Taiwan recently adopted a series of administrative reform laws designed to make the bureaucracy more transparent and allow public participation in regulatory policies. Because administrative reform limits the executive's power, it is clear why legislatures would favor strict administrative procedures. But it is less clear why presidents would support them. The passage of these laws begs the question why presidents support administrative procedural reforms designed to restrict their abilities to act freely. I argue that in Taiwan, President Lee Teng-hui's control of his party deteriorated as factional disputes within his own party increased over time. Lee ultimately concluded that the Kuomintang's political survival depended on major reforms. Consequently, the status quo-oriented bureaucracy—hitherto an important source of support for Lee and his key constituencies—became an impediment. Lee supported Taiwan's Administrative Procedure Act in order to reduce the bureaucracy's capacity to impede reform. More generally, I argue that administrative procedures designed to open up the bureaucracy to the public, including previously excluded groups, can serve politicians' goal of redirecting the bureaucracy. Archival data, secondary sources, and interviews with key presidential advisers, senior career bureaucrats, and politicians support my argument.

The Bush administration has pursued a new, hard-line approach to the current nuclear standoff with North Korea. In efforts to build public support from the American public as well as from its allies in the region, the Bush administration has carefully framed, in distinctive ways, the nature of the crisis and the grounds for an appropriate response to North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship. To assess the effects of these U.S. messages designed to build public support for its hard-line approach, we conducted a short experimental study in the United States and in South Korea. Our results indicate that many of these messages induce diverging responses in the two countries, implying that the Bush administration's rhetoric designed to build domestic support does not have comparable effects in South Korea.

In the 1990s and into the new century, increased Japanese sympathy toward Taiwan and antipathy toward mainland China led to a series of moves to improve treatment of Taiwan, including enhanced transportation links, a higher level and frequency of official contacts, posting of a military attaché, and expressions of support for Taiwan's participation in regional and international organizations. Nevertheless, Japan remains firmly wedded to a One China policy that opposes both the use of force by the mainland and a declaration by Taiwan of independence from China. Japan's willingness to cooperate with the United States to defend Taiwan is increasingly in doubt. The sources of Japan's supportive but restrained policy include the decline of traditional ties with Taiwan, the increasing size of the mainland market, and above all a perception of security risks that ultimately diverges sharply from that of Taiwan. Serious cooperation in defense and diplomacy requires shared (or complementary) threats, not just shared adversaries.

Fearing war on the Korean peninsula as a result of the current nuclear crisis, China has attempted to restrain its risk-taking ally in North Korea and push it toward a negotiated solution. In the process, Beijing has reneged on security commitments made in its bilateral alliance with Pyongyang. We should not be surprised by this behavior because China has acted similarly in other alliances with Asian neighbors. In particular, the PRC has demonstrated a wariness of being dragged into unwanted conflicts, has (since the economic reforms began in 1978) placed its own strategic economic development interests over fulfilling security pledges to allies, and has taught unruly allies a lesson for defying Chinese interests and advice by allowing them to be bloodied in combat. China's refusal to honor its security commitments in order to restrain North Korea and avoid entrapment in an undesired war raises the issue of the future of this alliance.

Today many governments that seek to perpetuate their power operate hybrid regimes, manipulating institutions yet holding regular elections. In this way, governments gain some legitimacy for their extended incumbency through the residual competitiveness that this regime type allows. However, recent studies show that voters may sometimes grow so activated that they make new use of this competitiveness, however limited, and turn elections into the means by which they can finally change the regime and the government that operates it. This article examines this thesis in Southeast Asia, a region in which hybrid politics have long been practiced. Its main finding is that while change has sometimes taken place, voters—participating only as voters—have never been central.

This article explores the evolution of social movement politics under the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government (2000–2004) by using the perspective of political opportunity structure. Recent “contentious politics” in Taiwan is analyzed in terms of four changing dimensions of the opportunity structure. First, the DPP government opens some policy channels, and social movement activists are given chances to work within the institution. Yet other features of the political landscape are less favorable to movement activists. Incumbent elites' political orientation shifts. As the economic recession sets in, there is a conservative policy turn. Political instability incurs widespread countermoblization to limit reform. Last, the Pan-Blue camp, now in opposition, devises its own social movement strategy. Some social movement issues gain political salience as a consequence of the intervention of the opposition parties, but its excessive opportunism also encourages the revolt of antireform forces. As a result of these countervailing factors, social movements have made only limited gains from the recent turnover of power.

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 article reexamines the period of the Japanese bubble (1985–1990) and emphasizes ill-supervised and ill-sequenced financial deregulation as a key proximate factor. Given the subsequent costs of this political choice, what explains such a path of domestic financial deregulation without the establishment of corresponding supervisory institutions? I argue that the suboptimal Japanese outcome represents the equilibrium point for political leaders who had to balance global pressures to deregulate the economy, corporate pressures to liberalize finance, and domestic resistance by an array of politically connected interest groups. The government chose ill-supervised financial deregulation as the path of least political resistance and the golden bullet that could both defuse trade tensions with the United States and readjust the Japanese political economy in a harmless way. Instead, as they interacted with other factors, the choices made in the early 1980s destabilized the Japanese system and carried the seeds of the ensuing financial crisis.

The Japanese government today is actively and strategically choosing among various institutional forums to deal with its trade partners, namely bilateral venues, multilateral settings, and even preferential regional arrangements. This ongoing high-profile institutional selection is somewhat unprecedented for Japan, and demands a review of the historical and analytical reasons that drive decisionmakers to select one forum over another. Overall, the Japanese case suggests that the aggregate trade forum choices are influenced both by the desire to institutionalize mechanisms for stabilizing a range of expectations and by the necessity of guaranteeing market access and protection of investment in the fastest time possible.

This article examines party platform change in a third wave democratic country, Taiwan, during its first fourteen years of full multiparty elections. A variety of datasets show that Taiwan's parties have moved from polarized positions toward a moderate center on all core electoral issues. However, the parties have not converged into indistinguishable catchall parties; instead they have instituted a state of moderate differentiation. The degree to which Taiwan's parties have moderated and been electorally successful has been intimately tied to the internal balance of power between election-oriented and ideologically conservative factions or leaders. In response to public opinion and electoral competition, Taiwan's election-oriented leaders attempted to drag their parties toward centrist positions. The key variable constraining convergent party movement and maintaining differentiation has been the strength of ideologically conservative party factions. When these ideologically oriented factions have held the upper hand in parties, they have promoted ideologically orthodox but often unpopular policies. Even when the election-oriented faction is in control at the party center, secondary factions have been able to constrain movement away from party ideals.

The Dokdo issue has constituted a popular area of academic enquiry in both Korea and Japan, but few studies have extended their research parameters beyond the question of who is the rightful owner of this island. Whatever the legal merits of competing claims to Dokdo, the Dokdo issue has expanded to represent an important political focus in the domestic affairs of both states, and it remains an omnipresent irritant in Korea-Japan relations. A full understanding of this complex issue cannot be gained simply through legal and historical argument. With the aim of overcoming these existing inadequacies in the academic coverage of Dokdo, this article attempts to identify the dynamics in which extralegal and extrahistorical factors have interacted and complicated this contentious issue.

A well-developed thesis in political economy claims that crises create opportunities for change. Yet despite creating similar preferences for change, the Asian financial crisis led to reform of policies and institutions in some issue areas and in some countries of Southeast Asia, but not in others. In this essay I find that policies and institutions associated with technological upgrading of the economy, and particularly the manufacturing sector, are often immune to reform efforts, for two reasons. First, reform demands that policymakers know what to do; and second, they must know how to do it. Whether countries can discover and adopt new “templates” for reforming technology policies and institutions depends on the capacity of preexisting institutions to foster participative rather than simply consultative public-private collaboration. Such collaboration is most likely when decentralized yet coordinated bureaucracies facilitate meaningful participation from private actors, including business, labor, and academia, in forming, implementing, monitoring, and enforcing development policies.

The present article suggests that expressions of Japanese identity may be more malleable and receptive to international influences than is usually thought. Through a study of the evolution of images printed on Japanese banknotes and of the political processes behind that evolution, the article shows Japanese state elites consciously following international models of identity content. In particular, it describes the shifts in Japanese banknote iconography in the early 1980s and again in the early 2000s as the product of a drive for conformity with the iconographic norms of European currencies. The state has been the main protagonist in this story, but for a full accounting of the magnitude and pace of iconographic change on the yen, it is necessary to unpack the “black box” of the state.

The protest by over half a million people on July 1, 2003, unleashed the most serious crisis of governance in Hong Kong since its retrocession to China in 1997. Triggered by the government's attempt to legislate new national security legislation, it exposed more fundamental institutional defects of an increasingly weakened government. This article puts forward two arguments. First, the political logic of the pre-1997 period was not compatible with the post-1997 political environment and public sentiment, resulting in a widening cognitive gap between government and people. Second, the former colonial administration, despite its non-democratic nature, was able to secure sufficient public acquiescence and acceptance through economic performance and service delivery. The new government was constrained by both economic and fiscal difficulties and unexpected social crises. A declining capacity to perform effectively had further eroded public support. Attempted reforms of the bureaucracy and the introduction of a new ministerial system had caused greater political-administrative disjunction and actually compounded the crisis of governance.

How important have Thai parties and intraparty factions been in Thailand's fast-evolving democracy? What role do they play today, especially since the enactment of the latest constitution? What has accounted for the fragmentation in Thailand's party systems and coalitions? How did Thai democracy allow for the rise to power of Thaksin Shinawatra? This article analyzes these questions, presents a theory of Thai coalition behavior, and offers some predictions for Thailand's democratic future.