Democracy In Asia Research Articles

Refugee protection and the role of civil society: a comparative study of Japan and South Korea

This study examines the role of civil society in refugee policy by comparing and contrasting refugee protection in two neighboring Asian democracies, namely Japan and South Korea. It argues that, despite their seemingly similar refugee protection trajectories, including their burden-shifting and non-recognition policies, civil societies have led the two countries to take divergent paths in the shape of refugee protection. While the Japanese civil society has taken the lead in adopting global refugee norms at the regional level, the Korean civil society has challenged the government’s refugee policies through robust domestic advocacy efforts.

India-Japan Relations @ 70: From Civilisational to Strategic Partnership

The rapidly changing strategic scenarios in Asia have increased Japan’s ties with India over the last few years. Major global and regional geo-political shifts have taken place in the contemporary world, which include the rise of China, the US policy of rebalancing and pivoting to Asia, and the response of regional countries, evolution of a new security architecture in Asia, maritime security challenges in Indian and Pacific Oceans, nuclear tests by North Korea, tensions on account of territorial disputes in South China Sea and East China, the evolution of ASEAN into an ASEAN community. In these contexts, the two Asian democracies have made concerted attempts to intensify their relationship at various levels- economic, strategic and political. Though the two countries had never exhibited much keenness in each other’s priorities, a confluence of various factors such as structural, domestic and individual leadership have given a new push to the bilateral relationship in recent years. The present paper attempts to examine and evaluate the changing dimensions of bilateral relations between the two Asian democracies against the backdrop of the Indo-Pacific region's evolving security and strategic scenarios.

Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia

Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia

Liberalizing in Confidence: From Development to Democracy and Authoritarian-Led Democratization in Asia

Liberalizing in Confidence: From Development to Democracy and Authoritarian-Led Democratization in Asia

Beating Backsliding? Episodes and Outcomes of Democratic Backsliding in Indo-Pacific Asia in the Period 1950–2022

Abstract The paper presents the first comprehensive analysis of all episodes of backsliding in democratic regimes in Indo-Pacific Asia from 1950–2022. Based on the experience of this sample of cases, this paper aims to generate insights into why some Asian democracies are more resilient to this gradual decline in the quality of democratic institutions. Using Haggard and Kaufman’s framework of the “weak democracy syndrome” and the three different kinds of mechanisms of accountability that, in theory, can beat democratic backsliding, our analysis aims to show not only how but also when different accountability mechanisms succeed or fail in stopping autocratization.

The education of human rights in Japan: a comparative analysis of civics textbooks in senior high school between the 1970s and 2010s

ABSTRACT The education of human rights, or Human Rights Education (HRE), has been increasingly vital for the preservation and dissemination of human rights values in contemporary time. Japan, as an East Asian democracy, is not an exception. Yet there has been limited scholarship in English on the efforts that the Japanese government has invested in educating human rights through formal citizenship education. To what extent did (does) Japanese formal citizenship education value human rights concepts and address domestic human rights issues? This study approaches the civics textbooks of Japanese senior high schools published in the 1970s-2010s by adopting comparative content analyses. It suggests that, first, there is an increasing usage of human rights conceptual terms with Liberty as the most frequently found word in the textbooks. Second, however, limited knowledge and empowerment are provided when the human rights issues of three underprivileged groups in Japan – the Burakumin, the Ainu, and foreign residents – are taught. This study suggests the government to put greater efforts into educating students about domestic human rights issues. Future studies are also suggested to continue investigating the development of HRE in Japan and to locate the reasons behind the reluctance in teaching domestic human rights issues there.

Empowering the religious minority: examining the mobilizing role of social media for online political participation in an Asian democracy

ABSTRACT Most current studies examining the mobilizing or reinforcing role of social media for political participation focus on gender and socioeconomic stratifications and are based in Western democratic societies. Attention to religious status as a form of social stratification concerning social media use for political participation, more so in non-Western settings, is nearly absent. This study, through survey data from India, investigates the roles of political interest, social media news use, and religious status in explaining online political participation gaps. Results show that individuals with higher political interest and frequent social media news use are likelier to engage in online political participation. Next, social media news use can moderate the relationship between political interest and online political participation, exacerbating the participatory gaps between politically interested and disinterested citizens. However, we also find that these relationships are further conditional upon the religious status of the citizens. Specifically, we observe that social media mobilizes politically interested members of religious minorities more than the majority group. The findings reveal the subtleties of the effects of social media on online political participation in a non-Western context. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of political engagement in the digital age.

The Changing Dynamics of Japan–India Cooperation: A Case of ‘Rule-Based Order’ in Indo-Pacific

Japan and India are the two oldest and largest democracies in Asia. Since the inception of their diplomatic relations in 1952, the two countries have maintained a cordial relationship. They remain aloof during the Cold War period due to their ideological differences. After that, India following the economic liberalization followed by the “Look East” policy in the post-Cold War period had a positive impact on bilateral relations. This took a sudden gap due to India’s second Pokhran nuclear test in 1998 followed by Japanese economic sanctions. However, the relations normalized soon when Mori visited India along with other South Asian nations in 2000. The bilateral relations further improved when the two countries signed the “strategic orientation of Japan-India global partnership” during Koizumi’s visit in 2005. Since then, the two countries have been engaging in different aspects of strategic partnership, and a peaceful and stable Indo-Pacific along with the “rule-based order” has always been their priority. Thus, different scholars and statesmen from both countries started the discussion on building a new architecture of ‘rule-based order’ in the Indo-Pacific. To that end, Japan and India have continuously engaged themselves in bilateral and multilateral dialogue such as G4, Shangri-La Dialogue and Quad. Thus, this paper will try to see how far the two countries can persuade the international community to push the concept of “rule-based order” in the Indo-Pacific.

Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia by Aram Hur (review)

Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia by Aram Hur (review)

Bureaucratic professionalization and cabinet management: How civil servants in presidential democracies are treated differently

AbstractHow does bureaucratic structure shape presidential strategy in managing top executive posts? The comparative literature on cabinet formation focuses heavily on presidential legislative strategy, largely overlooking the administrative dimension of cabinet management. This article fills this gap by examining how bureaucratic professionalization shapes the president's strategy in distributing and managing cabinet posts. We argue that as bureaucracies become more autonomous via professionalization, ministers from the bureaucracy are more likely to be central players in presidential cabinet management. Our analysis of original data on 1538 ministers' cabinet careers from 26 presidential administrations in four Asian democracies shows that bureaucrats are more likely to receive and retain cabinet posts in key policy areas as bureaucratic professionalization increases, whereas they are less likely to do so with decreasing bureaucratic professionalization. This finding suggests that presidential cabinet management follows a different set of rules according to the level of bureaucratic professionalization.

Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia by Aram Hur (review)

Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia by Aram Hur (review)

Afterword

The articles in this special issue of Social Anthropology reposition volatility as a critical concern for anthropological enquiry. At a time of global uncertainty – marked by environmental, economic, geopolitical and humanitarian crises – it seems that everyday life is more volatile than ever. But what does describing it so actually mean? Volatility is commonly understood to be a characteristic of, or a tendency for, things to change quickly and abruptly. It is often a way to describe a person's behaviour or even their character – to account for someone's rapid and perhaps surprising switch to anger and rage, for example. Some may, though, more usually think of volatility as an explanatory term that economists, business strategists and risk managers employ to describe, understand and forecast fluctuations in financial markets, trading and commodity price shocks, or when analysing the boom-and-bust nature of oil production and energy-dependent economies (e.g. Andersen and Bollerslev 2018; Campello and Zucco 2021; Sinclair 2013). Sociologists and political scientists also think of volatility as a useful hermeneutic for analysing the fragility and precarity of societies and political systems, as the editors and contributors of a recent book do when considering the future of democracies in Asia (Hsiao and Yang 2022). Ecologists talk of volatile ecosystems (e.g. Exton et al 2014), the nature of which become more urgent to understand in a rapidly changing world, and although the idea of abrupt change in climate systems and ecosystems is not new, the vast and ever-growing body of scientific literature about it now drips with references to thresholds and tipping points, to uncertainty, unpredictability, and to the transgression of planetary boundaries (e.g. Lenton 2013; Bonan and Doney 2018; Steffen et al 2018).

The “populist imbecile” versus the “heartless shrew”: Polarizing election coverage and voters’ evaluation in Taiwan

This study content analyzes the news coverage of two major presidential candidates—one populist challenger, the other female incumbent—in the 2020 Taiwan election. A nation-wide survey of voters and their newspaper uses was also utilized to verify the association between partisan news reliance and candidate evaluations. Based on the concept of partisan press, the study confirms that the coverage is highly polarizing and that it includes more horse race analysis than discussion of serious issues. Sexist and misogynistic terms were used more often by party-opponent (Blue-camp) newspapers to describe the female incumbent. The male populist candidate was portrayed more often in a personal fashion than the female candidate. The voters’ primary newspaper uses were found to be positively associated with their candidate evaluations and preferences. The study sheds new light on populist vis-à-vis gendered election coverage in the context of an Asian democracy.

Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia by Aram Hur

Journal Article Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia by Aram Hur Get access Aram Hur. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2022. 188 pp. $24.95. Hannes B Mosler Hannes B Mosler University of Duisburg-Essen https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9443-9177 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, qqad045, https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqad045 Published: 19 June 2023 Article history Corrected and typeset: 19 June 2023 Published: 19 June 2023

Democratic Ceilings: The Long Shadow of Nationalist Polarization in East Asia

East Asian democracies, long seen as the success stories of the Third Wave, have curiously co-existed with illiberal partisan competition. We argue that such patterns are symptoms of long-standing democratic stagnation, rather than democratic regress. We trace the entrenchment of illiberal competition to nationalist polarization in the early phase of democratization—a common phenomenon in Third Wave democracies where nation-building and democratization pressures coincided. Party polarization can take many forms, but when it centers on mutually exclusive nationalist visions from the outset, it redefines the end of democratic competition as state capture and justifies whatever means necessary, even those that violate democratic norms, to achieve it. Through a comparative analysis of Taiwan and South Korea, we show that when democratization tends to institutionalize, rather than alleviate, pre-existing nationalist conflicts, it can seed endemic barriers to the habituation of democratic norms, imposing a ceiling on democratic progress.

Economic Inequality and Political Participation in East Asian Democracies: The Role of Perceived Income Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility

This study examines how perceptions of economic inequality affect political participation focusing on East Asian democracies. It develops nuanced predictions on how perceptions of income inequality and social mobility and their interplay affect individuals’ engagement in various types of political activities in six East Asian democracies. Using the fourth wave of the Asian Barometer Survey, we examine novel arguments built upon the existing inequality-participation nexus. Our analysis suggests that inequality is a multifaceted concept, and the mechanisms of the inequality-participation nexus could vary depending on the regional, socioeconomic, and political context.

New democracy and autocratization in Asia

The 2008 financial crisis and, more recently, the COVID–19 pandemic are the hallmarks of the ‘new normal’: long-term recession and economic inequality. These crises have challenged the stability of democratic institutions and enabled an expansion of state power. From populist movements to coups d’état, democracies in Asia and across the world have been in decline, while ‘autocratization’ has been gaining momentum. Will the ongoing erosion of democracy lead to an increase in authoritarian systems? Or will it compel existing democratic systems to improve and consequently (further) consolidate their popularity? These are critical questions discussed in Kuyoun Chung and Wonbin Cho's edited volume, New democracy and autocratization in Asia. While mainstream comparative politics relies on regular, free and fair elections and other procedure-oriented indicators in order to assess the quality of democracies, this volume demands a more comprehensive understanding. The editors propose the concept of ‘new democracy’, through which the contributors consider the procedural quality of democracy and its results. The introductory chapter extensively covers the literature on minimalist and maximalist definitions of democracy, and the editors opt for the latter, which relates ‘the political system to the social context that encompasses the economy and environment’ (p. 3). In particular, the volume highlights the importance of guaranteeing ‘that all individuals have equal influence on the political process’ (p. 34). This approach is echoed in the chapters that discuss the importance of women's representation, income inequality and welfare systems in assessing the sustainability of Asian democracies.

Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies. By Erin Chung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 270p. $105.00 cloth, $35.99 paper.

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Authoritarian Successor Parties, Supporters, and Protest: Lessons from Asian Democracies

AbstractAre authoritarian successor party (ASP) supporters more likely to protest? I propose that ASP supporters are less likely to protest in general. The post-democratization mobilization environment is shaped upon the pre-democratization mobilization basis. During the pre-democratization period, protest was organized around the democracy movement. Thus, protest tactics and networks were accumulated through it. As former authoritarian ruling party supporters, ASP supporters are less likely to have legacies of participating in the democracy movement, which prevents them from accessing the accumulated protest resources from the democracy movement. However, I argue that this negative association varies based on the ASP qualities and supporters’ age. Supporters of ASPs that maintain strong pre-democratization legacies are more likely to participate in protests than supporters of ASPs that do not strongly highlight their authoritarian legacies. Also, when the ASPs’ characteristics are considered, older ASP supporters are more likely to participate in protests than younger supporters. Using both single-level and multilevel statistical analyses, I examine four Asian countries with politically powerful ASPs and find evidence supporting my hypotheses. Lastly, I compare two South Korean mass movements, the Candlelight movement and theTaegeukgirallies to unpack the relationships between ASP supporters, protest resources, and mobilization. This study reveals authoritarian legacies among post-democratization citizens through ASP supporters’ protesting behavior.

Beyond the Bipartisan System in the Taipei Mayoral Elections—Rise of Market-Oriented Strategies in Electoral Campaigns?

Current literature on political marketing seldom investigates elections in non-Western regions or countries. The analysis of the Taipei mayoral elections (TMEs) can fill this academic vacuum. This article studies the election campaigns for the TMEs between 1994 and 2018 to understand and analyse the political marketing strategies used by candidates and political parties in Taiwan, an East Asian democracy. While the New Party (NP) stuck to a product-oriented strategy, the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) employed sales-oriented strategies in most TMEs. This article argues that political parties with strong ideologies find it hard to use the market-oriented electoral strategy. The victory of Ko Wen-je in 2014 and 2018 TMEs can be analysed in terms of the successful employment of a market-oriented strategy. However, given the changing environment of local politics, Ko and his party, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), may not follow market-oriented strategies in future TMEs.