Abstract:

In India, the world’s largest democracy, the symbiotic relationship between crime and politics raises complex questions. For instance, how can free and fair democratic elections exist alongside rampant criminality? Why do political parties actively recruit candidates with reputations for wrongdoing? Why do voters elect (and even reelect) them, to the point that a third of state and national legislators assume office with pending criminal charges? In a new book, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics, Milan Vaishnav takes readers deep into the marketplace for criminal politicians by drawing on fieldwork on the campaign trail, large surveys, and an original database on politicians’ backgrounds. The result is the first systematic study of an issue that has profound implications for democracy both with and beyond India’s borders.

 

Speaker Bio:

Milan Vaishnav is a senior fellow in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His primary research focus is the political economy of India, and he examines issues such as corruption and governance, state capacity, distributive politics, and electoral behavior. He is the author of When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (Yale University Press, 2017) and co-editor (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Devesh Kapur) of Rethinking Public Institutions in India (Oxford University Press, 2017). He was previously a fellow at the Center for Global Development and has taught at Columbia, Georgetown, and George Washington Universities. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.

The eight-year presidency of Ma Ying-jeou (2008-2016) in Taiwan left a complex legacy of political achievements, confrontations, and disappointments that defies easy characterization. It began with President Ma and the Kuomintang’s (KMT) commanding electoral victories in the 2008 elections, and ended with the KMT’s overwhelming loss to the resurgent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its leader Tsai Ing-wen in 2016.

It featured rapid conclusions to a broad set of agreements on cross-Strait cooperation with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). But worries about closer ties with the PRC also triggered a popular backlash against growing mainland Chinese influence in Taiwan’s economy and culminated in a student-led occupation of the Legislative Yuan.

It coincided with contradictory trends in public opinion, including both the consolidation of a separate Taiwanese identity and support for the status quo in cross-Strait relations, as well as the increasing salience of divisions over social and environmental issues such as same-sex marriage and green energy at the same time as rising concerns about economic inequality.

It also marked a return to unified government after the acrimonious partisan fights of the Chen Shui-bian years, but long-standing intra-KMT divisions and the decentralized organization of the legislature continued to frustrate the administration, especially in President Ma’s second term.        

Finally, the Ma era produced no consensus about how to move beyond Taiwan’s developmental state legacies. Plans for domestic economic liberalization and greater integration into the global economy were only partially carried out, and the Ma administration ignored or struggled to address rising inequality, stagnant wages, increasing economic dependence on the PRC market, and a skewed tax system favoring investors and corporations over salaried workers.

 

Conference Agenda

The 11th Annual Conference on Taiwan Democracy will bring together scholars from Taiwan, the US, and Europe to consider these political achievements, confrontations, and disappointments in depth, and to assess the strengths and weaknesses of Taiwan’s democracy at the end of the Ma Ying-jeou’s presidency. Conference participants will discuss trends in public opinion, party politics and elections, cross-Strait relations, governance and media, and the performance of political institutions. The conference papers will be revised and included in an edited volume covering democratic practice during the Ma Ying-jeou era in Taiwan.

The conference is free and open to the public. Those interested in attending are requested to RSVP at the link above. This event is organized by the Taiwan Democracy Project in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

 

Thursday, March 9

9:15-10:45. Panel I. Public Opinion and Elections

• Min-hua Huang, "Why Young Voters Abandoned the KMT"
• Ching-hsin Yu, "Trends in National Identity, Partisanship, and Attitudes toward Cross-Strait Relations"
• Yun-han Chu, discussant

11:00-12:45. Panel II. Party Politics

• Austin Wang, "Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP: The Path Out of the Political Wilderness"
• Nathan Batto, "The KMT as a Presidentialized Party: Party Leaders and Shifts in China Discourse"
• Kharis Templeman, "The Disruption that Wasn't: How 2016 Changed the Taiwanese Party System"
• Ching-hsin Yu, discussant

12:45-1:45. Lunch

1:45-3:30. Panel III. Economics, Security, and Cross-Strait Relations

• Szu-yin Ho, "Ma Ying-jeou's Cross-Strait Policy: Ambitions, Constraints, Results" 
• Lang Kao, "Cross-Strait Agreements and Taiwan's Executive-Legislative Relationship, 2008-2016"
• Dean Chen, "In the Shadow of Great Power Rivalry: The KMT Administration's Relations with America, China, and Japan, 2008-2016"
• Larry Diamond, discussant

 

 

Friday, March 10

9:15-10:45. Panel IV. Governance, Media, and Civil Society

• Eric Yu, "The Changing Media Environment and Public Opinion"
• Yun-han Chu and Yu-tzung Chang, "The Challenge of Governability in Taiwan"
• Kharis Templeman, discussant

11:00-12:30. Panel V. Political Institutions

• Shih-hao Huang, w/ Shing-yuan Sheng, "Decentralized Legislative Organization and Its Consequences for Policy-making in the Ma Ying-jeou Era"
• Christian Goebel, "Special Prosecutors, Courts, and Other Accountability Institutions under Ma YIng-jeou"
• TJ Pempel, discussant

12:30-1:30. Lunch

 

 

 

 

This event is co-sponsored by the WSD HANDA Center for Human Rights and International Justice and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. 

 

Abstract:

Unchecked greed is the primary driver of conflict and mass atrocities in Africa. Most often, it manifests itself in the form of violent kleptocracies, in which governments are hijacked by networks of senior officials, military officers, bankers, mining and oil company representatives, and arms dealers. Conventional foreign policy approaches have failed to address the hell on earth that these networks have created. The principal vulnerability of the networks is their exposure in the international financial system, as most corrupt actors use that system to move their money and hide their wealth. The tools of financial pressure that have been honed in the aftermath of 9/11 hold great promise for countering the kleptocrats that are destroying parts of Africa through war and resource pillaging. Examining how those policies can be used and how a hopeful political constituency is being built is a major focus of this presentation.

 

Speaker Bio:

John Prendergast is a human rights activist and New York Times best-selling author who has focused on peace in Africa for over thirty years. He is the Founding Director of the Enough Project, an initiative to end genocide and crimes against humanity. With George Clooney, he also co-founded The Sentry, a new investigative initiative focused on dismantling the networks financing conflict and atrocities. John has worked for the Clinton White House, the State Department, two members of Congress, the National Intelligence Council, UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S. Institute of Peace.  He has been a Big Brother for three decades, as well as a youth counselor and a basketball coach.  John is the author or co-author of ten books. John also co-founded the Satellite Sentinel Project, which used satellite imagery to spotlight mass atrocities.  With NBA stars, John launched the Darfur Dream Team Sister Schools Program to fund schools in Darfuri refugee camps. He also created Enough’s Raise Hope for Congo Campaign, highlighting the issue of conflict minerals, and its student arm the Conflict-Free Campus Initiative. John also runs Not On Our Watch, the organization founded by Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Brad Pitt and George Clooney.  John has been awarded six honorary doctorates. He has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School, Stanford University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, and others. John has appeared in four episodes of  60 Minutes, for which the team won an Emmy Award, and helped create African stories for two episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. John has also traveled to Africa with NBC’s Dateline, ABC’s Nightline, PBS’ NewsHour, CNN’s  Inside Africa, and Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He also appears in the motion picture “The Good Lie,” starring Reese Witherspoon and Emmanuel Jal, as well as documentaries including Merci Congo, When Elephants Fight, Blood in the Mobile, Sand and Sorrow, Darfur Now, 3 Points, and  War Child.

 

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Abstract:

There is a growing backlash against the liberal and neoliberal economic, political and social ideologies that have dominated the globe since the 1980s. On economic fronts, critiques of free-market, privatization, and deregulation policies are on the rise, especially since the financial crisis of 2008. Even mainstream economists at the International Monetary Fund now report that the benefits of neoliberalism have been “oversold” and may contribute to increasing inequality. On political fronts, we see a decline in liberal democracy; for instance, Freedom House reports that more countries have experienced losses than gains in freedoms since 2005. We argue that just as there is a groundswell of opposition against dominant global economic and political ideologies, there is rising resistance to the social dimensions of a world culture rooted in Western liberalism. To illustrate our argument, we examine the rise of legal restrictions on foreign funding to non-governmental organizations in more than 50 countries over the period 1994-2015.

Speaker Bio:

Patricia Bromley is an Assistant Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology at Stanford University. Her work has focused on the rise and globalization of a culture emphasizing rational, scientific thinking and expansive forms of rights. It spans a range of fields including comparative education, organization theory, the sociology of education, and public administration and policy. A recent book, Hyper-organization: Worldwide organizational expansion, explains the global proliferation of organization, both in numbers and internal complexity (Oxford University Press 2015, with J.W. Meyer). Other recent publications appear in American Sociological Review, Administration & Society, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.