Candidates from established political families are more likely to win than their non-dynastic counterparts because their political inheritance often includes significant advantages in resources and reputation. Yet dynastic candidates also bring their own set of experiences and qualities to the game. Is it the case that their individual characteristics can explain their electoral success, or is their success due to their family legacy? Theoretically, how and when are political resources transferred to the new generation? We examine these questions by looking at non-incumbent candidates in city and county council elections in Taiwan from 2009 to 2014, drawing on unique data on politicians' backgrounds. The profile of dynastic candidates differs from that of non-dynastic candidates: they are younger, have less electoral experience and list experience in different sorts of organizations and jobs. However, these differences are not what drives their electoral success; indeed, they tend to win despite these qualities rather than because of them. Even after controlling for candidate quality, dynastic status remains a powerful predictor, conveying roughly a 20 percentage point increase in the probability of winning. This suggests that while dynastic candidates accrue some of their advantage long before they run for office, a large part of the inheritance is transferred during the campaign.

While vaccine hesitancy has become a salient issue, few studies have examined the influence of international collaboration and vaccine developments on people's attitudes towards vaccines. The international collaboration especially with China has been an integral part of the field of influenza. In recent years, attitudes towards vaccines and China are both heavily politicized in the USA with a deepening partisan divide. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to be vaccine hesitant, and they are also more likely to view China negatively. At the same time, the USA has economic, security, and medical collaboration with Japan and most Americans display a very positive view of the country. Thus, does a more international collaboration or more country-specific vaccine development have an influence on US vaccine hesitancy? This study conducts a survey-embedded question-wording experiment to assess the roles of US–China and US–Japan collaboration and partisanship in people's willingness to get the flu vaccine. Despite the previously successful and effective US–China collaboration, this study finds that respondents especially Republicans are much less likely to receive a US–China flu vaccine than a US–Japan or USA alone. Interestingly, both Democrats and Republicans are as willing to receive a US–Japan vaccine as USA alone. These results point to critical roles of partisanship and international relations.

This study examines the political dynamics that shape legislators' policy positions on importing US meat into Taiwan during the past decade, focusing on the cases of US beef in 2012 and US pork in 2021. The trade policy surrounding this issue has become politically contentious, involving conflicting national interests and constituency preferences. Legislators face a dilemma, torn between prioritizing the interests of their constituents and aligning with their party's interests. The central argument posits that legislators affiliated with the ruling party are more inclined to advocate for or adjust their stances to support the removal of import bans on American meat, while those associated with the opposition party tend to exhibit a greater reluctance to endorse such a stance. Factors such as the legislators' constituent's interests, district vs party-list affiliations, the urban–rural divide, or education level do not consistently explain legislators' positions on the US meat trade policy. To examine these arguments, this study employs a mixed-method approach, incorporating quantitative analysis and two case studies of individual legislators. The findings of this study offer empirical support for the central proposition.

This article examines the implications of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) centrality in East Asian regionalism. It seeks to address the question of how ASEAN created and maintained its central position in East Asian regionalism by managing regional cooperation in general and institution-building in particular. This article addresses the question by relying on the theoretical concept of productive power and tangible attributes associated with the concept. This article makes three arguments. First, ASEAN maintained its central position in East Asian regionalism by exerting productive power that works in generalized and diffuse social processes and through constitutive social relations. Second, the Association developed and employed specific meanings and norms that constituted the foundation for regional cooperation. Third, ASEAN maintained its central position in the complicated Sino–Japanese rivalry by embedding them in constitutive social relations and avoiding exclusive links with each of the two states.

In the wake of the intensifying Sino–Japanese rivalry in Asia, a new third-party market cooperation (TPMC) framework emerged in late 2018. The new mechanism was inaugurated around the time of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit to Beijing, displaying new attempts at Sino–Japanese economic diplomacy. Nonetheless, this article highlights the absence of major cooperative outcomes and suggests a pessimistic vision of TPMC's future, as three pairs of politico-economic gaps have led to asymmetries in the approaches adopted by China and Japan. First, a government-to-government policy asymmetry occurred between China's initiatives and Japan's responsiveness, as the latter merely utilized the TPMC as a temporary diplomatic tool to restore bilateral relations in late 2018 and appeared to have lost its policy momentum in the following years. Second, asymmetries in business modes and investment management between the two countries' enterprises have led to technical barriers in materializing the two governments' agreements into specific TPMC business collaboration. This study illustrated a project of Sino–Japanese collaboration in building a high-speed railway in Thailand, and saw this failed case as a warning for existing gaps of commercial modes. Third, both countries are now confronted with domestic underdeveloped public–private partnerships between state and private sectors. This article also aims to provide some policy-oriented implications for steadily implementing the Sino–Japanese TPMC in the future.

Transition from war to peace often leads to new challenges. Conflict scholars suggest that these challenges lead groups to be unable to commit credibly and suggest mechanisms for decreasing the fear of being the victim, and increasing the costs, of reneging. However, international law and international political economy scholars debate the utility of making agreements flexible. This paper argues that provisions intended to increase the flexibility of agreements are detrimental to implementation because they operate under the assumption that groups are in a repeated game, and because they can lead to an even more severe commitment problem. Using a newly collected dataset on civil war cease-fire agreements, duration analyses suggest agreements with more flexibility-enhancing provisions exhibit a higher likelihood of violations. Although provisions calling for third-party enforcement – a mechanism for reducing fear and increasing costs – seem to decrease the likelihood of violations, this effect disappears when flexibility-enhancing provisions are considered.

This study examines the relationship between ideology and resistance to the government's apology to Asian victims of Japan's colonial rule policy, which varies according to political knowledge. Based on existing research, because only a limited percentage of voters consider politics to be ideology based, it is expected that the association between ideology and resistance to intergroup apologies by one's own government differs according to their level of political knowledge. We selected three issues of political apologies: colonial rule in Asian countries, comfort women, and the massacre of Korean people based on false rumors at the time of the 1923 Kanto Earthquake; thereafter, we conducted an online survey of a panel selected by Nikkei Research Inc. The results suggest that the relationship between ideology and resistance among voters to political apologies varies with the level of political knowledge, as expected. On the contrary, social dominance orientations (SDO) were associated with resistance to apology, regardless of their level of political knowledge. We then tested the reproducibility of this finding by conducting a follow-up test on registered users of a crowdsourcing service after conducting a preregistration. In addition, we also measured general attitudes toward personal apologies and neighboring countries victimized by Japan's colonialist policies as factors that might predict resistance to apologies even among the politically uninformed. The association between ideology, SDO, and resistance to governmental apologies was generally replicated in this study.

The voting record of states of the global South at the United Nations General Assembly indicates they are dissatisfied with the US-led liberal international order. Against existing interpretations, this article challenges the notion that states belonging to the Group of 77 (G77) express discontent because they are illiberal and undemocratic. Instead, the article argues that the G77 is composed of a diverse group of states influenced by a common South–South ideology. This foreign policy ideology has a distinct intellectual history and conceptual morphology, grounded in common experience of colonial domination and international peripheralisation. These arguments are tested using a series of multiple regression models, controlling for illiberal characteristics of states and examining the reciprocal influence between G77 membership and voting stance at the United Nations. Disaggregation of General Assembly resolutions and analysis of the text of General Debate speeches corroborates the argument that a coherent set of shared ideas shape how global issues are conceptualised and framed by members of the G77. The results are consistent with the argument that states of the G77 have socialised one another into a shared South–South ideology and that domestic illiberalism is insufficient to explain why they express dissatisfaction with the US-led international order. Ideologies of foreign policy originating in the global South, therefore, should not be overlooked as an influence on world politics.

This study examined the mediating role of civic skill-acts and direct associations of group identity on intentions to engage in peaceful or radical protest actions (i.e., activism or radicalism intentions respectively). A sample of 526 university students in Hong Kong was surveyed. The findings suggested that political identity complementarily mediated the relationship between joining political activities and radicalism intentions. Religious identity and ethnic/racial identity each have an indirect-only mediation to activism as well as radicalism intentions when mediated by community activities and responding activities respectively. Finally, political identity and economic identity each have direct-only mediations to activism intentions respectively. These results suggest that although group identity and civic skill-acts uniquely contribute to protest intentions, the inter-relationship is complicated by the type of group identity, civic skill-act, and protest activity studied. Recommendations for future studies are discussed in light of the findings.

Since the 1990s, United Nations (UN) peacekeepers have been engaged in multidimensional activities in conflict-affected countries. The existing literature, however, focuses predominantly on the effectiveness of military and police peacekeepers involving the threat of force, and does not shed light on the effectiveness of civilian peacekeepers despite the latter's crucial role in rebuilding local livelihoods and restoring state institutions. Civilian participation in peacekeeping increases both the benefits of peaceful life and the costs of combat. Further, civilian activities, by strengthening the rule of law and political accountability mechanism, contribute to encouraging both the rebels and government to disengage from further violence. Using the original dataset of financial resources for UN peacekeeping operations in the world, from 1988 to 2019, I test hypotheses regarding the impact of civilian expenditures on battle-related deaths. Regression analysis shows that spending on the civilian component in UN peacekeeping reduces battle-related deaths on the government side inflicted by insurgents.

This study discusses why South Korea has not always succeeded in the ‘entrepreneurial state’ approach – defined as policy efforts to move away from the old developmental state model to a new industrial system of innovation in which small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are incorporated – by focusing on the limitation of new semiconductor industrial policies of the former Moon Jae-in government (2017–2022). Conventionally, many scholars have exclusively ascribed this limitation to large businesses' (chaebol's) practice of in-house production. Building upon historical institutionalism and its concept of increasing returns, alternatively, we shift attention to the way the Moon government played its entrepreneurial role. We argue that, as the government sought increasing returns from the developmental state idea and institution, the likelihood of wider SME incorporation decreased. Nationalism enabled the government to control the policymaking process but made it difficult to obtain new information through policy contestation. The government depended on developmental alliance to increase policy visibility through the chaebol's capabilities, but demands of small firms were downplayed. This study proposes to construct a more theoretical framework with which to explain how the old political economy model affects new entrepreneurial goals.

We address how democracy has influenced the ways in which the Korean state has managed the issue of labor-based collective action and suppression thereof. During the authoritarian period, the state, through specialized riot police, frequently, and violently, cracked down on protest movements and other forms of collective action. During democratization and post-democratic consolidation, private specialists in violence, operating with the consent of the state, began to replace public forces on the front lines, while working in concert out of the view of the public. Although such state/non-state collaboration in the market for oftentimes illegal violence has been addressed in scholarship elsewhere, we demonstrate through detailed evaluation that the extant explanations are largely incomplete, as they fail to capture the effects of changing relative levels of state-based autonomy from societal and corporatist influence.

This study explores whether and under what conditions foreign aid can help improve the donor country's image in countries that did not receive aid. We identified a world heritage site restoration project, which is visible, localized, has no political strings attached, and deals with global public good, as a most-likely type of foreign aid that can generate this positive effect. In light of the literature suggesting that tensions with the target country undermine public diplomacy effectiveness, we expect the positive effect will be more pronounced in non-recipient countries with which the donor country has a more amicable relationship. To empirically investigate our argument, we field a survey experiment in a developed non-aid-recipient country, Australia. We provide information to the Australian public about an aid project to restore the Angkor Monument in Cambodia conducted either by China or South Korea. We find that information on Korea's aid to Cambodia improves the image of Korea and the willingness to cooperate with the Korean government among Australians. No such effect, however, is observed in the case of similar aid by China whose relations with Australia have been strained in multiple domains. Our findings have policy implications for donor countries seeking to utilize the soft power element of foreign aid as a public diplomacy tool.

Japan, and its alliance with the USA, is central to the unfolding politics of the new space race. This essay draws attention to the ways the Japanese state has positioned its geopolitical and geoeconomic interests related to space in the context of the US–Japan alliance. It probes the material and ideational elements that are driving the Japanese state to closer alignment with its formal ally in the military, civilian, and commercial space domains. But while all these realities bode well for alliance collaboration, there are reasons to be cautious. While the Japanese state has proactively aligned its space policy and postures with the USA, it is not forever caught in the US orbit. Given the uncertain fate of US domestic politics that bears on great power competition, Japan is also prudently positioning for how the status of its ally may evolve. This is what complicates straightforward projections about alliance cooperation and balance of power politics in the unfolding international space order.

Politicians' voice pitch is known to affect voters' evaluation of the candidates in the US. But to what extent is this true outside of the American context? To address this question, we conducted an original survey experiment in Japan. Our findings are threefold. First, in contrast to previous studies, voters in Japan do not systematically prefer lower-pitched over higher-pitched female politicians. Second, our findings suggest heterogeneity in the effect of voice pitch by voters' gender – while Japanese women are indifferent as to female candidates' pitch levels, men are more likely to prefer female candidates who speak at lower pitch. Third, preliminary analyses reveal limited evidence that female candidates' political experience conditions the effect of voice pitch over voters' willingness to vote for that candidate. Our findings suggest that lowering pitch is likely to increase female candidates' electoral prospects by attracting male voters without backlash from female voters.

Observers have long debated how societies should invest resources to safeguard citizens and property, especially in the face of increasing shocks and crises. This article explores how social infrastructure – the spaces and places that help build and maintain social ties and trust, allowing societies to coordinate behavior – plays an important role in our communities, especially in mitigating and recovering from shocks. An analysis of quantitative data on more than 550 neighborhoods across the three Japanese prefectures most affected by the tsunami of 11 March 2011 shows that, controlling for relevant factors, community centers, libraries, parks, and other social infrastructure measurably and cheaply reduced mortality rates among the most vulnerable population. Investing in social infrastructure projects would, based on this data, save more lives during a natural hazard than putting the same money into standard, gray infrastructure such as seawalls. Decision makers at national, regional, and local levels should expand spending on facilities such as libraries, community centers, social businesses, and public parks to increase resilience to multiple types of shocks and to further enhance the quality of life for residents.

This article has two objectives. One is to explain the rise of female political representation in local assemblies in Tokyo's 23 Special Wards. The other is to examine how political women in Japan have or have not changed since the publication of Susan Pharr's Political Women in Japan in 1981. When Tokyo first saw the emergence of a new type of local assembly women in the 1990s, they consisted of well-educated suburban housewives who led the Seikatsusha Nettowaku movement. In the past 15 years, however, Tokyo has witnessed a decline in ‘housewife politicians’ and a further diversification in the types of political women. This article pays special attention to a new type of political women called Mama Giin (literally, mommy politicians). Mama Giin are professional working mothers, who have become local assembly women to address deficiencies in childcare services. Their numbers increased as socio-economic changes and party realignment reshaped supply and demand for female candidates in Tokyo. Most of them accept the gendered responsibilities for childcare very much like Pharr's New Women did in the 1970s. The younger cohorts of highly educated women enjoy greater job options and life choices unavailable to the New Women of their mothers' generation. However, they do not necessarily challenge Japan's patriarchy. This article examines the biographies of female local politicians in Tokyo's 23 Special Ward assemblies to understand the rise of Mama Giin.

More than 50 studies have examined the programmatic incumbent support hypothesis, which posits that once enacted, programmatic policies increase electoral support for the incumbent. Despite the careful attention to causal inference in this work, empirical findings have been strikingly inconsistent. We make the case that these inconsistent results are likely explained by incumbents' strategic responses to the enactment of a programmatic policy. Specifically, incumbents have good reasons to distribute different amounts of non-programmatic goods to voters who do and do not receive a programmatic policy. To examine this conjecture, we turn to the case of Japan, where municipalities receive allocations of non-programmatic goods and vary in their eligibility for a programmatic policy (a snow subsidy) according to plausibly exogenous factors. Using a geographic regression discontinuity design, we find that municipalities receiving the programmatic policy receive systematically more non-programmatic goods than municipalities that do not.

Why study Japan? Research on contemporary Japanese politics and foreign policy faces headwinds from the relative geopolitical decline of Japan and scholars skeptical about single-country studies. An overview of Japanese politics publications in English-language journals over the past four decades suggests the subfield remains active and robust. However, there is still room to grow. I argue that Japan is a harbinger state, which experiences many challenges before others in the international system. As such, studying Japan can inform both scholars and policymakers about the political challenges other countries are likely to confront in the future. In turn, scholarship on Japan offers a critical opportunity to develop theoretical insights, assess early empirical evidence, and offer policy lessons about emerging challenges and the political contestation surrounding them. I consider the reasons why Japan so often emerges as a harbinger across issue areas and suggest areas for ongoing scholarly attention.

Previous studies have discussed the effects of electoral competition on corruption, but only a few explored the effects of political power shifts – the results of electoral competition. To fill the gap, this study tests hypotheses that three types of political power shifts (the shifts of individual local government heads, local government ruling party, and local council majority) reduce the corruption (overall, external, and internal), with a panel data set of 226 Korean local governments. The empirical study shows that only shifts in the local government head reduce internal corruption. The other dependent and independent variables do not have any significant relationships. This can be because of structural matters of Korean local politics such as strong mayor-weak council and the closed local elite networks.