What motivates states’ choice of social classification? Existing explanations highlight scientific beliefs of modern states or social engineering by ideological regimes. Focusing on the initial state-building period of two Communist regimes, China and North Korea, this article complements the existing literature and suggests that social classification reflects three missions of political leaders: regime distinction, governance, and power consolidation. Population categories are created to distinguish the new government from the old, to selectively provide welfare, and to attack political opponents. The varying weight of the missions and their manifestation in social classification depend on new ruling elites’ cohesion and past experiences. This comparative historical analysis sheds light on the rise of political chaos in China and the personalistic dictatorship in North Korea in the 1970s.

This article presents evidence that high-ranking public officials in the Ministry of Strategy and Finance in South Korea affect local budget allocation. Applying a regression model on a uniquely constructed panel dataset, I found that the growth rate of the per-capita National Subsidy, which is a subcomponent of the national budget susceptible to discretionary behaviors, increases approximately 7 percent in the hometowns of high-ranking bureaucrats. To validate these findings and address causality, I conducted a battery of auxiliary robustness checks, which yielded confirmatory results. This study also found that enhancing transparency in the budget allocation system can alleviate concerns about bureaucratic hometown favoritism, providing suggestive evidence of bureaucrats’ rent-seeking behaviors without government transparency.

What explains the lack of electoral consequences for corrupt politicians? Building on studies of motivated reasoning and asymmetric partisan bias, this article highlights the importance of partisan differences in how voters interpret corruption convictions and make voting decisions. I contend that in post-authoritarian democracies, supporters of authoritarian legacy parties (ALPs) are less likely to punish corrupt copartisan incumbents compared to supporters of other parties faced with equally corrupt copartisan incumbents. While voters of all kinds appear likely to ignore corruption among copartisan incumbents, supporters of authoritarian legacy parties are particularly likely to do so. Using original datasets from South Korea, this study shows empirical evidence of the lack of corruption voting for ALP partisans across three legislative elections. This article further finds partisan discrepancies and a striking lack of corruption voting among authoritarian legacy partisans.

In 2019, Taiwan became the first in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage (SSM). This article considers the social movement strategies and relational dynamics of three activist groups in the year leading to the landmark SSM legislation, respectively representing the “yes,” “no,” and “alternative” agendas in the public debates and social mobilization around the issue of equal marriage rights. Through a critical study of the three cases, this article examines how various campaigners shaped local SSM discourses and mobilized people to support, oppose, and question marriage equality, focusing on their social mobilization strategies and inter-group relational dynamics under Taiwan's political and legal structures. In so doing, it proposes a hybrid theoretical model to understand complex social movement and countermovement relations and dynamics.

Research on attitudes toward immigrants and refugees largely focuses on intergroup conflict and related threats imposed by outgroup members. This study shifts the analytic focus to intragroup conflict: a domestic struggle among natives over how to handle recently arrived refugees and on their perception of foreign workers in general and Muslims in particular. By exploiting an exogenous variation in the interview timing of a nationally representative survey conducted in South Korea, a “new immigration destination,” this study offers a causal estimate (local average treatment effect) of domestic societal conflict on outgroup attitudes. Results from regression discontinuity (RD) analysis show that in its aftermath—immediately following the completion of a controversial e-petition sponsored by the anti-refugee group demanding that the government extradite asylum seekers—the public opinion of Korean adults toward foreign workers and Muslims became more, not less, favorable. Heterogeneous treatment effects are also found across two respondent-level characteristics: cosmopolitan identity and relative deprivation. Specifically, the focal relationship is more pronounced among individuals who identify less with cosmopolitan citizenship and among those who are more relatively deprived.

The Liberal Democratic Party maintains a dominant position in Japanese politics while the opposition side is fragmented into many parties. Small opposition parties, namely the Communists, are still surviving even though it has been almost three decades since the 1994 electoral law reform, which made it difficult for such parties to exist. Fragmentation of the opposition is giving an electoral advantage to the ruling party. How can small opposition parties survive? An empirical analysis of voter survey data supports the argument that the controversy over a constitutional revision is playing a role in preventing anti-government voters from unifying under a single party.

Does female bureaucratic support for female political leaders change over time? Existing research focuses on factors that vary across countries. Little work examines how contingent events within a context impact gender-based solidarity. Drawing on collective identity theory, we argue that high-profile incidents of perceived gender-based injustice against a female president could increase female bureaucrats’ support for the leader. To explore this, we leverage a unique setting of a female president's impeachment in South Korea to assess the relationship between gender and bureaucrats’ support. Examining support for President Park before and after the impeachment, we find that her impeachment has a gendered impact on support, with female bureaucrats’ support increasing and male bureaucratic support remaining unchanged. Furthermore, mediation analysis provides suggestive evidence that the result operates through a heightened sense of injustice. Our findings suggest that support for female political leaders varies not only across countries, but also shifts within governments.

In this paper, we study how a combination of random ballot ordering and concurrent elections can increase invalid votes in the context of South Korea. In South Korea, elections for the nonpartisan superintendent of education are held concurrently with other partisan races. Whereas the ballot order for candidates in the nonpartisan superintendent of education elections is randomized and rotated, this order for other partisan races is determined according to the number of seats each party has in the national legislature. In this study, we found that a match between candidates’ partisan preferences and their ballot positions decreases invalid votes. Our findings suggest that combining two different ballot-order schemes for concurrently held elections can confuse voters and increase invalid votes.