The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) came to power in 2009 promising significant transportation sector reform, but it has struggled to implement its proposals. I argue that the DPJ's initiatives faltered due to the legacy of “efficiency clientelism.” Historically, Japanese transportation policy combined two imperatives: (1) encourage efficiency by raising the cost of energy-inefficient transportation, and (2) redistribute benefits to supporters of the incumbent Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Because of the legacy of efficiency clientelism, DPJ campaign pledges—designed to appeal broadly to the general public by reducing transportation costs—ran up against the prospect of sharp declines in revenues and energy efficiency. Efficiency clientelism was well suited to political realities in Japan prior to the 1990s, but recent developments have undercut its viability. This raises profound questions about the sustainability of Japan's energy efficiency achievements.

Observers and practitioners of Sino-Korean relations in both the pre- and post-nineteenth century have utilized powerful “comforting fictions” to describe and justify power asymmetry. In the pre-nineteenth-century period, the idea of the “tribute system” put a veneer of Confucian benevolence on what a closer examination reveals to have been unequal and coercive relations. Western proponents of the Westphalian system of sovereign equality saw the new norms of international relations as potentially liberating to Korea, a way to free Korea from the Chinese yoke. However, Westphalian equality, too, was a comforting fiction that masked the reality of imperialism—both formal and informal. The Qing empire played a heretofore neglected role in both types of unequal coercive relations between Korea and the outside world.

What explains Korea's success in surviving as an independent state for over 2,000 years, not annexed to China, when it shares a border with this powerful imperial neighbor? I argue that diplomatic ritual can be conducive to managing asymmetric power relations and that the Korean state and the Chinese state prior to the nineteenth century used the diplomatic ritual of investiture in a strategic manner as a signaling mechanism to manage the expectations of each side. Drawing insights from ritual studies, I offer three specific mechanisms: (1) regularity and precision, (2) strategic ambiguity, and (3) the manipulation of symbols, through which the ritualization of power relations reduces the tension arising from the disparity in power. The empirical evidence comes from an investigation of a total of sixteen investiture cases between Chosòn Korea and Ming China between 1392 and 1644. It shows that the granting and seeking of investiture on both sides was not only a way of signaling their commitment to the status quo, but also a medium of negative soft power through which the stronger side could change the status quo relations to its favor using the symbolic power embedded in the investiture ritual.

Japan's remarkable postwar growth spurt in the 1960s would not have been possible without Japan's alliance with the United States. Policy makers, political scientists, economists, historians, and journalists on both sides of the Pacific have made this claim, but no study has yet tested it with modern statistical methods. In this article, we compare the economic growth trajectories of Japan and a statistically constructed “synthetic” Japan, which had a similar profile until the late 1950s but did not experience the consolidation of the US–Japan alliance, a process that began in 1958 and culminated with the signing of a formal defense pact in January 1960. We find that Japan's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) grew much faster than the synthetic Japan's from 1958 to 1968. We substantiate these results with in-depth historical analyses on how the United States facilitated Japan's economic miracle.

In this article I reinterpret Ng, Rangel, Vaithilingam, and Pillay's analysis in this issue of pro-BN voting in Peninsular Malaysia in Malaysia's 2013 general election. I show that the authors' statistical methods are inappropriate for testing whether district ethnicity predicts district-level BN vote share, and that their modeling choices result in tests of hypotheses that do not exist and cannot be derived from standard theoretical approaches to ethnic voting in Malaysia. I then provide a range of statistical evidence that supports three main conclusions: (1) ethnicity and district area (a proxy for urbanization) both predict BN vote shares at the district level, (2) neither the effect of ethnicity nor of district area can be reduced to the other, and (3) there is no interactive effect between ethnicity and urbanization. These results are in direct contradiction with the authors' results, and apply equally in Peninsular Malaysia and the entire country. I also discuss the broader issues that emerge when testing competing theories of BN vote share.

We analyze and compare three separate efforts to code bias in Malaysia's media and find strong empirical evidence of an ongoing and profound progovernment bias in coverage. We also find, however, significant variation in bias between different types of news outlets. While Malay and Anglophone sources tended to be strongly progovernment, Chinese-language and online outlets were far more impartial. We demonstrate that both the general bias and the variation in it are largely the result of two factors: (1) government censorship and (2) ownership structures that link many major outlets to the ruling coalition. These findings provide a detailed view of the struggle for media independence in a less-than-democratic regime and supply insight into media bias across both authoritarian and democratic regimes in Asia, as well as outside it.

Since 1976, the militaries of the United States and South Korea have been holding routine joint military exercises (JMEs) for the purposes of military training and deterrence against North Korea. These exercises are frequently cited as a cause of tension on the peninsula, causing North Korea to escalate its conflictual rhetoric and behavior. I empirically assess this claim using new data on US-ROK JMEs and machine-coded event data collected by the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System. The findings show that North Korea does not systematically escalate its conflictual rhetoric or behavior during or near the occurrence of JMEs. The results hold for both low- and high-intensity exercises and for rhetoric that has the United States and South Korea as its target.

Soviet and East European documents provide significant revelations about the interactions of North Korea and its allies. First, they show Pyongyang's longstanding interest in obtaining nuclear technology and probably nuclear weapons. Second, they reveal that North Korea's leadership consistently evaded commitments to allies on nuclear matters—particularly constraints on its nuclear ambitions or even the provision of information. Third, North Korea's words and deeds evoked substantial concerns in Moscow and other communist capitals that Pyongyang, if it obtained nuclear weapons, might use them to blackmail its partners or risk provoking a nuclear war. When aid from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not forthcoming, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea sought to bypass Moscow and obtain assistance from the Kremlin's East European clients and, when that proved fruitless, from Pakistan. The absence of international support reinforced the logic of self-reliance and “military first,” pushing North Korea to pursue an independent line with respect to its nuclear weapons. These patterns cannot be extrapolated in a linear way, but they surely suggest reasons for caution by those hoping to engage North Korea in a grand bargain.

In this article, I examine two contemporary cases in which the same foreign adversary, North Korea (DPRK), violated the sovereignty of neighboring states. I use a comparison of South Korean and Japanese reactions to political captivity to assess institutional performance in democratic states and ways in which these dynamics are connected to international politics. We see how “captivity narratives” can be differentially constructed and deployed and how policy capture can be achieved by determined political actors. Civic groups in both countries worked to mobilize political support, frame the issue for the media, and force policy change. In Japan, politicians were more willing to use the abduction issue for domestic political gain than in Korea, where the political class was determined to prevent human rights issues (including abductions) from interfering with their larger political agenda, including improved relations with the DPRK.

This article examines local fiscal behavior in contemporary China against the backdrop of decentralized spending responsibilities and recentralized revenues. Vertical imbalance after the 1994 tax-sharing system reform, coupled with other features of the fiscal institutions, is not conducive to conservative local fiscal behavior. Moreover, a main driving force behind the expansion of local governments is the politically motivated intergovernmental transfer scheme. The center in effect “buys” political stability in sensitive areas while holding local leaders accountable for their tax efforts. A dynamic panel analysis of Chinese counties reveals that a million-yuan increase in general transfer payment and salary raise subsidies would add, respectively, fifteen and sixteen employees to the county government payroll, other things being equal. At the same time, increased subsidies from upper-level governments do not “crowd out” or significantly affect local tax effort. Additional dynamic panel data analysis at the provincial level produced similar findings.

A large literature in political economy argues that governments in the advanced industrialized states retrenched from the application of industrial policy while resisting pressure to reform in a limited number of sectors. In this article, I argue that retrenchment and resistance do not fully describe the range of choices made by governments. Through an analysis of investment in energy policy in Japan, I show that in addition to retrenching from industrial policies and resisting pressure to reduce industrial targeting, domestic actors have retained and redeployed state functions in public policy areas unaffected by the causes of liberalization.

Regional bloc voting in South Korea has been ascribed to voters’ psychological attachments to birthplace. This article seeks to expand the existing discussion of regionalism by showing that economic conditions in voters’ places of residence affect vote choices at the individual level and produce clustering of votes at the aggregate level in South Korea. While the idea of residence-based regionalism has previously been suggested, empirical scrutiny of the idea has been limited. Exploiting a Bayesian multilevel strategy, this article provides evidence that short-term economic changes at the province level affected voters’ choices in the 2007 presidential election in South Korea, independent of the long-term political affiliation between regional parties and their constituents. The positive association between local economic conditions and vote choices remains significant, controlling for perceptions of national economic conditions and other individual level covariates such as age and political attitudes.

Our goal in this article is to explain how South Korea's Hyundai Motor Company successfully transferred its production system to the United States. When a production system is transferred to another country, it is modified under the influences of different institutional environments. The key to the success of Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama, Hyundai's transplant in Montgomery, Alabama, is found in Hyundai's relatively low dependence on skill formation and high reliance on numerical flexibility of its production system relative to its Japanese counterparts. While Japanese automakers had difficulties transferring their production system to their US transplants, Hyundai did not because its production system did not require highly skilled labor. Alabama's flexible labor market and the absence of labor unions enabled Hyundai to more efficiently utilize the numerical flexibility of production workers than was possible at its original plant in Korea, which suffered from adversarial labor relations. This case study casts doubt on the convergence model of technology and globalization, because it shows varieties of production systems developing under different institutional environments.

Term limits that effectively govern leadership transition play an important role in authoritarian power sharing. A fixed term and a pre-appointed successor – two crucial components of term limits – credibly commit the incumbent ruler to share power with other elites, and also allow the elites to monitor and coordinate against the ruler's transgression of the power-sharing agreement. While the successful adoption of term limits often requires an even balance of power among the ruling elites in the first place, once adopted it initiates an evolving bargain over allocation of political power among multiple generations of leaders that further keeps any one faction from dominating the others. I corroborate this argument using a biographical dataset of elite members of the Chinese Communist Party from 1982 to 2012. The findings suggest that the Party's incumbent leaders and their rivals (i.e., predecessor and heir-apparent) shared equal chances in promoting their associates—which proxy their political influence—and this pattern has become more salient since the 16th party congress, when the term limits that currently govern China's leadership transition became fully fledged. This result also sheds light on the role of informal, patronage-based promotion in the institutionalization of authoritarian politics.

Japan's civil society is being transformed as more people volunteer for advocacy and professional nonprofit organizations. In the US context, this trend has been accompanied by a decline in participation in traditional organizations. Does the rise in new types of nonprofit groups herald a decline of traditional volunteering in Japan? This article argues that while changes in civil rights, political opportunity structure, and technology have also taken place in Japan, they have contributed to the rise of new groups without causing traditional organizations to decline, because Japanese attitudes about civic responsibility have continued to support traditional volunteering.

In 2007, those behind the 2006 coup drafted a new constitution specifically aimed at turning back the political and policymaking clock to the pre-1997 era. However, in the preceding decade a significant transformation of Thai politics had taken place. Specifically, social cleavages had become politicized and particized in ways we have not seen before, and policy-focused, popular party programs had become part and parcel of serious party campaign strategies. Focusing on health policy, we thus argue in this article that institutional reforms have had predictable and observable implications for policymaking in Thailand, but only when considered in the context of changes to the broader social structure and other political conditions. While the 1997 reforms brought about a well-documented shift toward a more centralized, coordinated, and nationally focused policymaking environment, the 2007 reforms have been less successful at reversing that impact. In short, the coup makers are finding it harder than they supposed to force the genie back into the bottle.

The arrival of Westphalian sovereignty principles in nineteenth-century East Asia was not a uniformly transformative “shock” as commonly assumed. The Sino-centric order did not suddenly disappear; rather it lingered and evolved in a gradual and contested process of change. I argue that enduring domestic understandings of sovereign autonomy affected how Westphalian sovereignty was interpreted in Japan and Korea. Even as the regional structure shifted from regional hierarchy under China to a Western-led international state system, the lens of hierarchy—the long-standing sense of vulnerability and the need to attain autonomous status in a world of great powers—remained unchanged. In addition, each ruling regime in East Asia attempted to reconcile Westphalian sovereignty with existing diplomatic practices to protect its own interests within the Sino-centric order, which resulted in a new hybrid system of interstate relations encompassing notions of both equality and civilizational hierarchy. Within each country, contestation on sovereignty occurred in multiple stages, driven by existing security relationships and changing domestic politics debating the competing standards of civilization in the region.

What explains the electoral staying power of many Japanese interest groups in the wake of electoral reform? Electoral explanations provide part of the answer; candidates in elections to both houses of the Diet continue to face incentives—many of them unintended—to court the organized vote. But missing from such accounts is an explanation of why economically noncompetitive groups provide the bulk of such support. The primary reason for this, I argue, is organization. As a result of their historical linkages to the bureaucracy, many interests developed hierarchical, national organizational structures that enabled them to carry out a variety of vote-gathering functions that the parties had trouble performing themselves. Although electoral reform and long-term demographic trends have weakened the electoral influence of interest groups, these organizational complementarities between groups and the parties continue to matter in Japanese elections—including under conditions of two-party competition. To illustrate these points, I trace the evolution of interest group politics from the era of LDP dominance through the rise of two-party competition and the LDP's recent return to power, using postmasters associations and agricultural cooperatives as case studies.

When China embarked on economic reform in the late 1970s, its leaders aspired to learn from Japan's developmental policies that were restrictive of foreign capital. In the 1990s, China strove again to emulate Japan and South Korea in restricting foreign direct investment and promoting indigenous corporations. Despite these efforts, China's industrial catch-up was in fact led by FDI, in sharp contrast to the classic Japanese/Korean paradigm where FDI was strictly circumvented. Why was China unsuccessful in learning restrictive FDI policies? How did a new developmental path emerge in China? The answer lies in China's strong networks with diaspora communities. Through a diffusion mechanism, ties between local governments and diaspora capital helped initiate and catalyze China's FDI liberalization, despite the central efforts to learn from Japan and South Korea. Two critical reform episodes are examined: (1) the establishment of special economic zones and (2) the reform of state-owned enterprises.