dramatically across region and issue area, even within provinces. This fragmentation is deeply entrenched in the bureaucracy, creating enforcement problems that vex upper level officials and aggravate public dissatisfaction while simultaneously opening up opportunities for lower level innovation. Drawing from over 100 interviews with 51 police officers at the central, provincial, and local levels, I examine fragmentation of the police bureaucracy by parsing out observable patterns of control over the local level and analyzing the ways in which the central government's exercise of power both helps and hinders policing on the ground.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Suzanne is a pre-doctoral fellow at CDDRL and a PhD candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. A scholar of reform era China, her research is driven by interests in ground-level governance and authoritarian power structures. Her dissertation, "Policing China: Struggles of Law, Order, and Organization for Ground-Level Officers," maps the everyday challenges faced by local officers and their supervising authorities. Exploring the tensions between central government planning and the officers who enforce law on the ground provides insight into China's political reform and local state stability. Her work has appeared in PS: Political Science and Politics and China Quarterly (forthcoming).

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