This study examines the relationship between Islam and democracy with emphasis on the issue of whether and how Islam has bearings on democratic adjustment speed. Using comprehensive data on 17 Asian countries from 1996 to 2010, the study demonstrates that religion is a significant factor for determining democracy. Results indicate that the level of democracy in Islamic countries is generally lower than that in non-Islamic countries. However, the level of democracy in Islamic countries exhibits an upward trend, whereas that in (...) non-Islamic countries displays a downward trend. Moreover, when benchmark variables are controlled, democratic adjustment in Islamic countries is faster than in non-Islamic countries. Hence, despite the current lower level of democracy in Islamic countries, the results of this study refute the conventional wisdom that Islam hinders democracy. Instead, Islamic countries are highly malleable and exhibit a potential for faster democratic development compared with non-Islamic countries. Results further suggest that Islamic countries can effectively promote democracy by improving education, minimizing the gender gap, controlling population growth, or becoming an oil exporter similar to non-Islamic countries. However, Islamic countries likely own an additional unique advantage in effectively improving democracy – that is, promoting urbanization. This aspect is in contrast to non-Islamic countries where urbanization plays no role in determining democracy.Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

While the importance of social and political trust has been well documented, there is a lack of scholarly consensus over where trust originates. This article tests three theoretical arguments – social-psychological, social-cultural, and political institutional – on the origin of political trust against three East Asian democracies. The empirical analysis from the AsiaBarometer survey illustrates that political institutional theory best explains the origin of political trust in East Asian cases. Citizens of these East Asian democracies have a high level of (...) political trust when they believe that their governments perform well in management of the national economy and political representation of elected officials. Meanwhile, social-psychological and social-cultural theories explain the origins of social trust, but not political trust. The evidence reveals that socially trusting people are not automatically politically trusting; social trust and political trust originate from different sources and do not transform from one to the other.Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

‘Gender ’ is a troublesome loanword in Japan. While this term has been prevalent in feminist and scholarly circles, it has evoked confusion in the government and stimulated a backlash from the ultra-conservatives against gender equality. Japanese reactionaries have attacked the concept of gender because of their anxiety about cultural destruction – I thus call them the ‘old guard’. Focusing on a dispute over the term ‘gender’ between feminists and the old guard, this paper examines the changes in the term's (...) usage and meanings in the Japanese political context. I first shed light on Japan's reaction to the newly arrived term ‘gender’, outlining different attitudes towards gender between the feminist/scholarly circles and the government. Secondly, I discuss the old guard's condemnation of the concept of gender, in which they distort its significance in order to diminish its positive impact on society. I then scrutinize the old guard's reasons behind their attack on the concept of gender. My findings reveal that the old guard, whose political cause is to protect traditional Japanese culture, asserts that gender equality damages this culture. Moreover, I refute their emphasis on Japan's uniqueness, demonstrating that Japanese women's traditional virtues under the patriarchal family system are not peculiar to Japan. To gauge how the concept of gender has been interpreted politically, I highlight legislative debates about the term ‘gender’. In doing so, I elucidate the extent to which the concept of gender has infiltrated Japanese society through the dispute.Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

This article attempts to fill a gap in International Relations literature on East Asian security. ‘East Asia’ appears to be mostly an indeterminate conceptual construct, allowing scholars to look selectively at those aspects and areas that could justify their security thesis, albeit security dynamics in the region are all too difficult to comprehend and predict. This problem has been frequently pointed out in IR literature, but its methodological implications and suggestions have neither been appropriately illuminated nor been systematically offered, and (...) the main solution commonly found in the literature was the tautological one of ‘better defining’ the region. As an alternative, this article suggests that one needs to tighten geographical focus and differentiate the subjects of analysis. When it comes to the study of East Asian security, one needs to aim to develop specific and differentiated generalizations as opposed to generalizations of a broad character. To showcase the fact that research outcomes can be more determinate when the target of analysis is more focused and specified, this article takes Northeast Asian security as an example and challenges the so-called ‘peaceful East Asia’ thesis, one of the mainstream perspectives on East Asian security. This article ultimately argues that while apprehending East Asian security dynamics through delimiting the scope of analysis and circumscribing the subjects of investigation is often deemed to be a modest enterprise―in particular, in terms of generalizability―the merits are substantial: research outcomes will be able not only to give us a truer mapping of the real world, but also bring us closer to building knowledge which satisfies the scientific criterion of ‘falsifiability.’Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

The paper attempts to construct a global model of a social contract using well-known metaphors of two great philosophers: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke. By modelling a global social contract, I mean the formulation of a social contract using two sets of data: one is global citizens' preferences about values and norms while the other is sovereign states' participation in multilateral treaties. Both Rousseau and Locke formulate their versions of social contract theories in the national context of eighteenth-century Europe. This (...) paper tries my hands on extending their theories to the global context. This paper attempts to link empirically the relationship between global citizens' preferences as gauged by the World Values Survey and sovereign states' participation in 120 multilateral treaties deposited to the United Nations. To see the link between citizens and treaties (quasi-legislative outcomes, sort of), dimensional similarities of the cosmos of citizens' preference and the cosmos of sovereign states' willingness to join multilateral treaties are examined. Once done, all the sovereign states are located in each of the two cosmoses, citizens and states, and the correlation coefficients between them are measured. Based on these empirical results, the nature of the global quasi-legislative process is clarified. Conclusions and implications are drawn. (shrink)

The Second Khordad Movement was a democratic social movement in contemporary Iran. Investigation of this movement revealed two images, of flourish and of decline, as the movement was first generally successful until early 2000 and thereafter began to regress from the spring of that year onwards. The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive framework in which to examine the reasons behind the movement's failure and regression. To this end, the study utilizes the literature on social movements, especially (...) the political process model, and attempts to explain the initial success and subsequent decline of the movement based on elements such as political opportunity, framing processes, mobilizing structures, and the repertoire of collective action.Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Having been supressed and denied their rights by successive Syrian governments over the years, Syrian Kurds are now asserting a de facto autonomy. Since the withdrawal of the Syrian President's forces from the ethnically Kurdish areas in the early months of the current civil war, the inhabitants have declared a self-rule government along the lines of the Kurdistan regional government in northern Iraq. For Syrian Kurds, the creation of a small autonomous region is a dream fulfilled, albeit one unrecognized by (...) the international community. Some 15% to 17% of the Syrian population is Kurdish. Whether they can achieve statehood will depend on a reading of international law and on how the international community reacts. There are certain aspects which differentiate Kurdish self-rule in Syria from its counterpart in Iraq. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Kurdish Regional Self-rule Administration in Syria: A new Model of Statehood and its Status in International Law Compared to the Kurdistan Regional Government in IraqVolume 17, Issue 3LOQMAN RADPEY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1468109916000190Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Kurdish Regional Self-rule Administration in Syria: A new Model of Statehood and its Status in International Law Compared to the Kurdistan Regional Government in IraqVolume 17, Issue 3LOQMAN RADPEY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1468109916000190Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Kurdish Regional Self-rule Administration in Syria: A new Model of Statehood and its Status in International Law Compared to the Kurdistan Regional Government in IraqVolume 17, Issue 3LOQMAN RADPEY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1468109916000190Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

This paper starts out with a theoretical argument, based on panel data, that public mood in general and societal pessimism in particular should be measured from an explicitly temporal perspective. Next, based on a survey among more than 200 Japanese students and a wide array of existing data sources in three different languages and covering several decades it is shown that public mood in three quite different countries – first and foremost Japan, but also the United States and The Netherlands (...) – is quite apprehensive. In all these three countries societal pessimism can be observed during the past quarter century. Finally, utilizing a MDSD approach a few possible tentative explanations for this observed pessimism are sought. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Societal pessimism in Japan, the United States, and The NetherlandsVolume 17, Issue 3PEPIJN VAN HOUWELINGEN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1468109916000177Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Societal pessimism in Japan, the United States, and The NetherlandsVolume 17, Issue 3PEPIJN VAN HOUWELINGEN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1468109916000177Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Societal pessimism in Japan, the United States, and The NetherlandsVolume 17, Issue 3PEPIJN VAN HOUWELINGEN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1468109916000177Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

This article investigates the efficacy of a form of electoral innovation unique to the island-state of Singapore, the Nominated Member of Parliament scheme, and its impact on democratic governance, in light of the changing political landscape. A comparative perspective will be employed and broader conclusions on electoral engineering will be reached, especially for democratizing countries. Contrary to conventional scholarly wisdom, I argue that the NMP scheme can actually boost democratic representation in the country, considering the changing political landscape in the (...) state previously dominated by a hegemonic party. This is via two ways: firstly, NMPs could better represent the voices of the people at the margins of society and, secondly, they could be better positioned to raise issues that are deemed too to be raised by opposition parties. NMPs can enhance democratic governance by promoting deliberation, accountability, and representation. (shrink)

This study investigates the role of religion in shaping the norms of citizenship from a cultural perspective for an East Asian country that exhibits fundamental differences in social contexts from Western advanced democracies. Using data drawn from the Taiwan Social Change Survey, we find that the Eastern religions of Buddhism, Taoism, and Folk Religions are important for explaining the formation of the concept of being a good citizen. This study further examines the relationships between citizenship norms and various conventional and (...) unconventional types of political participation. The empirical results herein suggest that duty-based citizenship and engaged citizenship have significant differences in their effects on political participation. (shrink)

Asian diplomatic practices consistently frustrate western policymakers. This, I argue, is due in large part to cultural factors and the differences in interpreting political modernization. I will identify the features that contribute to a ‘diplomacy of encounter’ by, firstly, performing a historical reading of early indigenous annals that treat diplomacy in Asia, as well as of Jesuit and Portuguese encounters with Asia in the 1500s and 1600s; secondly, by reading a sample of nationalist tracts from Asia between the late 1800s (...) and 1960s; and, thirdly, by reading the practices of ASEAN and wider Asia-Pacific regionalism between the 1990s and 2000s. It is only through discourse analysis of the Foucaultian variety that one can tease out the cultural and modernization-related road bumps in so-called ‘modern Asian diplomacy’. This study hopes to contribute to enhancing appreciation of the ongoing procedural and substantive tensions between Asian states and their western, and mostly developed, dialogue partners. (shrink)

This paper examines how Japanese leading politicians cope with the communication problems posed during televised political interviews. Based on data gathered during the year 2012 equivocation, thereby to also assess the significance of these talk shows in the broader context of political communication in Japan.

Documenting how the Japanese state responded to increasing social discontent during initiation of unpopular welfare reforms, this study examines the factors that hindered the political empowerment of civil society despite the timely introduction of participatory policymaking institutions. The Japanese government opted in the early 2000s to introduce a participatory method to initiate the unpopular pension reform. Deliberation councils were established to encourage open discussions among government policymakers and committee members, including citizen representatives. The final outcomes of the deliberations, however, were (...) mostly about parametric adjustments and did not adequately consider the urgent demand of the general public. The participatory measure did not significantly improve the public's trust in the pension programs, but it did justify the government's reform initiatives. The welfare bureaucracy that set the goal, defined the scope of the agenda, and steered the discussions toward technical issues structurally restricted the voices of the citizen members in the deliberation councils. The lack of citizen advocacy groups, which could otherwise have effectively supported the citizen members on the committee, contributed to the limited roles and influences of the citizens. It is argued that the traditional conservative corporatism of Japan was reinforced during this time period, despite the introduction of the idea of participatory governance. (shrink)

Decentralization is predicted to increase popular participation in all processes, and especially decision-making at the local level. Through the analysis of interview data and secondary information, this claim was tested in five districts in Ghana. The evidence showed that contrary to theory, formal and informal procedures for participation are inadequate and irregular. Although the spaces for participation have been established and expanded, these are dominated by males with educated and professional backgrounds as well as the rich and influential with access (...) to power at the center. Women, the poor and disabled as well as people from rural peripheries are excluded from the process. Their exclusion is attributable to gender-insensitive decentralization policy, lack of socio-economic resources, low educational attainment, cultural practices, and patronage politics. The paper concludes that decentralization cannot compel the predicted level of participation unless these structural conditions inhibiting engagement and empowerment of especially marginalized groups are addressed. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze how citizens evaluate their president, especially focusing on why voters lower their evaluations at an individual-level perspective. We assert that citizens raise their evaluations of a new president when their expectations are met and lower their opinions when his or her performance disappoints them. Furthermore, the evaluations of the president are not only affected by a government's economic and diplomatic performance, but are also influenced by individual awareness of salient political issues, the contents of the (...) news, and their own perceived influence on politics. We test the theoretical hypotheses using Taiwan's Election and Democratization Study panel survey data. The statistical results support our theoretical hypotheses and show that when President Ma's performance did not meet respondents media exposure and political efficacy are significantly associated with the change in their opinions of Ma. (shrink)

This paper explores the time-inconsistency problem of audience costs in international disputes. The nature of democracy makes it difficult for leaders to back down from earlier diplomatic positions in an international dispute, out of fear of domestic political costs. Few studies have addressed the temporal aspect of such costs. This study argues that election timing impinges on the extent to which the audience cost mechanism works, and consequently, on state conflict behavior. While competitive elections are central to the political accountability (...) inherent in a democracy, voters typically lack enough opportunities to punish unsatisfactory leaders in a timely way, because of fixed election timing, and also may disregard foreign policy missteps that occurred in the distant past. Democratic leaders therefore have an incentive to choose strategically, with the electoral calendar in mind, when selecting a form of conflict behavior. Leaders can retreat from their demands without paying high audience costs when the upcoming election is in the distant future. To test this argument, the authors conduct a natural experiment featuring territorial disputes between Russia and two Baltic republics – Estonia and Latvia. Despite the commonalities in the disputes, as well as in their political systems and socioeconomic backgrounds, the governments of the two Baltic countries showed a sharp contrast in their diplomatic decisions. This paper argues that only the temporal gap in electoral timing can explain this variation, imparting the ironical implication that frequent democratic elections can obstruct peaceful conflict resolutions, and that excessive democratization may well hinder the very goal of peace. (shrink)

The Green Party Taiwan represents an important case both for scholars of environmental politics but also Taiwanese politics. Established in 1996, it is the oldest Asian green party and is one of the most active parties in the Asia-Pacific Greens network. The party has enjoyed mixed electoral fortunes. After promising early election results, the GPT virtually ceased contesting elections between 2000 and 2005. However, from 2006 the party began a gradual revival in its vote shares. This process culminated in the (...) January 2012 Legislative Yuan election when the GPT surprised many observers by coming fifth in the proportional party vote. Considering the limited resources at the party's disposal this was quite an achievement. In this study, we examine and explain the changing electoral fortunes of the GPT since its establishment in 1996. We are interested to see whether standard theories for explaining small or ecological party success, that have been developed in western Europe, work well in the Taiwan context. Our research is based on a range of new fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2014. These include in-depth interviews with campaigners and party leaders, focus group sessions with party leaders and candidates, and interviews with party supporters. (shrink)

Urban Chinese today do not appear to trust foreign countries. Why are they so suspicious? Over the past quarter century, the Chinese Communist Party has utilized its educational and propaganda systems to produce historical narratives of imperial China's beneficence towards its East Asian neighbors, and of an early modern at the hands of foreign powers. Qualitative analysis of Chinese social media today suggests that these narratives are tied to widespread popular distrust of China's East Asian neighbors and the West today. (...) Interrogating a 2012 survey of urban Chinese, this paper explores the sources of international attitudes quantitatively. It first examines whether Chinese today do indeed distrust foreign countries. It then tests two hypotheses about the drivers of Chinese distrust towards the world today. A socialization hypothesis holds that political and/or social pressures shape the international attitudes of the Chinese people. A psychological hypothesis, by contrast, holds that individual differences like age and gender shape Chinese attitudes. We find substantial support for the former: more years of education are associated with levels of dis/trust in foreign countries in the socially or politically appropriate ways. However, we also find that individual differences in subjective interest in international affairs interact with socialization processes like education and media exposure in shaping the international attitudes of urban Chinese today. The prevalence of public discourses of distrust towards foreign countries does not bode well for Chinese foreign policy in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The objective of the study is to re-examine the Verba, Nie, and Kim 's path-breaking analysis of political participation and political equality, under the inclusion of a social network model in Japan. In particular, the present research investigates how and why we find the extremely low correlations between one's socio-economic resource level and political participation in Japan, the evidence unsatisfactorily explained by the VNK analysis. Building on the social network model and employing the first wave of the Asian Barometer survey (...) conducted in 2003, this research presents a more comprehensive model of political participation. The study finds three major kinds of causes for the weak associations between SERLpsychological involvement linkage. From the viewpoint of the social network model, it is clear that the weak SERL–participation linkage is derived from the equalizing impact of group-based processes, yet uniquely Japanese style of network involvement. (shrink)

This paper examines the manner through which the Philippine government has utilized free trade in pursuing its development-oriented national security policies and strategies in the twenty-first century. It argues that against the backdrop of uneven economic development being perpetuated by a deeply entrenched oligarchic system and patronage culture, the primary referent of Philippine national security is its diminishing development space. Despite the government rhetoric with regard to the role of inclusive development in enhancing national security, the Philippine political economy remains (...) highly oligarchic and patrimonial. Such a condition has resulted in institutionalized inequality and structural poverty that undermine the country's supposedly development-based security model. The ability of the very few yet very powerful Filipino elites to transform the country into an oligarchipelago underscores the inefficiencies emanating from this type of politico-economic arrangement. In light of this, the paper evaluates the impacts of the Philippines' free trade activities on its overall level of development space by focusing on several crucial aspects of free trade that the government has failed to properly consider. Moreover, it scrutinizes the key factors that affect the utility of free trade for securing and enhancing the Philippines' development space. The paper concludes by arguing that the Philippine government's attempts at linking its development-centric security interests and free trade objectives have resulted not only in the preservation of uneven economic development and but also the further reinforcement of the existing oligarchic system and patronage culture in the country. (shrink)

Empowering the rank and file members in choosing a party leader has become an increasing trend in parliamentary democracies. This study examines the process of adopting more inclusive methods to choose a party leader in the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan. The LDP introduced a national primary to elect a leader in 1978. However, this first attempt to open up the party leadership selection was soon replaced by traditional coalition-making politics. In this regard, the LDP is different from most of (...) the Westminster parties that followed a smooth linear process of transferring more power to the rank and file members. This article identifies a ‘swing-back’ effect between 1980 and 1990 in the democratization process of party leadership selection. Working like a pendulum, the LDP did not resume a primary until 1991. It was in 2003 that a nationwide primary became a regular way. This article argues that the discontinuity of reformist actors caused this uncommon swing-back effect. The reformist split in 1976, the sudden death of Masayoshi Ohira, and Kanemaru mediation in 1984 stalled the reforms. Although one finds a similar trend in democratizing party leadership selection outside Europe, the LDP presented an abnormal inactivity and time-lag differences. (shrink)

Drawing upon the theses of State racism, homo sacer, and safe citizenship, and fieldwork data collected from a multiethnic primary school in Xinjiang, this paper examines the way in which the state agencies of the local government, the school and mainstream citizens design citizenship for Uyghurs, and how Uyghurs interpret and act upon their citizenship. The findings show why, and how, designed citizenship by the mainstream system for Uyghurs has failed to produce a desirably productive force for the prosperity of (...) both the Uyghur community and society at large. The findings require re-consideration of what could be a win-win citizenship for both the state and the citizen. (shrink)