8:30-8:45am Registration
8:45-9:00am Opening Remarks
Gi-Wook Shin, Director, Shorenstein APARC; Professor of Sociology, Stanford University
Byung-il Choi, President, KFAS; Professor, Graduate School of International Studies, Ewha Womans University
9:00-10:00am Session 1 “Where We Stand Now”
How would you diagnose the current state of liberal democracy?
What are notable global trends in liberal democracy?
How do you envision the next 10 years of democracy from global perspectives?
Speaker: Francis Fukuyama, Professor of (by courtesy) Political Science; Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow, FSI, Stanford University
Moderator: Byung-il Choi, President, KFAS; Graduate School of International Studies, Ewha Womans University
10:00-10:15am Break
10:15-12:15pm Session 2 “Looking into Backbone: Institutions”
Should the judiciary serve as the final arbiter of a country's disputes?
Is the party system the one and only? Can direct citizen action serve as an alternative?
Is liberal democracy necessarily better than other political regimes in terms of livelihood or quality of life?
Moderator: Sunhyuk Kim, Professor of Public Administration, Korea University
12:15-1:30pm Luncheon
1:30-3:30pm Session 3 “Under the Microscope: Pathology”
Can liberal democracy be saved from digital media?
Under the assumption that polarization is incurable, how should a highly polarized society live with it?
Is populism necessarily pernicious for democracy?
Moderator: Michael McFaul, Director, FSI; Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Stanford University
3:30-4:00pm Break
4:00-5:15pm Session 4 “Scoring Cards: Performance”
Megastudy identifying effective interventions to strengthen Americans’ democratic attitudes
Presenter: Robb Willer, Professor of Sociology; Director of Polarization and Social Change Lab, Stanford University
Moderator: Gi-Wook Shin, Director, APARC, Stanford University
Sanghoon Ahn is a Senior Fellow at the Korea Development Institute (KDI) and Adjunct Professor at the KDI School of Public Policy & Management. He is a member of the Committee for International Development Cooperation chaired by the Prime Minister. He has also served as a member of the President’s National Economic Advisory Council (2020-2022) and chaired its Sub-council on Innovation. As Executive Director of the KDI Center for International Development (2019-2021), he was in charge of research and knowledge sharing activities with developing partner countries mainly through the Knowledge Sharing Program of the Ministry of Economy and Finance. He was Senior Advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister of the Korean government (2017-2018), and Director of Industry and Service Economy at the KDI (2016-2017). He worked at the Science, Technology and Innovation Directorate of the OECD as a senior economist in the Structural Policy Division (2013-2015). Ahn holds a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His main areas of interest are economic growth, technology, innovation, structural reforms and productivity.
Joan Cho is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, and Assistant Professor by courtesy of Government, at Wesleyan University. Her research and teaching interests are authoritarianism, democratization, social movements, and authoritarian legacies in Korea and East Asia. Dr. Cho’s first book, Seeds of Mobilization: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea’s Democracy, is forthcoming at the University of Michigan Press (Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies Series). Her work on authoritarian regime support, South Korean democracy movement, and electoral accountability in post-transition South Korea are published in Electoral Studies, Journal of East Asian Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society. She is an adjunct fellow (non-resident) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Korea Chair, associate-in-research of the Council of East Asian Studies at Yale University, Vice President and governing board member of the Association of Korean Political Studies, and a 2018-2019 CSIS-USC U.S.-Korea NextGen Scholar. Joan Cho received her PhD in Political Science from the Department of Government at Harvard University.
Sang-Hun Choe is the Seoul bureau chief for The New York Times, focusing on news in North and South Korea. He worked for The Associated Press for 11 years before joining The Times in 2005. He is a co-author of two books on Korea and co-editor of another two, also on Korea. He was a 2010-11 fellow in Korean studies at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center of Stanford University. He has won journalism awards for his reports on Korea and Myanmar, including a 2000 Pulitzer Prize.
Byung-il Choi has been the President of Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS) since September 2020. He is also a professor and the former Dean of the Graduate School of International Studies, Ewha Womans University. As a renowned scholar in the field of international trade and US-China relations, he took various leadership roles, including President of Korea Economic Research Institute (2011-2014), a think tank representing the Korean business sector. He served as the President for Korea International Economic Association, the President of the Korea Association of Negotiation Studies, and the President of the Korean Association of Trade and Industry Studies. Prior to joining the academia, he was the Korean chief negotiator for the WTO basic telecom negotiations (1994-1997), and trade negotiator for service agreement and the telecom annex at the Uruguay Round, the Korea-US telecom agreement, and the Korea-EU telecom agreement. He led the Korean initiative of the Asia-Pacific Information Infrastructure (APII) at the 1995 APEC Summit. His book includes Politics of East Asian Free Trade Agreements: Unveiling the Asymmetry between Korea and Japan (2021), The US-China Competition: Who Will Rule the World? (2019), Northeast Asia in 2030: Forging Ahead or Drifting Away (2018), China, New Paradigm (2016), The KORUS FTA: Against All Odds (2006), and The Success and Failure of Trade Negotiations of Korea (2004). He received a BA from Seoul National University and PhD in economics from Yale University.
Donghyun Danny Choi is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University. His research focuses on two broad themes: political parties and identity politics. His first co-authored book, Native Bias: Overcoming Discrimination Against Immigrants, examines the extent to which common norms, identities, and ideas can reduce prejudice and discrimination against immigrants and ultimately facilitate their inclusion in democratic societies and was published by Princeton University Press in the Princeton Studies in Political Behavior series. His second book project, Severed Connections: Intraparty Politics and Representation in Africa, investigates how political parties and the nature of candidate selection institutions influence the relationship between elected representatives and their constituents in new democracies. This project won APSA’s Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation in the Comparative Study of Democracy. Danny's work on these two themes has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis among others. Before joining Brown, Danny was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh and a pre/postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Identity and Conflict Lab. He received a BA in economics from Korea University and his MA and PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Masters in International Policy Program, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, was published in the spring of 2022. He received his BA from Cornell University in classics, and his PhD from Harvard in Political Science.
Shang Eung Ha is a professor of political science at Sogang University. His research interests include political psychology, public opinion, and voting behavior. He has authored numerous articles in journals such as American Political Science Review, Political Research Quarterly, American Politics Research, and Political Psychology on topics ranging from personality traits to voting behavior in local elections. He is currently working on papers about the association between personality traits and political behavior, the antecedents and consequences of populist attitudes, and the effects of deliberation on political behavior of underinformed and misinformed citizens, all using large-scale, face-to-face or online, surveys conducted in South Korea. Before coming to Sogang University, he served as a dissertation fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, a postdoctoral associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, and an assistant professor of political science at Brooklyn College - The City University of New York. He earned a BA and an MA in International Relations from Seoul National University, as well as an MA and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago.
Ji Yeon (Jean) Hong is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Politics at Nam Center for Korean Studies in the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on authoritarian politics and authoritarian legacy, with particular attention to East Asia such as China, Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. She has various ongoing research projects related to authoritarian elites' behavior, political legacies of authoritarianism, and contemporary state building in East Asia. She obtained her PhD at the Department of Politics, New York University. Her research has been published or forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and British Journal of Political Science among others.
Aram Hur is the Kim Koo Chair in Korean Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science at The Fletcher School of Tufts University. Hur studies nationalism and democracy, with special focus on integration, identity change, and democratic support in East Asia. Hur's research is published or forthcoming in academic journals such as Comparative Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, and Journal of East Asian Studies. Her first book, Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia, is the winner of the 2023 Robert A. Dahl Award for the best book on democracy by an untenured scholar from the American Political Science Association. She is the 2021 Korea Society Sherman Emerging Scholar Awardee and a proud alumnus of CSIS US-Korea NextGen, which selects and trains the "next generation of Korea specialists in the United States." Hur holds a PhD in Politics from Princeton University, MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School, and BA with honors from Stanford University.
Jae Yeon Kim is a Senior Quantitative Researcher at Code for America and a Research Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute and P3 Lab at Johns Hopkins University. Kim earned his PhD in political science from UC Berkeley, where he was a senior data science fellow at D-Lab. Since 2020, he has been working on the Mapping Modern Agora project, incubated at the SNF Agora, which utilizes big data and machine learning to map civil society at scale in the United States. Kim's research focuses on civic engagement, political participation, and policy implementation in the US, Canada, and East Asia. He has published extensively in leading general science, political science, and computational social science journals. Kim received the Best Dissertation Award in Urban and Local Politics from the APSA (2022) and the Best Paper Award in AAPI Politics from the WPSA (2020).
Sunhyuk Kim is Professor in the Department of Public Administration at Korea University where. he was the Vice President for International Affairs in 2015-2019. He has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Southern California, a Visiting Professor at Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and a Research Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He is the author of The Politics of Democratization in Korea, Economic Crisis and Dual Transition in Korea, and numerous scholarly journal articles and book chapters. His most recently published articles include “The Origins of ‘Collaborative Governance’ in South Korea,” “Dealing with COVID-19 in South Korea,” “The Making of Presidential Agendas in Korea,” and “Historical Development of Civil Society in Korea since 1987.” His research interests include democracy, comparative democratization, civil society, and social movements. Professor Kim received his MA and PhD in Political Science from Stanford University and BA in Economics from Seoul National University.
Didi Kuo is the Associate Director for Research at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics, with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. Her recent work examines changes to party organization, and the impact these changes have on the ability of governments to address challenges posed by global capitalism. She is the author of Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which examines the role of business against clientelism and the development of modern political parties in the nineteenth century. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.
Munseob Lee is an Assistant Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS) at the University of California San Diego. Lee is also an Associate Director in GPS' Korea-Pacific Program. He got a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2017. His research areas are macroeconomics, economic growth, and the Korean economy. He has been a short-term consultant at the World Bank, a visiting fellow at the Asian Development Bank, and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
Michael McFaul is the Director and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science; and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He was also the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University from June to August of 2015. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995. Ambassador McFaul is also an analyst for NBC News and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post. He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014). He has authored several books, including most recently the New York Times bestseller, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. He is currently writing a book on great powers relations in the 21st century.
Seung-Youn Oh is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Bryn Mawr College, specializing in international relations and comparative politics in East Asia. She also serves as faculty director of the China and Korea sections of the Global Immersion Program at Wharton Business School, and a visiting professor at INSEAD Business School.
Her broader academic interests include China’s economic statecraft, the nexus between economy and security, trade disputes, industrial policy, global supply chains of emerging technology, and US-China strategic competition/cooperation. In the past, she was a POSCO Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu (2016-2017), a research fellow at the East Asia Institute in Seoul, Korea (2014-2015), a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania (2012-2013), and a visiting scholar at the Institute of World Economics and Politics of the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing, China (2009-2010). She holds an MA and a PhD in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley and a BA in Political Science from Yonsei University in South Korea.
Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI. Prior to joining Stanford, Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Persily's scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the "law of democracy," which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration. He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a BA and an MA in political science from Yale; a JD from Stanford where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a PhD in political science from U.C. Berkeley.
Sung Min Rho is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. Her research examines the relationship between structural labor market changes and political and social contention with a regional focus on East Asia. Her recent book, Atomized Incorporation: Chinese Workers and the Aftermath of China's Rise, examines patterns of labor protests in China's manufacturing sectors and explores their social and political implications amid increasing labor shortages and turnover. She is currently researching the political and social effects of automation and digitalization in Korea and China, focusing on the overt and covert forms of non-cooperation among young workers.
Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea in Sociology and a senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He has served as director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center since 2005, and as founding director of the Korea Program since 2001. His research concentrates on social movements, nationalism, and international relations, focusing on Korea and Asia. Shin is the author/editor of numerous books and articles, including South Korea’s Democracy in Crisis: The Threats of Illiberalism, Populism, and Polarization and The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security. Shin’s current research initiatives include Global Talent Flows and Nationalism and Racism, focusing on the Asia-Pacific region. Shin previously taught at the University of Iowa and the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a BA from Yonsei University and an MA and PhD from the University of Washington.
Jiewuh Song is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Seoul National University. She works on questions at the intersection of philosophy, law, and the social sciences and has particular interests in egalitarianism, human rights theory, theories of justice, and the political philosophy of international law. Her publications include “Human Rights and Inequality” (Philosophy and Public Affairs ) and “Pirates and Torturers: Universal Jurisdiction as Enforcement Gap-Filling” (Journal of Political Philosophy).
Jiyeoun Song is a Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies, Seoul National University. She has earned a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, and her M.A. and B.A. degrees in Political Science and International Relations from Korea University. Her research lies at the intersection of comparative political economy and international political economy, with a regional focus on East Asia. It examines several related themes: the politics of labor market reform, the diverging paths of social welfare policies under the pressure of socio-demographic challenges, and the political economy of social and economic development. Song is the author of Inequality in the Workplace: Labor Market Reform in Japan and Korea (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014) and articles in Governance, Social Policy & Administration, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Asian Survey, Journal of East Asian Studies, and other outlets. Before coming to Seoul National University, she had served as an advanced research fellow with the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University, an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies, Sogang University in Korea. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Social Science as well as the Department of Advanced Social and International Studies at University of Tokyo.
Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford and she teaches in the Department of Political Science, and in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution. Prior to coming to Stanford in 2004, she was on the faculty at Princeton University for nine years, jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the Princeton School for International and Public Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School). At Princeton, she received the Ralph O. Glendinning Preceptorship awarded to outstanding junior faculty. She received a BA (1988) and MA (1989) in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University (1995). In 2016 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Iliad State University, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.
Kiyoteru Tsutsui is the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor and Senior Fellow in Japanese Studies at Shorenstein APARC, the Director of the Japan Program and Deputy Director at APARC, a senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Professor of Sociology, all at Stanford University. Tsutsui received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Kyoto University and earned an additional master’s degree and a PhD from Stanford’s sociology department in 2002. Tsutsui’s research interests lie in political/comparative sociology, social movements, globalization, human rights, and Japanese society. His most recent publication, Human Rights and the State: The Power of Ideas and the Realities of International Politics (Iwanami Shinsho, 2022), was awarded with the 2022 Ishibashi Tanzan Award and the 44th Suntory Prize for Arts and Sciences.
Robb Willer is a Professor of Sociology, Psychology (by courtesy), and Business (by courtesy) at Stanford University where he is Director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab and Co-Director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Willer's teaching and research focus on social forces that bring people together (e.g., morality, altruism), forces that divide them (e.g., fear, prejudice), and domains of social life that feature the complex interplay of the two (e.g., hierarchies, politics). The primary area of his research looks at the social and psychological forces shaping Americans' political attitudes. He has a particular interest in techniques for overcoming polarization to build political consensus. He studies how political psychology findings can be applied to construct persuasive political messages. He holds a BA from University of Iowa, an MA and a PhD from Cornell University.
Hye Young You is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and School of Pubic and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her research interests are in political economy, interest groups, lobbying and campaign contributions, and American political institutions. She received her PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University in 2014. Her research has been published in the top outlets in political science such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics.
STUDENT PRESENTERS:
SeongJae Hong is a first year MA student in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Seoul National University. His research interest is in international security, alliance politics and global democracy. SeongJae earned his BA in Global Korean Studies and Political Science from Sogang University, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude. While at Sogang University, he received 'The Next Century Humanities Scholarship' from Korea Student Aid Foundation for academic excellence. He interned at the Ministry of Justice of ROK and Chosun Ilbo (daily news distributor). After finishing masters, SeongJae aims to further study for a doctoral program in international politics.
Jeong Won Lee is a third-year undergraduate student double majoring in International Studies and Business Administration at Ewha Womans University. Her main areas of interest are international economics and international law. Having grown up in both South Korea and America, she has developed an interest in international relations and issues, which she has explored through public speaking as well as journalism, writing for English newspapers at her high school and university. Jeong Won plans to study as an exchange student at George Washington University in the fall this year and graduate from Ewha in 2025.
Joseph S. Mernyk is a PhD student in the sociology department at Stanford University and a member of the PACS Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford. His research focuses on developing social psychological interventions to increase public support for policies and programs that tackle pressing social issues such as economic inequality, racial division, and political animosity. Passionate about maximizing the real-world impact of his work, he collaborates with external organizations and practitioners to deploy these interventions in the field. Joe has been awarded the Stanford PACS PhD Fellowship, the Stanford Impact Labs PhD Fellowship and is a winner of the Barbara and Sandy Dornbusch Award for Contribution to the Understanding or Solution of a Social Problem. Prior to graduate school, he earned his BS in psychology from the University of Pittsburgh before serving as a research coordinator for the Polarization and Social Change Lab.
Kerstin Norris is a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellow currently in her second year of Stanford's East Asian Studies master's program. Her research interests are focused on democracy, popular sovereignty, militarism, and imperialism. Her thesis is a political science project that concerns the rise of Trumpism and Moonppa (문빠), or the extreme supporters of President Donald Trump and President Moon Jae In. She compares the previous U.S. and South Korean presidencies and questions the role of fandomism in democracy, its contribution to polarization, and spread of misinformation in liberal democracies. Before coming to Stanford, Kerstin earned her BA from the Ohio State University in International Relations and Korean with a minor in Spanish language. Her undergraduate thesis researched the Yongsan Garrison's location, the installation of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, and the relocation of the United States military to Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek, South Korea through a neocolonial lens. At Stanford, Kerstin has participated in research under Professor Gi-Wook Shin, studying race in Asia. Additionally, she completed an exchange year at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea, where she researched hybrid coloniality and South Korean populism. Kerstin plans to graduate from Stanford this fall and go on to complete a PhD in Political Science.
Byungjoon Yoo is a senior student in the department of education at Seoul National University. He is exploring the intertwining between meritocratic and educational value system, manifested through public discourse and admission procedures, amplified by technological disruption and innovation. During his sophomore year, he started his military service as a member of the KATUSA (Korean Augmentation to United States Army) and was honorably discharged as a sergeant in the 532nd MI BN, 501st MI BDE with an Army Achievement Medal for his performance as a cryptological linguist and a Senior KATUSA. His undergraduate thesis analyzed the implementation process of learning analytics at secondary education institution, exploring factors that constitute students' and faculty members' trust and support towards its adoption. He has been awarded the Humanities 100 Year Scholarship from the KOSAF and the Ilju Academic Scholarship. He plans to participate in exchange program next semester at Humboldt University, Germany and hopes to continue his further academic endeavor in the U.S.
