Kharis Templeman

Kharis Templeman received a BA (2002) from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in political science (2012) from the University of Michigan. A fluent Mandarin speaker, he has lived, worked, and traveled extensively in both Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China.  As a graduate student, he worked in Taipei at the Election Study Center, National Cheng Chi University, and later was a dissertation research fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy.  His dissertation examined the development of Taiwan’s competitive party system from a comparative perspective, including a large study of the origins and decline of dominant party systems around the world over the last 60 years.

Current research interests include democratization, party system development in newly-contested regimes, and political institutions, with a regional focus on the new and transitioning democracies of Pacific Asia.  He is currently a regional manager for the Varieties of Democracy project.  Other ongoing collaborations include research on constitutional design for divided societies, on the arms-allies tradeoff in client states, and on intra-tribal voting coordination in elections in Jordan.