Extant literature on authoritarian legislatures argues that dictators set up quasi-democratic institutions to co-opt opposition and attract investors. We argue that dictators also nurture clientelistic ties with social groups useful to their rule, a previously overlooked function of authoritarian legislatures. Drawing on the case of Chinese local legislatures—namely, the local People's Congress and the local People's Political Consultative Conference—we find that Chinese local governments use these institutions to channel patronage to and gain political support from the private sector. Field interviews and an analysis of a nationwide firm-level survey show that private firms owned by local legislative members, while obtaining more bank loans, provide more support to the local government in various forms than those owned by nonmembers. This finding suggests that authoritarian legislatures, even those with weak policymaking efficacy, can help authoritarian states build stable alliances with social groups, thereby contributing to regime resilience.

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.

Based on a 2011 national survey, I argue that while US conservatives feel somewhat cooler toward the East Asian democracies than US liberals do, they feel much cooler toward China. Greater average conservative than liberal prejudice lingers, cooling attitudes toward the “Yellow Peril” of all Asian countries, but communism is a larger source of ideological differences over China. For cultural, social, economic, and political reasons, conservatives feel substantially cooler than liberals toward both communist countries in general and “Red China” in particular. I conclude by suggesting that with gerrymandering and ongoing ideological sorting, these ideological differences over China on Main Street may come to play a greater role in the making of US China policy.

Patterns of party switching in Taiwan have played an important role in the development and relative stability of its party system. In this study I aim to track key patterns of how politicians switched their partisan affiliation during the critical periods of party system change. I examine the level of party switching, where party switching was most prevalent, when switching was most common, and the most common types of switching since the advent of multiparty politics in Taiwan. Party switching is an important phenomenon in the development of party politics in Taiwan but thus far it has received surprisingly little systematic attention. This is the first comprehensive attempt to tackle this understudied topic.

Media censorship is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes, but much of the motivation and practices of autocratic media censorship still remain opaque to the public. Using a dataset of 1,403 secret censorship directives issued by the Chinese propaganda apparatus, I examine the censorship practices in contemporary China. My findings suggest that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is gradually adjusting its censorship practices from restricting unfavorable reports to a strategy of “conditional public opinion guidance.” Over the years, the propaganda apparatus has banned fewer reports but guided more of them. However, this softer approach of regulating news is not equally enforced on every report or by different censorship authorities. First, the party tends to ban news that directly threatens the legitimacy of the regime. In addition, due to the speed with which news and photographs can be posted online, the authorities that regulate news on the Internet are more likely to ban unfavorable reports, compared with authorities that regulate slower-moving traditional media. Lastly, local leaders seeking promotions have more incentive to hide negative news within their jurisdictions than their central-level counterparts, who use media to identify misconduct among their local subordinates. Taken together, these characteristics create a strong but fragmented system of media regulation in contemporary China.

Using data drawn from the Taiwan Social Change Survey, I investigate how citizens' incomes affect turnout and partisan voting. In contrast to studies of other countries, I find that lower-income voters are not less likely to turn out in Taiwan. Moreover, although income does not have strong effects on patterns of partisan voting in Taiwan, there is some evidence that people with income levels just below the middle-income group are less likely to vote for the left-wing party

We collected original experimental data, using the matched-guise technique, to examine the Taiwanese people's evaluational reactions to two major spoken languages in contemporary Taiwan: Mandarin and Taiwanese. Taking advantage of the effectiveness of the experimental technique in controlling for possible unobserved confounding variables, we clearly and systematically demonstrate that (1) language stereotypes do exist in today's Taiwan, and (2) there are some serious and significant implications for Taiwan's public opinion and democratic politics. Our data show that such language stereotypes are of great salience and consistently decoded for political issues, less so for socioeconomic issues, and almost insignificant for personality features. Our data also confirm that these language stereotypes are not just proxies of Taiwan's regional divisions; the Taiwanese people cognitively differentiate between the spoken languages' political and socioeconomic implications (despite some mild halo effect between the two).

More than ninety people died in political violence linked to the March–May 2010 “redshirt” protests in Bangkok. The work of the government-appointed Truth for Reconciliation Commission of Thailand (TRCT) illustrates the potential shortcomings of seeing quasi-judicial commissions as a catch-all solution for societies struggling to deal with the truth about their recent pasts. The 2012 TRCT report was widely criticized for blaming too much of the violence on the actions of rogue elements of the demonstrators and failing to focus tightly on the obvious legal transgressions of the security forces. By failing strongly to criticize the role of the military in most of the fatal shootings, the TRCT arguably helped pave the way for the 2014 coup. Truth commissions that are unable to produce convincing explanations of the facts they examine may actually prove counterproductive. Following Quinn and Wilson, we argue in this article that weak truth commissions are prone to politicization and are likely to produce disappointing outcomes, which may even be counterproductive.

Formally institutionalized party organization is usually considered a prerequisite for the development of programmatic linkages between parties and voters. However, in this article I show that political parties in South Korea have succeeded in stabilizing interparty competition through programmatic linkages without making any significant efforts to build a formal organizational base. In fact, it could be argued that South Korea is a “partyless” democracy, as political parties get easily captured by the interests of ambitious politicians, thus failing to establish themselves as independent actors. I therefore make a more general argument about the concept of party system institutionalization: we need to rethink the current practice of aggregating the different attributes of party system institutionalization into a single scale, as these attributes do not seem to be connected in a linear fashion.

In this article I examine changes in the election manifestos of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party. While the existing literature agrees that the LDP's policy platform has changed considerably since the introduction of the new election system in the 1990s, their analysis focuses on material policies such as pork barrel and welfare. Postmaterialist policies such as environmental protection have hardly been discussed, even though they have been relevant since pollution swept progressive mayors into power in the 1960s. I examine election platforms from 1956 through 2013, and argue that the LDP has carefully adjusted its policy mix by putting a greater emphasis on postmaterialist policies. My analysis also shows that while electoral reform has had an impact on the policy balance between postmaterialist and materialist policies as well as clientelist and programmatic policies, these changes are not linear, but vary from decade to decade.

In this article I analyze the extent and causes of party system fragmentation in Indonesia's provincial and district parliaments. Focusing on the results of the first three post-Suharto elections in 1999, 2004, and 2009, I first highlight that local-level fragmentation is not only generally higher than national-level fragmentation but also that it has consistently increased over the three elections and that fragmentation has been particularly high in Eastern Indonesia. I then explain these three trends as a result of three main factors: First, electoral institutions applied between 1999 and 2009 facilitated fragmentation and poor party system institutionalization, mainly due to the introduction of an open list system in 2009 and the absence of a parliamentary threshold at the local level. Second, low levels of party institutionalization progressively individualized local party politics and made it normal for candidates to switch to smaller parties if it suited their interests, thereby exacerbating fragmentation. Third, electoral campaigning for local parliaments has been dominated by traditional methods based on personal relationships and networks rather than lavish public relations campaigns with expensive TV ads, further reinforcing the effects of the first two factors.

In this article we set out a fine-grained measure of the formal authority of intermediate subnational government for Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand that is designed to be a flexible tool in the hands of researchers and policymakers. It improves on prior measures by providing annual estimates across ten dimensions of regional authority; it disaggregates to the level of the individual region; and it examines individual regional tiers, asymmetric regions, and regions with special arrangements. We use the measure and its elements to summarize six decades of regional governance in Southeast Asia and conclude by noting how the Regional Authority index could further the dialogue between theory and empirics in the study of decentralization and democratization.

What explains the electoral staying power of many Japanese interest groups in the wake of electoral reform? Electoral explanations provide part of the answer; candidates in elections to both houses of the Diet continue to face incentives—many of them unintended—to court the organized vote. But missing from such accounts is an explanation of why economically noncompetitive groups provide the bulk of such support. The primary reason for this, I argue, is organization. As a result of their historical linkages to the bureaucracy, many interests developed hierarchical, national organizational structures that enabled them to carry out a variety of vote-gathering functions that the parties had trouble performing themselves. Although electoral reform and long-term demographic trends have weakened the electoral influence of interest groups, these organizational complementarities between groups and the parties continue to matter in Japanese elections—including under conditions of two-party competition. To illustrate these points, I trace the evolution of interest group politics from the era of LDP dominance through the rise of two-party competition and the LDP's recent return to power, using postmasters associations and agricultural cooperatives as case studies.

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.

In this article we explore the state of the discipline of comparative Asian politics. In particular we analyze five aspects of research on Asia: whether the empirical scope of research is largely noncomparative; the extent to which that research is empirical rather than theory-generative; whether it pertains to public or foreign policy; if it relies on qualitative rather than quantitative methods; and the gender and geographic concentration of those conducting the research. After coding and analyzing data from 461 articles from eight different journals, we demonstrate that research on comparative Asian politics is more likely to be empirical, qualitative, focused on the country as unit of analysis, and disproportionately written by male academics educated and/or working in North America, Western Europe, or Australia.