This article examines how violence against citizens affects their political attitudes and behavior in the long run, and how those effects vary over time. We construct and analyze a novel dataset on the victims of Taiwan's February 28 Incident, in 1947, with survey data spanning 1990 to 2017. Our empirical analysis shows that cohorts having directly or indirectly experienced the Incident are less likely to support the Kuomintang Party (KMT), the former authoritarian ruling party responsible for the Incident. They tend to disagree with the key conventional policy stand of the KMT (unification with mainland China), are more likely to self-identify as Taiwanese, and are less likely to vote for KMT presidential candidates. Taiwan's residents who were born in towns with larger number of casualties during the Incident are more likely to reject unification. Finally, the effects are found to vary over the period following democratization.

This study explores collaboration between state actors and non-state specialists in the market for coercion. We focus on the case of forced evictions in South Korea, where violence carried out by private companies has occurred with the implicit, and at times explicit, sanctioning of the state. This level of government–private security cooperation has traditionally been explained by various hypotheses, including arguments about the weak capacity of a state to enforce compliance, trends in the neo-liberal marketization of state power, or as the outcome of a state being captured by the capitalist classes. Documenting the history of urban redevelopment projects and changes in government responses to major protest incidents in Korea, we instead argue that this niche market for private force is an observable implication of a shift in state–society relations in the wake of democratization. This phenomenon is, in effect, a very undemocratic response to democratization, by state elites.

The absence of class voting or the existence of “reverse” class voting under rising inequality remains a puzzling question in South Korea. While poor voters seem to support conservative candidates more than the rich do, this is due to a confounding effect of age, because poverty is concentrated among the elderly in Korea. Using the Korean General Social Survey data (KGSS 2004–2014) covering two presidential elections, two general legislative elections, and two nationwide local elections, we find that Koreans, in particular the poor electorate, engage in class voting in both objective and subjective terms. While regional and generational cleavages continue to be the most important determinants of partisan competition, class by income levels as well as subjective identity significantly impact vote choice when age is adequately controlled for.

Whether political ties enhance or weaken firm performance has been widely investigated in a number of studies, including some on China. Based on a database of non-financial A-share listed firms from 2004 to 2012, we study the effects of political ties on firm performance within a quantile regression framework. We find that there is a positive relationship between political ties and economic performance, but that it is diminishing with respect to firm performance. Political ties appear particularly important for weaker firms.

In nations where the executive has budgetary control, how are spending decisions and allocations affected? Is intraparty conflict relevant? This article sets out to show that institutional rules and leadership roles affect budgetary outcomes. It makes the following argument: if intraparty conflict exists in a one-party dominant or majority-party system, the executive reduces spending to punish the party in the legislature; if no intraparty conflict exists, then the executive increases spending to reward or cultivate loyalty to himself as the party leader. If intraparty conflict exists in a minority government or majority-coalition within a competitive multiparty system, the executive increases spending to reward or cultivate loyalty to himself as the party or coalition leader. Evidence from South Korea and Taiwan between the 1970s and 2000 supports the theory. This study advances scholarship in three ways. First, it shows that institutional rules that provide the executive with agenda control also lead to the strategic use of the budgetary process and outcomes to generate loyalty to the executive as leader. Second, it reveals that this strategy affects spending outcomes in election years; this is an important caveat to electoral spending manipulations. Third, the strategic use of the budget to control intraparty conflict occurred prior to and following democratization; this reveals that institutional changes need to include modifications in rules for policy transformations.

Taiwan recently adopted a series of administrative reform laws designed to make the bureaucracy more transparent and allow public participation in regulatory policies. Because administrative reform limits the executive's power, it is clear why legislatures would favor strict administrative procedures. But it is less clear why presidents would support them. The passage of these laws begs the question why presidents support administrative procedural reforms designed to restrict their abilities to act freely. I argue that in Taiwan, President Lee Teng-hui's control of his party deteriorated as factional disputes within his own party increased over time. Lee ultimately concluded that the Kuomintang's political survival depended on major reforms. Consequently, the status quo-oriented bureaucracy—hitherto an important source of support for Lee and his key constituencies—became an impediment. Lee supported Taiwan's Administrative Procedure Act in order to reduce the bureaucracy's capacity to impede reform. More generally, I argue that administrative procedures designed to open up the bureaucracy to the public, including previously excluded groups, can serve politicians' goal of redirecting the bureaucracy. Archival data, secondary sources, and interviews with key presidential advisers, senior career bureaucrats, and politicians support my argument.

Previous research claims that associational membership produces social capital. Employing the first wave of the Asian Barometer Survey conducted in 2003, this study investigates the development of social capital and its political consequences in South Korea. Rather than study simple association membership, I examine the quality of civil society (defined as associational commitment and interaction) that individuals pursue through membership. This, I believe, provides a close test of the theoretical impact of social interactions on political participation. The findings indicate that there is a positive association between voluntary activity and two modes of political activity (voting and campaign participation) in different ways and to varying degrees. Associational membership is a significant predictor of voting. In the case of the quality of social capital, associational interaction (talking politics with group members) turns out to be significant in encouraging participation in election campaigns. Overall, my findings on the role of social capital support Putnam's argument that group interactions foster democratic participation.

This article compares partisanship across East Asian nations, with four indicators reflecting different dimensions of the concept. Across these indicators, partisanship in East Asian nations was found to be relatively weak compared with most Western democracies, reflecting the less institutionalized nature of their party systems. This could be caused by insufficient time to develop partisanship through mechanisms such as electoral experience and parental socialization. Further breakdowns of income, gender, age groups, and educational levels of partisans showed that more advanced democracies share a relatively uniform pattern across demographics, while young democracies in East Asia showed a more skewed distribution of partisan identifiers, unevenly distributed across income and gender groups. This pattern suggests partisanship is likely to start its development from certain segments of the population and then spread into other segments of the society as a party system becomes more institutionalized.

A voter's capacity to acquire and retain information moderates the relationship between issues and the vote. Issues differ in their distance from the voter's personal experience. Proximate issues, such as personal economic conditions, affect the vote decisions of highly informed and less informed voters equally. Distant issues, such as national economic conditions and foreign affairs, affect the vote of highly informed voters but not less informed voters. The 2008 presidential election on Taiwan provides a critical test of the effect of information on issue voting. Unification with mainland China versus Taiwan independence is the most important issue in the 2008 election, and voters with higher levels of political information show a larger effect of the issue on their vote. The national economy is also a significant predictor of vote choice, but only for highly informed voters. Personal economic conditions and other proximate issues are not significant predictors of the vote at any information level.

Since 1997, following the twin transformations of economic meltdown and comprehensive constitutional changes, practically every area of Thailand's public sphere has undergone significant reordering. New checks and balances have been created, new institutions established, old institutions abolished and merged, and new rules of the electoral game put into place. A major new political party has emerged that currently dominates the parliament, civil society is flourishing, and dozens of mass protests are thriving all over the country. Yet beneath this veneer of change, the old Thailand is recognizably intact. Politicians of doubtful integrity still flourish; social cleavages are as evident as before; corruption is endemic and accountability weak; election results are contested and contentious; and the military, though lying low, retains an inordinate number of privileges. Despite the reform process, the Thai political system remains in a feeble state; new institutions designed to improve the functioning of the parliamentary and party political orders have thus far failed to change the rules of the game.

The Japanese public has been assumed to possess a deeply ingrained aversion toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons. We employ a survey experiment to ascertain whether this aversion is unconditional or may erode in the face of hypothetical deterioration in Japan's security situation, and in particular a hypothetical withdrawal of the US security-nuclear umbrella, increased North Korean nuclear weapons testing activities, and movement by South Korea toward the attainment of a nuclear arsenal. We find that the Japanese nuclear aversion may come under stress in the face of such developments. Additionally, we find that the elasticity of Japanese attitudes with respect to the nuclear option in the face of external security deterioration may be associated with an important individual-level demographic characteristic, namely, gender.

The incumbent-led subversion of democracy represents the most prevalent form of democratic backsliding in recent decades. A central puzzle in this mode of backsliding is why these incumbents enjoy popular support despite their actions against democracy. We address this puzzle using the case of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Although some Philippine analysts have speculated that his popularity was inflated due to social desirability bias (SDB) among survey respondents, there has been limited empirical examination. Our pre-registered list experiment surveys conducted in February/March 2021 detected SBD-induced overreporting at about 39 percentage points in face-to-face surveys and 28 percentage points in online surveys. We also found that the poor Mindanaoans, and those who believed their neighbors supported Duterte, were more likely to respond according to SDB. These possibly counter-intuitive results should be interpreted with caution because the survey was conducted during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, and the findings cannot necessarily be extrapolated to the other period of his presidency. Nevertheless, this study suggests that preference falsification could be an alternative explanation for the puzzle of popular incumbents in democratic backsliding.

Stimulated by Ole Waever's (1998) examination of American and European developments in International Relations, this article examines the growth of the discipline of international relations in Japan, focusing on the major currents of the social science tradition since 1868 and the intellectual agenda of international relations since 1945. Postwar scholarship has reflected the main themes and questions of Japanese history — the causes of war, the struggle for peace, Japan's place in the world and Asia, and Japan's role in the Cold War. To an extent, the organization and substance of IR teaching and scholarship in Japan can be explained by reference to certain sociological and historical variables. Discussions about methodology have not mirrored the “great debates” of the United States, but the younger scholars are moving closer to the American pattern. Recent exposure to and interaction with American scholarship has become increasingly visible, allowing Japanese scholars to make important contributions to debates in the US.

Since Korea's transition to democracy in 1987, Korean leaders have become increasingly confrontational toward Japan, with such steps ranging from verbal threats filled with hawkish rhetoric to material threats, such as displays of military force and threats of actually using it. To explain South Korean leaders’ hawkish approach to Japan, we build a theory of “prospective diversion” by combining insights from the diversionary theory of international conflict and prospect theory. We argue that foreign policy leaders have a strong tendency to overvalue political losses relative to comparable gains in their approval ratings. As a result, they are inclined to take risk-seeking diplomatic actions toward foreign adversary to avoid further losses. By conducting statistical analyses and developing case studies of Korean leaders’ confrontational policy decisions regarding Japan, we present empirical findings consistent with our hypothesis that Korean leaders are inclined to engage in prospective diversion toward Japan when they suffer domestic losses. This article provides an enhanced understanding of the domestic political foundation of South Korean leaders’ increasingly contentious attitude toward Japan.

The recent proliferation of regional trade agreements in the East Asian region can be seen as the most notable development in the region's trading panorama in recent years. Yet, very little is as yet understood about the anatomy of these agreements and, consequently, their full implications to the regional economy. This article strives to fill this gap by analyzing the structure of four dozen RTAs by their various key component parts, including tariff liberalization schedules, rules of origin, and competition policy, customs, investment, and services provisions. The results reveal that intra-Asian RTAs are generally quite rapidly liberalizing, with the exception of agriculture, but they are also quite thin in trade-related disciplines when compared with the more legalistic US trans-Pacific RTAs and those of Mexico and Chile. The proposed Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific would inherently be a construct of the political economy interests of these various constituent RTAs.

This article examines the organizational origins of political vulnerability among Chinese military veterans between 1949 and 2006. Recently declassified sources from urban and rural archives show that many veterans, even as they were officially considered core members of the ruling elite and hailed as the “flesh and blood of the revolution,” nevertheless experienced frequent humiliation and discrimination; few citizens sympathized with their plight. The argument here is that much of this mistreatment can be traced to the failure of the state to provide veterans with the opportunity to organize in the context of either fraternal organizations or quasi-autonomous federations. In this respect, their predicament is notably different from their counterparts in democratic, fascist, or corporatist systems, or in other Leninist regimes. Why have veterans in Taiwan, Vietnam, and the former Soviet Union been allowed to form veterans organizations but veterans in the PRC—to their misfortune—have not? This article explains this anomaly.

December 2002 shook up South Korea's conservative establishment and its U.S. ally. Five days before the South Korean presidential election, with a quarter of the electorate still remaining undecided, leaders of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and religious activists staged a massive candlelight vigil in front of Seoul's city hall to protest against “unequal” provisions in South Korea's Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with its U.S. ally. The political rally drew some 40,000 protestors from all walks of life. Moreover, it was only one among many climaxes in a long mobilization drive launched by NGOs and “netizens” since June, when a U.S. armored vehicle driven by Sergeant Fernando Nino and Mark Walker ran over two teenage girls during a military exercise in Hyochonli. That month saw some thirty NGOs establish a national umbrella organization to demand the trial of Nino and Walker under South Korean law. Then, in December, the Catholic, Buddhist, and Protestant religious orders joined in to lend their authority to the protestors by collectively calling for the revision of SOFA to give South Korea “primary jurisdiction” over criminal cases. The radical hanchongryon university students, too, showed up in protest sites to stir up and escalate anti-American sentiments, regularly raiding U.S. military bases in Uijongbu and Yongsan and even breaking into the U.S. Embassy compound in November. But unlike the past, this intrusion of radical hanchongryon activists did not drive away presumably conservative middle-class groups from political rallies. On the contrary, the call for a SOFA revision grew louder after the U.S. military court judged Nino and Walker not guilty of negligent homicide.

Political parties are widely seen as “a sine qua non for the organization of the modern democratic polity and for the expression of political pluralism.” The manner in which parties articulate political interests largely defines the nature of electoral competition, the representation of citizen interests, the policy consequences of elections—and ultimately the functioning of the democratic process.

This study examines the association between Internet use and protest politics in South Korea and Taiwan, using secondary data from the sixth wave (2010–14) of the World Values Survey. The data show that Internet use is positively associated with low-cost protest acts, like signing a petition. Internet use is also correlated with the willingness to consider higher-cost actions such as attending demonstrations and joining in boycotts. But it does not appear to consistently increase actual protests of this sort. Discussion is made to address comparable opportunity structures for protest politics in the two East Asian democracies, where the Internet is deeply integrated into the country's political landscape.

Factionalism is a dimension of informal politics that is hardly unique to China, but it has become well entrenched there for several reasons. We know from available survey data that Chinese political culture is relatively low in trust, and the faction provides a particularly useful refuge from the tiger world of politics, organized as it is around that culturally sanctioned dimension of trust known as guanxi (connections) (Shi 2001 and 1997; Pye 1981). From an individual perspective, although this has been changing more swiftly in society at large via marketization, the institutional landscape of elite politics is still dominated by the looming presence of a single monolithic party-state, to which all auxiliary organizations are subordinated in a corporatist hierarchy; any smaller and more personally useful organizations must be formed sub rosa on a self-help basis. From a structural-functional perspective, the faction serves several functions neglected by party-state corporatism: it services individual careers, in both a defensive and an offensive capacity (i.e., to protect against damaging criticism or purge, and to mobilize support for upward mobility); it provides a way of mobilizing minimal coalitions in policy conflicts; and it may even provide a microcosmic unit beyond the family for social identity and solidarity. Factions have always been rampant in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politics, but precisely because of the universally acknowledged propensity for factionalism, they are formally proscribed by the Leninist rules of innerparty life and hence exist only semiclandestinely, looming more clearly when the central leadership weakens or is in dispute (as, for example, during a succession crisis). Factions are assembled on the basis of a combination of one's formal and informal “bases” (zhengzhi jichu), the formal consisting of trusted colleagues and subordinates in one's current work unit, the informal consisting of ties made during one's previous socialization or career and carefully cultivated thereafter. Factional activities may most easily be understood according to realist or realpolitik methodological assumptions, but as we shall see, they need not operate in an ideological vacuum. Inasmuch as factions exist tacitly and become politically operational opportunistically, the precise affiliation of a given political actor may change over time depending on the issue at stake and other circumstances; hence faction membership can never be tabulated with certainty, even by faction leaders. A given political actor may have at his or her disposal a range of connections that varies in chronological depth (i.e., spanning x generations) and institutional breadth (i.e., spanning x organizational hierarchies). At a given time and place, the actor may need these categories to define him- or herself factionally. On such occasions, a strong factional network (i.e., one that has been assiduously cultivated over time) is useful and perhaps even indispensable to the actor's survival and highly useful for the pursuit of future political ambitions.