This study discusses why South Korea has not always succeeded in the ‘entrepreneurial state’ approach – defined as policy efforts to move away from the old developmental state model to a new industrial system of innovation in which small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are incorporated – by focusing on the limitation of new semiconductor industrial policies of the former Moon Jae-in government (2017–2022). Conventionally, many scholars have exclusively ascribed this limitation to large businesses' (chaebol's) practice of in-house production. Building upon historical institutionalism and its concept of increasing returns, alternatively, we shift attention to the way the Moon government played its entrepreneurial role. We argue that, as the government sought increasing returns from the developmental state idea and institution, the likelihood of wider SME incorporation decreased. Nationalism enabled the government to control the policymaking process but made it difficult to obtain new information through policy contestation. The government depended on developmental alliance to increase policy visibility through the chaebol's capabilities, but demands of small firms were downplayed. This study proposes to construct a more theoretical framework with which to explain how the old political economy model affects new entrepreneurial goals.

Why study Japan? Research on contemporary Japanese politics and foreign policy faces headwinds from the relative geopolitical decline of Japan and scholars skeptical about single-country studies. An overview of Japanese politics publications in English-language journals over the past four decades suggests the subfield remains active and robust. However, there is still room to grow. I argue that Japan is a harbinger state, which experiences many challenges before others in the international system. As such, studying Japan can inform both scholars and policymakers about the political challenges other countries are likely to confront in the future. In turn, scholarship on Japan offers a critical opportunity to develop theoretical insights, assess early empirical evidence, and offer policy lessons about emerging challenges and the political contestation surrounding them. I consider the reasons why Japan so often emerges as a harbinger across issue areas and suggest areas for ongoing scholarly attention.

The editors and authors provide a brief postscript about the contributions and the legacy of Susan Pharr for each author and the field of Japanese politics.

This paper highlights the concept of dignity as the cornerstone that justifies hate speech regulations in democratic societies. In political theory and constitutional law, the primacy of dignity as the moral and legislative justification for regulating hate speech has already been addressed by dignitarianism, especially in the course of debate with free speech advocates. We aim to augment this important claim in the normative literature with empirical data. Specifically, based on our survey conducted in Japan, where its first national anti-hate speech law had only recently been enacted and ordinary citizens were thus less predisposed of the debate, we show that citizens' concerns about the dignity of a targeted victim lead them to support regulations. Our analysis further clarifies the possible mechanisms of the dignitarian rationale, revealing not only the people's public-centered expectation regarding the societal consequences of hate speech, which dignitarians emphasized, but also the importance of more individual-based judgments regarding morality and justice, in shaping their regulatory attitudes.

Recent scholarly efforts to reveal the political effects of transnational terrorism are encouraging. They contribute to our understanding of how terrorism affects the targeted societies. We attempt to extend this line of research by examining the political impact of domestic terrorism. Domestic incidents overwhelmingly outnumber transnational incidents. In addition, the differences between domestic and transnational incidents may produce political outcomes. We examine the impact of domestic terrorism on the political survival of national leaders in the targeted societies. Our cross-national time-series analysis on a worldwide sample of 172 countries over the 1970–2014 period shows that domestic terrorism has a significant positive impact on leadership change. This impact is robust to various estimation techniques. This result suggests that heightened incidents of domestic terrorism hasten the removal of incumbent leaders in the targeted societies.

This paper mainly deals with the relationship between citizens' levels of news exposure and their behaviors toward the president's corruption scandal in South Korea. In particular, we examine how an individual's level of news exposure affected his/her level of political information about the corruption scandal, perception of then President Park Geun-hye's responsibility for corruption, and participation in anti-Park protests or counter-protests. In this paper, we argue that more exposure to consistent news reports of the president's corruption increases the amount of information citizens with different political dispositions have in common. The more their sets of political information overlap, the closer their perceptions and behavioral choices regarding a corruption scandal are likely to be.

This study explores whether and under what conditions foreign aid can help improve the donor country's image in countries that did not receive aid. We identified a world heritage site restoration project, which is visible, localized, has no political strings attached, and deals with global public good, as a most-likely type of foreign aid that can generate this positive effect. In light of the literature suggesting that tensions with the target country undermine public diplomacy effectiveness, we expect the positive effect will be more pronounced in non-recipient countries with which the donor country has a more amicable relationship. To empirically investigate our argument, we field a survey experiment in a developed non-aid-recipient country, Australia. We provide information to the Australian public about an aid project to restore the Angkor Monument in Cambodia conducted either by China or South Korea. We find that information on Korea's aid to Cambodia improves the image of Korea and the willingness to cooperate with the Korean government among Australians. No such effect, however, is observed in the case of similar aid by China whose relations with Australia have been strained in multiple domains. Our findings have policy implications for donor countries seeking to utilize the soft power element of foreign aid as a public diplomacy tool.