This article explores the relationship between diversification and energy security risks. It uses portfolio theory to conceptualise energy security as an insurance mechanism against disruptions to energy import markets. It provides quantitative measures of systematic and specific risks associated with Japanese energy imports during the period 1970—99. It suggests that Japan's policy of diversification of energy import sources has reduced specific risks, although fundamental changes in the political and economic structure of international energy and, in particular, oil markets have also significantly reduced systematic risks. The article concludes that, despite their limitations, portfolio measures provide a much more theoretically and methodologically robust indicator of energy import security than traditional measures of dependence.

The Singaporean patriarch Lee Kuan Yew popularized the argument that ‘Asian values’ derived from Confucian cultural traditions are inconsistent with the development of democracy in East Asia. There is an active scholarly debate over whether the hierarchic and deferential social authority relations of Confucian traditions are incompatible with support for democracy. Drawing upon the newest wave of the World Values Survey, we analyze public opinion in six East Asian nations and four Western democracies. We first assess orientations toward authority, and then link these sentiments to support for democracy. The results contradict the core tenets of the ‘culture is destiny’ argument in the Asian values literature, and offer a more positive view of the prospects for political development in the region.

Over 40 years ago, Daniel Bell made the provocative claim that ideological polarization was diminishing in Western democracies, but new ideologies were emerging and driving politics in developing nations. This article tests the End of Ideology thesis with a new wave of public opinion data from the World Values Survey (WVS) that covers over 70 nations representing more than 80 per cent of the world's population. We find that polarization along the Left/Right dimension is substantially greater in the less affluent and less democratic societies than in advanced industrial democracies. The correlates of Left/Right orientations also vary systematically across regions. The twin pillars of economic and religious cleavages remain important in European states; cultural values and nationalism provide stronger bases of ideology in Asia and the Middle East. As Bell suggested, social modernization does seem to transform the extent and bases of ideological polarization within contemporary societies.

The thesis that ‘Asian’ cultures oppose the ‘Western’ emphasis on emancipative values and liberal democracy has mostly been criticized for its political instrumentality. By contrast, the empirical claim about most Asians’ dismissal of emancipative values and liberal democracy has not been tested on a broadly cross-cultural basis. Filling this gap, this article uses data from the World Values Surveys to put the values of Asian populations into global perspective. As a result, the differences between Asian and Western populations over emancipative values and liberal democracy appear to be gradual, not categorical. What is more, the forces of modernization that gave rise to emancipative values and a liberal notion of democracy in the ‘West’, are doing the same in the ‘East’, confirming a universal model of human development rather than Asian exceptionalism, or any other form of cultural exceptionalism.

Dynastic politicians, defined as those whose family members have also served in the same position in the past, occupy a sizable portion of offices in many parts of the world. We develop a model of how dynastic politicians with inherited political advantages affect electoral outcomes and policy choices. Our model predicts that, as compared with non-dynastic legislators, dynastic legislators bring more distributions to the district, enjoy higher electoral success, and harm the economic performance of the districts, despite the larger amount of distributive benefits they bring. We test the implications of the model using data from Japan between 1997 and 2007.

A growing literature looks at how the design of the electoral system shapes the voting behavior of politicians in parliaments. Existing research tends to confirm that in mixed-member systems the politicians elected in the single-member districts are more likely to vote against their parties than the politicians elected on the party lists. However, we find that in South Korea, the members of the Korean National Assembly who were elected on PR lists are more likely to vote against their party leadership than the members elected in single-member districts (SMDs). This counterintuitive behavior stems from the particular structure of candidate selection and politicians' career paths. This suggests that any theory of how electoral systems shape individual parliamentary behavior needs to look beyond the opportunities provided by the electoral rules for voters to reward or punish individual politicians (as opposed to parties), to the structure of candidate selection inside parties and the related career paths of politicians.

Is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) a pluralistic security community (PSC)? Does community cause security in Southeast Asia? In a PSC, member states are sovereign. So are the members of ASEAN. Before concluding that the ASEAN region is a PSC, however, one should distinguish between two versions: a thin or descriptive PSC, whose members share both a sense of community and the expectation of security, and a thick or explanatory version in which community has actually been shown to cause security. Depending on how a sense of community is defined, one may say that at certain times in its history, ASEAN probably has been a thin PSC. More recently, however, the cooperative identity of regional elites may have frayed, as democratization, especially in Indonesia, has incorporated non-elites into public life. Meanwhile the proposition that the assurance of security in Southeast Asia has resulted from this sense of community, that ASEAN is a thick PSC, remains to be proven.

In recent years, concerns about misinformation in the media have skyrocketed. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that various news outlets are disseminating ‘fake news’ for political purposes. But when the information contained in mainstream media news reports provides no clear clues about its truth value or any indication of a partisan slant, do people rely on the congeniality of the news outlet to judge whether the information is true or false? In a survey experiment, we presented partisans (Democrats and Republicans) and ideologues (liberals and conservatives) with a news article excerpt that varied by source shown (CNN, Fox News, or no source) and content (true or false information), and measured their perceived accuracy of the information contained in the article. Our results suggest that the participants do not blindly judge the content of articles based on the news source, regardless of their own partisanship and ideology. Contrary to prevailing views on the polarization and politicization of news outlets, as well as on voters' growing propensity to engage in ‘partisan motivated reasoning,’ source cues are not as important as the information itself for partisans on both sides of the aisle.

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.

Political trust is a cornerstone of political survival and development. This paper makes use of data from the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey to examine the level of political trust in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It finds that the people of Hong Kong have a high level of trust in their government and judiciary, but a relatively low level of trust in their legislature. In contrast, the Taiwan people have a lower level of trust in all of their executive, judicial, and legislative branches, reflecting a serious problem with political confidence in Taiwan. A further analysis shows that institutional factors such as ratings of government performance, life satisfaction, and satisfaction with democratic rights and freedoms, and cultural factors such as interpersonal trust, post-materialism, and traditionalism have varying degrees of effect on the different domains of political trust in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but institutional factors appear to be more powerful than cultural factors in explaining the experiences of both societies.

In this paper we provide evidence from Japan that bears on a general theory of agenda power in legislatures. By agenda power we mean the power to determine: (a) which bills are considered in the plenary session of the legislature and (b) restrictions on debate and amendment to these bills, when they are considered. While a substantial amount of work has focused on the second category of agenda power, including studies of special rules in the US House (e.g., Sinclair forthcoming), closure in the UK House of Commons (e.g., Cox, 1987; Dion, 1997), and the guillotine in the French National Assembly (e.g., Huber, 1996), there is very little on the first and arguably more fundamental sort of agenda power. This agenda power – the power to decide which bills will actually be considered on the floor of the legislature – is our focus here, and henceforth when we refer to ‘agenda power’ we shall mean this narrower conception.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, individual scholars and research institutes have conducted numerous public opinion surveys to monitor how global citizenries react to the process of democratization taking place in their own countries and elsewhere. This article reviews the various issues surrounding the divergent conceptions of democracy among political scientists and ordinary citizens, and synthesizes significant findings of the conceptual and empirical research based on these surveys. It also raises a set of new questions that future surveys should address to broaden and deepen our knowledge about citizen conceptions of democracy.

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.

China does not have a federalist system of government. Nevertheless, with deepening reform and openness, China's political system in terms of central–local relations is functioning more and more like federalism. Federalism as a functioning system in China has been understudied. This paper defines the political system existing in China as de facto federalism, and attempts to explore the sources and dynamics of this de facto federalism. China's de facto federalism was mainly driven by two related factors, i.e. decentralization and globalization. This paper argues that while economic decentralization in the 1980s led to the formation of de facto federalism, globalization since the 1990s has accelerated this process and generated increasingly high pressure on the Chinese leadership to institutionalize existing de facto federalism.

China has undergone a media revolution that has transformed the domestic context for making foreign policy as well as domestic policy. The commercialization of the mass media has changed the way leaders and publics interact in the process of making foreign policy. As they compete with one another, the new media naturally try to appeal to the tastes of their potential audiences. Editors make choices about which stories to cover based on their judgments about which ones will resonate best with audiences. In China today, that means a lot of stories about Japan, Taiwan, and the United States, the topics that are the objects of Chinese popular nationalism. The publicity given these topics makes them domestic political issues because they are potential focal points for elite dis-agreement and mass collective action, and thereby constrains the way China' leaders and diplomats deal with them. Even relatively minor events involving China' relations with Japan, Taiwan, or the United States become big news, and therefore relations with these three governments must be carefully handled by the politicians in the Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee. Because of the Internet, it is impossible for Party censors to screen out news from Japan, Taiwan or the United States that might upset the public. Common knowledge of such news forces officials to react to every slight, no matter how small. Foreign policy makers feel especially constrained by nationalist public opinion when it comes to its diplomacy with Japan. Media marketization and the Internet have helped make Japan China' most emotionally charged international relationship.

This paper demonstrates that recent changes in the mass media, especially TV programs, change democratic practice. I argue that this theory is applicable not only to the US, but also to Japan after the 1990s. This paper is organized as follows: the first section confirms that the increase in TV news after the 1980s is driven by an increase in ‘soft’ or ‘infotaining’ political news. The second section describes the changes in political practice – elections, policy processes, and party organization brought about by this change in the mass media, using both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Assessment of the quality of governance has so far relied on socioeconomic statistics and expert opinions, while largely neglecting citizens’ perceptions. Using AsiaBarometer 2008 data, this paper examines the factors affecting citizens’ satisfaction with their government in six Asian-Pacific countries: America, Australia, China, India, Japan, and Russia. I found citizen satisfaction with the public services they receive, such as education, healthcare, and public safety, matters most in their assessment of government performance. Individual satisfaction with income, job, and housing also matters. The respondent will disapprove government performance if he or she thinks corruption is serious in government, or elected officials stop caring about citizens once voting is finished. In terms of macro variables, economic condition of a country seems to matters significantly. Especially, if a country's economy is growing fast, citizens are much more likely to be satisfied with government performance. Large within-country variations exist in countries such as China and India, where citizens of different cities or regions may give rather different assessments of government, suggesting many contextual variables not captured by this study. Lastly, citizens’ satisfaction with government performance seems to be highly divergent from international organizations’ evaluation of governance quality, such as the World Bank Governance Index. This raises both methodological and normative issues regarding the proper approaches to measuring good governance.

Cochin or Kochi is one of the few cities in India where the precolonial traditions of cultural pluralism refuse to die. It is one of the largest natural harbours in India and has also become, during the last fifty years, a major centre of the Indian Navy. With the growing security consciousness in official India, it has recently become less accessible to non-Indians, particularly if they happen to be from one of the countries with which India''s relationship is tense. Few mind that, for the city no longer means much to the outside world. To Indians, too, except probably for the more historically conscious Malayalis, Cochin is no longer the ‘epitome of adventure’ it was to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or a crucible of cultures, as it is to its former mayor, K. J. Sohan. For most, it is now one of those regional cities not quite up to the standard of India's major metropolitan centres.

As these essays show, there is a lively debate over the future of world order. Sergey Chugrow offers a dark portrait of the breakdown of what he calls Western hegemony, driven in part by Russia's grievances and aggression in Ukraine. He points to a future where international order will have a mix of realist geopolitics and post-modern diversity. Keisuke Iida sees the debate over liberal international order as a return to older debates about the viability of hegemonic order and the role of regions and non-Western values in a post-hegemonic global system. Peter Haas sees the debate over liberal international order as a window onto various new forms of global governance. Behind these important observations is Amitav Acharya's vision of a post-American global order marked by diverse regional sub-systems; a world that is globalized, diversified, and localized. These developments lead Acharya to announce the ‘end’ of the American-led liberal international order.

The Internet has played important roles in driving political changes around the world. Why does it help to topple political regimes in some places but improve the quality of governance in others? We found Internet usage in general leads to citizens’ distrust in political institutions. Different political environments, however, can condition such trust-eroding impacts of the Internet in significantly different ways. A democracy enables citizens to connect their online behaviors and offline expression and organization, releasing political discontent while facilitating state–society communication. On the contrary, by restricting various forms of off-line expression, authoritarian regimes drive Internet-active citizens' discontent and distrust to higher levels. We use the World Values Survey data to establish these different mechanisms across democracies and authoritarian systems. Entropy balancing shows our findings to be highly robust.