Under what conditions would Japanese leaders visit the controversial Yasukuni Shrine and why? Previous studies have focused primarily on the domestic benefits and effects of such visits, claiming that leaders employ visits to follow their own conservative ideology and gain domestic political support. Given the harsh international criticism that tends to ensue, however, political leaders should also consider the cost and international effects of such visits. This study proposes three necessary conditions for such visits: a conservative ruling party, a government enjoying high popularity, and Japan's perception of a Chinese threat. With regard to the latter, a security threat from China has allowed Japan to use these visits as a credible signal of its resolve against China. Comparative analyses of Japanese cabinets after the mid-1980s support this argument.

China's involvement in the world and its economic modernization are expected to lead to its democratization and adherence to the liberal international order. However, after several decades of development, the authoritarian system remains resilient, and China's foreign policy appears to be more assertive. The limited nature of scholarship on the public opinion in a rising power has prevented a better understanding of China's domestic changes and foreign policy. This study seeks to unveil the micro-foundations of the unexpected trajectory of China's rise by investigating the public's national and international orientations using nationwide representative survey data. The results show that international orientations had a very limited effect on Chinese popular attitudes toward domestic politics and foreign relations, while national orientations strengthened public support for the authoritarian system and China's assertive foreign policy. Intergenerational variations existed in public opinion in China, with the Xi generation showing a different pattern of political values than the preceding generations.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, the United States—from the government to the public, from the White House to Congress, from policymakers to pundits, from China specialists to people who know little about China—has engaged itself in the seemingly endless debate on China. Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, people debated whether China was still important to the United States and whether the Sino-U.S. special relationship was worth preserving. Since the early 1990s, with China's remarkable economic “soft landing” and the consequent robust and sustained economic growth, Americans seemed to have reached a consensus that China still matters to the United States for better or worse. U.S.-China relations were often referred to as one of the most important bilateral relations to the United States. But important in what way? Much debate ensued with a series of frictions between the two countries that climaxed in the dispatch of two U.S. aircraft carriers to the South China Sea during the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996, the U.S.-led NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and the midair collision between the two air forces in 2001. The U.S. media tirelessly asked the question: “China: friend or foe?” The pattern for U.S. China policy since the end of the Cold War is that whenever the relationship appeared to be stabilizing and a consensus was shaping, new crises emerged and destroyed the hard-won progress, triggering another round of debate on China as if people never learned anything from the previous debate; the old and familiar discourse started all over again.

Communication networks play an important role in the process of political socialization. This article, based on Taiwan's 2002 Taipei and Kaohsiung mayoral election data, investigates the extent to which political discussion with family and close friends affects changes in vote choices. Using two definitions of changes in vote choice—vote switching and partisan defection—the empirical findings support Alan Zuckerman and his followers' structural theory and partially sustain Paul Beck's social support theory. First, partisan voters in both cities who perceive great heterogeneity in their communication networks are likely to switch their vote in two consecutive elections. Second, partisan voters in Kaohsiung who frequently discuss politics within communication networks are not likely to defect their party identification. The implications of the findings for the development of deliberative democracy are discussed.

Corruption can erode political trust and a well-functioning democratic system, but it is unclear whether perceptions of corruption are significantly associated with citizens’ perceptions about the fairness of income distribution. This study thus examines the role of political trust in shaping the relationship between perceptions of corruption and perceived fairness of income distribution for East Asian countries. The findings show that perceived corruption has strong detrimental effects on political trust, and that those who have lower levels of political trust are more likely to perceive the income distribution as unfair in their countries. Causal mediation analysis results indicate that political trust plays an important role in mediating the negative effect of perceived corruption on perceived fairness of income distribution. Moreover, the results from examining the mutual causality linking corruption, political trust, and perceived fairness suggest that the reciprocal causal effects are also significant and robust.

Despite increasing economic integrations with China, worries exist in China's neighboring countries about China's implicit political intention. Do people view trading with China differently? In this article, we incorporate the political context of trade agreements by showing that trade with partners who come with political costs is less likely to be supported. Using a nationally representative survey experiment from Taiwan, we find that trading with China garners less support than trading with Japan or Malaysia, and nationalism suppresses self-interest when the proposed trading partner is China. We show that national attachment, which is neither a proxy for political identification nor a proxy for national chauvinism, becomes a stronger predictor of trade preferences toward China. While the political tension between China and Taiwan is unique, many countries see at least one other country posing a negative externality. Our finding suggests strongly identified nationalists would oppose engaging with a hostile outsider regardless of their self-interest.

When dealing with autonomous regions, states may utilize Unionist Economic Integration (UEI) programs to forge a stronger sense of unionism. However, the literature has not been able to explain why UEIs work differently across regions. With the identical UEI implemented in Macau and Hong Kong, Macau seems to be firmly within Beijing's grasp, yet protests in Hong Kong are still intensive. Why is economic integration effective in appeasing some regions, but not others in the same polity?

I argue that what makes UEI effective in appeasing a region is the region's economic dependence on the national center. UEIs add to the expected cost of contention, and thus high economic dependence sets that baseline to a higher degree, leading to effective appeasement with UEIs. I illustrate my argument with empirical analyses of two original datasets of protest counts and discontent with authoritarian institutions in Hong Kong, Macau, and Chinese provinces.

China's economic miracle has been achieved at considerable environmental cost. To fight against environmental pollution more effectively, the Chinese government established the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) in 2008. This study investigates the stock market reaction to this event and finds that, on average, listed firms in polluting industries experienced a statistically and economically significant negative abnormal return on the event date, which implies that the compliance costs of these polluting firms are expected to increase. In addition, this study finds that enterprises with different ownership styles and different political influence experienced different price reactions during the event window. More specifically, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in general experienced a less negative abnormal return over different event windows, and provincial SOEs perform much better than central SOEs and sub-provincial SOEs.

Using a novel statistical method, we estimate the vote counts of the secret elections held by the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party from 1945 to 2017. We also construct a metric for voter preference diversity based on a standard index of legislative party fractionalization. We find that both the number of dissenting votes and the voter preference diversity index plummeted to the bottom in 2017, which is an unprecedented phenomenon in the party's history. Applying the same method to provincial party congress elections from 2006–2017, we find that provincial dissenting votes also declined around the same time, though the magnitude is relatively smaller and there is a wide range of provincial variations. We suggest that President Xi's suppression of formal party institutions is complete at the national level but not yet at the provincial level.

To what extent do presidential candidates influence voting in mixed member legislative elections? A sizable literature addresses presidential–legislative coattail effects in the American context, with less attention given to this interaction in non-Western democracies. Nor is the role of past voting behavior adequately assessed in the literature. Taiwan's historic 2016 election allows for an analysis of the extent in which the popularity of presidential candidates influences coattail voting in the more complex electoral environment of two-vote mixed legislative systems. Evidence finds that, controlling for partisanship and previous voting behavior, voters who supported a presidential candidate were more likely to also support the party's legislative candidates, although this influence is stronger in regards to Democratic Progressive Party's Tsai Ing-wen.

This article argues that weak local governments increase levels of taxation by “borrowing” institutional capacity from certain types of businesses. While many businesses lobby against taxation, businesses that are locally owned, nationally connected, and logistically complex build robust associations that support taxation. These types of businesses benefit from improvements in public infrastructure, so they empower their associations to monitor members’ tax compliance and to pressure officials to uphold their spending commitments. The article demonstrates the necessity of business support for taxation in the absence of state capacity by comparing two Philippine cities that differ in their ability to tax despite a number of similarities between them. The case studies show that tax increases co-varied with business support, and that business support waxed and waned depending on over-time variation in the capability of business associations to discourage tax evasion and to enforce official commitments to spend on infrastructure.

The literature on East Asia's political economies identifies cohesive state bureaucracy and its effective intervention in the market as the key factors that have enabled the East Asian economic miracle and that differentiate the success of East Asian newly industrializing countries (NICs) from the failure of other developing countries. However, the sharply diverging growth trajectories of the Taiwanese semiconductor and wireless communications industries show that cohesive state bureaucracy and its effective intervention are not the generic trait of the Taiwanese developmental state, repeatedly found across industries and through time. On the contrary, the scope, depth, and coherence of state intervention are a variable rather than a constant. The semiconductor industry had an activist state promoting its growth from its very inception, whereas the wireless communications industry has failed to acquire consistent state support. Explaining the variation of state intervention requires not only an analysis of the state apparatus but also a study of its institutional links to the industry. This article develops an institutional explanation of the Taiwanese state's differing roles in promoting the semiconductor and wireless communications industries, but it differentiates itself from the existing literature of the developmental state and network theories by privileging the role of overseas technologists in influencing the scope, depth, and coherence of state intervention in two industries.

This article utilizes an original household survey of two regency-level elections in Indonesia to explore campaign targeting. It uses a list experiment to show that direct survey questions about accepting transfers from campaigns elicit honest responses from respondents in Indonesia. Although the relationship between income and whether a respondent accepted transfers from political campaigns decreases over the entire distribution of income, it increases initially, producing a curvilinear relationship between income and accepting transfers from campaigns. This article argues that the poorest voters face barriers to being targeted by campaigns. However, these barriers recede as they become relatively richer, at which point a negative relationship is found due to diminishing marginal utility of accepting these transfers. Finally, in-kind transfers, as opposed to cash transfers, target low-income voters more effectively.

Women are under-represented in politics in Northeast Asian countries. Yet, in the environmental realm, women have assumed prominent political, bureaucratic, and NGO positions. This article examines some of the forms that women's participation in environmental protection has taken in Japan, Korea, and China and attempts to assesses the reasons why women are engaging more actively with environmental issues than they are with many other policy areas.

Party activists are important for building party–voter links. This study focuses on the motivations of these activists and the hypothesis that economic factors are associated with more programmatic and policy-driven platforms. I examine a novel comparative survey data set of party activists collected in multiple districts in South Korea and Mongolia to determine whether national economic development, the local economy, or individual income shapes activist motivations. The results challenge the economic account and, instead, shed light on the importance of party characteristics, such as size, ideology, and whether a party has its roots in authoritarianism.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Chosòn Korea government designed and utilized hierarchical tribute systems for managing interactions, in particular, trade, with Japanese and Jurchen elites. Korean officials separated maritime and overland contacts, divided the contacts further into carefully delineated reception grades and diplomatic statuses, and designed detailed procedures for interaction. More specifically, diplomatic status determined the regulations by which the court provided reception and then trade to a contact.

This article examines the political economy of Chinese overseas development finance for coal fired power plants. In just over a decade China's two major policy banks provide more financing for overseas coal-fired power plant expansion than any other public financier in the world economy. We show how China's overseas surge in public financing for coal fired power plants is a function of a number of domestic push and foreign pull factors. Excess capacity, environmental regulation, and structural change are push factors that converge with rising demand for energy, pockets of coal abundance, and the lack of financing in Western capital markets for coal fired power plants. Fragmentation across the Chinese system and the demand for coal outside China's borders allow for a decline sector on the mainland to become a global Chinese powerhouse.

What effect do natural disasters have on political participation? Some argue that natural disasters decrease political participation because of the way they reduce individual and group resources. Others argue that they stimulate political participation by creating new social norms. Previous studies have been limited both by their focus on a specific disaster type and a lack of regional variation. This article advances the literature by assessing the effect of the 2011 triple disaster in Japan on political participation at both the individual and district level. Drawing on multiple sources of data, I use a difference-in-differences identification strategy to show that the 2011 triple disaster in Japan resulted in a 6 percent increase in participation in political groups in regions heavily affected by the disaster, and a 2.5 percent increase in voter turnout in districts in prefectures that were significantly affected by the disaster. The results also show that the effect at the individual level is largely confined to individuals with large social networks, suggesting that the effect of natural disasters on political participation is a combination of their direct and indirect impact on variables that operate through different subpopulations. Directions for future studies are suggested.

How do ordinary citizens view labor unions? The importance of public opinion about unions has rarely been highlighted in the contemporary literature on labor politics. Using five waves of the World Value Surveys on South Korea, this article suggests that public confidence in labor unions is significantly affected by individuals’ interpersonal trust, conditional on their perception of the political representation of labor. Unlike those with high levels of trust, low-trust individuals view unions as an agent seeking their exclusionary interests at the expense of the rest of the society. The difference between high- and low-trust individuals’ confidence in labor unions is more pronounced when a liberal, rather than a conservative, government is in power because of the public perception that labor interests are already well-represented by the liberal government and union functions are redundant in such a circumstances. The empirical findings are found robust to alternative theoretical arguments and empirical techniques.

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.