Does female bureaucratic support for female political leaders change over time? Existing research focuses on factors that vary across countries. Little work examines how contingent events within a context impact gender-based solidarity. Drawing on collective identity theory, we argue that high-profile incidents of perceived gender-based injustice against a female president could increase female bureaucrats’ support for the leader. To explore this, we leverage a unique setting of a female president's impeachment in South Korea to assess the relationship between gender and bureaucrats’ support. Examining support for President Park before and after the impeachment, we find that her impeachment has a gendered impact on support, with female bureaucrats’ support increasing and male bureaucratic support remaining unchanged. Furthermore, mediation analysis provides suggestive evidence that the result operates through a heightened sense of injustice. Our findings suggest that support for female political leaders varies not only across countries, but also shifts within governments.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We explore whether international disputes harm commerce by galvanizing consumer boycotts of foreign products. Boycotts increase the social penalty of owning goods associated with a foreign adversary, offsetting individual incentives to free ride or discount the utility of participation. By harming international commerce, boycotts can help reveal information about resolve and avoid more costly forms of conflict. Using administrative data on the universe of new passenger vehicle registration records in China from 2009 to 2015, we demonstrate that consumer boycotts that arose amid tensions between China and Japan over a territorial dispute in 2012 had significant and persistent effects on vehicle sales, especially in cities that witnessed anti-Japanese street demonstrations. The market share of Japanese brands dropped substantially during and after the boycott with long lasting effects. Our analysis provides concrete evidence of the short- and long-term impacts of international tensions on economic activities.

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.

My study investigates whether there has been a relative decline in the position of the Japanese bureaucracy in their relationship with politicians in recent decades. My hypothesis is that the loss of bureaucratic influence has been a function of the declining position of former bureaucrats within the ruling Liberal Democrat Party (LDP), and that politicians who were able to enter the Diet at a young age (due to hereditary recruitment) have gained influence. Their seniority has placed them at an advantage in promotion to key party and government posts. I use probit and logit analysis of LDP cabinet and Diet members (1955–2003) to demonstrate the decline of former bureaucrats within the LDP in terms of their overall numbers and their occupancy of key posts.

Facing massive protests, why did incumbent regimes in both South Korea and Poland repress movements for democratization in the early 1980s but make democratic concessions to the opposition in the late 1980s? I demonstrate how the United States and the Soviet Union as superpower patron states influenced democratic transitions in South Korea and Poland. The different outcomes across time are partially attributed to superpower policies toward their client states. Absent in 1980 were strong, credible signals from the United States and the Soviet Union to their respective client states to support political liberalization. But in the late 1980s superpowers affected the calculus of client state elites by either signaling or encouraging governments to make concessions to the opposition.

Thanks to supercharged economic growth, coupled with abundant physical and human capital, as well as political clout as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, China is a rising great power on the world stage. Whereas the former China under its closed, mysterious, and communist ideology was characterized as a threat to Asian and world peace during the Cold War years, today, ironically, a more open and internationally engaged China again triggers the “China threat” rhetoric. Despite China's constant assurance of peaceable foreign policy intentions and claims that it will “never seek hegemony,” skeptics rebuke these as a mere smokescreen that covers an enormous forward thrust, evidenced, for example, by the expansionist moves toward islets in the South China Sea. On the one hand, whether aggressive moves qualified China as a threat is still debated. On the other hand, whether provocative actions would escalate into large-scale militarized conflicts that jeopardize regional stability constitutes the immediate concern.

This research note explores an increasingly prominent, but often neglected, communication group in China's cyberspace—the online “influential” (big Vs or verified users)—who shape public perceptions, including on foreign policy issues. Examining threads on Sino-Japanese relations on Weibo reveals a diverse ecosystem that includes not only established media agencies and government agencies, but public intellectuals, whose role and presence are quite central. An analysis of the content of posts finds that influentials have similarly diverse viewpoints on Sino-Japanese relations; some have broken with the conflict-focused discourses that have prevailed on Weibo, reflecting a competing narrative espousing the need for greater pragmatism towards Japan. The findings call into question the argument that social media necessarily trends toward greater nationalism.

Why do some national governments in East and Southeast Asia receive more transnational scrutiny and pressure on their domestic human rights practices than others? This article argues that transnational human rights reporting is more likely to target states where domestic activists and victims are densely connected with human rights international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) through a local membership base. Human rights INGOs increase social demands and opportunities for transnational human rights reporting by strengthening local actors’ capabilities to leverage human rights and international solidarity as an advocacy strategy, and by mobilizing them for monitoring and information collection on the ground. Event count analyses of 25 Asian states from 1977 to 2008 find robust support for the theory, using new data on Amnesty International's human rights reporting and human rights INGOs’ local membership base, and controlling for government respect for human rights, regime type, military power, and other factors.

Land fiscalization in China is a local development strategy intended to tilt the distribution of interests disproportionately toward local officials. We propose that the degree of power concentration among provincial Chinese leaders affects their need for support from lower-level bureaucrats. The more that power is dispersed among provincial leaders, the more they are incentivized to dispense benefits to local officials. To test this hypothesis, we used provincial-year panel data spanning 2003–2012 to examine how power concentration among provincial leaders affected land fiscalization within their jurisdictions. The empirical results robustly supported the hypothesis.

In 2019, Taiwan became the first in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage (SSM). This article considers the social movement strategies and relational dynamics of three activist groups in the year leading to the landmark SSM legislation, respectively representing the “yes,” “no,” and “alternative” agendas in the public debates and social mobilization around the issue of equal marriage rights. Through a critical study of the three cases, this article examines how various campaigners shaped local SSM discourses and mobilized people to support, oppose, and question marriage equality, focusing on their social mobilization strategies and inter-group relational dynamics under Taiwan's political and legal structures. In so doing, it proposes a hybrid theoretical model to understand complex social movement and countermovement relations and dynamics.

Observers of East Asia frequently claim that Japanese nationalism is on the rise, and that Tokyo is abandoning its longtime military restraint. To determine whether these trends are indeed occurring, we define and measure Japan's nationalism and military assertiveness; we measure whether they are rising relative to Japan in the past, and relative to seven other countries.

Drawing from social identity theory, we distinguish between “nationalism” and a more benign “patriotism.” We find in Japan (1) strong patriotism that is stable over time, and no evidence of rising nationalism. Furthermore we find that (2) military assertiveness remains generally low, but it has risen in terms of decreased institutional constraints and peacekeeping activities. Our findings have important implications for academic debates about nationalism and Japanese security policy, and for policy debates about a nascent balancing effort against China.

One source of the idea that Taiwan independence would be politically desirable is belief in the concept of “Taiwan subjectivity,” which indicates that Taiwan is not an appendage of China but instead an autonomous actor charting its own course – or trying to do so in the face of huge difficulties. The ruling (since 2016) Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) pledges fealty to the goal of ultimately realizing subjectivity but cannot aggressively pursue the agenda because of opposition from the People's Republic of China (PRC), the United States, and some in Taiwan itself. What might that agenda be? Using a Structural Topic Model, we excavate the subjectivity discourse as it developed from 2008 to 2020 in the mainstream DPP-supporting newspaper, the Liberty Times. We find fourteen topics associated with the concept, the most prevalent of which in recent years warn of threats to subjectivity's realization in the political and sociocultural spheres.

Diffusion studies have rightly emphasized external ideas and resources that propel liberalization in the developing world. There remain two gaps: first, the literature has not covered the types of diffusers and the ways diasporas may shape liberalization in their homelands; second, it pays little attention to internal diffusion after national adoption within a country. This article explores the utility and conditions of diffusion by diasporas and examines the roles of diasporas and internal diffusion in China and India's FDI liberalization. In both countries, diasporas were main diffusers that led national adoption of liberalism at home. In China, however, entrepreneurial diasporas' networks with local governments helped expansive internal diffusion. India's professional diasporas did not strongly engage local governments or domestic companies. National adoption in India was followed by reversal and partial internal diffusions. India's software services provide a similar diffusion by diasporas to that in China.