Confucianism has been considered mainly to have had a negative influence on capitalistic development since Max Weber's theory on non-Western societies became widespread. However, in this article, we champion the positive role of Confucianism and attempt to explain Confucianism as providing fundamental “significance” to social development by imbuing it with religious significance. We present the self-sacrificing work ethic and zeal for education that characterizes Confucianism as having become the foundation for Korea's economic growth. In particular, we examine the religious significance inherent in the Confucian value of “filial piety” and illustrate how the value came to be a powerful economic motivator during the process of industrialization. The religious tendency of filial piety, which attempts to “remember” and “represent” one's ancestors, acted as an important spiritual ethos in Korea's social development centered on economic growth. Filial piety did not stop at being an ethical standard; it was the fundamental basis for macrosocial dynamism that was closely linked to the development of capitalism in Korea.

Overhaul of administrative procedures is an important part of most democratic transitions, and procedural regularization and transparency are often seen as steps toward the consolidation of democracy. Administrative procedures affect policy decisions, but whether particular procedural reforms facilitate or hinder democratic responsiveness depends on the details of the procedure and the political environment. In this article, we examine a particular procedural reform: the adoption of a sunset provision in Korea as part of an omnibus administrative procedures package at the end of Kim Young Sam's presidency. A sunset provision might be seen as clearly promoting democratic responsiveness by requiring the winner of the most recent election to explicitly decide whether to keep or drop old rules and regulations. Alternatively, it might be seen as limiting a democratically elected leader's ability to change policy in accordance with his mandate, by requiring expenditure of effort and resources just to maintain a status quo. We argue that the second interpretation applies to the Korean case. We use a spatial model and evidence from regulatory decisionmaking to argue that Kim Young Sam favored the sunset provision because it would constrain the policy decisions of future presidents. Our model offers an explanation for why Kim Young Sam would propose a sunset provision that limited the life of his own regulations.

In this article, we explore why oil import patterns differ between states with a view to understanding the relationship between agent-based explanations such as strategy and structural explanations—for example, geography. We compare degree of diversification between China and Japan in an effort to explore the relationship between agency and structure in the formation of energy security policy. The China-Japan comparison is contextualized with reference to the baseline case of the United States, a well-diversified importer. We employ the Shannon-Wiener index of diversity to assess the extent of oil import diversification, and temporal changes in diversification for China, Japan, and the United States. A key finding is that China's statist approach has allowed it to diversify its sources of imported oil more quickly than Japan's hybrid approach. In fact, since becoming a net oil importer in 1993, China's sources of imported oil have diversified quite rapidly. Japan's overreliance on the Middle East for much of its imported oil has been endemic since 1973.

In this study, I examine the effect of US foreign policy on the relationship between South Korea and North Korea. In particular, I analyze whether two different foreign policy approaches—the hard-line approach and the soft-line approach—have played a role in advancing or slowing steps toward peace in the Korean peninsula. I use the Integrated Data for Events Analysis dataset for the period 1990–2004. By employing a Vector Autoregression model, which analyzes the behavioral patterns of South and North Korea and the United States, I find that US foreign policy affects the relationship between the two Koreas by affecting North Korea's behavior toward South Korea. The triangular relationship among the United States, North Korea, and South Korea shows a reciprocal behavior pattern. This finding suggests that a soft-line and reciprocal US foreign policy toward North Korea is critical to maintaining peace in the Korean peninsula.

After the downfall of President Suharto in 1998, communal violence occurred in several Indonesian provinces, producing an image of the country as one characterized by strong ethnic politics. In this article, I propose that this image is mistaken. The political salience of ethnicity has subsided greatly as a new democratic system has settled into place. Overall, Indonesia is a weakly ethnicized polity. Ethnicity still counts in arenas such as local elections, but what prevails is a soft form of ethnic politics, with few of the deep disputes about ethnohistory or cultural policy that occur in more ethnicized polities. Moreover, rather than producing ethnic polarization, democratization has created powerful new norms of compromise. I present this overarching argument by advancing nine general theses on Indonesian ethnic politics and by pointing to explanations concerning institutional crafting, historical legacies, and the deep architecture of politics, notably the prevalence of patronage. Rather than positing definitive answers, I propose new questions and frameworks for investigating the weakness of ethnic politics in contemporary Indonesia.