In May 2017, Taiwan's Constitutional Court reached a landmark decision that marriage should be opened to same-sex couples within two years, making Taiwan potentially the first country in Asia to realize marriage equality. How can we explain the success of the LGBT movement here? I argue that explanations based on cultural proclivity, public opinion, and linkages to world society, are inadequate. This article adopts a “political process” explanation by looking at changes in the political context and how they facilitate the movement for marriage equality. I maintain that electoral system reform in 2008, the eruption of the Sunflower Movement in 2014, and the electoral victory of the Democratic Progressive Party in 2016, stimulated Taiwan's LGBT mobilization, allowing it to eventually overcome opposition from the church-based countermovement.

Corporate law shapes the fundamental business environment and affects various stakeholders. It is possible to determine the behaviour of various stakeholders by examining the politics of the reform process of corporate law. In order to understand the process, this paper uses the notice-and-comment procedure (public-comment procedure). Under this procedure, people submit comments to the Ministry of Justice; some of the comments are reflected in the final Bill, while others are not. The paper performs a quantitative analysis of a hand-collected dataset from two recent public-comment procedures on corporate law reform. The results showed that the bureaucrats are rigid and not willing to take public comments seriously. However, on some technical issues, legal academics, and legal professionals influence the behaviour of the bureaucrats. In addition, the bureaucrats employed these comments to honour the technical views of professionals. In other cases, corporate managers significantly influence the reform process.

Science shapes and is shaped by policy decisions. Yet scientists seem to have the greatest difficulty engaging in the policymaking process. When Congress makes public policy it does not work in a vacuum. It is responsive to public pressure. Interest groups that are effective at influencing policy know how Congress works, what are its rules, and who are the players. There is a need for scientists to engage in the process. Several important issues on the agenda involve weed science. There are a number of actions the weed science community can take to make itself available and helpful to policy makers.

Much of the external literature on the Cuban Revolution has been characterised by two dichotomies between ‘exceptionalism’ on the hand and the application of non-Cuban paradigms on the other, and that between Fidel-focussed interpretations and more systemic perspectives. This article examines the evolution of these dichotomies, from initial enthusiasm or condemnation, through an emerging awareness of a historical dimension, a focus on the social revolution, and new disenchantments, to the emergence of a less polemical attention to detail before the post-1991 return to type. In the light of this trajectory, new approaches are suggested to break with these patterns, while acknowledging the challenges for exogenous research.