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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How does the influx of foreign direct investment (FDI) affect labor protests in China? Building on the framework of fragmented authoritarianism, I argue that the regional competition to attract foreign investment causes labor protests in China due to its deregulatory effects on labor regulation. Each actor, including the central and local governments, foreign investors, and workers, has different cost–benefit considerations, which provide an explanation for the link between foreign investment and labor protests. By theorizing each actor's preferences, this article explains how FDI induces labor deregulation and workers’ protests in China. Analyzing China's prefecture-level city data from 2012 to 2018, I find that the influx of FDI is positively associated with labor protests. The result remains robust to alternative model specifications and instrumental variable estimation. I also provide empirical evidence for the deregulatory effect of FDI on labor standards with an analysis at the firm level using the World Bank Enterprise Survey. These findings deepen our understanding of how FDI shapes labor regulation and induces workers’ protests in the context of China.

The preconceived image of the pre-modern East Asian region order, known commonly as the tributary system, is problematic. That is because it is represented by ‘the Other’ — not only the external (Westerners) but also the internal (Asians) — and in turn the inaccurate image has gone on reproducing, expanding, and dominating. In order to solve this problem, in question, this paper will first critically review the preconceived image of the pre-modern Chinese world order and identify the problems of Orientalism and modernism. Then, in search for a real image, the paper reinterprets Confucian ideas and concepts as the principles undergirding the pre-modern East Asian regional order. The paper also discusses the Korean kyorin system, one of the subsystems of the pre-modern East Asian order. The objective is to decipher the ways in which Korea interpreted and institutionalized the Confucian ideas on foreign policy or international relationships during the Choson dynasty (1392–1910).

By doing these, we can describe a more real image of the pre-modern East Asian region order. The more “real” interstate relationship was based on li (principle) and li* (rites), and harmonized with another concept of gong (the public/publicness), as shown by pingfen or junfen (the fairly allocated). Based on such conceptions of the human world, the pre-modern East Asian regional order was divided into different territories and dominions, each with its own sovereign. Once the formality of the suzerain and tributary state was recognized, moreover, China did not intervene in the internal and external affairs of the tributary as well as hushi (a foreign trade system) states. Like interpersonal relationships, interstate ones were hierarchic, but they were also based on the idea of reciprocity, fair allocation as well as impartiality, harmony, and coexistence.

The Liberal Democratic Party maintains a dominant position in Japanese politics while the opposition side is fragmented into many parties. Small opposition parties, namely the Communists, are still surviving even though it has been almost three decades since the 1994 electoral law reform, which made it difficult for such parties to exist. Fragmentation of the opposition is giving an electoral advantage to the ruling party. How can small opposition parties survive? An empirical analysis of voter survey data supports the argument that the controversy over a constitutional revision is playing a role in preventing anti-government voters from unifying under a single party.