To bolster its legitimacy, China's authoritarian regime has launched numerous anticorruption campaigns. Many of these anticorruption campaigns seemed tainted by intra-elite competition and only effective at deterring low- and mid-level cadres (i.e., ‘flies’). Yet, Xi's campaign differs notably from previous ones in his targeting of senior officials (i.e., ‘tigers’) and introduction of institutional changes. By integrating anti-corruption data with three waves of nationwide surveys conducted in 36 major cities in China (2011, 2012, and 2015), we explore and compare the impacts of anti-corruption campaigns on popular political support under Hu and Xi. Our analysis shows that the overall popular support has declined steadily overtime, despite the positive effects of Xi's anti-corruption campaign. Specifically, ordinary Chinese did react positively to Xi's anticorruption campaign. Xi's campaign, particularly his crackdown on ‘tigers,’ increased people's trust in the central government. However, the campaign fell short in restoring the decline of central and local government legitimacy.

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.

Regime change often exacerbates ethnic conflict. This article examines the curious case of Myanmar, where a 2021 military coup was met, on the surface, with broad-based resistance across a divided society. An important question that therefore arises is whether, below the surface, this unity also took a more positive form of national solidarity. Were deep ethnic cleavages intensified or alleviated by the 2021 coup? This question bears theoretical relevance for the study of ethnic conflict and has social relevance for a nation marked by a long history of civil war and a recent experience of genocide against Rohingya Muslims. The article engages in a systematic examination of 180 social media posts uploaded in Burmese by key opinion leaders both before and after the coup. A qualitative analysis of major positive and negative themes indicates a shift in attitudes. The quantitative analysis shows that ethnic relations, measured by a change in themes, ratings and virality, improved significantly in the immediate aftermath of Myanmar's 2021 coup.

This study evaluates dyadic representation, that is, the link between the policy preferences of the constituencies and their representatives in the Japanese Lower House (LH). More specifically, this study examines how the within-party variation in policy positions among party candidates corresponds with that across their districts. By examining a series of candidate surveys conducted between 2003 and 2012 as well as the local employment structure, this study maps the association between the policy preferences of constituencies and those of their district candidates for two major parties. Specifically, candidates were found to take more rural-oriented positions on economic policies when running in districts with rural employment structures, while there remained a clear difference between parties. Moreover, this study demonstrates that constituencies accord more votes to candidates who better represent their preferences, strengthening the link by electing those who fulfill the responsibility beyond their party label.

This article examines three Japan–South Korea postwar compensation cases: the comfort women issue, the Sakhalin Island forced labor issue, and Korean atomic bomb survivor issue. These compensation movements produced vastly different results, even though the basic policy directions for compensation provision in all three cases were similar. Japan's approach toward the comfort women problem has been a complete failure, while its treatment of the Sakhalin forced labor issue and the atomic bomb issues has been more successful. This article's explanation of the different outcomes focuses on the character and geographical base of the civic groups leading these compensation movements. In South Korea, women's rights activists spearheaded the comfort women compensation movement and related victim-relief activities. The Korean non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that assisted the comfort women treated this problem not only as a women's rights issue, but also as a nationalist issue. In contrast, the Red Cross, a politically neutral international organization, promoted the Sakhalin forced labor and atomic bomb issues. In short, the different receptions accorded to those championing the comfort women issue and those promoting the Sakhalin forced labor and atomic bomb issues depended on the principal agent of each compensation process. This article aims to provide some implications for successfully implementing postwar compensation policies. It suggests that, if successful postwar compensation policy depends on successful perpetrator–victim reconciliation, establishing solidarity between perpetrator and victim countries’ civic groups is important. This can only be facilitated through the depoliticized and transparent operation of leading NGOs both inside and outside the redressal-seeking nation.

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.

There is a consensus that the post-war Japanese foreign policy is based on the Yoshida Doctrine or Yoshida Line, which refers to the strategies of former Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who relied upon US military security, and maintained limited defense forces while focusing on economic recovery and growth. This paper reconsidered the Yoshida Doctrine, referencing multiple related arguments and evidence, reaching a conclusion that post-war Japanese foreign policy should not be called the Yoshida Doctrine or Yoshida Line. The Yoshida Doctrine is an analytical concept created by researchers in the 1980s to justify Japanese foreign policy. This was done in response to the domestic and foreign criticism of low-level military spending, despite the flourishing economy. The Yoshida Doctrine differs from other foreign policy doctrines and has no merit for being called a doctrine. Furthermore, the ideas supporting this doctrine are not based on definitive proof; rather, they merely represent Yoshida's image, and a spurious correlation, drawn between limited defense spending and high-economic growth. The analysis carried out in this study reveals that the Yoshida Doctrine is fundamentally flawed. As a result, this study insists that it is necessary to abandon the Yoshida Doctrine as a base for future research on Japanese diplomacy.

Previous studies had no consensus on whether a ‘mandate-divide’ exists between district and party-list legislators under the mixed-member system. I argued that previous studies ignored the role of the party. This article aims to explore the legislative consequences of the 2005 electoral reform and the role of parties in Taiwan. I analyzed the roll-call votes, considering abstention and absence as potential defection, along with interviews. The data cover from the fifth to eighth Legislative Yuan, two periods each before and after the electoral reform. The findings show that district legislators tended to defect from the party line than list proportional representation (PR) members in pre- and post-reform periods. However, district legislators only tended to be absent from the voting than list PR members after the electoral reform. Mandate-divide was present throughout the period, but differences were more salient before the reform. Besides, evidence stressing the influence of parties was revealed in the interviews. Party leaders enforce various punishments to enforce party discipline. The role of party became more important after the electoral reform. District legislators have higher absence rate after the electoral reform because they need to engage more in constituency service or avoid expressing their position on controversial issues. The ruling party tends to sanction the absence when they have majority in parliament.

This study examines the attitudinal and behavioral consequences of holding local elections in China. Using survey data to test the propositions that elections do not alleviate pressure from society butreasonably make state–society conflict manageable for the Chinese Communist regime, evidence suggests that being aware of elections is negatively associated with citizens' involvement in collective activities that would destabilize the regime. Instead, the awareness of elections is positively correlated with people's willingness to use the institutionalized mechanism, letters and visits (shangfang), to solve their concerns. The findings imply that although elections may help buttress China's authoritarian rule, the survivability of the Chinese Communist Party is still dependent on whether existing institutions can function well in reducing public grievances.

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.

This paper explores how Japan's aging population impacts the politics of monetary policy. Previous research suggests that the elderly have a variety of distinct policy preferences. Given that elderly voters also have higher voting rates, the rapid greying of the population could have significant effects on distributive struggles over economic policy across much of the developed world. In Japan, aging is advancing rapidly, and the central bank has engaged in massive monetary stimulus to induce inflation, which existing work suggests the elderly should oppose. Analyzing results from three surveys, this paper has three central findings: (1) the elderly tend to have higher inflation aversion, (2) the elderly display some opposition to quantitative easing (QE), and (3) despite such policy preferences, the concentration of elderly in electoral districts has no significant effect on the preferences either of legislative incumbents or candidates. The third finding is attributable to the fact that elderly opposition to QE is moderated by their partisan identification. Elderly Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) voters have systematically lower opposition to QE, likely reflecting that these voters have aligned their preferences with the LDP's policies.

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has dominated Japanese politics since its foundation in 1955. The party's ability to support the interests of small farmers and its commitment to the middle-class through redistributive economic policies have been regarded as among the primary factors leading to its prolonged hegemony. Yet, the LDP has occasionally relied on non-economic political appeals addressing rather conservative issues such as Japan's military force and the country's traditional values. These appeals have significantly intensified under the premiership of Junichirō Koizumi and his successor Shinzō Abe, whose authoritative leadership styles and nationalist agendas reveal the relevance of non-economic values. This study focuses on the role of authoritarian values in shaping vote choice in twenty-first century Japan. Previously emphasized in The Japanese Voter, the authority–liberty dimension has gradually lost prominence in recent models of voting behavior, where socio-economic factors have had a central role in explaining vote choice. Our inquiry places new emphasis on this value dimension and provides evidence for the enduring relevance of individual authoritarian dispositions in models of vote choice.

Previous studies have discussed the effects of electoral competition on corruption, but only a few explored the effects of political power shifts – the results of electoral competition. To fill the gap, this study tests hypotheses that three types of political power shifts (the shifts of individual local government heads, local government ruling party, and local council majority) reduce the corruption (overall, external, and internal), with a panel data set of 226 Korean local governments. The empirical study shows that only shifts in the local government head reduce internal corruption. The other dependent and independent variables do not have any significant relationships. This can be because of structural matters of Korean local politics such as strong mayor-weak council and the closed local elite networks.

Under what conditions do policy disagreements cause parties to split? Before the general elections in 2017 in Japan, the Minshin, the largest opposition party, split, and the major opposition camp collapsed into three parties. Disagreement about defense policy was rapidly politicized by the founding leader of a new party, Hope. Some members were motivated to switch to Hope and split the Minshin. Why did the disagreement about defense policy, which had long existed but was inactive, become an issue that led to a major split? To answer these questions, we used Aldrich–Mckelvey and Blackbox transpose scalings to analyze the data from an expert survey about issue positions and the salience of party policies. The variance in experts' responses was also examined to consider whether parties consistently and clearly distinguish their policy positions. Party positions on defense policy were clearly distinguished and revealed a split among splinter parties. However, the party positions clearly converged on the environment, decentralization, and other policies in a two-dimensional space, which indicated the unity of the major opposition camp. Moreover, different item functioning (DIF) analysis revealed a high variance (i.e., negative weight) on the issue salience of defense policy, which indicated its politicization immediately before the split. Overall results indicated that the politicization of defense policy contributed to weakening party cohesion and the party was split over disagreement about it. This implies that party switching is caused by policy disagreement but also hinges critically on which policy is politicized as an issue for party unity.

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 the contemporary world order, one of the most attention-getting issues is the recent consolidation of defense and strategic engagement between China and Russia, specifically since the early 2010s. Throughout a critical juncture angle, this study attempts to explain what led to the reinforcement of these China–Russia relations, and how their strategic ties have evolved. This study argues that the three critical junctures driven by the USA – the US Pivot to Asia, the Ukraine Crisis and the US-led sanctions against Russia, and the US THAAD deployment to Korea – aggravated China and Russia's perception of threat from the USA, which contributed to the incremental China–Russia strategic and defense ties.

In this research note we examine the impacts of legislators' age on their representational behavior in Hong Kong by conducting content analyses of the questions raised by members of the Hong Kong legislature (LegCo) at the plenary meetings from 1998 to 2016. We explore whether young legislators were more likely than older legislators to represent youth interests. Our results show that legislators' age did not significantly affect their representational behavior. We propose three factors of this null finding. The first concerns the relatively low voter turnout among young people in Hong Kong. The second is related to the career incentives of legislators in authoritarian legislature. The last factor is the political affiliation of young legislators in Hong Kong.

How do electoral coalition signals affect voters' perceptions of party positions and coalition behavior in parliamentary democracies? Scholars have found that coalition signals can influence how voters view policy positions of parties. Extending research on the impact of government coalition participation on voter perceptions, a recent study found that Spanish voters update their perceptions of party positions when they receive a signal that a party joined an electoral coalition, believing it to be farther to the left (right) if the signal was of a left- (right-)leaning coalition. That study also found, in agreement with the literature, that electoral coalition signals lead to expectations of future coalition behavior. Much of the literature on electoral coalitions focuses on parliamentary democracies in Europe that use proportional representation. Since the effects of electoral coalitions might vary across contexts, we conduct a similar survey experiment in Japan, a parliamentary democracy that uses a mixed electoral system with an important disproportional component. We find no evidence that electoral coalition signals affect how Japanese voters view the ideological positions of parties, a result that matches a similar analysis conducted in Sweden. However, some coalition signals – if they contain new information – do increase Japanese respondents' expectations that certain coalitions are more likely to form in the future.

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.

Japan has experienced many of the factors associated with populism, but has not experienced an upsurge of populism in national-level politics. We posit that the dominant frames in the Japanese print media coverage of populism form a crucial and overlooked part of the explanation for the absence of populism. Our qualitative human-coded analysis of quality and tabloid coverage demonstrates that overall, the Japanese newspapers act as gatekeepers and set an agenda that is unfavorable for right-wing populism. The press engage in ‘media populism’ and frame populism – and alternatives to the status quo more generally – as a threat. Moreover, the print media are not hostile to immigrants in ways that populists could leverage.