As these essays show, there is a lively debate over the future of world order.Sergey Chugrow offers a dark portrait of the breakdown of what he calls Westernhegemony, driven in part by Russia's grievances and aggression inUkraine. He points to a future where international order will have a mix ofrealist geopolitics and post-modern diversity. Keisuke Iida sees the debate overliberal international order as a return to older debates about the viability ofhegemonic order and the role of regions and non-Western values in apost-hegemonic global system. Peter Haas sees the debate over liberalinternational order as a window onto various new forms of global governance.Behind these important observations is Amitav Acharya's vision of apost-American global order marked by diverse regional sub-systems; a world thatis globalized, diversified, and localized. These developments lead Acharya toannounce the ‘end’ of the American-led liberalinternational order.

Australia has experienced difficulties engaging with Asia-Pacific regional integration. Despite Australian attempts to punch above its weight in regional forums and to be a regional leader, it is still not regarded as a full member or as quite fitting into the region. It is an ‘awkward partner’ in the Asian context, and has experienced the ‘liminality’ of being neither here nor there. The former Rudd government's proposal for an ‘Asia Pacific Community’ (APC) by the year 2020 was a substantive initiative in Australia's ongoing engagement with Asia. It has, however, attracted a high level of criticism both at home and abroad. The main critical analysis of the proposal has focused on institutional building or architecture, or its relationship with existing regional institutions, but overlooks a host of often fraught questions about culture, norms, identities, and international power relations. The APC concept needs to be scrutinized in terms of these questions with a critical eye. This paper examines the cultural, cognitive, and normative dimensions of Rudd's proposal. It analyses four dilemmas or awkward problems that the APC faces.

Japanese society is often said to be one with a high premium on social capital. Two major theses have been put forward with regard to social capital in the last few years. One, advanced by Putnam (1993), is that social capital enables democracy to work. In other words, the historically acquired and accumulated social capital in terms of the propensity of individuals to engage with others in community and associational life facilitates the task of democratically working out the resolution of conflicts of interest and collectively producing good public policy. The other, advanced by Fukuyama (1995), postulates that social capital allows the creation of prosperity. In other words, a high level of social capital enables business firms to take risks and stretch networks fully in the creation of wealth on a large scale for a prolonged period of time.

Since the 1980s, the mass media have changed the way they cover major political stories, like foreign policy crises. As a consequence, what the public learns about these events has changed. More media outlets cover major events than in the past, including the entertainment-oriented soft news media. When they do cover a political story, soft news outlets focus more on “human drama” than traditional news media – especially the character and motivations of decision-makers, as well as individual stories of heroism or tragedy – and less on the political or strategic context, or substantive nuances, of policy debates. Many Americans who previously ignored most political news now attend to some information about major political events, like wars, via the soft news media. These changes have important implications for democratic politics. Most importantly, a large number of particularly persuadable potential voters are now tuning in to politics via soft news outlets. This gives politicians an incentive to develop strategies for reaching out to them. Such individuals care less about the nuances of policy and more about the personality of leaders and any sensational human drama that a policy, like a war, entails. Soft news consumers care less about geopolitics than about body bags. Politicians who want their votes are therefore likely to emphasize body bags more than geopolitics. In short, the “new” media environment changes both the style and substance of politics in democracies.

The Republic of Korea (Korea hereinafter) has been widely regarded as one of the most vigorous and analytically interesting third-wave democracies (Diamond and Shin, 2000: 1). During the first decade of democratic rule, Korea has successfully carried out a large number of electoral and other reforms to transform the institutions and procedures of military-authoritarian rule into those of a representative democracy. Unlike many of its counterparts in Latin America and elsewhere, Korea has fully restored civilian rule by extricating the military from power. As is the case in established democracies of North America and Western Europe, free and competitive elections have been regularly held at all the different levels of the government. In the most recent presidential election, held in December 1997, Korea also established itself as a mature electoral democracy by elevating an opposition party to political power. In Korea today, there is general agreement that electoral politics has become the only possible political game in town.

In this paper, we examine some of the ways in which Koizumi Junichiro took advantage of changes in television news to win the 2001 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) presidential election and become prime minister of Japan. Koizumi adopted a strategy of political populism to increase his exposure in the media and develop a public reputation. Changes in the LDP selection procedure, in combination with long-term social and economic change and political reform, meant that the media mattered more to his campaign than had previously been the case. We use data from the Japan Election Study II (JES II) to show that the effects of Koizumi' media-driven popularity and style of politics reversed the LDP' electoral fortunes in the Upper House Election in 2001.

The Barisan Nasional (BN) which won a landslide in 2004 was returned to power in 2008 elections with reduced majority and the loss of five state assemblies. Dissatisfied with unfulfilled promises, the electorate protested by voting for a strong opposition. BN additionally was characterized by factionalism. Three opposition parties joined hands and, using alternative media, unexpectedly won 82 seats in the parliament. A strong responsible opposition bodes well for Malaysian democracy.

The paper explores the dynamics of the phenomenon of Development Induced Displacement and the theoretical, legal, and policy level issues which have impeded the fluent process of implementation of development projects in India. Modern India has found itself embroiled in this tussle between the development plans of the State at the macro level and their undesirable consequences for the specific project affected people. Though the exigencies of time and the logic of the liberalization policy demand the continuous articulation of development projects, it is equally imperative to transcend the disempowering effects of displacement on its people. Despite recent initiatives by the government, concrete policy statements and laws governing the issues of compensation and resettlement are found wanting. The paper argues that there is an urgent need for the state to reach a necessary balance between its efforts to augur development and to make it sustainable, just, and equitous. The problems encountered in the allocation of compensation and resettlement in such projects form the focus of the article. The experiences of dam-induced displacement at the Sardar Sarovar Project in the Narmada River Valley Project in Gujarat in India are highlighted to serve as illustrations.

In this paper, we examine the micro-level implications of social capital for the development of democratic citizenship. By using a recent East Asia Barometer survey in Korea, we determine whether social networks and social trust, two key components of social capital, cultivate virtues of democracy among ordinary citizens. First, the analysis shows that the Korean people as a whole tend to be involved in small informal groups. Most of them stay away from formal associations. Second, the Korean people tend to differentiate trust-in-principle from trust-in-action. It turns out that a majority of the people display competence-based trust, if neither generalized nor particularized trust. Third, associational membership has no role in promoting support for democratic institutions and principles; it merely leads to more political activism. Fourth, social trust plays a role in promoting support for democracy. Yet it has little to do with political activism. It is concluded that in Korea, social involvement contributes to democratic citizenship behaviorally, whereas social trust contributes to it attitudinally.

Most of the current scholarship focuses on the functional aspects of regionalism such as economic and security issues, and the literature tends to be too focused on American or European concerns (Katzenstein, 2005; Higgott, 2007; Ravenhill, 2008). Despite the early examination of varied ideas of Asian regionalism (Milner and Johnson 1997, He, 2004, Acharya 2009), there remains a substantive lack of critical scholarship that focuses on the study of Asian ideas, proposals, and visions of regionalism.

Observers have long debated how societies should invest resources to safeguard citizens and property, especially in the face of increasing shocks and crises. This article explores how social infrastructure – the spaces and places that help build and maintain social ties and trust, allowing societies to coordinate behavior – plays an important role in our communities, especially in mitigating and recovering from shocks. An analysis of quantitative data on more than 550 neighborhoods across the three Japanese prefectures most affected by the tsunami of 11 March 2011 shows that, controlling for relevant factors, community centers, libraries, parks, and other social infrastructure measurably and cheaply reduced mortality rates among the most vulnerable population. Investing in social infrastructure projects would, based on this data, save more lives during a natural hazard than putting the same money into standard, gray infrastructure such as seawalls. Decision makers at national, regional, and local levels should expand spending on facilities such as libraries, community centers, social businesses, and public parks to increase resilience to multiple types of shocks and to further enhance the quality of life for residents.

In 1946 there were three democracies in the world with constitutions that, on the one hand, required the government to obtain the support of a legislative majority in order to come to and remain in power and, on the other hand, established a popularly elected president. In 2002, this number had grown to 25. Constitutions with this feature are often considered to be problematic, and, given the number of new democracies that have adopted them, have received considerable attention from political scientists. The primary concern has to do with the potential for conflict between the assembly supported government and the popularly elected president, which may lead to unstable governments, policy paralysis, and the eventual undermining of the democratic regime. Concern has also been raised regarding the negative role a popularly elected president may have on party development and the ‘chain of delegation’ that in a pure parliamentary democracy runs from voters to government through political parties. In this paper, we examine the effect the combination of assembly confidence with a popularly elected president has on government instability, accountability, legislative effectiveness, and democratic survival. We also examine the impact on these outcomes of different combinations of presidential powers. We find that the introduction of a popularly elected president in parliamentary constitutions is of little significant impact and that the preoccupation with the specific powers of the president is mostly overblown.

The extant social movement literature tends to regard the youth as radical actors and senior citizens as conservative actors. However, the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong exhibited strong solidarity among protesters across generations, despite the radicalization of protest actions over an extended period. These phenomena contradict Hong Kong's traditional political culture, which favors peaceful and orderly protests and the worldwide trend where radicalization often leads to internal division in movements. By analyzing the data collected from onsite protest surveys in December 2019 and January 2020 (N = 1,784), this paper presents the mediating role of guilt in shifting senior citizens from opposing radical actions to supporting them and feeling solidarity with militant protesters. We find that the relationship between age and feelings of guilt is stronger among respondents who experience state repression. The findings shed light on the affective and relational dimensions of protest participation, showing how the traumatic conditions under which different social actors are welded together by shared emotional upheavals facilitate ingroup identification and affective solidarity.

The attainment of good governance is the question of the day in Bangladesh. This paper discusses the ‘bedrock of good governance’, parliamentary accountability, and assesses the effectiveness of the Bangladesh Parliament in ensuring governmental accountability and promoting good governance since 1991 when the country re-entered into parliamentary democracy. Considerable discrepancies between the expected role and practical performances are identified and the study further identified a number of problems that severely hinder parliament's accountability function. This paper primarily argues that Bangladesh vested excessive powers in the hands of the executive branch; it, therefore, lacks the proper checks and balances a strong parliament could provide.

Japan is geographically located on the fringe of Asia. Japan's location is often divided between those arguing that Japan is inside Asia and those arguing it is outside Asia. Japanese ideas of Asian regionalism are thus immensely varied. This article details a number of Japanese ideas on Asian regionalism with author/agency, scope and method specified. Special mention is made of weak integration of government agencies, thus causing proliferation of many Japanese ideas within Asia. With the increasing self-assertiveness of China, the apparent peaking out of American hegemony, and the steady rise of non-Chinese Asians, Japan tries to maintain enduring alliance with the United States, to invigorate interdependence with China, and to reinvent new relationships with the countries of the East Asian Summit. Japanese ideas of Asian regionalism take those templates as guidelines to develop new ideas of Asian regionalism.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the governance of the global system has been organized around the United States and the advanced industrial democracies. In the shadow of the Cold War, these countries established a wide array of global and regional institutions to manage economic, political, and security relations. The Bretton Woods institutions, GATT (and later the WTO), the United Nations, and various functional institutions provided the bulwark for an open and managed postwar world economy and global order. An American-led alliance system provided a structure for regional security in Europe and East Asia. When the Cold War ended, these far-flung institutions were extended into a more fully global multilateral system of governance. The United States dominated the global order. But, more so than did leading states in previous eras, it established its dominance through institutions. It was an American-led liberal hegemonic order.

In this paper we are primarily concerned with political expertise, interest, and agreement as factors that might accelerate the flow of information between citizens. We examine dyadic exchanges of information as a function of two primary sets of factors: the characteristics of the citizens in the dyadic relationship and the characteristics of the larger network within which the dyad is located. Moreover, we compare political communication within dyads across several different national contexts: Germany, Japan, and the United States. We assume that citizens are more likely to obtain information from people they trust, but why do they trust some individuals more than others? Is the frequency of communication predicated on shared political preferences? Or is it based on one citizen's assessment regarding the political expertise of another? The answers to these questions have important implications for whether social communication and social capital create added value in the collective deliberations of democratic politics.

Other than during the Civil War of 1945–1949, Taiwan has never been part of a Chinese state ruled by Han Chinese in Mainland China. With the arrival of the Dutch in 1624, Taiwan underwent a succession of six foreign colonial rulers: the Dutch (1624–1662), the Spanish (in northern Taiwan, 1626–1642), the Cheng family (1662–1683), the Manchus (1683–1895), the Japanese (1895–1945), and the Chinese Nationalists (1945–1988). Only with democratization, beginning in 1988, have the people of Taiwan been able to rule themselves. With democratization, the people of Taiwan have increasingly identified as Taiwanese, an identification that is explicitly not Chinese. China's racial appeals to Taiwan are scientifically inaccurate and have no place in the modern world. In order to gain international support, Taiwan's leaders and people need to avoid the Chinese framework of ‘independence’ versus ‘unification’. Rather, they should emphasize Taiwan's decolonialization, a process that Taiwan shares with much of the world.

This article presents results from a nationally representative survey conducted in Taiwan in November 2011 that explores Taiwanese attitudes toward China and the world. It demonstrates that while ‘blue’ (KMT) and ‘green’ (DPP) supporters maintained different attitudes towards China, few Taiwanese supported reunification. Taiwanese attitudes towards other countries, the sources of Taiwanese party identification, and policy implications for cross–Strait relations are also explored.

The prevailing theory states that either Japanese voters have stopped ideologically distinguishing parties or that the main political parties in Japan have become more centrist in recent years. These arguments are based on survey questions asking citizens to locate parties on an ideological scale. However, these questions may suffer from noise caused by respondents who misinterpret the question wording or answer the questions inappropriately to mask their misunderstanding of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’. To address this problem by extracting only the views of those who know the meaning of left–right terms, this article develops a mixture model. Applying the model to an opinion poll conducted after the 2012 Japanese general election, I confirm that those who comprehend the left–right terminology – slightly over half of all voters – largely perceived parties’ ideologies in the same way as experts. Additionally, I find that even these voters face difficulties in placing ambiguous or new parties on the political spectrum. This study has implications not only for understanding trends in Japanese political ideology, but also for survey design and analysis of heterogeneous survey responses.