This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

**This event has been cancelled**

Torben Iversen is Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard. His research and teaching interests include comparative political economy, electoral politics, and applied formal theory. He is the author of Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare (Cambridge UP 2005), Contested Economic Institutions (Cambridge UP 1999), and co-author (with Frances Rosenbluth) of Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality (Yale UP, 2010). He is also the co-editor of Unions, Employers and Central Bankers (Cambridge UP 2000) and has published more than three dozen articles in leading journals and edited volumes. His work has won numerous American Political Science Association prizes including the Victoria Schuck Award, Best Book on European Politics and Society Award, the Luebbert Best Article Award, and the Gabriel Almond Best Dissertation Award. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is currently completing a book-length project with David Soskice on the political representation of economic interests in historical perspective.

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Abstract

Taiwan’s domestic politics, particularly presidential elections, has been the main driver of the island’s relations with China for two decades. The 2016 elections, in which the Democratic Progressive Party, led by Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, won both the presidency and majority control of the Legislative elections, promises to be no exception. Although PRC intentions under President Xi Jinping are far from certain, some change from the state of play under the current Ma Ying-jeou administration seems fairly certain, with implications for U.S. policy.

Bio

Richard Bush is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Director of its Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, and the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies. He came to Brookings in July 2002 after nineteen years working in the US government, including five years as the Chairman and Managing Director of the American Institute in Taiwan. He is the author of a number of articles on U.S. relations with China and Taiwan, and of At Cross Purposes, a book of essays on the history of America’s relations with Taiwan, published in March 2004 by M. E. Sharpe. In the spring of 2005, Brookings published his study on cross-Strait relations, entitled Untying the Knot: Making Peace in the Taiwan Strait. In 2013, Brookings published his Uncharted Strait: The Future of China-Taiwan Relations.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative in the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

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*Registration is now closed. For more information, please contact Kharis Templeman at kharis@stanford.edu.*

On January 16, 2016, Taiwanese went to the polls to elect a new president and legislature. The results were historic: Tsai Ing-wen of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won a landslide victory over two opponents, and the DPP won a comfortable majority in the legislature, giving the party full control over the central government for the first time. In contrast, the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), suffered its worst defeat in the presidential election since 2000, and its worst-ever defeat in the legislative elections, and it faces a long, difficult road to political recovery. This election was also notable for the entry into electoral politics of some of the leaders of the so-called "Sunflower Movement": the upstart New Power Party won five seats, becoming the third-largest party in the legislature.

This seminar will feature remarks by Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Affairs, and Kharis Templeman, the program manager of the Taiwan Democracy Project in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Dr. Diamond and Dr. Templeman will offer their thoughts about who won, why, what it means for Taiwan's democratic development, what to expect from the new government, and how it will affect relations between Taiwan, the United States, and the People's Republic of China.

This event is free and open to the public, and lunch will be served.

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Video from this event can be found here.