Symposium Info – Can Taiwan Make Divided Government Work? / Kharis Templeman

【Panel I: Civil Society and Democratic Resilience】

Topic: Deadlocked Democracy: Can Taiwan Make Divided Government Work?

Speaker: Dr. Kharis Templeman / Hoover Institution, Stanford University

—

Democratic resilience is usually discussed in an external context: how to resist infiltration and how to respond to coercion. But resilience also has an internal dimension. When the executive and the legislature are held by opposing camps, can the system still function? Is gridlock simply the normal price of democratic checks and balances, or the beginning of an erosion of social trust?

Kharis Templeman, who has long studied Taiwan’s party system, electoral institutions, and democratic governance, will take up this question in the first session.

—

About Speaker

Kharis Templeman is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and program manager of the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region, as well as a lecturer in the Department of East Asian Studies at Stanford University. A political scientist by training, he writes and speaks frequently about cross-Strait relations and Taiwan politics and policy issues.

Dr. Templeman has edited three book volumes: Taiwan’s Democracy Challenged: The Chen Shui-bian Years and Dynamics of Democracy in Taiwan: The Ma Ying-jeou Years (both with Larry Diamond and Yun-han Chu), and Electoral Malpractice in Asia: Bending the Rules (with Netina Tan). His other research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, Ethnopolitics, Journal of Democracy, International Journal of Taiwan Studies, and Taiwan Journal of Democracy, along with several book chapters. He has also written on Taiwan policy issues for the Brookings Institution, Atlantic Council, Foreign Affairs, Taiwan Insight, War on the Rocks, and The Diplomat. His current research agenda includes work on China’s Taiwan policy, the drivers of defense spending in Taiwan, and Taiwan’s party system evolution after the transition to democracy.  

—