The developmental states of Asia—South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore—have been widely recognized for their successful COVID-19 governance. However, despite these successes, a closer examination reveals significant differences in their strategic responses and the medical resources mobilized. This article explains the different governance approaches taken by the three developmental states. We argue that the pre-crisis industrial coordination capacity of each developmental state plays a crucial role in determining both whether and which medical resources can be mobilized during emergencies. Through comparative case studies and within-case process tracing, we demonstrate how pre-established industry-level coordination capacities enabled Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore to strategically prioritize the production and mobilization of test kits, masks, and vaccines, respectively, especially in the initial phase of the pandemic. This article emphasizes that a country’s domestic production capacity, an often-overlooked institutional factor, can facilitate a more efficient response in a short period of time and significantly strengthen crisis management efforts.

The dominant view in proliferation research holds that security guarantees from nuclear patrons reduce client states’ incentives to pursue nuclear armament. Yet in South Korea, public support for indigenous nuclear capabilities remains high despite strong trust in US extended deterrence. Drawing on the “better-now-than-later” logic from preventive war theory, we argue that this support reflects public forward-looking pessimism about the security environment, shaped by perceptions of the relative decline of the US and North Korea’s advancing nuclear capabilities. Analysis of the 2023 EAI Public Opinion Poll shows that concerns about systemic power shifts and pessimism about future inter-Korean relations are significantly associated with support for nuclear armament. South Korean public assessments of US extended deterrence and North Korea’s military threat do not align with conventional alliance theory expectations that high trust in extended deterrence should reduce support for nuclear armament. These findings underscore the need for reassurance strategies that address enduring alliance credibility.

This study examines the evolution of populism in South Korea by analyzing the rhetoric of its two mainstream political parties, the People Power Party (PPP) and the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), from 2012 to 2022. Utilizing a longitudinal content analysis of party statements and employing advanced large language models (LLMs) for classification, the findings reveal three key trends. First, populist rhetoric has increased over time across both parties. Second, its usage intensifies during election periods and when parties are in opposition. Third, among different forms of populism, sectarian populism, marked by moral polarization and hostility toward political opponents, emerges as the most prominent. These findings contribute to the broader understanding of populism’s role in third-wave democracies, illustrating its implications for democratic stability and the entrenchment of political sectarianism.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Japan maintained a “special relationship” with Myanmar, often bucking the policy approach of Western countries to provide financial and political support to the country’s military leaders. Following the February 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar, however, Japan’s policy approach toward the country notably shifted in response to domestic and international pressures. Utilizing declassified documents from Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and other Japanese-language sources, this study examines how Japanese diplomacy toward Myanmar evolved in response to the coup. Through a structured assessment of Japan’s geopolitical strategy, bureaucratic politics, and the influence of informal actors, the study demonstrates how these interconnected factors prompted Tokyo to “rethink” certain aspects of its relationship with Myanmar while maintaining distinctive elements of its previous approach.

In-person networks based on imperial legacies, immigrants, and general trading companies that share a common language and culture can help expand trade in differentiated goods. However, little is known regarding how such networks can facilitate deals for differentiated goods. To investigate the role played by general trading companies in this context, we study how major trading companies navigated a sensitive transaction—the procurement of distillation facilities for oil shale in Manchuria—in imperial Japan during the first age of globalization. Our archival research revealed that trading companies logistically supported Japanese buyer engineers when they met in person with engineers associated with Western suppliers, and visited plants in the West with the aim of acquiring tacit knowledge beyond the scope of written specifications. The role played by Japanese trading companies in this context involved promoting knowledge spillover from the West by providing logistic support for such in-person meetings.

Why did Meiji Japan succeed in modernizing its state apparatus while Qing China failed? According to neorealists, states respond to threats by balancing. Successful balancing requires an efficient bureaucracy to extract enough resources from society to sustain a formidable military. Yet not all states are equal when it comes to modernizing. We argue that a state’s ability to adopt best practices depends on its past position in the international system. States suffering from a longstanding material weakness will tend to adopt new practices from abroad more quickly than states that have enjoyed a dominant position for a long time. Embeddedness decides whether or not the state perceives its model’s crisis. Therefore, we propose a theory of neorealist imitation success or failure that counts three variables: embeddedness as the independent variable, political leadership’s willingness to adopt best practices, and elite cohesion as intervening variables.

The Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in 2019 sparked the most radical mass protests seen in Hong Kong since the transfer of sovereignty. Scholars have proposed various explanations for the radicalization of the protests, as well as for the mass support for this radicalization across various sectors of society. However, economic grievances have been relatively downplayed in attempts to understand the radical protests. Using data from a survey conducted during the suspension of the movement in 2020 (N = 1,574), this study examines the relationship between economic grievances and support for the protests. Through mediation analysis, the findings show that individuals who perceived themselves as belonging to a lower class tended to have a diminished sense of social mobility and equality. These negative perceptions contributed to concerns about the activities of Mainland Chinese individuals and the use of public resources. Thus, these particular economic grievances were found to be positively associated with support for the 2019 movement.

Conservative parties and politicians are often caught in a dilemma regarding immigration policies. Business interest groups and xenophobic populist forces both support conservative political parties but expect fundamentally different immigration policies. Japan is a rare case among advanced democracies that has experienced neither large-scale immigration nor the emergence of xenophobic populism. Yet, Japan’s conservative government, facing the reality of a rapidly aging and declining population, has begun to loosen immigration policy. We analyze the ruling party politicians’ policy positions on foreign worker intake and demonstrate that their views have shifted in a pro-foreign-worker direction, especially among legislators representing rural areas that have seen a sharp increase in foreign residents.

What shapes the ways in which citizens participate in politics? This article investigates the association between private homeownership and the forms of citizens’ political behaviors using a Chinese nationwide social survey. Exploiting the abolishment of the welfare housing system in the late 1990s as a quasi-natural experiment, I find that owning a home and experiencing home value appreciation increases citizens’ willingness for political engagement as well as participatory behaviors through formal channels, but reduces their confrontational behaviors towards government such as participation in protests. Further evidence on political attitudes suggests that homeowners are more critical of government performance, yet they report higher political trust in the state and a stronger preference for maintaining the status quo. These findings highlight the critical role of asset ownership in preventing conflict and promoting stability by shaping the political behaviors and beliefs of citizens.

This article examines legislative waffling behavior—where legislators reverse their position between bill sponsorship and floor voting—in the South Korean National Assembly from 2004 to 2020. Using multilevel logistic regression analysis of 21,292 bill-legislator observations across four legislative terms, we develop a novel theoretical framework that disaggregates waffling into three distinct strategic types: dissent (voting against), abstention, and no-show (strategic absence). Our findings challenge US-based theories by revealing that minority party members in Korea exhibit significantly higher rates of waffling across all types, with the effect particularly pronounced when bills are passed as chairman’s substitutes in majority-controlled committees. We demonstrate that ideologically extreme legislators are more prone to waffling, while main sponsors maintain greater consistency throughout the legislative process. The analysis of committee control structures reveals complex dynamics where minority party members face heightened waffling pressures even in committees they control, suggesting that formal institutional authority cannot fully overcome broader power imbalances in consensus-based systems. These findings highlight how Korea’s distinctive institutional features—including proportional distribution of committee chairs, mixed electoral system, and consensus-oriented legislative culture—create fundamentally different incentive structures for legislative behavior compared to majoritarian systems, underscoring the importance of developing context-specific theoretical frameworks for comparative legislative studies.

In 2015, China adopted “Made in China 2025” to upgrade its manufacturing sector and to engage firms in contributing to state priorities including economic growth and national security. Since 2015, the media and academics have noted that manufacturing firms of more strategic importance received more subsidies. However, firms manufacturing cutting-edge products do not necessarily mean that they are willing to meet the state’s political goals. This article argues that China grants more subsidies to manufacturing firms more connected to the party-state. Data on manufacturing firms listed in China supports the argument. Data also demonstrates that when manufacturing firms are more politically connected, the positive effects of subsidies on local manufacturing growth and on firm-level productivity tend to decrease. The symbiotic relationship between politically connected firms and the party-state may curb on the growth momentum, which contradicts one of the key goals of “Made in China 2025”: economic growth.

Using data from the seventh wave of the World Values Survey, this study examines how social media use shapes the negotiation of transnational identity in South Korea and Taiwan—two countries characterized by distinct forms of nationalism—and whether social capital moderates this relationship. A two-dimensional model encompassing local–global attachment and protectionism–openness was employed to identify latent classes of transnational identity. The findings reveal that nationalism significantly influences identity negotiation in both countries, with Taiwanese citizens exhibiting stronger global ties compared to Koreans. In addition, social media use reinforces local and protectionist identities in these countries, limiting transnational solidarity and amplifying exclusivity through algorithmically mediated digital networks. Notably, social capital moderates this dynamic by fostering global openness, particularly when trust in out-groups is high. This study highlights the intricate interplay between social media use, social capital, and transnational identity negotiation, contributing to a nuanced understanding of the cultural response to globalization in East Asia.

Throughout the twentieth century, Taiwan and South Korea underwent rapid economic development and successfully democratized without reversal to authoritarianism. Despite their similar trajectories, the two countries diverge significantly in political and public support for gender equality. Taiwan is widely seen as the most gender-equal country in Asia, while South Korea remains deeply polarized, with uneven progress in women’s representation. What accounts for this divergence between two democracies? This article advances a political institutions thesis, arguing that differences in democratic institution-building—particularly the actors and modes of democratization—have shaped the contour of gender politics of each country. Contrasting the histories of party-driven democratization in Taiwan and mass-driven democratization in South Korea, this article shows that the process of building democracy has had lasting effects on the institutionalization and sustainability of gender equality.

Indonesia’s population skews young, so political analysts are increasingly concerned with what the “youth vote” looks like, and what generational change will bring to Indonesia’s democracy. On the one hand, analysts have historically focused on the liberal political activism of more educated cohorts of young people, and especially those in urban areas. On the other, and most recently, young Indonesians overwhelmingly voted for Prabowo Subianto in the 2024 presidential elections, suggesting this cohort to be either unaware of, or unperturbed by, his authoritarian history. This paper examines how young Indonesians perceive their country’s democratic trajectory. We analyze two decades of nationally representative survey data, and examine the democratic preferences of Indonesian voters whose political socialization took place entirely in the post-authoritarian era (1998–). The results suggest both life-cycle and intriguing cohort effects: on average, Indonesians become more positive towards their democracy as they age; but we also find that Indonesia’s Gen Zs are more satisfied with democracy than other generational cohorts—despite a precipitous decline in the quality of Indonesian democracy over the past decade. We argue, therefore, that while all Indonesians show high levels of satisfaction with their weakening democracy, young Indonesians, more than other generations, can be understood as ‘complacent democrats.’

The East Asian democracies (EAD) of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have received little attention from the international political science community working on populism. By analyzing the last two to three decades of research on EAD we look for clues to help us explain why there is so little interest. In our review we encounter cases of eclectic conceptualization, suboptimal data, innovative categorization, binary analytics, and even political bias, all of which may weaken the persuasiveness of the respective research in the eyes of critical colleagues. Our key finding, however, is that all studies on EAD implicitly refer to local political standards as the baseline from which alleged populist behavior is identified and labeled. In direct comparison, the populist characteristics of East Asian politicians appear to be less pronounced than those of sledgehammer populists like Donald Trump, Hugo Chavez, or Boris Johnson. Consequently, scholars working on the latter may be less curious about the former. Our findings, therefore, confront us with the question of what to use as a baseline for the measurement of potentially populist phenomena. We argue for the application of what is locally considered standard political behavior and conclude that such a practice has the potential to draw more attention to cases from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Propagandists discredit political ideas that rival their own. In China’s state-run media, one common technique is to place the phrase so-called, in English, or 所谓, in Chinese, before the idea to be discredited. In this research note we apply quantitative text analysis methods to over 45,000 Xinhua articles from 2003 to 2022 containing so-called or 所谓 to better understand the ideas the government wishes to discredit for different audiences. We find that perceived challenges to China’s sovereignty consistently draw usage of the term and that a theme of rising importance is political rivalry with the United States. When it comes to differences between internal and external propaganda, we find broad similarities, but differences in how the US is discredited and more emphasis on cooperation for foreign audiences. These findings inform scholarship on comparative authoritarian propaganda and Chinese propaganda specifically.

We introduce a novel dataset mapping career transitions of 505 elites in North Korea. Despite ample attention to granular data on elites, there is a lack of comprehensive information spanning state, party, military, and parastatal sectors. Granular rank and position data enable tracing intra- and inter-institutional elite transitions, opening new research avenues on North Korean elite studies and leader-elite dynamics in personalist autocracies. Exploiting within-regime threat-level variation during successions, we test hypotheses on dictators’ use of intra- versus inter-institutional elite management. We conclude with implications for new research directions in North Korean studies and authoritarianism literature.