How have China's princelings benefitted from their family backgrounds in their careers? This study seeks to answer the question and, in so doing, to add to the existing factionalist and meritocracy approaches to Chinese political elites. Based on biographical data of 293 princelings, quantitative analyses show that princelings have various advantages over non-princeling officials on the Central Committee. This is not simply familial advantage, however, as regression analysis finds parents’ rank and longevity do not significantly affect princelings’ career outcomes. Rather, the findings suggest that princelings benefit from membership in an affiliative status group, which differs from factions. The qualitative analysis find princelings’ status is formed and reproduced in a “collective” manner: (1) princelings’ status and early advantages originated in the state's centralized resource allocation system; (2) princelings’ education and career choices are intertwined with the state's practical and ideological goals; (3) princelings’ shared life courses strengthens their collective identity; (4) princelings’ career advantages are secured by the party-state's cadre management system. These factors combine to reproduce princelings’ elite status within the party and state, what I term “collective elite reproduction.”

The end of the Cold War has given rise to a wide-ranging debate about the future of international relations in the Asia-Pacific. This debate has been difficult to assess in part because of the elusive quality of the outcomes being explored, such as whether the region is characterized by “stability” or “rivalry.” What exactly do we want to explain?

Factionalism is a dimension of informal politics that is hardly unique to China, but it has become well entrenched there for several reasons. We know from available survey data that Chinese political culture is relatively low in trust, and the faction provides a particularly useful refuge from the tiger world of politics, organized as it is around that culturally sanctioned dimension of trust known as guanxi (connections) (Shi 2001 and 1997; Pye 1981). From an individual perspective, although this has been changing more swiftly in society at large via marketization, the institutional landscape of elite politics is still dominated by the looming presence of a single monolithic party-state, to which all auxiliary organizations are subordinated in a corporatist hierarchy; any smaller and more personally useful organizations must be formed sub rosa on a self-help basis. From a structural-functional perspective, the faction serves several functions neglected by party-state corporatism: it services individual careers, in both a defensive and an offensive capacity (i.e., to protect against damaging criticism or purge, and to mobilize support for upward mobility); it provides a way of mobilizing minimal coalitions in policy conflicts; and it may even provide a microcosmic unit beyond the family for social identity and solidarity. Factions have always been rampant in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politics, but precisely because of the universally acknowledged propensity for factionalism, they are formally proscribed by the Leninist rules of innerparty life and hence exist only semiclandestinely, looming more clearly when the central leadership weakens or is in dispute (as, for example, during a succession crisis). Factions are assembled on the basis of a combination of one's formal and informal “bases” (zhengzhi jichu), the formal consisting of trusted colleagues and subordinates in one's current work unit, the informal consisting of ties made during one's previous socialization or career and carefully cultivated thereafter. Factional activities may most easily be understood according to realist or realpolitik methodological assumptions, but as we shall see, they need not operate in an ideological vacuum. Inasmuch as factions exist tacitly and become politically operational opportunistically, the precise affiliation of a given political actor may change over time depending on the issue at stake and other circumstances; hence faction membership can never be tabulated with certainty, even by faction leaders. A given political actor may have at his or her disposal a range of connections that varies in chronological depth (i.e., spanning x generations) and institutional breadth (i.e., spanning x organizational hierarchies). At a given time and place, the actor may need these categories to define him- or herself factionally. On such occasions, a strong factional network (i.e., one that has been assiduously cultivated over time) is useful and perhaps even indispensable to the actor's survival and highly useful for the pursuit of future political ambitions.

Recent scholarship on communal violence in Indonesia since the late New Order has focused on identifying causal mechanisms of particular subtypes of communal violence such as large-scale communal violence, town-level communal rioting, intervillage violence, and lynching. While such analyses are useful in understanding aspects specific to each subtype of violence, analyzing each subtype separately risks the analytical problem of selection on the dependent variable if there are important similarities across subtypes. Drawing on the observation that each of these subtypes appeared to rise and fall together since the late New Order, I propose a common factor that can explain the broad temporal patterns of communal violence. In particular, I point to increasing restraints on the military that arose from intraregime infighting, greater scrutiny of military actions during the keterbukaan (political openness) period, and the withdrawal of the military from police duties during Reformasi. I examine four cases of communal conflict: (1) a case in which intravillage violence was averted, (2) a case of lynching, (3) a case of lynching and subsequent intervillage reprisals, and (4) a case of large-scale communal violence. The first three cases are from Lampung province, and the fourth is the case of Poso district, Central Sulawesi.

The years since 2004 have been marked by a level of insurgency in the southern region of Thailand unknown for decades. An accurate perspective on this conflict requires a deeper understanding of differences between the Buddhist and Muslim Thais of the region than has been evident in public and academic discourse. This study utilizes data from a survey taken in 2006, of attitudes and political orientations across all regions of Thailand, including an independent sample of the southern region. The data indicate that southerners are different from the rest of Thailand, whether Buddhist or Muslim; that Malay-speaking Muslims are different from other Muslims; and that sympathy for the insurgency lies not in religion, but in defending practices associated with loyalty to specific forms of Malay culture that characterize the region.

China has largely been cut off from direct transfers of military systems and technologies since the announcement of the EU arms embargo in 1989. Nevertheless, the EU and its member states remain a major source of high technologies for China, namely, by means of trade, investment, and scientific cooperation. This is mainly because the EU-China relationship continues to be dominated by the economic interests of individual member states, both in trade and increasingly in investments. Furthermore, due to a lack of direct security interests in the Asia-Pacific, Europeans do not generally see China as a security threat or a strategic competitor. Therefore, the EU has so far failed to develop a strategic approach toward the potential security implications of transfers of European militarily sensitive technologies that goes beyond the existing arms embargo and currently lacks effective mechanisms to control the flow of such technologies to China.

The history of leadership change in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exemplifies Pareto's notion of circulation of the elite. To analyze it we have compiled a partially ranked dataset of members and alternates of the Politburo Standing Committee, Politburo, and Central Committee for the 1st through 18th National Party Congresses. Quantitative studies of leadership change in the CCP have typically focused on the fraction of new members in each political body from one Party Congress to the next, but the existence of partially ranked data calls for a more subtle quantification of leadership change. Thus, we define a new family of metrics which consider change within each political body, the magnitude of such change, and the importance of each change to CCP structure and policy. We use two of these metrics to compute the distances between each pair of successive, partially-ranked leadership lists in our dataset. Our results capture important political developments from the irregular leadership change of the early years to the subsequent transformation of the CCP into a more institutionalized polity. This metric-based analysis also supplements our understanding of anomalous leadership transitions, intra-Party dynamics, and systemic change in the CCP.

When and why does a perpetrator state take a contrite stance on its past wrongs? More specifically, why do Japanese behaviors differ over time in addressing apology and compensation with regard to the comfort women issue? In this article I address these questions by testing two hypotheses, utilizing an instrumentalist approach and a transnational-political activism model. The former posits a perpetrator state is more likely to take a contrite stance on its past misdeeds when it calculates such action is in its security and/or economic interests. The latter hypothesizes that when transnational activism is powerful and a perpetrator state is led by a progressive ruling coalition, the state is more likely to adopt conciliatory policies toward historical issues. I find that the transnational-political activism model possesses more explanatory power than instrumentalism for within-case variations in Japanese behavior toward the comfort women issue. The two approaches are not, however, mutually exclusive and are complementary in some regards. The effect of transnational activism is heightened when the target state is faced with other geopolitical incentives and/or when the target state is led by a progressive ruling coalition and has weak conservative reaction.

Democracy movements in authoritarian regimes usually fail and are repressed, but they may still affect attitudes and norms of participants and bystanders. We exploit several features of a student movement to test for enduring effects of social movements on democratic attitudes. College students were the core of the movement and had wide exposure to the ideas and activities of the movement, as well as the suppression of the movement. College-bound high school students had limited exposure to the movement and its activities. Time of college entry could in theory be manipulated and endogenous, so we also use birthdate as an exogenous instrument for enrollment year. Applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity, we test for the impact of exposure to the movement on long-term attitudes. We find significant attitudinal differences between those in college during the movement, and those who started college post-movement. These results are strongest for alumni of the four universities that were most connected to the movement.

The absence of class voting or the existence of “reverse” class voting under rising inequality remains a puzzling question in South Korea. While poor voters seem to support conservative candidates more than the rich do, this is due to a confounding effect of age, because poverty is concentrated among the elderly in Korea. Using the Korean General Social Survey data (KGSS 2004–2014) covering two presidential elections, two general legislative elections, and two nationwide local elections, we find that Koreans, in particular the poor electorate, engage in class voting in both objective and subjective terms. While regional and generational cleavages continue to be the most important determinants of partisan competition, class by income levels as well as subjective identity significantly impact vote choice when age is adequately controlled for.

This article compares partisanship across East Asian nations, with four indicators reflecting different dimensions of the concept. Across these indicators, partisanship in East Asian nations was found to be relatively weak compared with most Western democracies, reflecting the less institutionalized nature of their party systems. This could be caused by insufficient time to develop partisanship through mechanisms such as electoral experience and parental socialization. Further breakdowns of income, gender, age groups, and educational levels of partisans showed that more advanced democracies share a relatively uniform pattern across demographics, while young democracies in East Asia showed a more skewed distribution of partisan identifiers, unevenly distributed across income and gender groups. This pattern suggests partisanship is likely to start its development from certain segments of the population and then spread into other segments of the society as a party system becomes more institutionalized.

In nations where the executive has budgetary control, how are spending decisions and allocations affected? Is intraparty conflict relevant? This article sets out to show that institutional rules and leadership roles affect budgetary outcomes. It makes the following argument: if intraparty conflict exists in a one-party dominant or majority-party system, the executive reduces spending to punish the party in the legislature; if no intraparty conflict exists, then the executive increases spending to reward or cultivate loyalty to himself as the party leader. If intraparty conflict exists in a minority government or majority-coalition within a competitive multiparty system, the executive increases spending to reward or cultivate loyalty to himself as the party or coalition leader. Evidence from South Korea and Taiwan between the 1970s and 2000 supports the theory. This study advances scholarship in three ways. First, it shows that institutional rules that provide the executive with agenda control also lead to the strategic use of the budgetary process and outcomes to generate loyalty to the executive as leader. Second, it reveals that this strategy affects spending outcomes in election years; this is an important caveat to electoral spending manipulations. Third, the strategic use of the budget to control intraparty conflict occurred prior to and following democratization; this reveals that institutional changes need to include modifications in rules for policy transformations.

Taiwan recently adopted a series of administrative reform laws designed to make the bureaucracy more transparent and allow public participation in regulatory policies. Because administrative reform limits the executive's power, it is clear why legislatures would favor strict administrative procedures. But it is less clear why presidents would support them. The passage of these laws begs the question why presidents support administrative procedural reforms designed to restrict their abilities to act freely. I argue that in Taiwan, President Lee Teng-hui's control of his party deteriorated as factional disputes within his own party increased over time. Lee ultimately concluded that the Kuomintang's political survival depended on major reforms. Consequently, the status quo-oriented bureaucracy—hitherto an important source of support for Lee and his key constituencies—became an impediment. Lee supported Taiwan's Administrative Procedure Act in order to reduce the bureaucracy's capacity to impede reform. More generally, I argue that administrative procedures designed to open up the bureaucracy to the public, including previously excluded groups, can serve politicians' goal of redirecting the bureaucracy. Archival data, secondary sources, and interviews with key presidential advisers, senior career bureaucrats, and politicians support my argument.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and China's state-led model for economic globalization more generally, have attracted controversy: Are state-led overseas investment and lending driven by strategic motives or market rationale? How have the recipient economies reacted to the influx of Chinese capital? This special issue sheds light on these questions by first outlining the fragmented state system driving the BRI, a system featuring both Beijing's strategic logic at the top and market considerations in policy implementation. The role of the state is unpacked further in China's globalizing coal industry and in the growth of Chinese industry export to BRI countries. Finally, the issue explores the mechanisms behind public backlash and political pushback facing China in Zambia and Australia. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to shift China's relationship with the world, this special issue contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the modus operandi of Chinese capital going global.

Whether political ties enhance or weaken firm performance has been widely investigated in a number of studies, including some on China. Based on a database of non-financial A-share listed firms from 2004 to 2012, we study the effects of political ties on firm performance within a quantile regression framework. We find that there is a positive relationship between political ties and economic performance, but that it is diminishing with respect to firm performance. Political ties appear particularly important for weaker firms.

Since 1997, following the twin transformations of economic meltdown and comprehensive constitutional changes, practically every area of Thailand's public sphere has undergone significant reordering. New checks and balances have been created, new institutions established, old institutions abolished and merged, and new rules of the electoral game put into place. A major new political party has emerged that currently dominates the parliament, civil society is flourishing, and dozens of mass protests are thriving all over the country. Yet beneath this veneer of change, the old Thailand is recognizably intact. Politicians of doubtful integrity still flourish; social cleavages are as evident as before; corruption is endemic and accountability weak; election results are contested and contentious; and the military, though lying low, retains an inordinate number of privileges. Despite the reform process, the Thai political system remains in a feeble state; new institutions designed to improve the functioning of the parliamentary and party political orders have thus far failed to change the rules of the game.

Stimulated by Ole Waever's (1998) examination of American and European developments in International Relations, this article examines the growth of the discipline of international relations in Japan, focusing on the major currents of the social science tradition since 1868 and the intellectual agenda of international relations since 1945. Postwar scholarship has reflected the main themes and questions of Japanese history — the causes of war, the struggle for peace, Japan's place in the world and Asia, and Japan's role in the Cold War. To an extent, the organization and substance of IR teaching and scholarship in Japan can be explained by reference to certain sociological and historical variables. Discussions about methodology have not mirrored the “great debates” of the United States, but the younger scholars are moving closer to the American pattern. Recent exposure to and interaction with American scholarship has become increasingly visible, allowing Japanese scholars to make important contributions to debates in the US.

The incumbent-led subversion of democracy represents the most prevalent form of democratic backsliding in recent decades. A central puzzle in this mode of backsliding is why these incumbents enjoy popular support despite their actions against democracy. We address this puzzle using the case of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Although some Philippine analysts have speculated that his popularity was inflated due to social desirability bias (SDB) among survey respondents, there has been limited empirical examination. Our pre-registered list experiment surveys conducted in February/March 2021 detected SBD-induced overreporting at about 39 percentage points in face-to-face surveys and 28 percentage points in online surveys. We also found that the poor Mindanaoans, and those who believed their neighbors supported Duterte, were more likely to respond according to SDB. These possibly counter-intuitive results should be interpreted with caution because the survey was conducted during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, and the findings cannot necessarily be extrapolated to the other period of his presidency. Nevertheless, this study suggests that preference falsification could be an alternative explanation for the puzzle of popular incumbents in democratic backsliding.

Since Korea's transition to democracy in 1987, Korean leaders have become increasingly confrontational toward Japan, with such steps ranging from verbal threats filled with hawkish rhetoric to material threats, such as displays of military force and threats of actually using it. To explain South Korean leaders’ hawkish approach to Japan, we build a theory of “prospective diversion” by combining insights from the diversionary theory of international conflict and prospect theory. We argue that foreign policy leaders have a strong tendency to overvalue political losses relative to comparable gains in their approval ratings. As a result, they are inclined to take risk-seeking diplomatic actions toward foreign adversary to avoid further losses. By conducting statistical analyses and developing case studies of Korean leaders’ confrontational policy decisions regarding Japan, we present empirical findings consistent with our hypothesis that Korean leaders are inclined to engage in prospective diversion toward Japan when they suffer domestic losses. This article provides an enhanced understanding of the domestic political foundation of South Korean leaders’ increasingly contentious attitude toward Japan.

The Japanese public has been assumed to possess a deeply ingrained aversion toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons. We employ a survey experiment to ascertain whether this aversion is unconditional or may erode in the face of hypothetical deterioration in Japan's security situation, and in particular a hypothetical withdrawal of the US security-nuclear umbrella, increased North Korean nuclear weapons testing activities, and movement by South Korea toward the attainment of a nuclear arsenal. We find that the Japanese nuclear aversion may come under stress in the face of such developments. Additionally, we find that the elasticity of Japanese attitudes with respect to the nuclear option in the face of external security deterioration may be associated with an important individual-level demographic characteristic, namely, gender.