What explains South Korean public opposition for refugees and does the public differentiate among groups? Although a sizable literature addresses perceptions of North Korean arrivals, few studies directly compare sentiment for this group to others. Using an original web survey with an embedded experimental design, we find clear greater support for accepting North Korean arrivals compared to both non-ethnic Korean refugees and Muslim refugees. Additional analysis finds clear majorities view Islam as incompatible with Korean values. Our results suggest the challenge of encouraging multiculturalism in the largely homogeneous country.

The political autonomy of Chinese provinces derives from their economic independence. After the 2008 economic crisis, budget deficits increased significantly in most Chinese provinces, making them more reliant on financial support from Beijing. Provinces suffering high deficits will lose their political clout in both local and national politics. Therefore, provinces with large deficits tend to be less resistant to the enforcement of the law of avoidance and underrepresented in the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. We find that in provincial standing committees, the members who are native or have more birthplace ties are more likely to be ranked behind the outsiders, especially so in provinces with a high level of deficits. We also find that provincial-standing-committee members from high-deficit provinces have a low possibility to obtain seats in the party's Central Committee. These findings confirm the close relationship between economic independence and political autonomy of Chinese provinces. In addition, we find that the logic of economic independence cannot depict the whole picture and that regional pluralism is also an important concern when the party manages its provincial leadership teams.

The aim of this paper is to suggest that the emergence of the so-called Cambridge School of history of political thought can best be understood in terms of two competing visions of the relationship between history and social science, focusing on Peter Laslett and Quentin Skinner. Although Laslett is often distinguished as a founder of the Cambridge School, this paper suggests an alternative view by emphasizing the theoretical discontinuity between Laslett and Skinner rather than their continuity. Laslett, a practitioner of Karl Manheim's ideas, promoted the idea of a comprehensive scientific social history, within which intellectual history was located. This paper argues that Skinner broke with Laslett's idea. For Skinner, (1) Laslett was a positivist who applied the natural scientific model to intellectual history; (2) Laslett's positivism was actually ‘contextualism’; and (3) the alternative to Laslett's contextualism was the history of ideology. Skinner's early methodology was, in part, a rhetorical redescription of ‘ideology’, which opposed both Mannheim and Laslett. As such, this paper focuses on the discursive disconnection between Laslett and Skinner, thus providing a clue to construct a platform for facilitating a further discussion of the history of ideas and the social sciences.

Several decades have passed since the first call was made toward political scientists, among other social scientists, to devote attention to human rights and enrich, through empirical investigations, our understanding of how human rights implementation works. Today, the political science discipline is finally beginning to respond to this appeal, with an increasing number of scholars making it their goal to isolate variables that obstruct or facilitate human rights implementation. The current paper joins this burgeoning body of literature by offering a within-case analysis of Japanese prison policy-making. In particular, I compare the 2005 bill updating the Prison Law (Kangoku hō) that had been in force in Japan since the Meiji era with an earlier draft version of that bill which appeared in parliament on three occasions since the early 1980s. On the basis of the convergence of these bills in terms of seeking to align Japan with the evolved new global standards for convicted prisoners' treatment, I argue that a three-decade delay occurred in the implementation of prisoners' rights in Japan. To account then for this delay, I point to a provision pertaining to the criminal procedure (i.e., pre-conviction) which was incorporated in the law in question in 1908 merely for pragmatic reasons, and with regard to which the modern-time stakeholders of the bar and the police could not find agreement. Ultimately, the message that this case deals to the political science of human rights is that institutional–infrastructural factors, such as ties of legal nature, matter to human rights implementation.

In this study, we examine whether strategic voting – in which a voter seeks to maximize the expected payoff from casting a ballot – occurred among late voters in the 2018 Taipei City mayoral election. This multi-candidate mayoral contest was noteworthy because ballot-counting started before all the votes had been cast, with preliminary results being leaked to the media. Theoretically, having access to real-time updates of voting figures could have influenced the decision of voters who were still in line waiting to cast their ballots. Analysis and reconstruction of aggregate polling data, however, demonstrate that there was very little (if any) strategic voting among these late voters on election day, even if they had information that might have induced them to vote strategically.