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.

Recent literature claims that China censors informationthat has the potential to ignite collective action.This article extends this finding by arguing thatChinese censors respond differently to politicalchallenges than they do to performance challenges.Political challenges call into questioning theParty's leading role, whereas performance challengesare directed at the failures of public goodsprovisions. A survey experiment of about 60 mediaprofessionals finds that censors are inclined toblock political challenges and to tolerate criticismof the government's performance. However, whencriticism contains both performance and politicalchallenges, censorship is far more likely. Byexploring the range of censorship activities, theresults suggest that the Chinese regime's relianceon popular support constrains its censorshipdecisions.

The People's Action Party (PAP) of Singapore is one of the world's longest ruling dominant parties, having won every general election since the country's independence in 1965. Why do Singaporeans consistently vote for the PAP, contrary to the expectations of democratization theories? We argue that valence considerations—specifically, perceptions of party credibility—are the main factor in the voting behavior of Singapore's electorate, and are critical to explaining the PAP's resilience. Furthermore, we argue that the primacy of valence politics arose in part by design, as the PAP has used its control of Singapore's high-capacity state to reshape society and thereby reshape voter preferences towards its comparative advantages. We use a multi-methods approach to substantiate this argument, including a comprehensive quantitative analysis of recent elections. Ultimately, our findings suggest that a focus on valence politics can increase the resilience of dominant parties, but that such a strategy also faces natural limits.

This study examines the impact of China's growingterritorial ambitions on Japanese public opinion. Byexperimentally manipulating perceived territorialthreats from China, we tested two potentialmechanisms of increased support for a conservativeincumbent leader in Japan. The first is the “rally’round the flag” model, in which threats universallyboost support for the leader through emotion. Thesecond is the “reactive liberal” model, in whichsupport from conservatives remains constant, butthreatened liberals move toward supporting theconservative leader. Two survey experiments providedno support for the emotion-based “rally ’round theflag” model, but they lent support for the reactiveliberal model in explaining the impact on Japanesepublic opinion. However, the second experimentindicated that priming with an image of the primeminister that highlights his role as the supremecommander of the national defense forces completelyeliminated the gain in approval rates amongliberals.

Democracy and opposition are supposed to go hand in hand. Opposition did not emerge as automatically as expected after Indonesia democratized, however, because presidents shared power much more widely than expected. The result has been what I call party cartelization, Indonesian-style. This differs significantly from canonical cases of party cartelization in Europe. Yet it exhibits the same troubling outcome for democratic accountability: the stunted development of a clearly identifiable party opposition. Since the advent of direct presidential elections in 2004, Indonesian democratic competition has unsurprisingly assumed somewhat more of a government vs. opposition cast. But this shift has arisen more from contingent failures of elite bargaining than from any decisive change in the power-sharing game. So long as Indonesia's presidents consider it strategically advantageous to share power with any party that declares its support, opposition will remain difficult to identify and vulnerable to being extinguished entirely in the world's largest emerging democracy.

The North Korean regime is unique among dictatorships because it is both long-lasting and highly personalized. We argue that initial factionalization of the regime, coupled with the presence of multiple foreign backers early in the regime, allowed the first leader to personalize the regime by first wresting power from the military and then subsequently curbing the autonomous power of the Korean Worker's Party. Using a measure of personalism constructed from historical data, we trace the consolidation of personal power in the North Korean regime and compare it to other communist regimes in the region to show how the evolution of personalist rule in these cases differed. We then explain this sequence of personalization in North Korea by showing how regime imposition by one foreign power, the Soviet Union, combined with military backing from a second foreign power, China, incentivized Kim Il-sung to consolidate personal control over the military and internal security apparatus by reducing the threat of military backlash.

In the aftermath of the 2006 and 2014 Thai coups,observers declared the resurrection of thebureaucratic polity. Bureaucrats, though, remainedinfluential even during the period of 1992–2006,when elected politicians were thought to command theThai state. Bureaucratic involvement in politicsposes a challenge for dominant political sciencetheories of politician–bureaucrat relationships,which draw heavily from principal–agent frameworks.I apply agency theory to Thailand, testing threedifferent hypotheses derived from the theory.Examining legislative productivity and control overbureaucratic career trajectories, I find thatelected politicians increasingly acted as principalsof the Thai state from 1992 through 2006, and to alesser degree from 2008 to 2013. Thai bureaucrats,though, have frequently engaged in the politicalsphere, blunting political oversight and expandingtheir independence vis-à-vis politicians. Thissuggests that the principal–agent model overlooksthe range of resources that bureaucracies can bringto bear in developing countries, granting themgreater autonomy than anticipated. As such, theoriesof the politician–bureaucrat relationship indeveloping states need to better account for themechanisms through which bureaucrats exercise policydiscretion and political influence.

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.

To what extent do presidential candidates influence voting in mixed member legislative elections? A sizable literature addresses presidential–legislative coattail effects in the American context, with less attention given to this interaction in non-Western democracies. Nor is the role of past voting behavior adequately assessed in the literature. Taiwan's historic 2016 election allows for an analysis of the extent in which the popularity of presidential candidates influences coattail voting in the more complex electoral environment of two-vote mixed legislative systems. Evidence finds that, controlling for partisanship and previous voting behavior, voters who supported a presidential candidate were more likely to also support the party's legislative candidates, although this influence is stronger in regards to Democratic Progressive Party's Tsai Ing-wen.

Why do some national governments in East and Southeast Asia receive more transnational scrutiny and pressure on their domestic human rights practices than others? This article argues that transnational human rights reporting is more likely to target states where domestic activists and victims are densely connected with human rights international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) through a local membership base. Human rights INGOs increase social demands and opportunities for transnational human rights reporting by strengthening local actors’ capabilities to leverage human rights and international solidarity as an advocacy strategy, and by mobilizing them for monitoring and information collection on the ground. Event count analyses of 25 Asian states from 1977 to 2008 find robust support for the theory, using new data on Amnesty International's human rights reporting and human rights INGOs’ local membership base, and controlling for government respect for human rights, regime type, military power, and other factors.

How do the president's calculations in achieving policygoals shape the allocation of cabinet portfolios?Despite the growing literature on presidentialcabinet appointments, this question has barely beenaddressed. I argue that cabinet appointments arestrongly affected not only by presidentialincentives to effectively deliver their key policycommitments but also by their interest in havingtheir administration maintain strong politicalleverage. Through an analysis of portfolioallocations in South Korea after democratization, Idemonstrate that the posts wherein ministers caninfluence the government's overall reputationtypically go to nonpartisan professionalsideologically aligned with presidents, while theposts wherein ministers can exert legislators'influence generally go to senior copartisans. Myfindings highlight a critical difference inpresidential portfolio allocation from parliamentarydemocracies, where key posts tend to be reserved forsenior parliamentarians from the ruling party.

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.

Defection from North Korea to South Korea has increased dramatically, but little is known of its political consequences. Do North Korean defectors successfully adopt democratic norms, and if so, what factors aid this process? Through a novel survey of defectors, I find that national identification plays a significant role in motivating their fledgling sense of democratic obligation. Greater feelings of national unity with South Koreans lead to a stronger duty to vote and otherwise contribute to the democratic state. This effect is more powerful than that of conventional contractual factors, on which most state resettlement policies are based, and is surprising given that defectors’ nationalist socialization mostly took place under the authoritarian North. The findings suggest the need to reconsider integration approaches toward North Korean defectors and similarly placed refugees elsewhere.

Party activists are important for building party–voterlinks. This study focuses on the motivations ofthese activists and the hypothesis that economicfactors are associated with more programmatic andpolicy-driven platforms. I examine a novelcomparative survey data set of party activistscollected in multiple districts in South Korea andMongolia to determine whether national economicdevelopment, the local economy, or individual incomeshapes activist motivations. The results challengethe economic account and, instead, shed light on theimportance of party characteristics, such as size,ideology, and whether a party has its roots inauthoritarianism.

This article utilizes an original household survey of two regency-level elections in Indonesia to explore campaign targeting. It uses a list experiment to show that direct survey questions about accepting transfers from campaigns elicit honest responses from respondents in Indonesia. Although the relationship between income and whether a respondent accepted transfers from political campaigns decreases over the entire distribution of income, it increases initially, producing a curvilinear relationship between income and accepting transfers from campaigns. This article argues that the poorest voters face barriers to being targeted by campaigns. However, these barriers recede as they become relatively richer, at which point a negative relationship is found due to diminishing marginal utility of accepting these transfers. Finally, in-kind transfers, as opposed to cash transfers, target low-income voters more effectively.

In this research note, we introduce a new dataset onChina's national legislators. It providesdescriptive information on one key parameter: thenature of the business owned by private entrepreneurdeputies in China's National People's Congress (NPC)from 2003 to 2017. The dataset contains informationon whether the deputy once worked as a governmentofficial, whether the deputy was a former topmanager of a state-owned/collective enterprise, andwhether his/her current company was astate-owned/collective enterprise before beingprivatized. We categorize deputies as “insiders” aslong as they stratify one of the aforementionedbackgrounds, whereas others as the “grassroots.”This dataset thus reveals two types of privateentrepreneur deputies who are significantlydifferent with regard to how they started their ownbusinesses. These findings shed new light on therelationship between private entrepreneurs and theparty-state in China.

Over the past 30 years, Southeast Asia has experienced rapid growth in intra-regional economic activity, but despite the remarkable diminution in the frequency and intensity of military conflict and crises, it has not been free of interstate disputes, such as maritime disputes. However, the struggle against maritime crime activities such as maritime piracy is a priority for all countries of the region, as well as one of the unavoidable prerequisites for the achievement of the regional economic security. This research note focuses on the impact of maritime piracy on the Southeast Asian countries’ trade. Bilateral trade flows among the Southeast Asian countries over the 1994 to 2013 period are used to estimate an augmented gravity model that includes various measures of maritime crime activities. The purpose is to find the evidence to indicate how maritime piracy has affected the volume of intra-regional trade.

Of the ten fastest growing economies since 1960, eightare in East Asia. As Haggard (2018) aptlydemonstrates for Northeast Asia, two explanationsaccount for this exceptional regional performance.On the one hand, neo-liberals committed to anAnglo-American night-watchman state (Krueger 1978;Bhagwati 1978; Edwards 1993; World Bank 1993; Packand Saggi 2006) attribute performance tomacroeconomic stability, provision of public goods,and openness to trade and investment. On the otherhand, a heterodox group (Johnson 1982; Amsden 1989;Wade 1990/2004; Chang 2002, 1994; Rodrik 1995; Evans1995; Lin 2009) focuses on market and coordinationfailures and the need for states to adopt pragmatic,‘trial and error’ and selective approaches tohigh-speed growth. In this latter view, the strongdevelopmental states of Northeast Asia used theirembedded autonomy viz the private sector to overcomemarket and coordination failures to usher in rapidgrowth and technological catch-up.