On Sept. 24, Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, together with the Atlantic Council, hosted Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves for a discussion on technology and elections. The conversation - moderated by CDDRL Director Francis Fukuyama – examined Estonia’s technological infrastructure and their use of electronic voting in eight of their past ten elections. The conversation provoked greater questions of security and privacy surrounding cyber governance, as well as the limits of transparency.
For more information on CDDRL, please visit: cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu
For more information on the Atlantic Council, please visit: atlanticcouncil.org
Both South Korea and Taiwan are considered consolidated democracies, but the two countries have developed very different sets of electoral campaign regulations. While both countries had highly restrictive election laws during their authoritarian eras, they have diverged after democratic transition. South Korea still restricts campaigning activities, including banning door-to-door canvassing, prohibiting pre-official period campaigning, and restricting the quantity and content of literature. Taiwan has removed most campaigning restrictions, except for finance regulations. This study explores the causes of these divergent trajectories through comparative historical process tracing, using both archival and secondary sources. The preliminary findings suggest that the incumbency advantage and the containment of the leftist or opposition parties were the primary causes of regulation under the soft and hard authoritarian regimes of South Korea and Taiwan. The key difference was that the main opposition party as well as the ruling party in South Korea enjoyed the incumbency advantage but that opposition forces in Taiwan did not. As a result, the opposition in Taiwan fought for liberalization of campaign regulations, but that in South Korea did not. Democratization in Taiwan was accompanied by successive liberalizations in campaign regulation, but in South Korea the incumbent legislators affiliated with the ruling and opposition parties were both interested in limiting campaigning opportunities for electoral challengers.
Bio:
Dr. Jong-sung You is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University. His research interests include comparative politics and the political economy of inequality, corruption, social trust, and freedom of expression. He conducts both cross-national quantitative studies and qualitative case studies, focusing on Korea and East Asia. He recently published a book entitled Democracy, Inequality and Corruption: Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines Compared with Cambridge University Press. His publications have appeared at American Sociological Review, Political Psychology, Journal of East Asian Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Asian Perspective, Trends and Prospects, and Korean Journal of International Studies. He obtained his Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University and taught at UC San Diego. Before pursuing an academic career, he fought for democracy and social justice in South Korea.
Jong-sung You
Senior Lecturer
College of Asia and the Pacific, Australia National University
Based on first-hand participant-observation, this talk will examine the culture, politics, and spatiality of the Sunflower Movement. Taiwan's most significant social movement in decades, the Sunflower Movement not only blocked the passage of a major trade deal with China, but reshaped popular discourse and redirected Taiwan's political and cultural trajectory. It re-energized student and civil society, precipitated the historic defeat of the KMT in the 2014 local elections, and prefigured the DPP's strong position coming into the 2016 presidential and legislative election season.
The primary spatial tactic of the Sunflowers-- occupation of a government building-- was so successful that a series of protests in the summer of 2015 by high school students was partly conceived and represented as a "second Sunflower Movement". These students, protesting "China-centric" curriculum changes, attempted to occupy the Ministry of Education building. Thwarted by police, these students settled for the front courtyard, where a Sunflower-style pattern of encampments and performances emerged. While this movement did not galvanize the wider public as dramatically as its predecessor, it did demonstrate the staying power of the Sunflower Movement and its occupation tactics for an even younger cohort of activists.
The Sunflower Movement showed that contingent, street-level, grassroots action can have a major impact on Taiwan's cross-Strait policies, and inspired and trained a new generation of youth activists. But with the likely 2016 presidential win of the DPP, which has attempted to draw support from student activists while presenting a less radical vision to mainstream voters, what's in store for the future of Taiwanese student and civic activism? And with strong evidence of growing Taiwanese national identification and pro-independence sentiment, particularly among youth, what's in store for the future of Taiwan's political culture?
Speaker Bio
Ian Rowen in Taiwan's Legislative Yuan during the Sunflower Student Movement protest.
Ian Rowen is PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and recent Visiting Fellow at the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan, Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology, and Fudan University. He participated in both the Sunflower and Umbrella Movements and has written about them for The Journal of Asian Studies, The Guardian, and The BBC (Chinese), among other outlets. He has also published about Asian politics and protest in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (forthcoming) and the Annals of Tourism Research. His PhD research, funded by the US National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, has focused on the political geography of tourism and protest in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
Encina Hall E301616 Serra StreetStanford, CA94305-6055
(650) 724-5579
(650) 723-6530
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rnico@stanford.edu
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Ph.D.
Nico Ravanilla joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center as Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2015-16 year. His research interests are political economy and governance, comparative politics and Southeast Asia. While at Shorenstein APARC, Ravanilla will research how political selection impacts governance, and evaluate possible routes for incentivizing capable and virtuous citizens to run for public office.
His project titled “Nudging Good Politicians” looks at the case of the Sangguniang Kabataan, a governing body in the Philippines comprised of elected youth leaders. Ravanilla aims to apply his research to develop and scale up programs for politicians, especially those at the onset of their careers, which would include specialized leadership training and merit-based endorsement.
Ravanilla is also a Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) Young Southeast Asia Fellow for 2015-16. He received his Ph.D. in political science and public policy from the University of Michigan in summer 2015.
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has almost 15 million followers on Twitter and over almost 30 million “likes” on Facebook, making him among the most followed politicians on social media. With a mix of ‘feel good’ messages, shout-outs to other celebrities, well-timed ritualized responses, as well as a careful strategy of ‘followbacks’ for a small selection of his most active followers, Modi grew his following dramatically since 2013. This talk looks at ways in which Twitter is used as part of a larger brand management exercise through which Modi has emphasized different issues at various phases of his political evolution.
Joyojeet examines four specific phases, during each of which, the focus of his social media message evolved based on electoral or post-election needs. While Twitter helped Modi circumvent the mainstream media and directly reach a significant constituency of listeners, he also examines how social media was central to Modi's image shaping as a technology-savvy leader who represents pan-Indian aspirations of modernity, away from Modi’s own past image in the popular media as a divisive communal politician.
Bio
Joyojeet Pal is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information where his work focuses on user experience and accessibility in low and middle-income countries. His recent research looks at the use of social media in political communication in India, specifically on the role of political branding online in India. He is one of the technical collaborators on the Unfinished Sentences project examining oral histories of the El Salvador civil war, and leads the Colombia Digital Culture project at the University of Michigan. He researched and produced the award-winning documentary, "For the Love of a Man" based on the fan following of South Indian film star Rajnikanth.
Note: Those of you attending this talk may be interested in a related event, "Why India Matters", a talk by Richard Verma, 25th US Ambassador to India.
Wallenberg Theatre
450 Serra Mall #124
(The room is located in the main quad, across the road from Stanford Oval).
Post-doctoral Fellow at The Europe Center, 2015-2016
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Sarah Cormack-Patton received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh in August 2015. She is a political economist working at the nexus of comparative politics and international relations with a focus on European politics. Sarah is interested in how the cross-border movement of goods, capital, and people impacts the domestic policy-making process, and how domestic politics affect these cross-border flows. In her current research, Sarah examines these questions through the lens of international migration. Sarah's doctoral dissertation examined the ways in which varying bundles of migrant rights affect domestic preferences over immigration, the effect of these rights on the policy-making coalitions that form over immigration, and how these preferences aggregate in various institutional environments. In addition to her Ph.D., Sarah holds a BS in International Affairs and Modern Languages (French) and MS in International Affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a MA in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh.
Encina Hall 616 Serra Street Stanford, CA 94305-6165
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linae@stanford.edu
Visiting Student Researcher at The Europe Center, 2015-2016
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Lina M. Eriksson is a Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher from the Department of Government at Uppsala University and the Center for Natural Disaster Science (CNDS), Sweden. Ms. Eriksson is visiting the Europe Center for 9 months, September 1, 2015 – May 31, 2016, to work under the supervision of Jens Hainmueller. Ms. Eriksson holds an MA in Ethnic Conflicts and Conflict Resolutions, Asylum Immigration and Integration from University of Waterloo, Canada and an MSc in Political Sciences, Economics and International Development from Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), Sweden. At the moment, she is working on her dissertation entitled Natural Disasters and National Politics. The focus of her dissertation concerns two natural disasters and three sequential elections. The 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, the 2005 Storm Gudrun and the 2006, 2010 and 2014 Swedish Parliamentary Elections. The overall aim of her dissertation is to investigate accountability in regards to the crises management of these two natural disasters and, specifically, if it has occurred in the form of reduced vote support for the 2006 Social democratic incumbent.
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Please RSVP. We will close registration once the attendance list reaches 250 people.
Abstract:
On September 24, Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in partnership with The Atlantic Council will present a public address by President Toomas Ilves of Estonia on the future of technology in elections. Elections are set to take center stage in the coming year, in this country and abroad. As technology plays an increasingly large role in people’s lives, the discussion—moderated by CDDRL Director Francis Fukuyama— will explore its role in elections worldwide. President Ilves of Estonia—the only country in the world to use Internet voting for national elections— will discuss how technology can promote transparency, inclusion, and stronger democracies.
This event is a partnership between Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and The Atlantic Council, a DC-based think-tank committed to promoting constructive leadership and engagement in international affairs.
Bio:
Toomas Hendrik Ilves was elected President of the Republic of Estonia in 2006 and re-elected in 2011. He served as Chairman of the EU Task Force on eHealth from 2011 to 2012, and since November 2012 he became Chairman of the European Cloud Partnership Steering Board. His interest in computers stems from an early age – he learned to program at the age of 13 - and he has been promoting Estonia’s IT-development since the country restored its independence. Prior to his presidency, he served as Ambassador of Estonia to the United States of America and Canada (1993 -1996). In this position, he initiated the Tiger Leap initiative to computerize and connect all Estonian schools online. He also served as Minister of Foreign Affairs (1996-1998; 1998-2002) and Member of the Estonian Parliament (2002-2004). In recent years, President Ilves has spoken and written extensively on integration, transatlantic relations, e-government, and cyber security. He graduated from Columbia University in 1976 and received his Master’s degree in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978.
President Toomas Hendrik Ilves
President
Republic of Estonia
Abstract: While social media pervades many aspects of our lives, it has not yet proved to be an effective tool for large scale decision making: crowds of hundreds, perhaps millions, of individuals collaborating together to come to consensus on difficult societal issues. The objective of our research is to develop an algorithmic and empirical understanding of large scale decision making, and experiment with real-life deployments of our algorithms. In this talk, we will first present our platform for voting in participatory budgeting elections, which has been used in over a dozen different elections. We will then describe the related algorithmic problem of knapsack voting, where voters have to allocate a fixed amount of funds among multiple projects. We will conclude by analyzing opinion formation processes in terms of their effect on polarization, and relate this to the design of recommendation systems for friends and contents.
About the Speaker: Ashish Goel is a Professor of Management Science and Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University, and a member of Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 1999, and was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California from 1999 to 2002. His research interests lie in the design, analysis, and applications of algorithms; current application areas of interest include social networks, participatory democracy, Internet commerce, and large scale data processing. Professor Goel is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan faculty fellowship (2004-06), a Terman faculty fellowship from Stanford, an NSF Career Award (2002-07), and a Rajeev Motwani mentorship award (2010). He was a co-author on the paper that won the best paper award at WWW 2009, and an Edelman Laureate in 2014.
Professor Goel was a research fellow and technical advisor at Twitter, Inc. from July 2009 to Aug 2014.
Ashish Goel
Professor of Management Science and Engineering
Stanford University
Ian Rowen in Taiwan's Legislative Yuan during the Sunflower Student Movement protest.
