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.

This paper examines how Japanese leading politicians cope with the communication problems posed during televised political interviews. Based on data gathered during the year 2012–13, the paper replicates and modifies the Theory of Equivocation to detail the responsiveness of national and local level politicians (and for comparison also of non-politicians) to interview questions. Its main focus is on the extent to which Japanese politicians equivocate during televised programs, and the reasons underlying this equivocation. Overall, the paper aims to identify the motives behind interviewees’ equivocation, thereby to also assess the significance of these talk shows in the broader context of political communication in Japan.

Urban Chinese today do not appear to trust foreign countries. Why are they so suspicious? Over the past quarter century, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 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 ‘Century of Humiliation’ at the hands of ‘imperialist’ foreign powers. Qualitative analysis of Chinese social media today suggests that these narratives are tied to widespread popular distrust of China's ‘ungrateful’ East Asian neighbors and the ‘hegemonic’ 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 ‘top-down’ socialization hypothesis holds that political (e.g. party propaganda via education and the media) and/or social (e.g. peer groups, social conformity) pressures shape the international attitudes of the Chinese people. A ‘bottom-up’ 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 ‘bottom-up’ individual differences in subjective interest in international affairs interact with ‘top-down’ 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.

The changing trust that Chinese students who study in Taiwan exhibit toward the Chinese government is a critical, but rarely explored topic, which is crucial for maintaining the sovereignty of Taiwan. I conducted a panel study and adopted a political socialization approach, proposing and verifying five hypotheses based on the theories of cognitive dissonance, assimilation, social contact, and social identity. The results indicate that compared with the average score for political trust that Chinese students exhibit at the time of arrival in Taiwan, the scores obtained four months later significantly declined by 0.09. Specifically, 50% of students exhibited a decreased level of political trust, whereas 33% exhibited an increased level of trust. The regression model developed in this study explains 23.6% of the variance in the changes in the political trust of Chinese students studying in Taiwan. In addition, five hypotheses were empirically supported.

Drawing upon the theses of State racism (Michel Foucault), homo sacer (Giorgio Agamben), and safe citizenship (Cynthia Weber), 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.

‘Gender (jenda)’ 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.

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.

The aim of this paper is to project China's emerging path towards high politics in East Asia, which is ostensibly spawned by regional geopolitical dynamics. Hegemonic transition, replacing hegemonic stability, is seemingly activating the dynamics. There is almost an inexorable move towards predominance, by the two major powers, that tends to get stimulated by the presence of issues that may trigger conflict, possibly war. These issues range from flashpoints to populist nationalism, economic interdependence, nuclear issues, and alliance relations in the Western Pacific. The paper concludes, by highlighting, likely resultant action–reaction cycles, polarizations, and alignments through the varying array of forces, possibility of war, mutual deterrence, and above all projecting overall power relations.

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.

The objective of the study is to re-examine the Verba, Nie, and Kim (VNK)'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 (SERL) 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 SERL–participation levels in Japan: exogenous factors (i.e., sex, urbanization, and age); equalizing impact of social networks; and weak SERL–psychological 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.

Literature discussing the factors in government and parliament that cause of gridlock is limited in examining cases that occur in contexts where the democratic principle of ‘inclusion’ expands. This paper analyzes the legislative gridlock revealed in the process of the South Korean government's efforts to pass the Bill of Financial Consumer Protection, beginning in July 2012, from the perspective of overlapping political conflicts among multi-scalar actors. Research shows that the government's desire to reform financial supervisory governance created two cleavages among the multi-scalar actors because of their long-held political interest in the Bill. The conflict intensified as the cleavages overlapped and were presented as one big issue in the history of Korea's financial supervision, which directly facilitated the gridlock. This paper identifies academic implications to advance the study of gridlock and its policy implications, including the need to develop an inter-scalar mediator, which has negative effects on the quality of democracy.

This article investigates the efficacy of a form of electoral innovation unique to the island-state of Singapore, the Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP) 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 ‘sensitive’ to be raised by opposition parties. NMPs can enhance democratic governance by promoting deliberation, accountability, and representation.

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 (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan). 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.

The paper examines the domestic politics explanations to Japanese security policy expansion between the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. In response to the various explanations offered in the literature, such as the implementation of administrative and institutional reforms since 1994 that resulted in the centralization of the decision-making process, changes to the balance of power of political parties within the Japanese political system, and shift in the type of politicians that dominate the LDP, opposition parties and security policymaking structure, this paper argues that it is important to incorporate collective identity into understanding Japanese security policy expansion. Two reasons highlight the importance of collective identity – first, without collective identity, it is difficult to understand the type of security policy produced as the discussion of vision is omitted; and, second, collective identity reveals the organizational make-up of the security policymaking structure that is responsible for the formulation of security policy. To explicate the collective identity–institution relationship, this paper focuses on Japanese security identity and the Japanese security policymaking regime in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. Two security identities for Japan are examined – the peace-state and international-state; and three elements of the regime are studied – the agents involved or marginalized in the security policymaking process, the decision-making structure of the security policymaking, and the role of the US. This paper aids in our understanding of how collective identities are sustained and supported within an institution, and how Japanese security policy expanded in the post-Cold War period.

The Green Party Taiwan (GPT) 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.

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.

The emergence of politicians with overwhelming financial muscle in Nigeria since 1990s has complicated the relationship between money and politics in the country. This has been intensified by lack of clear legislation on how political parties should seek funding for their campaigns. Although effective supervision of political parties’ finance is critical to the survival and consolidation of any democracy, the relevant electoral laws in Nigeria have not been effectively enforced. This is evident in the unbridled deployment of financial and other material resources by moneyed politicians and corporations during party campaign fundraising and electioneering. Among other things, this paper investigated the interface between the electoral laws and monitoring of campaign financing during the 2015 Presidential Election in Nigeria. The study is a documentary research and data were analyzed using a qualitative descriptive method. Utilizing the Marxist theory of the post-colonial state, the paper established that the electoral laws are generally couched ambiguously by politicians with vested interests in order to weaken the enforcement capacity of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), as well as facilitate the advancement of the electoral interests of the ‘political entrepreneurs’. Thus, the unbundling of the Commission is recommended as a sine qua non for effective monitoring and supervision of political parties in the country.

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 (longitudinal) 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.

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.

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.