This article discusses the effects of executive leadership on fiscal policies and performance. I propose that executive leadership, as a political entrepreneur who provides collective goods for organization, has incentives to maintain fiscal discipline so that he or she can stay in office by developing his or her party's reputation and leading party legislators to electoral success. This article argues that executive leadership with stronger public support is more likely to restrain fiscal expenditure and maintain fiscal discipline. I demonstrate this argument by showing that the prime minister who receives higher public support is more likely to restrain fiscal expenditure in Japan.

The objective of the paper is to examine the role of the two donor agencies, the IMF and the World Bank in the formulation of social welfare policies in the post-independence Sri Lanka. The ideologies of the two major parties in Sri Lanka, the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), became the determining factor in the formulation of social welfare policies before 1977. In this context, the IMF and the World Bank played two different roles before 1977. Meanwhile, the ideological gap existed between the two major parties began to disappear after 1977 with the introduction of liberalized economic policies. The IMF and the World Bank played an important role during the post-1977 period. There was evidence that these funding bodies influenced in the formulation of social welfare programmes under the two major parties. The guideline recommended by these two organizations adversely affected the subsidized rice ration, one of the major welfare programmes, in the country.

This article examines the trajectory of Asian politics in terms of modernization and democratization. Going beyond broad generalizations about democracy's Third Wave, empirical evidence is adduced to show an affective orientation and lively appetite for democracy among Asian citizens and even states. However, in many instances, while the citizens are willing to democratize, the state is institutionally weak. Conversely, strong, high performance states ofen block the path of democratization. Historically speaking, modernity and its social and economic concomitants have been coterminous with the emergence and arrival of democracy, but, owing to socio-economic and historical disjunctures in Asian social fromations, such an emergence or arrival of democracy has remained tortuous and problematic. The institutionalization of middle-class driven ‘bourgeois’ democracy is clearly evident in many cases. However, civil society and political culture in some instances remain mired by a lack of political maturity and sophistication and a superficial attachment to economic performance. Many Asian politics have remained starkly authoritarian or simply undemocratic, even as modernization has advanced rapidly. Ultimately, the agency for democratization rests with a vibrant civil society. Again no necessary automatic correspondence obtains between modernization and the development of a vibrant civil society. The agency for such a social transformation has to be contestualized for different social formations. Finally, an important distinction has to be made between procedural and substantive democracy. For the latter to be sustained, it necessitates the engagement of citizens and civil forces on a multiplicity of social and political terrains outside of electoral politics.

This study summarizes and discusses the trends and main features of South Korean studies on Japan's economy and business since the 1960s. I consulted 271 publications (articles and books) for this study. Academic and individual publications comprise 69.7% (189 publications) of the total; public and corporate research institutes 30.3% (82 publications). Therefore, academic and individual researches constitute a majority of the publications. The most pressing issues for South Korea are those of business administration, such as Japanese corporate governance, Zaibatsu, and Japanese firms, which have been mainly studied by academic and individual researchers. The second most important issues are those of international economics such as FTA, FDI, and the trade deficit between South Korea and Japan, mainly researched by government research institutes and individual researchers. Although more interest seems to have shown in the Japanese economy and business since the 1990s, the number of Ph.D. holders who studied economics and business in Japan has been keeping very small portions compared with other majors. In order to attract more students from Korea, the Japanese graduate system for economics and business studies needs to be more globalized and competitive.

Since the outbreak of the Great Recession triggered by the Lehman shock in 2008, writings on American decline have proliferated. World-renowned scholars and commentators have all pointed out that the American hegemony or empire is rapidly coming to an end, and that as a consequence the world is in greater turmoil than ever (for example, Zakaria, 2008; Friedman and Mandelbaum, 2011; Kupchan, 2012; Bremmer, 2012). Although there are differences among various works, most commentators predict a bleak prospect for the future.

In the contemporary world order, one of the most attention-getting issues is the recent consolidation of defense and strategic engagement between China and Russia, specifically since the early 2010s. Throughout a critical juncture angle, this study attempts to explain what led to the reinforcement of these China–Russia relations, and how their strategic ties have evolved. This study argues that the three critical junctures driven by the USA – the US Pivot to Asia, the Ukraine Crisis and the US-led sanctions against Russia, and the US THAAD deployment to Korea – aggravated China and Russia's perception of threat from the USA, which contributed to the incremental China–Russia strategic and defense ties.

‘Gender (jenda)’ is a troublesome loanword in Japan. While this term has been prevalent in feminist and scholarly circles, it has evoked confusion in the government and stimulated a backlash from the ultra-conservatives against gender equality. Japanese reactionaries have attacked the concept of gender because of their anxiety about cultural destruction – I thus call them the ‘old guard’. Focusing on a dispute over the term ‘gender’ between feminists and the old guard, this paper examines the changes in the term's usage and meanings in the Japanese political context. I first shed light on Japan's reaction to the newly arrived term ‘gender’, outlining different attitudes towards gender between the feminist/scholarly circles and the government. Secondly, I discuss the old guard's condemnation of the concept of gender, in which they distort its significance in order to diminish its positive impact on society. I then scrutinize the old guard's reasons behind their attack on the concept of gender. My findings reveal that the old guard, whose political cause is to protect traditional Japanese culture, asserts that gender equality damages this culture. Moreover, I refute their emphasis on Japan's uniqueness, demonstrating that Japanese women's traditional virtues under the patriarchal family system are not peculiar to Japan. To gauge how the concept of gender has been interpreted politically, I highlight legislative debates about the term ‘gender’. In doing so, I elucidate the extent to which the concept of gender has infiltrated Japanese society through the dispute.

Japan during the interwar period was more globalized in many ways than it is now. Japan prospered under the liberal international order. The Japanese people at the time believed that the country needed more land overseas to feed the increasing population, but the growing mainland economy gave jobs to the most Japanese population. The benefits the colonies conferred were not great, but some Japanese, particularly military and civil personnel in the colonies, were major beneficiaries. Japan was among the first to recover from the Great Depression, and by the middle of the 1930s was in a full employment situation. Japan did not need to export its population to other countries or to acquire territories through military action. The military expansion into China and the shift to a controlled economy in Japan and Manchukuo benefitted those who supplied goods to the military and obeyed the authorities. Such benefits, though, came at the expense of Japanese taxpayers and consumers, who were oppressed and were unable to criticize the military. The benefits gained from the military clampdown and a controlled economy were quite visible, but the benefits of the liberal international order often cannot be clearly seen. Japan still had a chance to recognize the true benefits of the liberal international order and the false benefits of colonization, military expansion, and a controlled economy, but could not. Wilsonian-Taisho moment was lost at the end of the 1930s.

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. (James Madison, 1788)

Democracy is not only a (polyarchical) political regime but also a particular mode of relationship between state and citizens, and among citizens themselves, under a kind of rule of law that, in addition to political citizenship, upholds civil citizenship and a full net work of accountability. (Guillermo O'Donnell, 1999b)

Why study Japan? Research on contemporary Japanese politics and foreign policy faces headwinds from the relative geopolitical decline of Japan and scholars skeptical about single-country studies. An overview of Japanese politics publications in English-language journals over the past four decades suggests the subfield remains active and robust. However, there is still room to grow. I argue that Japan is a harbinger state, which experiences many challenges before others in the international system. As such, studying Japan can inform both scholars and policymakers about the political challenges other countries are likely to confront in the future. In turn, scholarship on Japan offers a critical opportunity to develop theoretical insights, assess early empirical evidence, and offer policy lessons about emerging challenges and the political contestation surrounding them. I consider the reasons why Japan so often emerges as a harbinger across issue areas and suggest areas for ongoing scholarly attention.

The Vientiane Action Program, issued in 2013, declared that the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) will enhance integration, focusing on connectivity of member states by 2015. One of the policy tasks included in the Vientiane Action program, under the heading of Society, includes health and the environment. This special issue examines how ASEAN citizens evaluate their quality of life and environmentalism in order to help ASEAN achieve its goal of improving health and the environment by 2015 and beyond.

This article sheds light on a relatively unexplored aspect of the Northern Territories dispute by examining the views of residents in Nemuro – the symbolic frontline in Japan's Northern Territories Reversion Movement (NTRM). The NTRM began in this northern periphery as a movement of divergent attitudes but was soon coopted by the Japanese government for political reasons. Local opposition to the government's four island en bloc policy existed in some quarters but was largely kept in check by state largesse. However, as a result of demographic and socioeconomic changes, dissent is slowly emerging in Nemuro. There are signs of an emerging disjuncture between national policy and local aspirations. This disjuncture has both theoretical and policy implications. Theoretically, this paper is congruent with politico-institutional arguments emphasizing the impact of the regulatory regime in shaping civil society organizations. From a policy perspective, public opinion in Nemuro indicates a potential avenue for compromise in Tokyo's negotiating strategy, although pressure for change is unlikely to emerge from the bureaucratized NTRM.

How democratic is contemporary Indonesia? While analysts differ, Indonesian citizens, when asked in systematic public opinion surveys conducted regularly by the authors since 1999, consistently express strong support for democratic principles and also believe that their country's democratic performance is high. Support for democratic performance is highly correlated with support for government performance, as measured by perceptions of the condition of the national economy and political system. At the same time, higher levels of education and income, in Indonesia as in other countries, have created a considerable number of critical citizens, that is, citizens who value democracy but are critical of its performance. On our evidence for Indonesia, it is members of this group who are the most motivated and best prepared to demand a higher level of democratic performance from their elected officials.

This article employs a simple model of sophisticated voting under incomplete information and explores the strategic contexts of the vote on political reform bills in Japan. The government-sponsored political reform bills were voted down by the defection of government coalition members in the House of Councillors before a final compromise was reached in the joint committee of both houses and passed subsequently. In contrast to the accepted view that the defectors were short-sighted sincere voters, I show that Japan's institutional arrangements created an uncertainty about the agenda in the legislative process and led to the sophisticated voting behavior of pivotal voters whose preferences were different from the party leadership. The analysis underscores the importance of sophisticated voting for the empirical study of Japanese legislative politics.

The article focuses on the issue of patterns of religious engagement among Indian Hindus during last decade. It tries to look at both the issue of private religion practiced in the form of offering puja at home and public religion seen in terms of participation in Katha, Satsang, Bhajan-Kirtan etc. by Indian Hindus. Sizeable numbers of Indian Hindus offer puja every day; sizeable numbers of them are also engaged in public religious activities. This is more prevalent among the urban, educated, upper-caste, upper-class Hindus compared to their counterpart. Along with factors, which influence religious practices, is gender. Hindu women are more religious compared to the Hindu men. Similarly, upper-caste Hindus practice religious activities more regularly compared to other Hindus. There is hardly any change in patterns of engagement in religious activities among Hindus over the last five years. The levels of engagement in religious activities also have an impact on voting behavior. The higher the engagement in religious activities, the greater is the support for the BJP and vice versa. Between the 2004 and 2009 Lok Sabha elections, there had been a decline in the vote share of BJP due to its declining popularity amongst all the Hindu voters, but the decline in the support for the BJP is much sharper amongst highly religious Hindus compared to those who are not so religious. Along with other factors, this may be one of the important factors that led to the defeat of BJP in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. The article draws evidence from the National Election Study 2004 and 2009 conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies during these two elections.

With the emergence of new information and communication technologies, scholars and politicians view the Internet as a means both to govern and to bring citizens, especially younger generations, closer to the political process. Given the tremendous impacts of the Sunflower Movement on Taiwanese politics, this paper sets out to dynamically examine whether and to what extent the Internet inspired offline electoral and non-electoral participations of Taiwanese young adults. While the younger generation's Internet usage for political causes significantly encouraged their voting turnout in the 2014 election, a similar effect was not detected in either the 2012 or 2016 presidential and legislative elections. The estimated statistics not only show the particular effect of the Sunflower Movement on young adults' voting turnout and participation in self-help activities in the 2014 election, but also reveal that the fast-changing and diverse Internet domain did not have a long-lasting influence on young citizens' political engagement in the offline world.

This article responds to Gavan Duffy's critique of Analogies at War in his recent essay on the agent-structure debate in the JJPS (2001, 2: 161–175). I argue that Duffy's use of Analogies at War to pursue his thesis about “giving structure its due” is flawed because he (1) fails to assess the book in terms of the outcomes it seeks to explain; (2) conflates “structure” with process, perceptual, and personality variables; (3) misinterprets my assumptions while neglecting the findings of recent works that corroborate the findings of Analogies at War; and (4) fails to demonstrate one of his key suggestions, i.e. the importance of showing how agents and structures are mutually constitutive. The article concludes by discussing some pointers raised by the exchange for furthering the agent-structure debate.

This article demonstrates that ubiquitous references to ‘power’ in English-language foreign policy discourse can be understood in the light of the inclination in international relations theory to place power on a par with capability. It makes two claims: that such a concept of power is ill-fitted for foreign policy analysis; and that much clarity would be gained by following the Japanese example of terminological pluralism and thus abandoning ‘power’ as a catch-all term. Foreign policy analysis would benefit from adopting a concept that takes power to reside in specific relationships. Its adoption would moreover dissolve a power paradox associated with the analysis of Japan's post-Cold War foreign policy.

Winston Churchill once asserted ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’. In this conception, democracy is ‘a lesser evil’, something that is not good but is less bad than its alternatives. This study offers a rigorous test of this concept in the context of East Asia. Analysis of the East Asia Barometer surveys conducted in five new democracies in the region reveals that small minorities of these countries actually perceive the current democratic regime as a lesser evil. A large majority of these ‘lesser-evil perceivers’, moreover, refuse to support democracy fully. On the basis of these findings, we argue that the Churchillian lesser-evil notion of democracy has limited utility as an alternative paradigm for the study of democratization among ordinary citizens.