The debates on Asian democracy began 30 years ago. Western countries have often promoted liberal democracy as being the genuine democracy, giving justice to the people and being able to meet the needs of their communities. However, at the same time, some Asian countries practice democracy that promotes Asian values, which are very different from Western values. Western countries describe Asian democracy as an excuse for some leaders to maintain power in their respective countries, for example Malaysia. Critics have pointed out that some Asian leaders have used authoritarianism or despotism in order to mitigate the weaknesses of their rule. Asian democracy is practiced in Kelantan where the PAS (Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party) continued to maintain power for 23 years, from 1990 to 2013. Factors that have contributed to the long rule of the PAS party include socio-political stability, including political parties who were clean and competent and leaders who are knowledgeable and pious.

Although state transformation after the 1980s has been a major topic of debate in political science, the transformation of the Japanese state has not been fully explored, with the pluralist and rational choice approaches dominating within the Japanese politics literature. This article addresses the lacuna by exploring state transformation in Japan's antimonopoly regulation after the 1980s, focusing on the state at the macro level through analysing evolving power relations within the core executive in response to the challenges of governance. The case study reveals the flexible change of power relations within the core executive; the core executive retained its dominance within policy-making arenas through this adaptation, which is regarded as the reconstitution of the state. Drawing on that, the article argues that the nature of state transformation in Japan is the sustained dominance of the core executive as a collective group over the sector through reconstituting the state.

Taxation is a critical part of state power and has evolved with modernization. Although tax systems are expected to converge as countries achieve economic development, there are variations in the scale and structure of tax revenues. A recurring question is which tax dominates state financing in democracies. Some scholars associate mature democracies with progressive income taxation, and others find that democracies have relied on regressive taxation on consumption. Learning from the history of tax development, this paper illuminates that countries in different democratic waves followed divergent paths of tax development in the process of modernization. The first and second wave democratizers established progressive income taxation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and continued to rely on it. On the other hand, newly democratized countries came to rely heavily on the value-added tax, which was innovated in the mid-twentieth century, shortly before the beginning of the third wave of democratization. By shedding new light on the linkage between the development of modern taxation and the waves of democratization, the study demonstrates that the trajectory of modernization has shaped different tax systems.

The former Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto is the focus of much public attention in Japan. He is a polarizing figure who is both liked and disliked in equal measures, and his political character, including his argumentative approach, has been widely discussed by the Japanese and international media, as well as within academic research. For example, the Japan Times labelled his speech style as ‘a Japanese version of Donald Trump and the former Tokyo mayor, Shintaro Ishihara, said Hashimoto's speech is like ‘Hitler's’. This study examines the differences between Hashimoto's rhetoric and that of other Japanese politicians. Of the various tactics involved in the argumentative strategy of Hashimoto, this study specifically focuses on his attacking of opponents, which is one of the common and important tactics used in political debate. This study analyses the three linguistic approaches used in political debate: the policies or character of the target; the evaluative meanings of attack, and negotiation used to reduce the assertiveness of attack. The data were drawn from a televised political debate, in which Hashimoto was required to debate with three opponents who opposed his points of view. This study demonstrates that the target and the evaluative meanings behind Hashimoto's attacks were not remarkably different from the other politicians. However, Hashimoto did not use negotiation and and he was more assertive in presenting criticisms while the other politicians’ criticisms were mediated by negotiation.

Latin American fiscal policy presents a stark challenge to standard analytical models of political economy. Most importantly, since about 1990 the combination of drastic inequality, electoral democracy, and weak redistributive efforts appears to contradict the economists’ workhorse, the median-voter model, which predicts significant fiscal redistribution under these conditions (Meltzer and Richard, 1981; Profeta and Scabrosetti, 2008: 70–71; Huber and Stephens, 2012). However, recent innovations – a “basic universalism” in social welfare and a couple of progressive tax reforms – might be thought to bring the region more in line with the model's predictions, or perhaps those of other approaches. In short, this field could benefit from theoretical clarification. This paper evaluates the performance of median-voter and several other models in an attempt to explain longstanding differences in fiscal policy. It compares Latin America with other world regions, first and mainly, before examining variation across the region. It then turns its attention to the new developments in policy.

Although the importance of public satisfaction is well documented, few studies have been conducted on the diversity of citizens’ evaluations of the various levels of government. This study explored hierarchical government satisfaction among the public in two culturally Chinese societies, namely China and Taiwan. Basing the analysis on the perspective of responsibility attribution, this paper proposes that the two publics’ distinctive perceptions, which are shaped by different information flows, lead hierarchical government satisfaction in the two societies in separate directions. This argument is supported by the empirical findings from the sixth wave of the World Values Survey. The findings confirm that personal evaluations, including household economic satisfaction, democratic evaluation, and public service confidence, exert more influence over local government satisfaction in China, but conversely have a greater impact on central government satisfaction in Taiwan. Moreover, these evaluations are shown to affect hierarchical government satisfaction differently in the two societies. The evidence reveals that the two publics attribute blame for problems to different administrative objects: Chinese citizens tend to blame local governments, whereas Taiwanese citizens are inclined to criticize the central government.

The aim of this special issue is to give a new spin to the study of the impact of the liberal Wilsonian moment on Japan, with a focus on the interwar period in a broader historical span. The Wilsonian liberal international order encompasses its fledgling (1914–1945), formative (1945–1952), competitive (1952–1989), and maturity (1989–2018) periods. In this special issue, the four articles deal with the first and second periods. Yutaka Harada and Frederick Dickinson adopt this longer perspective – not just President Wilson's moment of Fourteen Points – each focusing on (1) the vigor of Japan's industrialization and open economic policy in 1914–1931 and (2) the basic continuity between the prewar and postwar periods in terms of normative and institutional commitments with the fledgling, if volatile, liberal international order such as those with the Versailles and Washington treaties after World War I, the war prohibition treaty of 1928, and the naval disarmament treaty of 1930. Ryoko Nakano and Takashi Inoguchi take up the re-examination of two tiny minorities of liberal academics, Yanaihara Tadao and Nambara Shigeru, who at most kept their integrity. Nakano recasts Yanaihara's academic life with its intellectual agony of believing in a national self-determination policy for Japanese colonies. Inoguchi underlines Nambara's stoic self-discipline under wartime dictatorship and active political involvement under US occupation regarding the newly drafted Japanese Constitution. An emphasis is placed on the considerable positive influence of Wilsonian ideas on Japan, an influence that faded in the late 1930s, but re-emerged with considerable vigor after 1945.

Since its democratization, South Korea has widened the population coverage of various social programs, yet the generosity of most programs remains shallow. Existing studies offer state/elite-centered explanations for this move toward a weak universalistic welfare state. I suggest that the move rather accurately reflects citizen attitudes as well: a majority of Koreans across economic classes support welfare state expansion, yet a large segment of the self-proclaimed supporters are unwilling to pay for the expansion. I argue that underlying such mixed attitudes is the perceived unfairness of the tax and transfer systems. More specifically, (1) the perception of unfair contribution vis-à-vis other taxpayers and (2) the perception of unfair fiscal exchange with the government significantly lower one's willingness to contribute to the welfare state. My analysis of a nation-wide survey lends support to my argument. My findings have important policy implications for the emerging economies where, despite a growing citizen demand for social protection, the fiscal support base for welfare state expansion is frail.

Japan during the interwar period was more globalized in many ways than it is now. Japan prospered under the liberal international order. The Japanese people at the time believed that the country needed more land overseas to feed the increasing population, but the growing mainland economy gave jobs to the most Japanese population. The benefits the colonies conferred were not great, but some Japanese, particularly military and civil personnel in the colonies, were major beneficiaries. Japan was among the first to recover from the Great Depression, and by the middle of the 1930s was in a full employment situation. Japan did not need to export its population to other countries or to acquire territories through military action. The military expansion into China and the shift to a controlled economy in Japan and Manchukuo benefitted those who supplied goods to the military and obeyed the authorities. Such benefits, though, came at the expense of Japanese taxpayers and consumers, who were oppressed and were unable to criticize the military. The benefits gained from the military clampdown and a controlled economy were quite visible, but the benefits of the liberal international order often cannot be clearly seen. Japan still had a chance to recognize the true benefits of the liberal international order and the false benefits of colonization, military expansion, and a controlled economy, but could not. Wilsonian-Taisho moment was lost at the end of the 1930s.

The article presents an overview of the electoral politics of Punjab as it has evolved since partition from the vantage point of Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), the oldest surviving state level party in India. It is argued that SAD has been the catalyst behind the major shifts in the politics of the post-partition state. Besides being the most successful party, apart from the Congress, since the state's reorganization in 1966, it has had statewide organizational presence. The Panthic party also receives attention, as it claims to be the legitimate custodian of the Sikh community's religious and cultural interests whenever they are perceived to be under threat, and not just their political interests. Post-militancy, the leadership of Badal has been instrumental in affecting a critical shift in the SAD agenda as it now seeks support based on its record at the front of development and governance rather than by evoking ethnic issues. Significantly, while SAD has retained its core social constituency of the rural Sikhs, it has also succeeded in reaching out to the urban Hindus, including the sizable dalits by following a regionalist populist agenda. Its long-standing alliance with the BJP, an urban Hindutva party, has helped the party broaden its support base. Emergence of AAP as the third credible alternative in what has long been a bipolar polity, with the political power remaining either with the Congress or with the SAD/BJP combine, has posed a fresh challenge to the long entrenched parties, most significantly the SAD which is no longer an ideologically driven cadre based driven movement party.

The concept of late development is ubiquitous in political science. Scholars generally use the term to explain the state's role in the economy based upon the timing of a country's industrialization. Many consider Japan a quintessential example of state-driven late development. This article surveys the late development theories of Alexander Gerschenkron and Alice Amsden. It then appraises these theories based upon Japan's experience, demonstrating that neither accurately describes the state's role in Japan's industrialization.

To be clear, the argument is not that the state played no part in Japan's economic development. The question is whether late development offers an effective conceptual tool for explaining the causes, content, and timing of state action. There are many possible explanations of Japan's industrialization. Late development is only one of them, and not a very good one.

For voters with bounded rationality to emulate the formation of policy preferences under full information, party cues provide effective heuristics. Although the effect of party cuing has been robustly established in US-centered studies, the literature indicates that the characteristics of modern US politics, such as political polarization, magnify the effect of party cues. Therefore, the effect of party cues has been subject to only lenient empirical scrutiny, as empirical evidence exists primarily for the US. The present study aims to test the generalizability of the effect of party cues by focusing on Japan, where the ideological positions of parties have become increasingly vague. Furthermore, in light of the fact that the media system in Japan is more stable and ideologically polarized than its party system, we also test whether press cues (i.e. newspaper names) serve as substitutes for party cues. A survey experiment demonstrates that the effects of party and press cues in Japan are muted, and therefore these two types of cues do not serve as effective shortcuts in forming policy preferences. These results indicate that issue voting based on cognitive heuristics is difficult under an unstable multiparty system. Therefore, the extant literature on party cues that presupposes the US-style party system cannot be easily generalized to other political contexts.

The relationship between taxation and welfare regime in Taiwan has largely been unexplored to date. This study argues that since taxation capacity of the state decides the fate of new welfare programs such as the public provision of long-term care, it also affects the trajectory of the welfare regime. Through the analysis of Taiwan's tax revenue structure and tax base, this study reveals that Taiwan, unlike many new democracies, has shone away from relying on goods and services taxes but at the same time continues to provide preferential tax treatment for the corporate world. The result has been the erosion of tax base which makes introducing new welfare programs extremely difficult even when new policies allow for credit-claiming. Therefore, the familialistic welfare regime persists because of a weakened taxation capacity. Furthermore, the political determinants of the weakened taxation capacity can be found in identity-based party politics, an influential capital vs acquiescent labor and the limited bargaining power of civil society.

Recent scholarship of comparative authoritarianism suggests that party institutions contribute to regime resilience by facilitating power-sharing among the party elites and preventing the paramount leaders’ abuse of power that undermines political stability. Existing studies tend to focus on the empirical association between party organizations and regime resilience, whereas the actual effects of institutions on elite behavior receive less attention. This paper conducts an in-depth study of China's appointment system to examine whether the CCP's power-sharing institutions indeed constrain the person- nel authority of the party's paramount leader. Using a unique dataset of provincial leadership appointment from 1992 to 2014, the empirical analysis reveals that the General Secretary enjoys what can be described as ‘constrained supremacy’ in the making of personnel decisions: the leader can boost his own position by providing favorable treatment to key supporters, but the formal arrangement of collective decision-making constrains rampant reward of patronage that would unsettle the balance among the regime's top elites. The findings of the paper lay bare the diffculty of capturing the inner workings of authoritarian politics with broad, cross-national indicators of regime type; they also illustrate the complicated interaction between formal institutions and informal, personal logic of exercising power in authoritarian regimes.

Woodrow Wilson's name remains forever entwined with the Paris Peace Conference and efforts to transform geopolitics after 1918. Despite recent emphases on the power of this so-called ‘Wilsonian Moment,’ initiatives by the American president remain controversial, and his principal global legacy has come to be defined as the rise of nationalism in the developing world. In the historiography of modern Japan, Wilson and the Paris Conference have long been identified less as opportunities than as challenges, embodied unmistakably in Prince Konoe Fumimaro's 1918 condemnation of the conference and the proposed League of Nations as beneficial only to the USA and Britain. Reading back from 1931, historians of modern Japan have located in the Versailles settlement seeds of an epic new expansionary effort from the Manchurian Incident to the destruction of Imperial Japan. This paper, by contrast, analyzes the interwar years on their own terms and, in so doing, locates the structural foundations of a dramatic Japanese national departure. Wilson is more than a ‘moment’ in interwar Japan. Embraced at the very moment that a largely agricultural and regional nineteenth-century Japan becomes a twentieth-century industrial state and world power, it is potent enough to withstand the illiberal tide of the 1930s and 40s to blossom again after the Second World War.

The discovery of oil in commercial quantity in Nigeria in 1956 ushered in a period characterized by endemic crises of oil rents management and corporate insecurity. From 1999, democratic renewal, backed by excess oil rents returns, made the popular democratic control of oil wealth critical. The consequent rentier management of oil wealth, excluding the citizens and their huge expectations occasioned threats to national security, thus punctuating limited democratic control of oil wealth, or lack of it. Employing the ex-post-facto research design, primary data for the study were generated from focus group discussions with experts in the oil sector, while other sources were from observations of the Nigerian Navy, Nigerian Customs Service, Nigerian Police, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, National Bureau of Statistics, and the Central Bank of Nigeria. Logical induction was used to analyze the data. Anchored on a frustration-aggression conceptual and theoretical framework, the study found that deprivation of oil benefits to Nigerian citizens manifested in illegal oil bunkering, pipeline vandalization, cross-border smuggling of petroleum products, attacks on oil installations, kidnapping, and piracy, with attendant threats to national security.

Taxation is considered an important reason for the persistent inequality in developing countries. Developing countries tend to rely heavily on revenue from regressive taxation on consumption, such as the value-added tax, and fail to use progressive income taxes for revenue. Thailand is a typical case of those developing countries. Scholars argue that the median voter model does not apply to the developing countries because their ineffective income taxation results from the weak representation of the poor. A close examination of tax politics in Thailand, however, demonstrates that the low revenue from income taxation in Thailand is attributed to the strong representation of the poor rather than the weak one. This study details the process of Thai tax reform based on interviews with policymakers in Bangkok. It traces changes in the country's tax regulations and uses tax data collected at both the local and national level. Tax reforms, particularly those on income taxes after the 1997 financial crisis, have resulted in a decreased tax burden on the poor as well as the rich.

How is modern constitutionalism related to anticolonialism? This Article takes into account this question with a special reference to the case of Hồ Chi Minh. It argues that modern constitutionalism offers a powerful ideational and discursive weapon for the colonized people to struggle against colonialism. To understand this, the Article introduces the concept of ‘anticolonial constitutionalism’, defined as a form of political discourse in which anticolonialists employ the language and ideas of modern constitutionalism to combat the predatory colonial government and to express the aspirations to a constitutional government. Anticolonial constitutionalism emerges under three conditions, namely exploitatory and arbitrary colonialism, anticolonialism, and constitutional enlightenment. The case of Hồ Chí Minh illustrates this phenomenon well. When Vietnam was under French colonialism as a part of French Indochina during the first half of the twentieth century, Vietnamese anticolonialism was vehement, and different anticolonialists employed the language and ideas of constitutionalism to oppose the colonial government. One of them was Hồ Chí Minh, considered by many Vietnamese as the father and icon of the nation. A tremendously influential anticolonialist, he was enlightened with constitutionalist knowledge and employed key ideas of modern constitutionalism, namely a written constitution, the rule of law, popular sovereignty, and fundamental rights to struggle against French colonialism and to express such aspirations to a constitutional government in Vietnam. This study has implications for the trajectory of constitutionalism in contemporary Vietnam given the continuing influence of Hồ Chí Minh's constitutionalist discourse in the country nowadays. More generally, this study has implications for the relationship between constitutionalism and anticolonialism.

Albeit with little reference to Woodrow Wilson, Yanaihara Tadao, the Chair of Colonial Policy at Tokyo Imperial University in the 1920s and 1930s, and a pious Christian, adapted the core ideas of Wilsonian liberalism such as national self-determination, multilateralism, and democracy to the political and legal framework of imperial Japan. Yanaihara advocated the principle of autonomy for the Japanese empire to transform itself into the core of a liberal international order. He articulated that the combination of colonialism and unfettered capitalism had detrimental effects on the colonized and advocated for a Japanese empire that reflected the voice of its colonized people. However, having seen little improvement in the status of the colonized, Yanaihara increasingly regarded Japanese pan-Asianist ideas in the 1930s as a cover-up of Japanese expansionism. Almost abandoning his earlier ideas about empire as a multiethnic society, he criticized Japan's military venture as economically unprofitable, and policies toward Manchuria as stoking the rise of Chinese nationalism. He advocated for the normative framework advanced by the Mandate System of the League of Nations as a way toward the universalization of sovereignty, and protection of stateless populations. The failure of the Wilsonian moment in Japan forced Yanaihara out of Tokyo Imperial University but also strengthened his inclination towards liberal internationalism.