Abstract:

Electoral competition, like athletic competition, requires its own norms of fair play. While the rules of the game, and the institutional umpire to enforce those rules, are important components for achieving the goal that the competition be fair, they do not suffice. The participants themselves must have their own standards of fair play apart from the rules and the referee. This need is particularly acute with respect to negative campaign ads, since the First Amendment bars the government from umpiring the fairness of those ads. But the same problem applies to other aspects of electoral competition, including compliance with campaign finance rules. What are these norms of fair electoral competition? Are they only intuitive, or can they be systematized? More specifically, insofar as incumbent candidates are officeholders, does due process constrain the use of their power to attain an unfair advantage in their race for reelection?

 

Speaker Bio:

Edward Foley directs Election Law @ Moritz at Ohio State’s law school, where he also holds the Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law. His book Ballot Ballots: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States, published by Oxford University Press, was available as of December 2015. Ned also serves as the reporter for the American Law Institute’s Election Law Project, which is developing nonpartisan rules for the resolution of disputed elections. (The American Law Institute is the well-respected professional society responsible for the Restatements of Law and the Model Penal Code, among many other projects.) While Ned has special expertise on the topics of recounts, he is conversant in all topics of election law, including redistricting and campaign finance, and recently co-authored a casebook Election Law and Litigation: The Judicial Regulation of Politics (Aspen 2014), which covers all aspects of election law. He and his casebook co-authors also have a contract with Oxford University Press to write a treatise on election law—remarkably the first of its kind in the United States in over a century. He is also a co-author of From Registration to Recounts: The Ecosystems of Five Midwestern States (2007).

Abstract:

Compulsory voting reinforces the distinctive and valuable role that elections play in contemporary democracy. Some scholars have suggested that mandatory voting laws can improve government responsiveness to members of poor and marginalized groups who are less likely to vote. Critics of compulsory voting object that citizens can participate in a wide variety of ways; voting is not important enough to justify forcing people to do it. These critics neglect the importance of voting’s particular role in contemporary democratic practice, though. The case for compulsory voting rests on an implicit, but widely shared, understanding of elections as special moments of mass participation that manifest the equal political authority of all citizens. The most prominent objections to mandatory voting fail to appreciate this distinctive role for voting and the way it is embedded within a broader democratic framework.

 

Speaker Bio:

Emilee is an assistant professor of Political Science at Stanford. Her current research project examines the distinctive value of voting in contemporary democratic practice, and its significance for electoral reform and the ethics of participation.

 

 

 

Abstract:

From El Salvador to Pakistan, high levels of internal violence characterize a growing number of poorly consolidated electoral democracies. Gangs, violent criminals, insurgents, and low-intensity conflict seem to entrench in many of these countries for decades. But some countries have managed to reduce extreme levels of violence. How did they succeed? And why were other, similarly situated countries unable to achieve similar success? Based on current and historical case studies, this upcoming book identifies continuities that suggest why these countries are so violent, and commonalities in the paths countries have taken to reduce violence. The findings are policy-focused and unexpected, even undesired. But they offer ideas to policy-makers based on the reality of what has worked, rather than the hopes of what might be achieved.

 

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she focuses on the rule of law, security, and governance. She previously served for nearly ten years as the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project, a movement to promote U.S. security policies that advance stability, security, and human dignity worldwide, for which Time Magazine named her one of the top 40 under 40 political leaders in the United States. From 2011-2014 she was chosen by Hillary Clinton to serve on the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, which advises the Secretary of State quarterly. Rachel has consulted on governance, security, and the rule of law for the U.S. and other governments, and international, nonprofit, and private organizations. She appears regularly in national and international media, and is the author of multiple books and articles, including Advancing the Rule of Law Abroad: Next Generation Reform, which was named one of the best foreign policy books of 2012 by Foreign Affairs magazine. She received her M. Phil and D. Phil from St. Antony’s College, Oxford, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar, and her B.A. from Yale University. Rachel was born in a log cabin on a dirt road in her beloved Fairbanks, Alaska.

Abstract:

India has the third largest system of higher education in the world, with many expecting this system to drive India's economic development going forward. And yet there is profound variation across this system, as some public universities perform admirably even as others suffer from endemic problems that we associate with weak states: absenteeism, bribery, and the like. What explains why some public universities seem to function so well even as others struggle? I argue that the presence or absence of meritocratic practices explains this variation, and in this talk, we shall examine the conditions under which meritocracy comes about. This research brings together five years of archival work, more than one-hundred interviews, as well as data from a large survey I conducted.

 

Speaker Bio:

 

Dinsha Mistree is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL, where he studies governance in developing countries. He is currently working on a book project examining India's higher education sector. Dinsha's previous work has appeared or is forthcoming at Comparative Politics, Springer Press, and Cambridge University Press. Dinsha holds a PhD in Politics from Princeton as well as Bachelor's and Master's Degrees from MIT.

 

 

 

This half-day symposium will bring together scholars and practitioners to reconsider Taiwan's prospects for entry into the Trans-Pacific Partnership in light of the conclusion of negotiations in October 2015 and the election of a new president and legislature in Taiwan in January 2016. It will revisit the themes and conclusions of the Taiwan Democracy Project's 2013 annual conference.

9:00-9:15am: Introductions

9:15-11:00am. Panel 1: The Politics of Trade and Development in Taiwan

Stephen Tan, Vice President of the Cross-Strait Policy Association, Taipei

Kristy Hsu, Director, Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center, Chung Hua Institution for Economic Research, Taipei

Chung-ming Kuan, Chair Professor, Department of Finance and Director of CRETA at National Taiwan University, and former Minister of the National Development Council

Hung-mao Tien, President of the Institute for National Policy Research, and former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan

11:00-11:15. Break

11:15-12:45. Panel 2: International Perspectives on the TPP: Implications for Regional Development and Geopolitics

Vinod Aggarwal, Professor of Political Science and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley

Nicholas Hope, Director of the China Program at the Stanford Center for International Development

Thomas Gold, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley

 

tpp_seminar_agenda.20160421.pdf

Audio Recording