Existing studies have relied on the notion of developmentalism to explain key aspects of the tax policies in Japan and Korea. However, limited efforts have been made to explore these cases from a comparative perspective based on relevant evidence. Far fewer studies have been conducted for examining the contemporary evolution of the tax policies following major reforms since the 1990s. This article seeks to fill these gaps in the research. Employing an analytic framework of tax structure, it provides key definitions of the old and new tax models in Japan and Korea in a way that is comparable with other OECD cases. “Residualism” and “constrained activism,” two heuristic models drawn from low-tax OECD countries, provide useful references for this comparative task. To validate key assessments, the author utilizes and replicates extensive tax data that operationalize important aspects of the tax structure from the 1980s to 2018.

In the last three decades, many Asian democracies have decentralized their political systems to promote the democratic, equal, and efficient distribution of national resources across regions. Nonetheless, most of these countries, including South Korea, are still in a stage of “partial fiscal decentralization,” in which locally elected officials have spending authority, while a significant portion of their financing relies on transfers from the central government. This article argues that the decentralized distribution is significantly influenced by the partisan interests of central and local governments. The central government transfers more funds to local governments that their co-partisans govern, and local incumbents follow partisan policy priorities to obtain the allocation of available fiscal resources. This argument is strongly supported by the empirical analysis of subsidy transfers and regional social expenditures in South Korea from 2002 to 2015. First, we find that the central government in Korea transfers larger subsidies to politically aligned regions. Second, regional governments with larger subsidy transfers have higher levels of social expenditures. Third, governors or mayors affiliated with a progressive party spend significantly more on social welfare and education than do those affiliated with a conservative party.

Do history wars shape international affairs? If so, how and for whom? Taking the historical dispute between China and South Korea over the ancient Gaogouli/Goguryeo Kingdom as a case study, this article explores the individual-level psychological micro-foundations of history wars. A 2020 survey experiment in South Korea pit “ours” vs “theirs” Goguryeo imitation Wikipedia entries to explore their downstream consequences. It revealed direct, indirect, and conditional effects. Exposure to China's claim to the Kingdom undermined Korean pride, increasing dislike of China, and lessening desires to cooperate with it. Pre-existing levels of nationalism divided South Koreans in how angry they became after exposure the Wikipedia primes. That anger, however, only shaped the China policy preferences of those South Koreans who viewed the balance of military power with China favorably. Implications for ownership disputes over kimchi and other national possessions are also discussed, as are the implications of history wars for war and peace in twenty-first-century East Asia.

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.

South Korea's persistent enmity towards its erstwhile colonizer Japan has been a compelling topic of East Asian international relations scholarship for decades. This article argues that the historical evolution of South Korea's democracy offers a vital and overlooked piece of this puzzle. Given that it emerged from one of the most virulently anti-communist dictatorships of the Cold War period, in a society facing an ongoing threat from communist North Korea, any left-of-center opposition movement faced an uphill battle against severe anti-communism. In such circumstances, the only way for a leftist opposition party to survive was by pitting its stronger anti-Japan reputation against conservatives’ anti-communism. After South Korea's democracy stabilized, liberals tried and failed to overturn the anti-leftist institutions left over from the Cold War and then sought equilibrium through parallel rhetoric targeting pro-Japanese elements. Today, neither left nor right can afford to allow a final amicable settlement with its respective target of antagonism. Through analyses of domestic political rhetoric targeting alleged pro-Japanese or pro-communist elements, this paper demonstrates how these competing antagonisms achieved an uneasy equilibrium that undergirds South Korean political dynamics to this day.

In this article, we take a gender perspective to explore the relationship between private entrepreneurs’ business success and their Chinese Communist Party (CCP) membership. We theorize that, due to male-dominated CCP-business networks, female entrepreneurs are not able to leverage CCP membership into greater business success. Observable implications of this are that women will experience little or no business advantage from Party membership, while men will experience a significant advantage. The independence of women's business success from Party connections allows the possibility that women have carved out an area of autonomy from the party-state. Using a series of national entrepreneur surveys collected between 2002 and 2012, we assess the degree of empirical support for our expectations. We show that the CCP does appear to function as an exclusive “boys’ club” in terms of profitable patronage or networks, while the most successful women tend not to be Party members. The surveys also provide some evidence consistent with a CCP effort to recruit successful female entrepreneurs in order to curtail their autonomy. Our findings suggest non-CCP female entrepreneurs are a significant but generally overlooked socio-economic group with considerable potential autonomy.

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.

This article explains the political significance of the Union of Youth Federations of Cambodia, the quasi-youth wing of the ruling Cambodian People's Party in Cambodia. I argue that pro-regime events organized by the youth wing are a form of state mobilization designed to help the ruling party pre-empt the threat posed by the country's growing youth population. In doing so, the youth wing draws upon the monarchy, culture, and nationalism to regenerate the ruling party's legitimacy claims to make them more appealing to the target group. The article contributes to our knowledge of how authoritarian regimes mobilize citizens to maintain power.

This study analyzes political polarization among the South Korean elite by examining 17 years’ worth of subcommittee meeting minutes from the South Korean National Assembly's standing committees. Its analysis applies various natural language processing techniques and the bidirectional encoder representations from the transformers model to measure and analyze polarization in the language used during these meetings. Its findings indicate that the degree of political polarization increased and decreased at various times over the study period but has risen sharply since the second half of 2016 and remained high throughout 2020. This result suggests that partisan political gaps between members of the South Korean National Assembly increase substantially.

This paper examines speechmaking on a contentious policy by arguably one of the most controversial figures to have assumed the Philippine presidency. Drawing on quantitative textual approaches on a corpus of 845 presidential speeches delivered between June 2016 and July 2020, we provide evidence that Rodrigo Duterte's evocative utterances against drug lords and criminals are not just deliberate illocutionary acts intended to court public support, but also priming tactics aimed towards a politically and economically significant audience whose acquiescence gives symbolic legitimacy to a controversial anti-crime policy. Using quantitative textual approaches and econometric analysis, we find that violent-crime rhetoric is more likely to accompany public pronouncements made before a political audience consisting of law enforcement authorities and government officials, as well as an economic audience made up of business chambers, overseas Filipino workers, and labor groups. Overall, the findings nuance an image of Duterte beyond that of a penal populist.

How can authoritarian regimes effectively control information to maintain regime legitimacy in times of crisis? We argue that media framing constitutes a subtle and sophisticated information control strategy in authoritarian regimes and plays a critical role in steering public opinion and cultivating an image of competent government during a tremendous crisis. Using structural topic models (STM), we conduct a textual analysis of more than 4,600 news reports produced by seven Chinese media outlets during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that Chinese media, instructed by the propaganda authorities, used a heroism frame to feature frontline medics’ sacrifices when saving others in need and resorted to a contrast frame to highlight the poor performance of the United States in the fight against COVID-19. We also show that both state and commercial media outlets used these two frames, though the tone of commercial media coverage was generally more moderate than the state media version.

Who attempts to influence policymaking through authoritarian assemblies and why are some delegates considerably more active in doing so than others? Drawing on original data from provincial People's Political Consultative Conferences (PPCCs) in China, this study adopts a delegate-centered perspective and develops a theory of delegates’ activity in authoritarian assemblies. It argues that delegates’ activity can be explained by a combination of both cooptation theory and an understanding of delegates’ position within the authoritarian regime and hierarchy. The results highlight that core elites with more direct means of influencing policymaking will forego assemblies. Yet, peripheral elites lack other institutional channels of access to decision-makers and have to voice their demands in authoritarian legislatures. This study highlights the need for disaggregating groups of actors in authoritarian politics and offers an alternative view of cooptation particularly relevant for closed authoritarian regimes.

Drawing insights from legislative, electoral and welfare studies, the article investigates whether and to what extent electoral competition affects incumbent politicians’ overpromising of social welfare benefits. For this, Taiwan is chosen as the case and the article examines the fate of elite-level social welfare legislative proposals in the period between 1992 and 2016. Findings drawn from quantitative bill sponsorship patterns demonstrate that political elites tend to propose failure-prone social welfare bills during election periods. Moreover, this tendency grew even more clearly in tandem with the rising levels of electoral democracy. The article argues that the overpromising of social welfare benefits is likely due to cognitive biases on the voter side allowing politicians to make promises without necessarily facing the negative consequences of under-delivery. The article contributes to the comparative welfare state literature by adding much-needed nuance to the existing debates on the relationship between democratic deepening, electoral competition, and the development of welfare politics.

Anti-corruption efforts are inherently political. Corruption charges can be levied against political opponents as an instrument of repression; they can also be used against troublesome allies in the same party coalition to further consolidate power. In this paper, we focus on Indonesia and ask: Do major corruption charges follow a presidential electoral cycle—and if so, how? We contend charges against prominent members of the government coalition are more likely to happen before an election, allowing the government to replace intra-party rivals with loyal allies. Conversely, charges against prominent opposition members are more likely to happen after an election when fears of retaliation are low, opportunities for credit-claiming are high, and there is an incentive to remove veto players who may inhibit implementing the government's agenda. To test this argument, we use an original, newly assembled dataset of all major corruption charges—i.e., those involving high-profile politicians and garnering international attention—in Indonesia from 1998–2015 as reported in the Associated Press. We find a significant and robust relationship between the electoral calendar and major corruption charges. This relationship is robust across presidential administrations. These results yield insights into how anti-corruption efforts can become a political tool and counsel caution about the effectiveness of “good governance,” especially in new democracies. Finally, we discuss how contextual political factors external to Indonesia's anti-corruption commission, reinforce this empirical pattern.

Language is one of the quintessential markers of ethnicity. It allows co-ethnics to easily identify one another and underscores in-group and out-group boundaries. Recognizing this, politicians frequently employ ethnic tongues to enhance their political appeal. To what extent does this shape the opinions of their audiences? Utilizing a survey experiment, I test the impact of an ethnic tongue against that of the common political language among the Javanese in Indonesia, the Tagalog in the Philippines, and the Isan people in Thailand. The experiment demonstrates that the ethnic language has a significant impact in both Thailand and Indonesia, but there appears to be little effect of using Tagalog over Filipino English in the Philippines. The findings suggest that ethnic tongues have the potential to significantly enhance political appeals, both among dominant (Javanese) and marginal (Isan) ethnic groups, but when the ethnic group is already the linguistic hegemon (Tagalog), such effects may be limited.

Under pressure to choose between the U.S. and China, Southeast Asian countries have adopted a hedging strategy: deepening economic relations with China while strengthening security cooperation with the U.S. How does the region's public view this strategy? With tensions rising in South China Sea territorial disputes, are more nationalistic individuals more likely to oppose hedging? Using an original public opinion survey conducted in the Philippines, we find that while an overwhelming majority of respondents were concerned about the territorial disputes, more nationalistic Filipinos were no more concerned than less nationalistic ones. Further, more nationalistic Filipinos were more likely to view economic relations with China as important for the Philippines and to approve of Duterte's China policy, which follows the logic of hedging. These surprising findings suggest that under the shadow of great-power competition, the link between domestic politics and foreign policy is nuanced in the Philippines, and Southeast Asia in general.

Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) won another landslide victory in the 2020 general election. Although there was widespread dissatisfaction with the government's poor management of the economy and ethnic conflicts, as well as with the pre-electoral coordination of ethnic parties in several states, opposition and ethnic-based parties had failed to gain more seats. Previous explanations had focused on the economy, electoral system bias, weak party institutionalization, and vote splitting among ethnic parties; however, they underestimated the significance of two contextual factors: military dominance of politics and ethnic conflict. This article argues that military dominance hindered normal political development in Myanmar. The anti-military sentiment favored the NLD, which made most Bamar voters disregard the party's poor economic performance. Despite the electoral system's bias, prolonged ethnic conflicts made ethnic parties that had fought for their community's causes more likely to maintain support. These arguments are verified by survey and electoral data sets. The military nullified the 2020 election claiming that electoral fraud was to blame, but the findings indicate that it was the political environment the military created that led to the victory of the NLD and some ethnic parties in the first place.

In this article, I offer a theory of lawmaking in multiparty presidential systems with different legislative institutions. I present a model that combines Krehbiel's pivotal politics theory with Tsebelis's veto players theory. This model simplifies various institutional veto players into the de facto veto players. I analyze the model to explain how the government type (unified versus divided governments), the legislative rules (majoritarian versus supermajoritarian rules), and the party system (two-party versus multiparty systems) affect legislative productivity. I apply the theoretical results obtained to solve the puzzle about the nondifferential legislative performance between unified and divided governments in the National Assembly. I test a hypothesis stating that the distance between the ideological positions of the agenda-setter and the de facto veto players has a negative effect on the proportion of controversial bills enacted between the 16th and the early 21st National Assemblies.

The effects of the 1990s reforms to the electoral system of Japan's House of Representatives have been among the most frequently discussed topics in political science research on the country. These reforms saw the replacement of a hitherto single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system by a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system with a strong Single Member District (SMD) and a weaker Proportional Representation (PR) component. Many studies have suggested that the reforms may have had significant impact on the strategies of political parties. Generally, SMD systems have been widely thought to favor larger parties, while PR systems are more beneficial to small and medium-sized parties. On the content side, larger parties seeking control of the government would try to win the support of large numbers of floating voters by campaigning on universal/programmatic policy appeals, as opposed to particularistic interests. In contrast, smaller parties would cater towards their core supporters’ preferences. Previous studies have noted that the old SNTV system in Japan had produced results similar to PR systems (Reed 2003). Japan's electoral reform may have thus changed the strategy of large parties, which would need to win more seats in the SMDs to gain (or hold onto) power, while smaller parties have continued to try and win seats via the PR tier. Therefore, the reform provides valuable research material in so far as we can simultaneously observe different effects by the SMD and the PR systems on parties of different sizes.

While processes of land-use change have triggered conflicts across Asia, our knowledge of the responses of affected communities is largely based on case-studies. This review essay addresses this challenge by reviewing and synthesizing 49 studies of conflicts between rural communities and companies in order to identify salient characteristics of anti-corporate activism in Indonesia. We find that, in contrast to the ‘rightful resistance’ observed elsewhere, the strategies employed by rural communities in Indonesia are remarkably “rightless” as both their discourse and their conflict resolution efforts are marked by a remarkable irrelevance of laws, regulations and courts. Communities frame their claims mostly in terms of customary laws while largely relying on informal mediation by local authorities. We attribute this “rightless” character of land-use change conflicts to the weak legal protection of land rights in Indonesia and the relative powerlessness of communities in the face of collusion between authorities and companies.