This paper aims to address an important yet under-studied issue – how does violence from the side of the protestors affect overseas support for a democratic movement? The importance of this question is twofold. First, while violence and radicalization are not exactly unfamiliar territories for scholars of contentious politics, they do not receive as much attention when their effects spill beyond the domestic arenas. Second, this study seeks to examine international solidarity with democratic movements at the civil society level, which differs substantially from the conventional elite-centric approach when it comes to the intersection between democratization and international relations. Against this backdrop, this paper considers the relationship between violent tactics employed by the protestors during the anti-extradition movement and the sentiment expressed by people elsewhere towards the protests. To this end, a total of 9,659,770 tweets were extracted using Twitter Application Programming Interface during the period of 1 June 2019–31 January 2020. Leveraging computational methods such as topic modelling and sentiment analysis, findings in this paper demonstrate that a majority of foreign Twitter users were supportive of the protestors while held relatively negative sentiments against the government as well as the police. In addition, this study reveals that, broadly speaking, violence might cost a democratic movement by its international support, but could also garner more attention at times. Despite its restricted scope, this paper hopefully will shed some useful light on the dynamics underlying international solidarity for a democratic movement abroad as well as the complex mechanisms of interactions between people who protest at home and those who observe from overseas.

Why did Korea integrate multiple health insurers into a single insurance body in 2000? This study argues that the combination of institutional frictions and reinterpretations of them led to institutional changes by reshaping coalitions of healthcare policies. This study demonstrates how the interaction between institutional mismatches and policy feedbacks caused by policy transfer distortions and actors' ideas can trigger the institutional changes. When Korean policymakers adopted the Japanese health insurance system in the 1970s and 1980s, they deliberately modify some institutional sub-components to reflect the interests of bureaucrats and dominant groups. As a result, the mismatched institutional and ideational patterns created frictions for institutional changes. The self-governance of health insurance societies has hardly been achieved in Korea and it reduced individual health insurance societies to no more than a governmental body that collected contributions. In problem-solving mechanisms, there was a weak commitment for support such as loosely institutionalized finance assistance for rural health insurance schemes since the nascent democratic regime wanted to manipulate the subsidy for political reason, with low financial burden. Due to these distorted institutional practices, the health insurance system was seen as a symbol of the social exclusion of the disadvantaged and as a malfunctioning social policy stemming from an irresponsible government. Meanwhile, by reshaping its orientations and preferences, Korean labor reinterpreted the meaning of the health insurance system and socially oriented labor movements in Korea have formed a coalition with civil movement for the health insurance reform.

Research has shown that Japan's parallel electoral system altered the incentives that parties and their members face when competing for lower-house seats, leading to, among other things, more policy-oriented and less personalistic elections. What is less well known is how these altered incentives affect the decisions of incumbents to stay with their current party organizations or exit and join another political party. We address this question by using data from the 2017 snap election in Japan, specifically, the exit decisions of Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) incumbents. Typically exit decisions involve considerations of electoral support, policy, or increased office benefits. Our results indicate that policy considerations were a primary factor in DPJ members' exit decisions but also that exiting legislators considered the risks associated with these decisions, which was molded by available party alternatives, each's electoral strength, and a unique feature of Japan's electoral rules, the fact that it reduced the electoral risk for some but not all incumbents who contemplated switching parties.

How do parties and candidates react to electoral system reform? While the literature on causes and consequences of electoral reforms is receiving increasing attention, we lack a systematic micro-level account on how parties and candidates adopt to changes in electoral rules and district boundaries. This paper examines the case of the Japanese Liberal Democrats to explore how the party has managed to accommodate a surplus of incumbents to a reduced number of nominal tier seats following the 1994 electoral reform. By using micro-level data, I examine how the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has matched candidates based on their expected electoral strength and ideological positioning to new districts. Moreover, I investigate how the newly instituted party-list allowed the LDP to avoid its disintegration at the local level by systematically defusing local stand-offs through the handing out of promising list positions. My findings help to understand how the LDP could avoid its disintegration and could continue to dominate Japanese politics until today.

In China, the public has gradually shifted their focus from GDP growth to quality-of-life issues, which imposes new challenges for the government. The food safety problem, as a salient issue, is one such example. This article analyzes how food safety problems affect ordinary Chinese people's trust in the government and their attribution of governmental responsibility using nationally representative survey data. As food safety risks are unequally distributed in China, the political impact of food safety problems varies among people of different socioeconomic statuses. The results show that food safety problems weaken the public's trust in both the central and local governments, but this negative effect is attenuated among people with a low level of education. Moreover, the Chinese public tends to attribute major responsibility to the central government rather than local governments when perceiving the severity of food safety problems, and this tendency becomes stronger for the low-income population. The results deepen the understanding of the local-central political trust patterns and the political implications of food safety problems in China.