Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) won another landslide victory in the 2020 general election. Although there was widespread dissatisfaction with the government's poor management of the economy and ethnic conflicts, as well as with the pre-electoral coordination of ethnic parties in several states, opposition and ethnic-based parties had failed to gain more seats. Previous explanations had focused on the economy, electoral system bias, weak party institutionalization, and vote splitting among ethnic parties; however, they underestimated the significance of two contextual factors: military dominance of politics and ethnic conflict. This article argues that military dominance hindered normal political development in Myanmar. The anti-military sentiment favored the NLD, which made most Bamar voters disregard the party's poor economic performance. Despite the electoral system's bias, prolonged ethnic conflicts made ethnic parties that had fought for their community's causes more likely to maintain support. These arguments are verified by survey and electoral data sets. The military nullified the 2020 election claiming that electoral fraud was to blame, but the findings indicate that it was the political environment the military created that led to the victory of the NLD and some ethnic parties in the first place.

The effects of the 1990s reforms to the electoral system of Japan's House of Representatives have been among the most frequently discussed topics in political science research on the country. These reforms saw the replacement of a hitherto single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system by a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system with a strong Single Member District (SMD) and a weaker Proportional Representation (PR) component. Many studies have suggested that the reforms may have had significant impact on the strategies of political parties. Generally, SMD systems have been widely thought to favor larger parties, while PR systems are more beneficial to small and medium-sized parties. On the content side, larger parties seeking control of the government would try to win the support of large numbers of floating voters by campaigning on universal/programmatic policy appeals, as opposed to particularistic interests. In contrast, smaller parties would cater towards their core supporters’ preferences. Previous studies have noted that the old SNTV system in Japan had produced results similar to PR systems (Reed 2003). Japan's electoral reform may have thus changed the strategy of large parties, which would need to win more seats in the SMDs to gain (or hold onto) power, while smaller parties have continued to try and win seats via the PR tier. Therefore, the reform provides valuable research material in so far as we can simultaneously observe different effects by the SMD and the PR systems on parties of different sizes.

How do attachments to political parties among the mass publics of East Asia affect the process of democratization in the region? Analyses of the East Asia Barometer surveys reveal that partisanship motivates East Asians to endorse the democratic performance of their political system and embrace democracy as the best possible system of government. These findings accord, by and large, with the socialization, cognitive dissonance, and rational choice theories of partisanship.

This paper argues that “China threat” was largely a myth and that the China factor was not the critical factor leading to the re-affirmation process of the U.S.-Japan alliance in the mid-1990s. It took the 1994 Korean crisis for this to materialize. The China factor was important only as a general background, and the role of the U.S.-Japan alliance in dealing with the rise of China was implicit, remaining in the domain of managing shifting major power relations after the Cold War rather than being directed against the myth of a “China threat.” The paper also argues that preoccupation with Japan as an independent security pole is an important source of confusion about the nature of Japan's security policies and its profile therein, which, as before, will continue to be premised on the U.S.-Japan alliance. It explains actual records of Japanese security behaviors as a series of attempts to cope with the dual identity as a security actor. Japan's readjustment to the post-Cold War security environment, founded upon the re-affirmation of the U.S.-Japan alliance, was a clear case in point.

We attempt to trace the Hyundai crisis back to its roots with the following questions in mind. What actions taken by the Hyundai Group since its birth contributed to Hyundai's post-1997 afflictions and to the split and the subsequent fall of the parent group? What changes in the corporate environment, in particular, the changes in business-government relationships, brought on by the national financial crisis of 1997 determined the Hyundai Group's fate? The Hyundai crisis was ultimately a test on whether the old business- government relationship could survive the new market environment generated by the 1997 financial crisis. In spite of the government's indecision and inconsistency, however, it was the government itself which eventually yielded and accepted the new market environment it had helped to create after 1997. The government reluctantly transferred the control rights of Hyundai Construction and Hynix Semiconductor to creditor banks via debt-equity swaps starting from March 2001.

This article builds on the theoretical debate over age, period, and cohort effects (APC) and explores how these factors might affect Taiwan's partisan stability. We conducted a two-level multinomial logit random effects model using survey data from 1991 to 2020 to disentangle the APC effects. Our findings challenge Converse's core assumption that partisanship strengthens with age. As a new democracy, Taiwan's party affiliations remain fluid, and we do find evidence of period effects, particularly associated with cross-Strait crises that favor the DPP. However, generational replacement is the most significant factor driving party identity changes in Taiwan. With generational replacement, the Kuomintang is burdened by the image of a century-old party. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had previously fared better among young cohorts but has recently lost its support from millennials. The youngest generation increasingly refuses to associate with the traditional political parties. It seems reasonable to expect that the new generational forces will restructure the Blue–Green cleavage and expand the ideological diversity of Taiwan's party system.

Nuclear and missile tests by North Korea, which directly threaten China's national interests, regional stability, and economic development, have consistently irritated China. Since the 1950s, China and North Korea have held high-level meetings aimed at discussing and improving their bilateral relationship. Using empirical analysis, this study attempts to examine the impact of these meetings on North Korea's missile and nuclear tests. The study argues that as the frequency of high-level meetings between China and North Korea increases, North Korea's provocative actions decrease. The high-level meetings serve to address the issue of incomplete information, create avenues for economic aid and cooperation, and reduce the likelihood of future nuclear and missile tests. The empirical findings indicate that while high-level meetings with or without the presence of top leaders can lead to a reduction in missile tests by North Korea, only summits between China and North Korea have a significant impact on the reduction of nuclear tests by North Korea.

Environmental goals are linked to regionalism, but they are often a low priority for advocates of nationalism. Early in the 1990s idealists assumed that reallocations of money, newly active social movements, and a lively process of regionalism would boost environmentalism to one of the top priorities across Northeast Asia. Soon they found, as regionalism floundered, that countries did not have a strong commitment to the environment and some showed little concern. In a region where state-centered development and national dignity remain powerful concerns, environmental hopes rest on gradual acceptance as a secondary theme as part of balanced regionalism. After fading before great power competition in 1996–99, regionalism made a partial comeback in 2000. Hopes for environmental cooperation rest on new gains for regionalism, but strains in the summer of 2001 suggest that progress will be slow.

On September 28, 1986, the Democratic Progressive Party was formed in defiance of restrictions set by a decades-old authoritarian regime, heralding the emergence of a fully competitive multiparty electoral system in Taiwan. Existing literature on Taiwan's democratic breakthrough suggests that international factors have played a significant role in bringing about democracy on the island. But what exactly were these external factors and how have they effected political change in Taiwan? A reexamination of the changing geopolitical and normative environments surrounding Taiwan suggests that they were crucial in shaping political development on the island in ways that have not been described in the literature. This article examines how the geopolitical and international normative environment enabled myriad external substate and nonstate actors to form a transnational “protection regime” around the political opposition, preserving the democratic movement and allowing it to reach its full mobilizational potential in time.

Many scholars have suggested that Japan aligned its foreign policy with the US War on Terror. Part of Japan's alignment is said to have involved disbursement of foreign aid to support the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with other security interests associated with the War on Terror. To date, however, there has been little empirical study of this question. Employing a data set on Japanese aid to 133 countries between 1995 and 2008, we examine the War on Terror and Japanese ODA. We find that Japanese aid was aligned with some security interests in the War on Terror, but the effects were mixed.

Are authoritarian successor party (ASP) supporters more likely to protest? I propose that ASP supporters are less likely to protest in general. The post-democratization mobilization environment is shaped upon the pre-democratization mobilization basis. During the pre-democratization period, protest was organized around the democracy movement. Thus, protest tactics and networks were accumulated through it. As former authoritarian ruling party supporters, ASP supporters are less likely to have legacies of participating in the democracy movement, which prevents them from accessing the accumulated protest resources from the democracy movement. However, I argue that this negative association varies based on the ASP qualities and supporters’ age. Supporters of ASPs that maintain strong pre-democratization legacies are more likely to participate in protests than supporters of ASPs that do not strongly highlight their authoritarian legacies. Also, when the ASPs’ characteristics are considered, older ASP supporters are more likely to participate in protests than younger supporters. Using both single-level and multilevel statistical analyses, I examine four Asian countries with politically powerful ASPs and find evidence supporting my hypotheses. Lastly, I compare two South Korean mass movements, the Candlelight movement and the Taegeukgi rallies to unpack the relationships between ASP supporters, protest resources, and mobilization. This study reveals authoritarian legacies among post-democratization citizens through ASP supporters’ protesting behavior.

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.

When do militaries in the newly industrialized countries of East and Southeast Asia support their governments, when do they support citizens' challenge of government, and when do they launch coups? We propose and test a theory of military behavior using data from across East and Southeast Asia between the 1970s and 2008. The results corroborate the model's predictions to make four contributions: First, the model provides a framework of military behavior for countries to expand study beyond coups or the absence thereof. Second, the findings bring to focus the influence of citizens on the military's behavior, an aspect largely overlooked in scholarship of the region. Third, the necessary conditions—weak economy and galvanized citizens' challenge—that affect the military's behavior vis-à -vis citizens and the government highlight the strategic interaction treatment. Fourth, this study broadens systematic treatment to enrich empirics and theory-building for the political economies of these countries.

In this paper, we study how political parties react to democratic transitions. We find that the structure of legislators’ social networks plays a critical role in shaping their political interactions during the transition period, and consequently, the post-transition party systems that emerge. We focus on the Korean case, where the incumbent authoritarian party merged with one of its pro-democracy opponents to create a powerful and enduring conservative party under democratic rule. Using a novel individual-level dataset on all legislative members during the transition, we find that the merger was facilitated by dense social networks linking members of the merged parties, which increased trust across the parties and reduced the difficulty of a merger. Conversely, we find that the paucity of ties linking pro-democracy parties hindered their long-term cooperation, despite their shared ideologies and policy goals. The study complements existing theories by providing a network-based explanation for the weakly institutionalized political party system that has characterized Korean politics since democratization.

This article traces the evolution of international relations studies as an academic discipline in China in the last two decades or so. Almost non-existent before the 1980s, IR studies has become an increasingly dynamic, sophisticated, and popular field of social science in both teaching and research. This is reflected in the growth of institutions, degree programs, scholarship and paradigmatic debate as well as interaction with the Western intellectual community in both theory and personnel. Nevertheless, the development of IR studies in China is still in its primitive stage and it must contend with various problems such as political control, a lack of well-trained scholars, inadequate funding, and ideational uncertainty.

The methodologies and assumptions that guide our acquisition of knowledge and interpretation of data are context and time bound. Academic disciplines, sub-disciplines, methodological approaches and research agendas are to a large degree conditioned by the ‘real world,’ and none more so than International Relations. Accordingly, it is important to consider the possible sociological foundations of different epistemologies and paradigms of International Relations. Surely there is more than one way of looking at the world, unless one is steadfastly married to a positivist universal truth. Yet it is interesting that East Asian scholarship and teaching in IR has seemingly not developed strong ‘indigenous’ regional characteristics, perhaps with the exception of Japan with its large market, long tradition, political freedom and economic affluence. In fact IR has absorbed and closely followed Western and particularly North American social science. This introduction and the articles that follow will explore the fortunes of IR scholarship and regional studies in East Asia in the context of national and regional environments. It will consider how IR is taught and researched in various national settings, and examine the interaction between IR as a social science and national/regional historical experiences, cultural and pedagogical traditions, and politico-ideological values. The underlining problematique concerns the idea of an East Asian ‘IR community’: why has this tended to be comparatively weak? How can we envision the development of a more rigorous East Asian IR community, one that is not exclusively judged according to external — and particularly North American — terms of reference and standards? It goes without saying that we are not attempting to antagonize our American friends and colleagues, but simply to stimulate a ‘sociology of science’ reflection of the discipline in the East Asian regional setting. Two questions serve as the organizing themes of this special issue. The first concerns the primary characteristics of the regional IR community. Many of the papers in this collection point to the dominance of US-originated ideas and theories. The second question arises from the first question: whether these predominant approaches help us to understand the region in a time of change.

Almost two decades after the initial victory of Thai Rak Thai, scholars still debate the forces behind Thaksin's rise to power. I revisit these debates and argue for a more explicit analysis of dynamics over time. I distinguish analytically between the founding moment of TRT's first victory and the subsequent reproduction of its dominance. I argue that TRT's financial muscle was a sufficient condition for its 2001 victory, that institutions merely contributed to the scale of its victory, and that its platform was not decisive. Once in power, however, institutions were instrumental in allowing TRT to complete its term, but more important for its long-term dominance was the rapid implementation of its campaign promises, which created a mass constituency that in turn made Thaksin-linked parties resilient at the polls despite institutional reforms designed to weaken their electoral performance.