Americans' feelings about foreign countries are embedded in foreign policy belief systems and affect policy preferences. The analysis of nine surveys of the US general public conducted between 1978 and 2006 indicates that on average Americans have had rather lukewarm or slightly cool, nearly neutral, feelings toward China, India, South Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia; warm feelings toward Japan and Australia; and cold feelings toward North Korea and (at least since 2001) toward Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Individuals' feelings are affected by certain personal and social characteristics. High levels of formal education tend to make people feel considerably warmer toward most of these countries—especially Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India. Education increases information: those who know more about the world generally express warmer feelings. But most important are internationalist attitudes, especially putting a relatively low priority on US domestic threats and concerns, embracing capitalism and world markets, and espousing world antipoverty goals. National security considerations play only a limited part. Policy implications are discussed.

Village elections are a democratic institution in one of the most resilient authoritarian regimes in the world. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has promoted village elections over the past twenty years, but not elections at higher levels. I present a game-theoretic model in which candidates would engage in vote buying when competing in a small electorate but not when competing in a larger electorate. The model's equilibrium outcome implies that the logic of China's introduction of village elections inherently limits this democratic reform to the grassroots level. Elections for higher levels of government would be dangerous to the regime because they would lead candidates to create substantive policy platforms and political organizations. Thus, rather than being an experiment that has failed to lead to further reforms, village democracy is self-limiting by design.

While processes of land-use change have triggered conflicts across Asia, our knowledge of the responses of affected communities is largely based on case-studies. This review essay addresses this challenge by reviewing and synthesizing 49 studies of conflicts between rural communities and companies in order to identify salient characteristics of anti-corporate activism in Indonesia. We find that, in contrast to the ‘rightful resistance’ observed elsewhere, the strategies employed by rural communities in Indonesia are remarkably “rightless” as both their discourse and their conflict resolution efforts are marked by a remarkable irrelevance of laws, regulations and courts. Communities frame their claims mostly in terms of customary laws while largely relying on informal mediation by local authorities. We attribute this “rightless” character of land-use change conflicts to the weak legal protection of land rights in Indonesia and the relative powerlessness of communities in the face of collusion between authorities and companies.

With the globalization of Chinese capital, economic statecraft has become an increasingly prominent component of China's foreign policy. In this article, I examine China's use of economic inducements in developed democracies, a topic of growing concern for policymakers, focusing on the case of Australia. I show how Beijing's attempts to coopt public voices and influence Australia's foreign policy using non-transparent political donations and academic funding generated a strong backlash. At the same time, economic interdependence has provided a buffering effect, with key domestic actors in Australia advocating for cooperative relations, although this effect can in turn be limited by Beijing's coercive economic tactics. My findings underline the reputational costs of certain approaches to economic statecraft, the value of building supportive coalitions, and the challenges faced by China's authoritarian state capitalist model. They also highlight the impacts of globalized Chinese capital in developed democracies, including the resilience and vulnerabilities inherent in democratic political processes.

Broader structural developments in Japan in the past two decades—decline of clientelist practices, partisan de-alignment, and decentralization—have dissolved traditionally close ties between national and local party systems, creating an environment conducive to the emergence of local parties. In this context, popular chief executives in four regions launched new parties. I trace how these parties emerged and how national parties reacted to them, from the appearance of the new-party leaders to the 2011 local elections. In comparing the four cases, two factors appear to shape their trajectories: the urbanness of their electoral environments and the responses of the two national parties at the local and the national level. In dealing with the new challengers, both the Liberal Democratic Party and Democratic Party of Japan experienced considerable intraparty conflict and defections, indicating a process of delinking between national and local party systems.

The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) saw forty of its forty-six female candidates elected in the 2009 lower house election; twenty-six were first-time candidates. Recently, both the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the DPJ have supported more women as “change” candidates in response to changing electoral incentives that favor broad appeals. The DPJ's victory, however, has not had a large impact on women in terms of governance or policy. An exploration of child allowance, day care provision, and dual surname legislation under the DPJ reveals that low seniority and the lack of a critical mass have prevented DPJ women from overcoming significant veto points. The electoral incentives of the emerging two-party system have resulted in a larger number of women in office, but the volatility of the system has sustained a weak voice for women in policymaking.

While Japanese business interests support the export of high-technology items and the transfer of technology from Japan to China, these economically motivated actions may have direct and indirect impacts on Japan's national security. First, the transfer of dual-use technology to China may directly help China's military buildup. Second, high-tech exports and technology transfers may have an indirect effect by eroding Japan's technological advantages vis-à-vis China. In this article I place these concerns into a historical context and analyze the current challenges to Japan's export control policies. I offer an overview of the Japan-China trade relationship, with a special focus on high-tech trade. I then discuss changes in Japan's export controls regarding China, based on heightened security concerns. Evidence indicates that the Japanese government is ill equipped to deal with “technology leakage,” which is accelerating the erosion of Japan's technological supremacy and is not covered by its current export control regime.

China has established a petition system to elicit information about grievances. However, the petition system may have perverse effects because it also reveals to the center the failure of local-level officials to resolve those grievances. Anecdotal accounts suggest that local officials have incentive to silence petitioners, often with the use of repression. In this article we study whether non-regime threatening petitions would provoke local governments' coercive response. To tackle the endogenous relationship between petition and repression, we take advantage of a natural experiment afforded by a change in hydroelectricity policy in China. In particular, we use provincial hydropower outputs as an instrument to identify citizen petitions. We find that citizen petitions significantly increase a province's spending on its repressive apparatus. The results suggest a paradoxical outcome of China's petition system: while it may help reduce the national authority's use of repression, it has caused an explosion of repression within the authoritarian system as a whole.

How are resources distributed when administrative units merge? We take advantage of recent, large-scale municipal mergers in Japan to systematically study the impact of municipal mergers within merged municipalities and, in particular, what politicians do when their districts and constituencies suddenly change. We argue that when rural and sparsely populated municipalities merge with more urban and densely populated municipalities, residents of the former are likely to see a reduced share of public spending because they lost political leverage through the merger. Our empirical analyses detect changes in public spending before and after the municipal mergers with remote sensing data, which allows for flexible units of analysis and enables us to proxy for spending within merged municipalities. Overall, our results show that politicians tend to reduce benefits allocated to areas where there are a small number of voters, while increasing the allocation to more populous areas. The micro-foundation of our argument is also corroborated by survey data. The finding suggests that, all things being equal, the quantity rather than quality of electorates matters for politicians immediately after political units change.

Thailand and Japan both faced the threat of colonialism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. While geopolitical vulnerabilities provided Japan with a critical impetus for defensive modernization, they compelled the Siamese state to pursue a strategy of defensive underdevelopment. To understand this paradox, the article explores how variations in the “unequal treaties” imposed on Japan and Siam by Western powers shaped state interests in a policy area of vital importance to the two countries' predominantly agricultural economies: the rural land rights regime.

Why do voters in single-party regimes express support for the ruling party in such large numbers? Scholars offer three sets of explanations: 1) Support is manipulated by regime leaders or falsified by frightened voters; 2) Support is due to genuine popularity or “performance legitimacy”; 3) The incumbent party holds an extreme incumbency advantage due to voters’ certainty about their candidates’ policy positions or access to state resources. Despite the impressive theoretical development in this literature, these arguments have not been subjected to a research design capable of examining the relative importance of each of these factors. We use a unique survey experiment on nearly 42,000 Vietnamese citizens over three years that reduces the threat of preference falsification and allows us to isolate voter's true preferences as much as possible. While we find some evidence for all three explanations, we find substantial support for incumbency bias. An important subset of Vietnamese voters—those inclined to vote for non-party candidates—sincerely favor the party under conditions of uncertainty about the candidates’ policy stances or experience in the legislature.

Although quite a few third-wave democracies in Southern and Central Europe became consolidated within a decade of their origin, all of those in East Asia are still fragile and fledgling. Ever since South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines embarked on democratic transition or restoration more than a decade ago, elections have been regularly held, and democratic competition is widely considered the only path to power. Rough edges remain, however. Rules are stretched, even bent. Political stalemate tends to delay, if not prevent, timely policy action. And public cynicism toward underperforming, if not malfunctioning, democracy in these four polities is so pervasive and unnerving that pundits warn against a crisis of governance in East Asia's new democracies.

This study provides a new dataset on the ideological positions of political parties in Hong Kong, which is a hybrid regime with electoral elements. Using this dataset, the study challenges the non-ideological view of party competition in Hong Kong by identifying an ideological dimension to the elections held between 1998 and 2016. It is shown that parties do position themselves along an identifiable left–right spectrum, with shifts that can be meaningfully interpreted, and that the aggregate ideology of the electorate appears to be linked to the level of economic growth. The ideological dimension provides a novel perspective on local politics that looks beyond the dominant pro-democracy versus pro-Beijing divide while also shedding light on the recent changes underlying the latter. This study provides valuable objective data for analyzing political competition dynamics and contributes to the comparative literature by incorporating Hong Kong into the framework of the manifesto coding project.

Most of the contemporary policy debate regarding economic interdependence and peace has focused on devising responses either in favor of or in opposition to the prevailing notion that trade is positively and unconditionally correlated with peace. The China and Taiwan case—noteworthy for the simultaneous presence of an ever-increasing economic interdependence and an adversarial political relationship—provides an interesting counterexample to the leading positions in the literature. What is missing in the literature is a model that studies states' decisions to trade and initiate conflict as a function not only of their own utility but also of their perceptions about how their opponent will respond. States' decisions to trade depend on the likelihood that their prospective trade partner will initiate a conflict, and decisions to initiate a conflict depend on perceptions of the likelihood that the target will concede. In this article, the authors develop a model that expands the domain of the trade-peace analysis by endogenizing and analyzing states' decisions to trade and initiate conflicts.

In the aftermath of the economic crisis of 1997–1998, South Korea undertook a number of reforms in financial supervision. Questions have been raised, however, as to whether Korea has in fact succeeded in creating a system of financial supervision capable of dealing with certain risks and responding to new challenges. This article examines Korea's recent experience in financial instability resulting from misconduct by credit card companies as a case in point and argues that the postcrisis reform in financial supervision was limited to changing formal institutions for financial supervision and that further reforms will have to be undertaken in other related institutions if Korea is to improve its financial supervision.

Despite having the fifth highest per capita GDP in the world (according to IMF PPP statistics for 2007), and despite numerous government efforts to spur innovation, Singapore has faced difficulties in establishing a durable base of entrepreneurial activity. Many ascribe this failure to the city-state's policies, which are often portrayed as generating a culture of risk aversion and a lack of creativity. In contrast to this conventional view, this article argues that the city-state's institutional arrangements generate conflicting innovation incentives and ultimately undermine innovative activity. Statistical tests across twenty-three countries offer evidence that is consistent with this argument.

In the past several years, the Republic of Korea—a former least developed country (LDC) and aid recipient that became a donor—joined the “club of emerging donors” to Africa. In March 2006, President Roh Moohyun declared Korea's Initiative for Africa's Development. The initiative puts poverty reduction and socioeconomic development of African countries in the forefront. Using pooled cross-sectional time series data, in this study we examine the determinants of Korean bilateral official development assistance (ODA) to Africa for the period 1991–2011. The findings of the study suggest that the approach of Korean ODA does not differ significantly from that of many conventional donors whose ODA disbursement has had a dual purpose: to improve the welfare of developing countries and to serve self-interests.

This paper uses Province A and City T as case studies to explore the strategies used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for managing citizens’ “irregular letters and visits” (irregular petitions) and the logic behind them. We believe that the local officials use both “hard” and “soft” measures to exercise control over these activities. The soft measures include persuasion and negotiation aimed at getting petitioners to abandon their irregular petitions. The hard measures involve the use of the coercive power of the state to compel the petitioners to return home. During important political meetings and holiday periods, both of which are popular times for petitioning, the CCP is more likely to take a hard approach to resolve serious problems and maintain stability. In normal times, it generally uses less costly soft tricks. These two social control strategies are utilized alternately by the CCP to maintain social stability and guarantee its regime survival.

In the 1990s and into the new century, increased Japanese sympathy toward Taiwan and antipathy toward mainland China led to a series of moves to improve treatment of Taiwan, including enhanced transportation links, a higher level and frequency of official contacts, posting of a military attaché, and expressions of support for Taiwan's participation in regional and international organizations. Nevertheless, Japan remains firmly wedded to a One China policy that opposes both the use of force by the mainland and a declaration by Taiwan of independence from China. Japan's willingness to cooperate with the United States to defend Taiwan is increasingly in doubt. The sources of Japan's supportive but restrained policy include the decline of traditional ties with Taiwan, the increasing size of the mainland market, and above all a perception of security risks that ultimately diverges sharply from that of Taiwan. Serious cooperation in defense and diplomacy requires shared (or complementary) threats, not just shared adversaries.

A well-developed thesis in political economy claims that crises create opportunities for change. Yet despite creating similar preferences for change, the Asian financial crisis led to reform of policies and institutions in some issue areas and in some countries of Southeast Asia, but not in others. In this essay I find that policies and institutions associated with technological upgrading of the economy, and particularly the manufacturing sector, are often immune to reform efforts, for two reasons. First, reform demands that policymakers know what to do; and second, they must know how to do it. Whether countries can discover and adopt new “templates” for reforming technology policies and institutions depends on the capacity of preexisting institutions to foster participative rather than simply consultative public-private collaboration. Such collaboration is most likely when decentralized yet coordinated bureaucracies facilitate meaningful participation from private actors, including business, labor, and academia, in forming, implementing, monitoring, and enforcing development policies.