It is often asserted that Vietnam is balancing against China, or that it will or should. But does this assertion align with the empirical foreign policy behaviors of Vietnam? Indeed, Vietnam represents a case of a country that should be particularly cautious about China. To be sure it is a fraternal communist brother, but it is also economically entangled—with the down- and upsides of leverage—and geographically close with a history of disputes and outright war. This article argues that existing literature often neglects the ample information that China and Vietnam have about each. Years of engagement have enabled Vietnam and China to reach a modus vivendi that can settle disputes and permit a muted military response to Chinese risks. The lack of existential threat further dissuades Vietnamese leaders from moving closer to extra-regional powers such as the United States. That a key member of the potential balancing coalition against China doesn't engage in balancing behavior, calls into question US Indo-Pacific strategies premised on the assumption that countries will “soft align” or openly join with the US to contain China.

We explore whether international disputes harm commerce by galvanizing consumer boycotts of foreign products. Boycotts increase the social penalty of owning goods associated with a foreign adversary, offsetting individual incentives to free ride or discount the utility of participation. By harming international commerce, boycotts can help reveal information about resolve and avoid more costly forms of conflict. Using administrative data on the universe of new passenger vehicle registration records in China from 2009 to 2015, we demonstrate that consumer boycotts that arose amid tensions between China and Japan over a territorial dispute in 2012 had significant and persistent effects on vehicle sales, especially in cities that witnessed anti-Japanese street demonstrations. The market share of Japanese brands dropped substantially during and after the boycott with long lasting effects. Our analysis provides concrete evidence of the short- and long-term impacts of international tensions on economic activities.

The incumbent-led subversion of democracy represents the most prevalent form of democratic backsliding in recent decades. A central puzzle in this mode of backsliding is why these incumbents enjoy popular support despite their actions against democracy. We address this puzzle using the case of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Although some Philippine analysts have speculated that his popularity was inflated due to social desirability bias (SDB) among survey respondents, there has been limited empirical examination. Our pre-registered list experiment surveys conducted in February/March 2021 detected SBD-induced overreporting at about 39 percentage points in face-to-face surveys and 28 percentage points in online surveys. We also found that the poor Mindanaoans, and those who believed their neighbors supported Duterte, were more likely to respond according to SDB. These possibly counter-intuitive results should be interpreted with caution because the survey was conducted during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, and the findings cannot necessarily be extrapolated to the other period of his presidency. Nevertheless, this study suggests that preference falsification could be an alternative explanation for the puzzle of popular incumbents in democratic backsliding.

Is political polarization in Indonesia here to stay? For years, scholarly consensus on partisanship in Indonesia viewed weak partisan identity, collusive party behavior, and the predominance of personality as features of a system that would prevent the emergence of deep polarization. In the wake of religious and ethnic mobilizations during three contentious elections, the question of whether polarization has come to Indonesia is increasingly salient. Where previous studies have focused on elite polarization, we focus on whether polarization has a mass base. Using an original, nationally representative survey of 1,520 Indonesian adults shortly before the 2019 election, we tested whether political preferences in Indonesia reflected any of four underlying sets of resentment—religious, anti-Chinese, anti-Java, or regional. We found links of varying strength between each of these resentments and political preferences. Analyzing the sources of resentments, we find evidence that different resentments may travel through different channels: religious resentment through organizational membership, anti-Chinese resentment through exposure to social media, regional resentment through awareness of regional resource disparities, and resentment of Java through having experienced the old politics of Java—Outer Islands conflict. These links between political affiliation and resentment suggest that polarization is here to stay, so long as politicians make use of real, underlying resentments.

In new democracies, what is the role of nationalism in terms of democratic behavior such as voter turnout? Previous studies have found that, in Western democracies, constructive national pride increases voter turnout, while blind national pride decreases it. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to new democracies. Given different political contexts, we argue that blind national pride can boost turnout in some new democracies that have lingering authoritarian legacies. Using the case of South Korea, we offer a theory about the relationship between blind national pride and voter turnout. We show that, in contrast to the West, blind national pride is positively associated with turnout in South Korea, and that the relationship appears more robust among both older cohorts, who experienced authoritarianism directly in the recent past, and those with conservative ideologies.

In autocracies, party membership offers benefits to citizens who join the ruling party. The recruitment process consists of (i) citizens' applying to become party members, followed by (ii) ruling parties' selection among applicants. Hence, I propose that ruling parties can face a “recruitment dilemma” when the citizens who apply for party membership with an eye on its benefits do not overlap with the ruling party's targeted population. Previous research assumes that the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) interest in co-opting white-collar workers is matched by those workers’ interest in becoming party members. However, it is their emergence as an essential social group that changed the CCP membership's pattern, leading it to adapt its co-optation strategy to solve the recruitment dilemma. Using surveys across multiple waves between 2005 and 2017, I show (i) changes in application patterns, (ii) the CCP's recruitment dilemma when they receive applications from more laborers than white-collar workers, and (iii) the CCP solution of rejecting laborers in favor of white-collar workers.

Nuclear and missile tests by North Korea, which directly threaten China's national interests, regional stability, and economic development, have consistently irritated China. Since the 1950s, China and North Korea have held high-level meetings aimed at discussing and improving their bilateral relationship. Using empirical analysis, this study attempts to examine the impact of these meetings on North Korea's missile and nuclear tests. The study argues that as the frequency of high-level meetings between China and North Korea increases, North Korea's provocative actions decrease. The high-level meetings serve to address the issue of incomplete information, create avenues for economic aid and cooperation, and reduce the likelihood of future nuclear and missile tests. The empirical findings indicate that while high-level meetings with or without the presence of top leaders can lead to a reduction in missile tests by North Korea, only summits between China and North Korea have a significant impact on the reduction of nuclear tests by North Korea.