Malaysia has long been viewed as a model of a “moderate” Islamic polity. Muslims and non-Muslims have enjoyed the same civil and political rights, and Islamic parties have competed alongside secular ones in periodic elections, in spite of the distinctly Islamic timbre of Malaysia's state and society. Growing domestic political volatility, however, has led many to question the viability of political moderation. Mounting Islamism among the public, reflected both in the rise of Islamic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and in the greater priority placed on public displays and enforcement of piety, has spurred and been reinforced by increasingly Islamist political parties. Discussions of political change have come to revolve largely around the place of Islam in party platforms and state institutions. The relative position of Muslim and non-Muslim citizens in the polity has altered with the incremental Islamization of state and society, and observing religious rituals has become a matter as much of state law as of personal choice for Muslims. Internationally, too, Malaysia has come to emphasize more its ties with non-Western and especially Muslim-majority states. Islam has thus become increasingly central to Malaysian politics—even though only slightly more than half the population (all ethnic Malays, and a small proportion of Indians, Chinese, and others) is Muslim.

Much has been written on the triangular, and increasingly high-profile, China-Taiwan-US relations. However, scholars have yet to apply Diversionary Theory to the China-Taiwan dyad. DT argues that leaders may resort to international conflict when domestic political and economic situations become troublesome, aiming at directing public attention away from problems at home. While creation of explicit military conflict in the Taiwan Strait by Taipei is deemed quite unlikely, more subtle processes of diversion might be expected instead. This article applies a variant on DT to assess whether leaders in Taipei have used rhetoric about Taiwan independence or unification as a distraction from domestic problems during the years leading up to Taiwan's 2004 presidential election. We find that, as the president's approval sinks, pro-independence rhetoric becomes more likely. Overall, the results of this study confirm extension of DT to the case of Taiwan and encourage further research applied to middle powers.

Why do Chinese traders along the China–North Korea border turn to informal trade, and what does it provide for them? Using a unique set of interviews with Chinese formal and informal traders operating in North Korea, we argue that the strategies of informal trade are a calculated response to certain types of risk. In doing so, we introduce a typology of risks and the mechanisms by which informal trade allows traders to mitigate those risks. Because informal traders bypass trade regulations and border checkpoints, they are able to mitigate risk more cheaply than formal traders in some cases and can overcome barriers that can cause failure in formal trade. Informal traders can thus maintain trade in many circumstances, including across North Korean personnel instability and policy reversals, Chinese sanctions enforcement, and delays and smuggling crackdowns on both sides of the border.

How do the president's calculations in achieving policy goals shape the allocation of cabinet portfolios? Despite the growing literature on presidential cabinet appointments, this question has barely been addressed. I argue that cabinet appointments are strongly affected not only by presidential incentives to effectively deliver their key policy commitments but also by their interest in having their administration maintain strong political leverage. Through an analysis of portfolio allocations in South Korea after democratization, I demonstrate that the posts wherein ministers can influence the government's overall reputation typically go to nonpartisan professionals ideologically aligned with presidents, while the posts wherein ministers can exert legislators' influence generally go to senior copartisans. My findings highlight a critical difference in presidential portfolio allocation from parliamentary democracies, where key posts tend to be reserved for senior parliamentarians from the ruling party.

Three perspectives on the determinants of Japan's official development assistance (ODA) program are often represented as distinct, valid explanations of the aid program. Yet few studies have attempted to simultaneously test the hypotheses generated from all three perspectives in a global study of Japanese aid flows. This study seeks to improve the understanding of the Japanese ODA program by addressing some of the gaps in the existing literature. Providing a comprehensive analysis, the article investigates the effects of different political and economic variables on Japanese aid disbursement in eighty-six countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East from 1979 to 2002. The findings of the study make several contributions to the literature. First, the results provide strong support for the claim that humanitarian concerns, as measured by poverty and human rights conditions in recipient countries, are important determinants of aid allocation. Second, although much of the previous literature has hypothesized that Japan's aid program seeks to promote Japan's economic interests, little empirical support for this view is found in the present study. Likewise, the disbursement pattern of ODA was associated with only a limited number of US security interests; US economic interests are shown to have no effect on ODA.

In this article I seek to explain the microfoundations of patronage politics in the developing world. Two distinct approaches have evolved in the literature. One puts emphasis on the demand side, arguing that patronage persists because poor voters tend to desire individualistic goods over policy. The other focuses on the supply side: few politicians offer programmatic policy, so voters have no alternative but to vote for the politicians who distribute patronage. In this study I test those competing theories using original data from Jakarta, Indonesia. I find evidence supporting the demand-side theory: when both patronage and policy are offered, poor, less-educated voters tend to demand patronage, such as jobs and money, over national programs like free education and universal health care, whereas well-off, better-educated voters tend to prefer the national policies. However, the study also reveals that demands for patronage are affected by level of participation in politics: those who voted in previous elections and those who affiliate with a political party are more likely to demand patronage. This microfoundational evidence helps to explain the persistence of patronage politics in places of widespread poverty.

Migration to electoral autocracies has become increasingly common. Extant studies, however, accord little attention to the immigrants' influences on the domestic politics of these regimes. We argue that immigrants have attributes (status quo bias and lack of prior exposure to local politics) that make them an attractive co-optation target of the authoritarian regime. We provide a case study of mainland Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong to illustrate our argument. Since the sovereignty transfer, the Hong Kong government has devised various schemes to attract these immigrants, while pro-establishment political parties and groups have actively sought to co-opt them. Using two distinct public opinion surveys, we also find that immigrants are more likely to approve of the political and economic status quo, and less likely to vote for pro-democracy opposition parties than the natives. In addition, we find no evidence that exposure to political information can change the immigrants' vote choice.

We explore in this article an institutional foundation of agricultural protectionism in Japan, a country long recognized as resisting international pressures to open up its rice market. Using our qualitative analysis of postwar politics of agricultural protectionism and a simple formal model, we argue that farmers in Japan have stronger incentives to mobilize electoral support for the governing party in multimember district systems than in single-member district systems, because the marginal effects of mobilization on policy benefits are different under these electoral systems. Our empirical findings corroborate this claim and provide implications for the gradual changes in Japan's farm policies occurring after the electoral reform in 1994.

Observers and practitioners of Sino-Korean relations in both the pre- and post-nineteenth century have utilized powerful “comforting fictions” to describe and justify power asymmetry. In the pre-nineteenth-century period, the idea of the “tribute system” put a veneer of Confucian benevolence on what a closer examination reveals to have been unequal and coercive relations. Western proponents of the Westphalian system of sovereign equality saw the new norms of international relations as potentially liberating to Korea, a way to free Korea from the Chinese yoke. However, Westphalian equality, too, was a comforting fiction that masked the reality of imperialism—both formal and informal. The Qing empire played a heretofore neglected role in both types of unequal coercive relations between Korea and the outside world.

What explains Korea's success in surviving as an independent state for over 2,000 years, not annexed to China, when it shares a border with this powerful imperial neighbor? I argue that diplomatic ritual can be conducive to managing asymmetric power relations and that the Korean state and the Chinese state prior to the nineteenth century used the diplomatic ritual of investiture in a strategic manner as a signaling mechanism to manage the expectations of each side. Drawing insights from ritual studies, I offer three specific mechanisms: (1) regularity and precision, (2) strategic ambiguity, and (3) the manipulation of symbols, through which the ritualization of power relations reduces the tension arising from the disparity in power. The empirical evidence comes from an investigation of a total of sixteen investiture cases between Chosòn Korea and Ming China between 1392 and 1644. It shows that the granting and seeking of investiture on both sides was not only a way of signaling their commitment to the status quo, but also a medium of negative soft power through which the stronger side could change the status quo relations to its favor using the symbolic power embedded in the investiture ritual.

Democratization should reduce incentives to engage in corruption, by expanding the size of the winning coalition, heightening transparency, increasing accountability to the electorate, and multiplying the number of veto points required for a corrupt deal. Yet many young, consolidated democracies, such as South Korea, have recorded higher levels of perceived corruption following democratization.

I argue that the apparently higher level of corruption accompanying democratization results from overdependence on perception surveys to measure corruption. As democratization frees the press, more stories of graft lead the public to higher levels of perceived corruption without any corresponding rise in real corruption. A more effective measurement strategy is to objectively “follow the money,” by focusing on outflows of rents and any related personal receipt of favors by relevant officials. Applied to the Korean case, contrary to popular perceptions of increased corruption, objective measurement of elite corruption reveals that democratization produced a sharp reduction in the corrupt exchange of rents through industrial restructuring programs, bank lending, and government procurement contracts.

Deepening economic ties across the Taiwan Strait are widely believed by analysts and scholars to be a stabilizing force in cross-Strait political relations. Yet within the broader international relations literature, the relationship between economic interdependence and military conflict continues to be controversial. This article examines the impact of growing cross-Strait economic links on the likelihood of cross-Strait military conflict within the context of this broader literature. A description of three separate causal mechanisms—identified in the existing literature—through which economic ties could promote peace is followed by a discussion of how broadly these processes are operating in the Taiwan Strait case. Although the article does not rule out the possibility that economic integration across the Strait makes a military confrontation less likely, it shows that the evidence in support of such a proposition is ambiguous.

There is significant variance in the strategies of labor market flexibility under the same pressure of globalization. This article attempts to explain that variance by examining closely the Korean case, with particular attention to the response of labor, one of the most intractable actors in the reform process. After theorizing the nature of social welfare as a quasi-collective good and hypothesizing labor's responses based on Olson's theory of collective action, the study seeks to explain Korea's low commitment to flexicurity and the resultant dualism in the labor market. The core argument here is that the collective action problem among atomized corporate unions has led to high employment protection for regular workers in big business at the expense of marginal workers without appropriate social protection.

Responding to conflict, in Indonesia and elsewhere, requires an understanding of its distribution, forms, and impacts. In this article, we outline an attempt to use local newspaper monitoring to measure the levels and impacts of violent conflict during the period 2001–2003 in two Indonesian provinces (East Java and NTT). We also assess variation in incidence, impact, and form across and within areas. The study data suggest first that previous research has vastly underestimated the impacts of violent conflict in Indonesia. Comparing our data with those of the previous attempt to use newspapers to map conflict in Indonesia (by the UN Support Facility for Indonesian Recovery [UNSFIR]), we find three times as many deaths from collective violence. These differences are a function of the level of news sources used, with provincial papers picking up only a small proportion of deaths in our research areas. Further, we argue that the impacts of certain types of violence between individuals should be included, leading to even higher figures. Second, our data call into question the dictum that violence in Indonesia is concentrated in a small number of regions. While there is variation between districts, we record large impacts from collective violence in areas not previously considered conflict-prone. Third, substantial variations in conflict form are found across regions, and these result in different kinds of impacts. This underlines the importance of consideration of the role of local factors in driving conflicts and suggests that approaches must be tailored to local conditions. Finally, we demonstrate that using local newspapers to measure and analyze conflicts presents a useful tool for understanding conflict in Indonesia. The use of subprovincial news sources captures more accurate estimates of conflict incidence than other methods, such as provincial newspaper mapping or surveying. It can also provide a basis for a deeper understanding of variations in patterns of conflict across areas and provide insights into how we might respond.

The purges of former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang, former Central Military Commission Vice Chairman Xu Caihou, and the former head of the Central Committee Office Ling Jihua in 2014 re-excited a long-standing debate in the field of elite Chinese politics: how contentious is politics at the elite level? On the face of it, these purges, as well as the arrests of ninety nine senior officials associated with these three individuals and with other cases, seem to prove that elite politics remains highly contentious at the top (People's Daily 2015). This outcome was surprising considering that decades of institution building had taken place after the Cultural Revolution. However, proponents of institutionalized politics in the CCP argue that the leadership had a genuine desire to clean house, and that these arrests, even if politically motivated, instilled a renewed discipline in the party. Once the “bad apples” were eliminated, the leadership under Xi Jinping would have continued on the road of institutionalization (Li 2014). Cadre promotion institutions, regular meetings of the Politburo and its standing committee, party congresses, and retirement rules remain largely unaffected by the purges and will continue to ensure relatively harmonious decision making and predictable successions in the foreseeable future.

China's Labor Contract Law came into force on January 1, 2008. One of several important legislative acts aimed at improving the processing of labor grievances through mediation, arbitration, and litigation, and averting collective labor protest, it provides that all employed persons must work under written individual employment contracts. We evaluate the legislation's impact nationally and by province for the years before and after the law's adoption. Observing that the law's effect varied substantially across provinces, we estimate the effects of the law, controlling for time, development level, export intensity, and migrant labor share, on the volume of disputes by province using a cross-sectional time series design. We also examine the law's impact on the incidence of collective disputes and the grounds for disputes. We find that the law significantly increased the volume of labor disputes, raising questions about the relative costliness of the government's strategy for managing employment relations.

Japan's remarkable postwar growth spurt in the 1960s would not have been possible without Japan's alliance with the United States. Policy makers, political scientists, economists, historians, and journalists on both sides of the Pacific have made this claim, but no study has yet tested it with modern statistical methods. In this article, we compare the economic growth trajectories of Japan and a statistically constructed “synthetic” Japan, which had a similar profile until the late 1950s but did not experience the consolidation of the US–Japan alliance, a process that began in 1958 and culminated with the signing of a formal defense pact in January 1960. We find that Japan's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) grew much faster than the synthetic Japan's from 1958 to 1968. We substantiate these results with in-depth historical analyses on how the United States facilitated Japan's economic miracle.

Are preferential trade agreements (PTAs) in the Asia-Pacific region merely a political phenomenon with no economic basis, as some critics say? I challenge this interpretation; in this article I present an explanatory model based on intra-industry trade to indicate what economic interests should drive Japanese and South Korean PTAs with ASEAN partners, and derive specific predictions. An analysis of the actual tariff barrier elimination in the agreements suggests important, but highly specific, economic benefits. First, preference margins are substantively greater for intra-industry trade, and second, intra-industry trade is much less likely to be excluded from tariff reductions when imported into Japan or South Korea. This indicates that PTAs help firms specialize their production throughout the region, and provides an economic rationale for these agreements. A qualitative case study of the Japan-Malaysia PTA and a statistical analysis of tariff liberalization in the PTAs of Japan and South Korea with the ASEAN countries support this view.

This paper discusses area, regional, and international relations studies as seen from the vantage point of the United States. Part I situates the issue of regionalism in the current debate about conceptualizing international relations since the end of the Cold War and at the dawn of a new millennium. Against the historical backdrop of a powerful case for area studies made soon after the end of World War II, Part II focuses attention on the crosscurrents that are affecting area studies from three different directions: (1) disciplinary-based, scientific critics who value nomothetic approaches more than contextualization; (2) cultural critiques developed from the perspective of the humanities and, at times, post-modernism; and (3) the growing emphasis on cross-regional studies that seek to blend and incorporate elements from both scientific and humanistic perspectives. Part III concludes with some brief reflections on the relations, in the classroom, between areas, regional and international studies.