Democratization should reduce incentives to engage in corruption, by expanding the size of the winning coalition, heightening transparency, increasing accountability to the electorate, and multiplying the number of veto points required for a corrupt deal. Yet many young, consolidated democracies, such as South Korea, have recorded higher levels of perceived corruption following democratization.

I argue that the apparently higher level of corruption accompanying democratization results from overdependence on perception surveys to measure corruption. As democratization frees the press, more stories of graft lead the public to higher levels of perceived corruption without any corresponding rise in real corruption. A more effective measurement strategy is to objectively “follow the money,” by focusing on outflows of rents and any related personal receipt of favors by relevant officials. Applied to the Korean case, contrary to popular perceptions of increased corruption, objective measurement of elite corruption reveals that democratization produced a sharp reduction in the corrupt exchange of rents through industrial restructuring programs, bank lending, and government procurement contracts.

Our goal in this article is to explain how South Korea's Hyundai Motor Company successfully transferred its production system to the United States. When a production system is transferred to another country, it is modified under the influences of different institutional environments. The key to the success of Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama, Hyundai's transplant in Montgomery, Alabama, is found in Hyundai's relatively low dependence on skill formation and high reliance on numerical flexibility of its production system relative to its Japanese counterparts. While Japanese automakers had difficulties transferring their production system to their US transplants, Hyundai did not because its production system did not require highly skilled labor. Alabama's flexible labor market and the absence of labor unions enabled Hyundai to more efficiently utilize the numerical flexibility of production workers than was possible at its original plant in Korea, which suffered from adversarial labor relations. This case study casts doubt on the convergence model of technology and globalization, because it shows varieties of production systems developing under different institutional environments.

A commonplace view holds that the trend toward Asian financial regionalism is a relatively new phenomenon, developing in response to the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis in particular. In this article I challenge this view by analyzing financial regionalist projects before the crisis. Asian countries, especially Japan, sought to establish an Asia-only financial cooperation framework throughout the 1990s. The policy stance of the United States, in contrast, was to participate in Asian forums and/or by itself propose and establish regional groupings that included the United States. This competition between Japan and the United States is a key factor in understanding the rise and fall of various regionalist projects and also has theoretical implications for membership politics in regional financial cooperation frameworks.

In 1986, Kenneth Lieberthal observed that the study of China in the United States had had little effect on the evolution of political science. Over twenty years later, its impact on the core debates in comparative politics seems to have been no more significant. Why have some of the most influential books in the study of contemporary Chinese politics not been significant in the discipline of comparative politics? Based on a quantitative overview of forty-two comparative politics syllabi, my argument is twofold. First, China scholarship has isolated the study of Chinese politics by primarily publishing in area journals, building analyses around debates exclusive to Chinese politics, and generating knowledge with limited contemplation of its potential for generalization outside China. Second, comparative politics seems to have been caught in a “democratic prism,” which has impeded scholars' ability to adapt some of the debates to empirical changes associated with China's rise and development.

In “Diversionary Dragons, or ‘Talking Tough in Taipei’” (Journal of East Asian Studies 9, 3: 369–398), Yitan Li, Patrick James, and A. Cooper Drury presented a newly created data set to show that Chen Shui-bian used independence rhetoric and confrontation with the mainland as a diversionary tactic in the face of domestic political difficulties. In the present exchange, Jonathan Sullivan challenges the authors' understanding of how the Democratic Progressive Party used the Taiwan independence issue—and the authors' interpretation of independence—and raises questions about the coding of press coverage as a means of identifying underlying preferences. The authors respond, concluding that the future use of such diversionary tactics is by no means foreclosed.