Bio


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.

Academic Appointments


  • Hoover Research Fellow, Hoover Institution

Program Affiliations


  • Center for East Asian Studies

Current Research and Scholarly Interests


His current research agenda includes work on the quality of democracy in Taiwan, on cross-Strait relations, and on electoral malpractice and manipulation in Asia. He is the editor (with Larry Diamond and Yun-han Chu) of Dynamics of Democracy in Taiwan: The Ma Ying-jeou Years (2020, Lynne Rienner Publishing). Other writing and research has appeared in The Diplomat, Foreign Affairs, War on the Rocks, Taiwan Insight, Ethnopolitics, Comparative Political Studies, and the Journal of Democracy.

2023-24 Courses


All Publications