Přednášky prof. Da-chi Liao a prof. Samuel C. Y. Ku z Taiwanu

DA-CHI LIAO - The application of ‘big data’ methods to legislative studies

The lecture on application of “big data” methods to legislative studies involves three major parts. First is to brief the meanings and the functions of ‘big data’ methods. Second and third are to explicate how to use information technologies (IT) to supervise legislatures and to analyze legislatures, respectively. In regard to IT techniques used to supervise legislatures, this speaker would introduce iVoter website (http://ivoter.tw/) that  was founded  and  has been  keeping on operation by her nearly 10 years (2010-). The main function of iVoter is to match a voter’s policy preferences with those of his/her country’s political parties or candidates. This kind of preference-matching mechanism is often called Voting Advice Applications (VAA) in current literature. The speaker would further illustrate how to use data gathered from iVoter to supervise legislatures. The third part of the lecture regards using text-mining techniques to analyze both legislative documents and social media data that concern legislators. Three papers mainly authored by this speaker would exemplify how this kind of work has been done. These are: “Parliamentary Oversight in ‘Atypical Foreign Affairs’ under Semipresidentialism– a Comparison of the French National Assembly, Romania’s Parliament and Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan.” (2014)  “The Effect of Social Movements on Representative Deficit: A Study of Two Taiwanese Cases.” (2017)  “Legislators’ Utilization of Facebook and Their Legislative Performance- A Case of Taiwan (2016-2018).” (2018)

Dr. Da-chi Liao is a distinguished professor of Graduate Institute of Political Science at National Sun-Yat-sen University (NSYSU), and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 1990. She has long been focusing on legislative studies, constitutional design, identity problems, information technology and politics, election and politics. From 2004 to 2006, she served as the president of Taiwanese Political Science Association. She has published more than 70 refereed journal articles ever since 1990, and edited two books before 2006: American Policy in Asia Pacific Region After 9-11 (2002), and Democratization, Globalization, and the Role of Parliaments (2006, in Chinese). In recent 10 years, she has been devoting significant time to study how to utilize ICTs (Information and Communication technologies)as a tool to analyze politics as well as to improve the quality of democracy in Taiwan. She has been working with information technologists to employ text-mining techniques doing content analyses either on legislative documents or on social media, such as Facebook or Taiwan’s BBS. She has also cooperated with European University Institute (Florence, Italy) to set up the iVoter website (http://ivoternet.org/) as a communication platform between Taiwanese voters and legislative candidates for the 2012, 2016 and 2020 elections. This effort was then published into two books. One is entitled as “iVoter: A Record of Taiwan’s Internet Democracy,” (2013, in Chinese) and the other is: Political Behavior and Technology—Voting Advice Applications in East Asia (2016 in English by Palgrave & Macmillan).

SAMUEL C. Y. KU -Parliamentary Reforms in the Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines: A Comparative Perspective

Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines are three major countries in Southeast Asia, sharing different culture, religion, and political history.  By the mid-1980s, these three countries were ruled by authoritarian regimes, mostly military-dominated governments.  Being ruled by a hereditary monarch, Thailand is a Buddhist country with frequent military coups since 1932, whereas Indonesia, the largest Islamic state in the world, was under the rule of General Suharto for thirty two years from 1966 to 1998.  The Philippines is a Catholic state, but it was under the authoritarian rule of Mr. Marcos for twenty one years from 1965 to 1986. These three countries, however, began to make political changes towards democracy, including parliamentary reforms, since the mid-1980s, although they experienced different bumpy roads in the last few decades.  Indonesia is the most successful country moving towards democracy, while Thailand and the Philippines suffered from various internal disputes and conflict.  This paper will take a historical and comparative perspective to explore the changes of parliamentary reforms in these three countries and argue that a universal value for democracy is functional in Southeast Asia.

Professor Ku received his Ph.D. in political science from the Ohio State University in June 1989.   Dr. Ku then began to work at National Sun Yat-sen University from September 1989 to July 2016, where he had served as the director of the Sun Yat-sen Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies for Social Sciences (August 2001- May 2006) and the Graduate Institute of China and Asia-Pacific Studies (August 2011–July 2016).  In addition, Professor Ku had been a visiting scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, East Asian Institute in Singapore, Ateneo de Manila University in Manila, and Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Professor Ku was recruited to serve as the Vice President for international affairs at Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages in August 2016 (till January 2019); he is now a professor at the Master Program on Southeast Asian Studies in Wenzao. Professor Ku’s major research interests include political development in Southeast Asia and Taiwan’s relations with Southeast Asia. Professor Ku has published more than fifty journal articles and more than ten books, including a series of books on eight individual Southeast Asian country, i.e. Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, the Philippines and Cambodia. While two thirds of his publications are in Chinese; his English articles have also appeared in such international journals as Asian Survey, Asian Perspective, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Issues and Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Asian and African Studies, etc.

The event is supported by CAS cooperation activity with leading research institutions in South and Southeast Asia, 2019.

Seminars will be held in English. No registration is needed.