[11/18/24] Pulse Check on Taiwan’s Democratic Resilience: Institutions, Domestic Debate, and New Governance Frontiers

“Democracy is never a thing done,” wrote poet Archibald MacLeish. “Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.” In a similar vein, Taiwan’s vibrant democracy continues to be shaped and tested by dynamic internal and external pressures. This year, Taiwan’s January elections resulted in its first divided government since 2004, with no party winning an outright majority in the Legislative Yuan. Social movements have emerged in Taiwan in response to domestic political developments, including the Bluebird Movement, which formed in protest of a set of contentious legislative reform bills and produced the largest civil society demonstration since the 2014 Sunflower Movement. At the same time, exogenous factors such as the 2024 U.S. presidential election, ongoing cross-Strait tensions, and major military exercises conducted this year by the People’s Republic of China have left indelible marks on domestic political discourse in Taiwan. All the while, cross-sector social and digital innovations, such as civic technologies designed to counter disinformation, position Taiwan as a pioneer in new forms of democratic governance. How are Taiwan’s democratic institutions adapting to this wide array of internal and external social, political, and security challenges?
Join the Sigur Center for Asian Studies for a timely conversation with a group of multidisciplinary experts to unpack, explore, and assess the current state of domestic political discourse in Taiwan, the robustness and resiliency of Taiwan’s democratic institutions, and the newly emerging democratic frontiers confronting Taiwan and beyond.

Agenda:

Welcome Remarks: Dr. Eric Schluessel, Director, Sigur Center

Conference Introduction: Richard Haddock, Assistant Director, Sigur Center

Panel 1: Elections, Political Upheavals, and Domestic Discourse in Taiwan (10:30 AM-12:00 PM)

• Dr. Chiaoning Su, Associate Professor in Communication, Journalism and Public Relations
  • “Six Months In: Evaluating President Lai’s Leadership and Changing Political Dynamics”
• Dr. Dennis Lu-Chung Weng, Associate Professor of Political Science.
  • “Reassessing Taiwan’s Opposition: Why the U.S. and Democratic Allies Must Recognize Its Strategic Value Beyond Stereotyped Labels”
• Dr. Austin Horng-En Wang,  Associate Professor of Political Science.
  • “Public Opinion in Taiwan and its implications to US-China-Taiwan relations”

Lunch Break (12:00-12:30 PM)

Panel 2: The Health and Future Frontiers of Taiwan’s Democratic Institutions (12:30-2:00 PM)

• Dr. Li-Yin Liu, Associate Professor of Political Science
  • “Strengthening Democratic Governance in Times of Crisis: Taiwan’s COVID-19 Response, State Capacity, and the Impact of Policy Design and Bureaucratic Expertise”
• June Lin, Senior Program Manger for the Asia-Pacific programs
• Dr. Kharis Templeman, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution
  • “Making Democracy Work under Divided Government”

Panel One

Dr. Dennis Lu-Chung Weng joined the department of political science at Sam Houston State University in 2017. Dr. Weng’s research and teaching interests are in the fields of comparative politics, Asian Politics, political behavior, and survey research. His articles have appeared in the Electoral Studies, Japanese Journal of Political Science, Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, Asian Journal of Political Science, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and several News Media in Asia.

Dr. Weng was a business consultant and journalist in Taiwan prior to his academic career. Before coming to SHSU, he taught at The State University of New York at Cortland, Wesleyan University (CT), and The University of Texas at Dallas. He is the recipient of several teaching awards from previous institutions. Weng holds degrees in Political Science (Ph.D., MA) from the University of Texas at Dallas, International Relations (MA), and Business Administration (BA) from Tamkang University (Taiwan).

Dr. Austin Horng-En Wang is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is also an associate political scientist at the RAND corporation. He received his doctoral degree in political science from Duke University in 2018, his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering in 2009, and master’s degree in Public Administration in 2012 from National Taiwan University.

His research and teaching interests focus on voting behavior, East Asia, and political psychology. His dissertation examines the relationship between temporal discounting and political participation through survey and experiments in the U.S., Taiwan, and Ukraine. His ongoing and sponsored research projects explore the long-term effect of political repression and attitude toward war in East Asia.

His research articles had published in several journals such as Political Research Quarterly, Electoral Studies, Asian Survey, and Social Science Research. He also has written book chapters about voting advice application and party politics in Taiwan. His comments on Asian politics had appeared in Washington Post, The National Interest, and Huffington Post, among others.

 Panel Two

Dr. Li-Yin Liu received her B.A. in Public Management and Policy and MPA from Tunghai University in Taiwan. She then received her Ph.D. degree in Political Science from Northern Illinois University, where her first field was Public Administration with specialization in public policy and nonprofit management.

Liu’s research interests are centered around science-intensive public policies, including environmental sustainability and COVID-19 policies. Her current research focuses on environmental nonprofit organizations’ influence in policy-making and citizen engagement in environmental policy implementation. In light of the COVID-19 public health crisis, she also participates in several collaborative research teams, examining the institutional determinants of COVID-19 policy configurations and the Taiwanese government’s comprehensive response to COVID-19. 

In addition to her primary research interests, Liu is also committed to advancing gender equity through her collaborative projects. She has been recognized for this focus and was selected as a Gender Equity Research Fellow for the 2023-24 academic year at the University of Dayton.

Liu’s teaching interests are in advanced/introductory public administration theory, public policy, nonprofit management, research methods, program evaluation and environmental governance and policy.

Prior to joining the University of Dayton, Liu was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Administration at Northern Illinois University, and she worked for the Legislative Yuan (Congress) and non-governmental organizations in Taiwan before moving to the United States.

June Lin is the senior program manager for Asia-Pacific programs at National Democratic Institute (NDI), overseeing the institute’s Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Asia-Pacific regional programs to counter China’s illiberal influence. With over eight years of experience in the non-profit sector in the US and Taiwan, Ms. Lin began her endeavors in the democracy, rights, and governance sector as an activist in the 2014 Taiwan Sunflower Movement. In 2016, Ms. Lin moved to the United States and joined the Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA)  as a policy expert focusing on US-Taiwan relations. Before joining NDI, she worked at Freedom House and the International Republican Institute (IRI), focusing on supporting civil society actors in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Uyghur communities. In her personal capacity, Ms. Lin also serves as the Board Secretary of the Hong Kong Democracy Council (HKDC), and as an advisor to Doublethink Lab (DTL).

Dr. Kharis Templeman is Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the manager of the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region. He is also a Lecturer at the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University.

From 2013-19, he was a social science research scholar in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, where he was the program manager of the Taiwan Democracy and Security Project (TDSP) in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC). (Prior to fall 2017, the TDSP was known as the Taiwan Democracy Project and was part of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law).

Outside of Stanford, he is a member of the U.S.-Taiwan Next Generation Working Group, and he was a 2019 National Asia Research Program (NARP) Fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR). He has also served since 2012 as a contributor to the Varieties of Democracy project, and from 2016-18, he was the coordinator of the Conference Group on Taiwan Studies (CGOTS), a Related Group of the American Political Science Association.

He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan, and a B.A. from the University of Rochester.

 Moderaters

Eric Schluessel is a social historian of China and Central Asia, and his work focuses on Xinjiang (East Turkestan) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Land of Strangers, his first monograph, uses local archival and manuscript sources in Chinese and Chaghatay Turkic to explore the ramifications of a project undertaken in the last decades of the Qing empire to transform Xinjiang’s Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians. It won the 2021 John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association.

Schluessel is currently pursuing two research projects: Saints and Sojourners explores the economic history of the Uyghur region from the 1750s through the 1950s as seen from below, through the records of merchants, farmers, and managers of pious endowments. It ties changes at the village level to shifts in the global economy in places as far away as Manchester and Tianjin. Exiled Gods delves into Han Chinese settler culture and religion to illuminate the history of a diasporic community of demobilized soldiers and their descendants that spanned the Qing empire.

Thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, Schluessel has also completed a translation and critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, which is an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang.

Schluessel previously taught at the University of Montana in Missoula and spent the 2018–2019 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Schluessel has also completed a translation and critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, which is an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang.

Richard J. Haddock is the Assistant Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the George Washington University, where he leads the Center’s robust Taiwan affairs programming, outreach, and curriculum development. He is also a member of the UC Berkeley U.S.-Taiwan Next Generation Working Group, where his research focuses on U.S.-Taiwan education diplomacy and exchange. Previously, he has held positions at the GW East Asia National Resource Center, the National Democratic Institute’s Asia team, the American Institute in Taiwan’s Public Diplomacy Section, and the U.S. Department of State. Mr. Haddock is currently pursuing a PhD in Public Policy and Public Administration at The George Washington University, focusing on digital democracy and e-governance development in the Asia-Pacific. He holds an MA in Asian Studies from the Elliott School, with a concentration on domestic politics and foreign policy of East Asia. He graduated from the University of Central Florida with a BA in Political Science and minors in Asian Studies and Diplomacy.