Shelley Rigger

Senior Fellow - Asia Program

Research Areas:

Taiwan, Nationalism, Democracy

Shelley Rigger, a Senior Fellow in the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, is the Brown Professor of East Asian Politics and Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. She has a PhD in Government from Harvard University and a BA in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University. She has been a visiting researcher at National Chengchi University in Taiwan (2005) and a visiting professor at Fudan University (2006) and Jiaotong University (2015) in Shanghai and at National Taiwan University (2019). Rigger is the author of two books on Taiwan’s domestic politics: Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy (Routledge 1999) and From Opposition to Power: Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (Lynne Rienner Publishers 2001) as well as two books for general readers, Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse (2011) and The Tiger Leading the Dragon: How Taiwan Propelled China’s Economic Rise (2021). She has published articles on Taiwan’s domestic politics, the national identity issue in Taiwan-China relations and related topics. Her current research studies the effects of cross-strait economic interactions on Taiwan people’s perceptions of Mainland China.