Stanford University

Governance

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.

Taiwan's Democratic Development: Reflections on the Ma Ying-jeou Era

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Ma Ying-jeou KMT

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

 

 

 

Oksenberg Room, 3rd Floor, Encina Hall Central

Larry Diamond

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Knight-Hennessy Scholars Peking University Information Session

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Each year up to 100 high-achieving students with demonstrated intellect, leadership potential and civic commitment will receive full funding to pursue a graduate education at Stanford. Join us to learn more about the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program. 

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https://apply.knight-hennessy.stanford.edu/register/PKU 

 

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The Future of Globalization

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The populist backlash against globalization is being felt acutely across Europe as well as here in the US. And yet whether you look at it from an economic, political or military perspective, transnational cooperation has become an integral part of our global landscape. Hear CDDRL Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama on the future of globalization for World Affairs. 

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Seasoned journalist analyzes US-China relations under Trump

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The future of relations between China and the United States depends on the readiness of both governments to focus on resolving shared challenges, longtime journalist John Pomfret said at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) last Wednesday.
 
“The reality of the U.S.-China relationship is collaboration and competition,” said Pomfret, who served for 15 years as a foreign correspondent, describing the nature of interaction between the two countries that began to normalize relations in 1972.
 
Pomfret's remarks were delivered at a colloquium entitled, “The United States and China in the Era of Donald Trump,” which explored the unorthodox approach Donald Trump took during his campaign on a range of issues related to China, and implications for the bilateral relationship now that Trump has assumed the U.S. presidency.
 
Pomfret over the course of his journalism career spent seven years covering China, including during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and from 1998 through 2003 as the bureau chief for the Washington Post in Beijing, and recently authored the book, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, which examines U.S.-China relations from 1776 to the present. He won the 2007 Shorenstein Journalism Award, an annual honor conferred to a journalist who produces outstanding reporting on Asia.
 
“It’s clear that a new type of reciprocity is needed to right the balance in the U.S.-China relationship, but just whether Trump and his team have the wherewithal to do it…is very much an open question,” he said.
 
Trump continues to promise to restore manufacturing jobs in the United States, but fulfillment of that promise could come in conflict with its trade relationship with China, where much manufacturing of U.S. products takes place, he said.
 
Equally important in the U.S.-China relationship is how to address North Korea and its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles program, which remains an “extremely complicated” and pressing situation, he said.
 
Pomfret expressed uncertainty about the Trump administration’s capacity to change China’s position from the status quo, which has long supported the North Korean regime by way of trade and relaxed implementation of U.N. sanctions despite repeated provocations.
 
Yet, amidst the vague foreign policy positions projected by Trump toward China, “there is one positive, and that is that he has the Chinese off-balance,” Pomfret admitted.
 
For Pomfret, his appearance at Stanford was a bit of a homecoming; he spoke to an audience of 200 faculty, students and community members at the colloquium sponsored by the China Program and Center for East Asian Studies, the center from which he received his master’s degree in 1984.
 
Asked about the future of China and its governance, he noted that today’s China is markedly different than when he was there in the 1980s studying as a student, and later, working as a journalist. The generational changes are stark, said Pomfret, relaying a sense of optimism that the country would become more democratic over time.
 
“The amount of personal freedoms that the average Chinese person has has expanded exponentially. I think the desire of Chinese people to have more agency over their lives will continue to grow – that’s clear.”
 
Innovation will be a determinant of China’s future growth, said Pomfret, coupling the idea that societies that have knowledge-driven economies typically demand more freedoms. Without innovation, China will fall into the middle-income trap, he said, “I don’t think they want to be there; they are an incredibly proud nation.”
 
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Renewing American Infrastructure

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The Stanford University Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, the Stanford Global Projects Center and Common Good hosted the “Renewing American Infrastructure” Roundtable 

 

The roundtable brought together senior leaders and policymakers from the public and private sectors and academia to Stanford for a two-day workshop. Attendees discussed federal policy reforms to accelerate and enhance the development and redevelopment of critical economic and social infrastructure in the United States, with a focus on maximizing the public benefit of new federal spending and institutional reforms to streamline investment at the federal, state and local levels.  

 

The Renewing American Infrastructure Roundtable was held on February 9th and 10th, 2017 to discuss federal reforms and policy changes in the US to accelerate the improvement of our critical economic and social infrastructure. The roundtable was hosted jointly by the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), the Stanford Global Projects Center (GPC) and Common Good, a non-partisan reform group.  

 

Participants included policymakers and leaders from the public and private sector as well as academia. Topics of discussion included policy and regulatory reforms to make infrastructure investment more efficient, and potential mechanisms to finance a new federal infrastructure initiative in the US.  

 

While acknowledging that additional federal spending on infrastructure will help, the roundtable participants formed a consensus that policy and institutional reforms are also sorely needed. Many US institutions and policies for approving and developing infrastructure projects are extremely outdated and have not kept pace with best practices globally. Any new federal infrastructure initiative will need to combine policy reforms with additional Federal, State, local and private spending to be successful.   

 

The participants developed four thematic areas for policy reform recommendations to accelerate the improvement of US economic and social infrastructure. Those initiatives include: 

 

  1. The role of private investment and management expertise should be dramatically expanded. Even where projects are funded predominantly by the public sector, public-private partnerships (P3s) can optimize project delivery with “design-build-operate-maintain” contracts that account for the life-cycle costs of keeping infrastructure working in good order.  

 

  1. Nonetheless, it is an illusion to think that private sector resources will be sufficient by themselves to fix the problem:  many necessary infrastructure projects will not generate the revenues needed to attract private investment.  The federal government will need to provide new resources, through new borrowing or taxation, to cover needs like the simple maintenance of existing structures. To consolidate federal infrastructure investment and procurement resources, the Roundtable proposes creating a new Federal Infrastructure Agency headed by a cabinet-level appointee with responsibility for national infrastructure spending and project support that are currently spread across numerous agencies. Consolidating responsibility is essential to set priorities, coordinate projects and afford the public transparency in the allocation of federal resources.  This agency and cabinet member could be set up for a designated time period – say ten years – to assess its effectiveness before extending its mandate beyond the sunset date. 

 

  1. Planning and permitting must be streamlined so that projects can move from the drawing board to shovels in the ground in no more than two years. These processes must be overhauled so that public input is solicited early in the planning, not after a project is cast in stone. Clear lines of authority must be created to decide issues about environmental review to avoid years of unnecessary delay, overseen by the Chair of the Council of Environmental Quality. Finally, the new Secretary of Infrastructure should have authority to resolve disagreements among different agencies, including pre-empting state and local authorities if necessary to avoid delay on projects of national importance.   

 

  1. State and local governments should retain primary responsibility for prioritizing infrastructure investment and funding within their jurisdictions.

 

Specific policy recommendations and institutional changes under each of these initiatives will be published in the weeks and months following the roundtable. The roundtable was chaired by Stanford Professors Francis Fukuyama and Raymond Levitt, and Philip Howard, founder of Common Good. 

 

Contacts 

 

Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law 

Djurdja Padejski, Communications Manager 

E: djurdjap@stanford.edu 

T: 650.723.9959 

 

Stanford Global Projects Center 

Terra Strong, Program Manager 

E: terras@stanford.edu 

T: 650.725.2380 

 

Common Good 

Emma McKinstry 

E: emckinstry@highimpactpartnering.com 

T: 203.912.7174 

 

About the Stanford Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law 
The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University has collaborated widely with academics, policymakers and practitioners around the world to advance knowledge about the conditions for and interactions among democracy, broad-based economic development, human rights, and the rule of law.  CDDRL is home to a dynamic interdisciplinary research community of innovative and distinguished faculty members and scholars from around the world. Their work spans the globe and bridges the divide between academic research and policy analysis, forging partnerships not only with other research centers but also with international development agencies, governments and civil society organizations in numerous countries.  

More information can be found at http://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu  

 

About the Stanford Global Projects Center 
The Stanford Global Projects Center (GPC) is an interdisciplinary research center at Stanford University that seeks to facilitate understanding of the financing and development of critical infrastructure globally. The center conducts research on the policies and practices of institutional investors getting capital into the real economy, and studies best practices of public agencies in investing in and developing new infrastructure. The center also facilitates engagement among academic, government and industry leaders in the sector.  

More information can be found at https://gpc.stanford.edu  

 

About Common Good 
Common Good is a nonpartisan reform coalition that offers Americans a new way to look at law and government. We propose practical, bold ideas to restore common sense to all three branches of government––legislative, executive and judicial––based on the principles of individual freedom, responsibility and accountability. Common Good’s philosophy is based on a simple but powerful idea: People, not rules, make things happen. This idea is fundamental to how we write laws and regulations, structure government agencies and resolve legal disputes. It affects all our lives, every day. Our mission is to overhaul governmental and legal systems to allow people to make sensible choices. We believe Americans need to be liberated to do their best. 
More information can be found at http://www.commongood.org 

 

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Save the Date: US Ambassador to Poland - Paul Jones

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