Stanford University

Democracy

Christopher Carothers

0
CDDRL Postdoctoral Scholar, 2019-20
carothers_headshot.jpeg

I am a scholar of comparative politics and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Contemporary China. My research is on authoritarianism and corruption control with a regional focus on East Asia—especially China, the Koreas, and Taiwan. My first book, Corruption Control in Authoritarian Regimes: Lessons from East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2022), is about why some autocrats are motivated to curb corruption, why their efforts succeed or fail, and what the political consequences of such efforts are. I received my Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2019.

My writing has been published or is forthcoming in numerous academic and policy journals, including Perspectives on Politics, Government and Opposition, the Journal of Democracy, Politics and Society, the Journal of Contemporary China, the Journal of East Asian Studies, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the China Leadership Monitor, and The National Interest.

Before academia, I lived and traveled in East Asia for several years, learning Chinese and Korean along the way. I worked for The Wall Street Journal Asia in Hong Kong, taught English in Xinjiang, and studied Korean in Seoul. I received my B.A. (summa cum laude), also from Harvard, in Social Studies and East Asian Studies.

Democracy Demotion: How the Freedom Agenda Fell Apart

News Type
Commentary
Date
Paragraphs

In the honor of publication of Larry Diamond's "Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency" Foreign Affairs are providing past the paywall article "Democracy Demotion: How the Freedom Agenda Fell Apart" by Larry Diamond. Read here. 


 

Hero Image
iraqi voters inked fingers
All News button
1

Decades of Being Wrong About China Should Teach Us Something

Authors
Amy Zegart
News Type
Commentary
Date
Paragraphs

Thirty years ago this week, I watched the news from Beijing and started shredding my bedding. It was the night before my college graduation, I had been studying Chinese politics, and news had broken that college students just like us had been gunned down in Tiananmen Square after weeks of peaceful and exhilarating democracy protests—carried on international TV. In the iconic square where Mao Zedong had proclaimed the People’s Republic decades before, bespectacled students from China’s best universities had camped out, putting up posters with slogans of freedom in Chinese and English. A “goddess of democracy” figure modeled after the Statue of Liberty embodied their hopes—and ours—for political liberation in China.

On my campus back then were just a handful of students majoring in East Asian studies. Learning of the brutal crackdown in Beijing, we somehow found one another, gathered our friends, and stayed up making hundreds of white armbands for classmates to wear at commencement the next day. Grappling with the cold realities of the “real world” we were about to enter, we didn’t know what else to do. So we tore sheets and cried for what might have been.

The June 4, 1989, massacre was a horrifying spectacle that the Chinese government has sought to erase from national memory ever since. But, 30 years later, contemplating what might have been is more important than ever. In hindsight, Tiananmen Square serves as a continuing reminder about just how much China has defied, and continues to defy, the odds and predictions of experts. The fact is that generations of American policy makers, political scientists, and economists have gotten China wrong more often than they’ve gotten China right. In domestic politics, economic development, and foreign policy, China has charted a surprising path that flies in the face of professional prognostications, general theories about anything, and the experience of other nations.

Read the rest at The Atlantic

Hero Image
zegart amy cropped
All News button
1

Opposition Party Building and Electoral Competition in Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Malaysia

Authors
Sebastian Dettman
News Type
Blogs
Date
Paragraphs
As a 2018-19 Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, I have been working on my book manuscript Pathways to Power: Opposition Party and Coalition Building in Multiethnic Malaysia. The book examines the dilemmas faced by opposition parties in authoritarian regimes as they try to build electoral and political power. In this brief blog post, I’ll discuss the motivation for the book project, the main argument, and some of its findings.
 
Competitive authoritarian regimes, where opposition parties compete against powerful incumbents that skew political and electoral institutions in their favor, are the most common type of non-democratic regime today. As conceptualized by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, competitive authoritarian regimes feature the trappings of democracy, including regular elections and multiparty political competition, but with an electoral playing field that heavily favors the ruling government. Ruling powers in these regimes use a variety of tools to stay in power, including electoral fraud, targeted arrests or harassment of opposition leaders, and subtler strategies to divide and coopt potential opposition.
 
Nevertheless, opposition parties in such regimes sometimes succeed in growing substantial electoral support against the authoritarian odds. My book analyzes how and why some opposition parties are able to do so – and provides a novel explanation for the conditions under which opposition parties build broad-based and coordinated electoral challenges. I examine two key electoral strategies used by opposition parties: Individual strategies used by parties to win over new voters from the ruling government, and collective strategies, where opposition parties coordinate or build coalitions with each other in elections. Even as these two strategies allow parties to win over new blocs of voters away from the ruling government, I focus on the dilemmas that these strategies create for the opposition. First, parties face different constraints in trying to appeal to new voters while maintaining the issues and identities around which they mobilize core support. Second, individual and collective electoral strategies are in fundamental tension with each other. When parties coordinate with each other in elections, I argue that they are less likely to broaden their individual base of support. As a result, coordination and coalition building constrains the ability of individual parties to develop a broad base of support across territory and among new demographics.
 
The manuscript examines these dilemmas through tracing opposition party emergence and growth in Malaysia. Malaysia is an interesting and important case for several reasons. First, a single party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), dominated the country’s ruling coalitions from the country’s independence in 1957 until 2018. But against this backdrop of extraordinary stability, Malaysia’s opposition parties gradually built up electoral power to the point of unseating UMNO from national power for the first time in 2018. Second, Malaysia is a country of incredible diversity: Its largest ethnic group, the Malays, makes up about half of the population, and it contains significant ethnic minority populations of Chinese, Indian, and other indigenous groups. This made the challenges faced by the opposition even more pronounced as they sought to expand support across ethnoreligious lines while also building cross-cleavage coalitions. I draw on diverse evidence from my fieldwork in Malaysia, including in-depth interviews with party elites and leaders from all major parties, data on elections at the subnational and national level, as well as evidence from political campaigns, party congresses, and archival research.
 
The empirical chapters trace the strategies of four opposition parties: The Democratic Action Party (DAP), Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), The People’s Justice Party (PKR), and The United Indigenous Party of Malaysia (Bersatu) in the period of 1999-2018 as they sought to respond to new electoral opportunities to scale up their support. I examine their varying attempts to expand their individual appeal, while showing how their increasingly coordinated electoral challenges paradoxically strengthened their reliance on existing ethnoreligious bases of support. I analyze how these strategies set the stage for their success in the 2018 elections, where three of these four parties won power and formed a new national government. Another empirical chapter brings the theoretical argument to bear on additional cases, providing an in-depth examination of three other cases of authoritarian regimes to demonstrate the generalizability of the argument beyond Malaysia. 
 
The book seeks to make three contributions to the academic literature. First, it brings a new theoretical perspective to the study of political competition under authoritarianism that sheds light on the determinants of opposition party success and failure. Second, it provides evidence and analysis of the factors leading to Malaysia’s unprecedented transition of government in 2018. Finally, it provides new insights into a broader literature on party adaptation in multiethnic societies and the study of the relationship between opposition parties and democratic transition.
 

 

Hero Image
Supporters of Mahathir Mohamad, chairman of Malaysia's opposition 'Pakatan Harapan' (The Alliance of Hope) attend an election campaign rally on May 6, 2018 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Supporters of Mahathir Mohamad, chairman of Malaysia's opposition Pakatan Harapan (The Alliance of Hope) attend an election campaign rally on May 6, 2018 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In a stunning election upset, the 92-year-old Mahathir Mohamad defeated incumbent Najib Razak's ruling coalition to become the world's oldest elected leader. | Ulet Ifansasti / Stringer via Getty Images
All News button
1

Philippines Investigative Journalist and Press Freedom Beacon Maria Ressa Wins 2019 Shorenstein Journalism Award

Authors
Noa Ronkin
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

STANFORD, CA, May 21, 2019 — Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) announced today that the esteemed journalist Maria Ressa is the recipient of the 2019 Shorenstein Journalism Award. Ressa, the cofounder, CEO, and executive editor of the Philippine news platform Rappler, has been a highly-regarded journalist in Asia for more than thirty years and commended worldwide for her courageous work in fighting disinformation and attempts to silence the free press. Presented annually by APARC, the Shorenstein award is conferred upon a journalist who has contributed significantly to greater understanding of Asia through outstanding reporting on critical issues affecting the region. Ressa will receive the award at a ceremony at Stanford in fall quarter 2019.

Ressa spent nearly two decades at CNN, where she was lead investigative reporter focusing on terrorism in Southeast Asia and served as the network’s bureau chief in Manila, then Jakarta. She then became head of news and current affairs at ABS-CBN, the largest media network in the Philippines. Her work aimed to redefine journalism by combining traditional broadcast and new media for social change. In 2012, Ressa launched Rappler, turning it into one of the Philippines’ most influential news organizations and integrating data, content, and new technologies to promote public service journalism and civic engagement. With a commitment to editorial independence, Rappler has often produced critical coverage of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial policies and actions. In response to these reports, Duterte and his government have repeatedly targeted Rappler and Ressa with threats and lawsuits. Ressa has been arrested twice in recent months.

“Maria Ressa is a champion of digital journalism innovation, and a paragon of protecting democracy and speaking truth to power,” said Gi-Wook Shin, Shorenstein APARC director. “For decades, before she became internationally acclaimed for her brave fight to ‘hold the line,’ Maria’s work had provided deep insights into the complexities of Southeast Asia based on her nuanced knowledge, investigative skills, and the ability to draw upon them to connect with audiences around the world. We are honored to recognize her with the Shorenstein Journalism Award.”

Ressa has taught courses in politics and the press in Southeast Asia for her alma mater, Princeton University, and in broadcast journalism for the University of the Philippines. She is the author of two books: From Bin Laden to Facebook (2012), which traces the spread of terrorism from the training camps of Afghanistan to Southeast Asia and the Philippines, and Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia (2003), which documented the changing tactics of Al-Qaeda and its next-generation roots in the Muslim strongholds in the Philippines and Indonesia.

The Shorenstein Journalism Award, which carries a $10,000 cash prize, honors the legacy of APARC’s benefactor, Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. APARC recently introduced a new selection committee for the award that presides over the judging of nominees and honoree selection. “We are grateful to the Shorenstein family for its support of our Center and its mission, and to our selection committee members for their expertise and service,” noted Shin. “Our sincere thanks also to the members of the award’s previous jury for their contributions over the years.”

The independent selection committee for the Shorenstein Journalism Award, which unanimously chose Ressa as the 2019 honoree, includes Wendy Cutler, Vice President and Managing Director, Washington, D.C. Office, Asia Society Policy Institute; James Hamilton, Hearst Professor of Communication, Chair of the Department of Communication, and Director of the Stanford Journalism Program, Stanford University; Raju Narisetti, Director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism and Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Journalism School; Philip Pan, Asia Editor, The New York Times; and Prashanth Parameswaran, Senior Editor, The Diplomat.  

“Maria Ressa is recognized around the world as a stellar leader in accountability journalism,” said committee member James Hamilton. “As an investigative reporter at CNN, she shed light on terrorism’s threats in Southeast Asia. In cofounding and leading the online news outlet Rappler, she’s brought attention to contentious politics and policies in the Philippines even as she endured politically motivated arrests for her coverage.”

Ressa has earned multiple honors and awards by professional peers and international press freedom organizations, including the Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, the Knight International Journalism Award of the International Center for Journalists, the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Free Media Pioneer Award from the International Press Institute, the National Democratic Institute’s Democracy Award, and the 2018 Time magazine Person of the Year.

Seventeen journalists have previously received the Shorenstein award, including most recently Anna Fifield, the Washington Post’s Beijing Bureau Chief and long-time North Korea watcher; Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of the Wire and former editor of the Hindu; Ian Johnson, a veteran journalist with a focus on Chinese society, religion, and history; and Yoichi Funabashi, former editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shimbun.

Information about the 2019 Shorenstein Journalism Award ceremonies featuring Ressa will be forthcoming in the fall quarter.

Find out more at aparc.fsi.stanford.edu/events/shorenstein-journalism-award.

Media Contact:

Noa Ronkin
Associate Director for Communications and External Relations
Shorenstein APARC
noa.ronkin@stanford.edu

 

 

Hero Image
Portrait of Maria Ressa
Rappler
All News button
1

Ill Winds: Book Launch and Discussion with Larry Diamond

Please join Larry Diamond, Senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Affairs and the Hoover Institution for the launch of his latest book, "Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency."

 

Featuring a Panel Conversation with:

 

Zin Mar Aung

Burmese MP and political activist

 

Vladimir Kara-Murza

Russian journalist and anti-corruption crusader

 

Cara McCormick

CEO, Chamberlain Project, Co-founder/Co-leader of The

Committee for Ranked Choice Voting in Maine

 

*Reception to follow

Bechtel Conference Center

Encina Hall

616 Serra Mall

Stanford, CA 94305

Jamie O'Connell

Room 212, Crown Quadrangle
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305-8610

650.736.8771
0
Lecturer in Residence, Stanford Law School
jamie-oconnell-3-400x400.jpg

Jamie O’Connell is a Lecturer in Residence at Stanford Law School. He teaches and writes on political and legal development and has particular expertise in law and development, transitional justice, democratization, post-conflict reconstruction, and business and human rights. Until 2018, he was a Senior Fellow of the Honorable G. William and Ariadna Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, as well as a Lecturer in Residence, teaching both law and undergraduate students.

O’Connell has worked on human rights and development in over a dozen countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, under the auspices of the United Nations, local and international non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions. He co-founded International Professional Partnerships for Sierra Leone, a non-governmental organization that worked with the government of Sierra Leone to enhance the performance of its agencies and civil servants. Earlier in his career, O’Connell studied international business as a researcher at Harvard Business School, publishing numerous case studies. He has directed the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Sierra Leone and taught as a visitor at Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School. O’Connell clerked for the Honorable James R. Browning on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and is admitted to practice in California (inactive status) and New York. In 2016-17, he was a visiting professor and Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Valencia (Spain) Faculty of Law.

O’Connell’s scholarship includes “Representation, Paternalism, and Exclusion: The Divergent Impacts of the AKP’s Populism on Human Rights In Turkey” in Human Rights in a Time of Populism: Challenges and Responses (2020); “When Prosecution Is Not Enough: How the International Criminal Court Can Prevent Atrocity and Advance Accountability by Emulating Regional Human Rights Institutions” (with James L. Cavallaro, Yale Journal of International Law, 2020); “Common Interests, Closer Allies: How Democracy in Arab States Can Benefit the West” (Stanford Journal of International Law, 2012); “Empowering the Disadvantaged after Dictatorship and Conflict: Legal Empowerment, Transitions and Transitional Justice,” in Legal Empowerment: Practitioners’ Perspectives (2010); “East Timor 1999,” in The Responsibility to Protect: Moving the Campaign Forward (2007); “Gambling with the Psyche: Does Prosecuting Human Rights Violators Console Their Victims?” (Harvard International Law Journal, 2005); “Here Interest Meets Humanity: How to End the War and Support Reconstruction in Liberia, and the Case for Modest American Leadership” (Harvard Human Rights Journal, 2004); and Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Special Court: A Citizen’s Handbook (with Paul James-Allen and Sheku B.S. Lahai, 2003).

CDDRL Affiliated Scholar
Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label
Subscribe to Democracy