The institutional changes to the developmental states in South Korea and Taiwan have been well-documented. This paper offers a theory to recount the states' actual transformation processes in these two cases. Advancing existing insight that the state's transformation process is shaped by the emergence of either concentrated or dispersed economic interests, I argue that a crucial process behind the transformation of the developmental state is a democratic transition of a country motivated by ruling elites' strategic choices. Specifically, a democratic transition in a developmental state is shaped by two consecutive elite decisions: (1) the decision to initiate democratic transition in response to the democratic mobilisation of the middle class; (2) the decision to introduce democratic elections in response to an electoral threat from opposition elites. This process of democratic transition facilitates the emergence of state policy constraints by transforming the political foundation of the state.

The Internet has played important roles in driving political changes around the world. Why does it help to topple political regimes in some places but improve the quality of governance in others? We found Internet usage in general leads to citizens’ distrust in political institutions. Different political environments, however, can condition such trust-eroding impacts of the Internet in significantly different ways. A democracy enables citizens to connect their online behaviors and offline expression and organization, releasing political discontent while facilitating state–society communication. On the contrary, by restricting various forms of off-line expression, authoritarian regimes drive Internet-active citizens' discontent and distrust to higher levels. We use the World Values Survey data to establish these different mechanisms across democracies and authoritarian systems. Entropy balancing shows our findings to be highly robust.

Although preceding studies on Japan's foreign aid tend to report that Japan's aid policy is receptive to US pressure, it remains unclear which direction the US wishes Japan to assist its aid programs and how bureaucratic politics of Japan reduces the magnitude of US influence. This paper pursues the first attempt to provide a theoretical framework for the direction of US influence on Japan's aid provision and to explore whether its impact varies across different types of aid. I utilize a new dataset on Japan's Official Development Assistance from 1971 to 2009 and employ both ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares regressions to handle the issues of reverse causality and joint decision-making. The combined results of quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that the US tends to urge Japan to complement its aid efforts rather than to substitute them as substitution will allow Japan to increase its clout in strategically important recipients and the US attempts to minimize this risk by asking Japan to disburse aid in tandem. I also find that the allocation of Japanese grants is more receptive to US pressure than that of loans because the former is left to the discretion of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that uses external pressure to win bureaucratic turf wars, whereas loans are determined through consultations among multiple agencies with constituencies that prioritize Japan's domestic interests. The findings are robust across different model specifications and different samples.

This study examines the ways political events can affect the stock prices of politically connected firms by studying one of the biggest corruption scandals in modern South Korean history, which led to the first-ever impeachment of a sitting president. We analyzed the stock returns of firms that donated money to foundations allegedly controlled by the president's confidante. We found that the abnormal stock returns of politically connected firms decreased when the president was removed from office. Using tick-by-tick stock price data, we were able to pinpoint the exact moments when the stock prices of firms that donated money fluctuated, as the president's fate was determined by the justices of the Constitutional Court.