Description

Netina’s work examines sources of authoritarian resilience in the age of democracy. Her presentation will focus on her doctoral dissertation that investigates why hegemonic party rule persists in Singapore, while Taiwan concedes to multipartism. Building on party politics and electoral authoritarianism literature, she explains why elites unite and oppositions fail to pose a credible threat. Her comparative study of two similar hegemonic parties of different outcomes: the People’s Action Party in Singapore and the Kuomintang Party in Taiwan argues that strategic co-ordination – provision of public goods and selective coercion, represses political participation. Her findings drawn from elite interviews, archival sources and survey data show how an institutionalized oligarchic party stays cohesive overtime. In 2011, her dissertation received the Vincent Lemieux Prize for the best dissertation submitted in a Canadian institution for 2009 and 2010 by the Canadian Political Science Association.

Netina (Ph.D. University of British Columbia) is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs. Her upcoming book project traces institutional learning and organization adaptation in China, Taiwan and Singapore. She is also working on a series of journal articles on effects of electoral reforms on women’s political representation and implications of brain drain and immigration in Southeast Asia. Currently, Netina has three articles under review in Party Politics, Electoral Studies and Journal of Contemporary China and three chapters forthcoming on party system institutionalization, hegemonic party stability and managed liberalization in Singapore. For more on Netina, see http://www.politics.ubc.ca/graduate-program/current-phds/netina-tan.html