This paper examines economic statecraft in the case of rare-earth elements, of which China controls over 90% of the world's current supply, and famously cut off exports to Japan during a territorial dispute in 2010. The rare-earth sanctions provide an opportunity to investigate claims of economic statecraft, power and interdependence, and the political implications of near-monopoly control of a resource critical for high-tech military, consumer, medical, and environmental industries. A vector error correction model statistically disentangles the effects of China's economic statecraft from their rare-earth quota and pricing policies. Prior to the sanctions, there was little international supply diversification. China's purported use of rare-earth elements was an economically costly diplomatic signal that demonstrated their potential leverage, but also had unintended consequences, as Japan moved to diversify rare-earth supplies and in doing so deepened diplomatic ties with China's neighbors. Economic statecraft served to heighten regional tensions and undermine the China's own end goals.

We advance the literature on electoral institutions and legislative representation by investigating legislators’ position taking strategies in Taiwan under the single non-transferable voting period. Existing research largely assumes that representatives elected from the same electoral rule behave similarly. We challenge this conventional understanding by arguing that legislators in multi-member districts (MMDs) tend to move toward the extreme direction from the party line if they come from districts where their party is less competitive. This pattern of legislative representation allows them to appeal to partisan voters, as lowering one's partisan profile can be too costly in such districts. On the contrary, those who are elected from strong partisan districts are expected to deviate from the party toward the moderate direction. Given a solid partisan foundation in these districts, these legislators may target voters across party lines. Our analysis covering the entire period of MMD elections after Taiwan's democratization (1992–2008) provides robust empirical evidence to our theoretical claim. Our findings, therefore, shed lights for future studies on the intertwining nature between electoral systems, district level factors, and legislative representation.

This paper aims to test two types of legislative shirking in a new democracy, South Korea. Using the lame-duck sessions of the Korean National Assembly, we test whether a legislator shirks in voting participation and in voting decisions. We weave two competing motivations of legislative shirking in voting participation – that to secure more leisure time and that to utilize the last, valuable voting opportunity – into a synthetic hypothesis and test it with two-part hurdle models. To test a shirking in voting participation hypothesis, we analyze legislators’ choices on bills that are supposedly related to the interests of constituents or political parties. Empirical results strongly support our shirking in voting participation claims, while only partial evidence is found on shirking in voting decisions. The findings suggest that, besides the trade-off between labor and leisure, some legislators deem the lame-duck sessions an opportunity to express their own preferences unconstrained.

Political parties’ behavior in coalition formation is commonly explained by their policy-, vote-, and office-seeking incentives. From these perspectives, the 20-year partnership of Japan's ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its pacifistic Komeito junior coalition partner is an anomalous case. The longevity, closeness, and nature of their unlikely partnership challenges core assumptions in existing theories of coalition politics. LDP–Komeito cooperation has sustained for two decades despite vastly different support bases and ideological differences on fundamental policy issues. LDP leaders also show no signs of abandoning the much smaller Komeito despite enjoying a single-party majority. We argue that the remarkable durability of this puzzling partnership results primarily from the two parties’ electoral incentives and what has effectively become codependence under Japan's mixed electoral system. Our analysis also demonstrates that being in a coalition can induce significant policy compromises, even from a much larger senior partner. Beyond theoretical implications, these phenomena yield important real-world consequences for Japanese politics: especially, a far less dominant LDP than the party's Diet seat total suggests, and Komeito's remarkable ability to punch significantly above its weight and constrain its far larger senior partner, even on the latter's major national security policy priorities.