Taiwan recently adopted a series of administrative reform laws designed to make the bureaucracy more transparent and allow public participation in regulatory policies. Because administrative reform limits the executive's power, it is clear why legislatures would favor strict administrative procedures. But it is less clear why presidents would support them. The passage of these laws begs the question why presidents support administrative procedural reforms designed to restrict their abilities to act freely. I argue that in Taiwan, President Lee Teng-hui's control of his party deteriorated as factional disputes within his own party increased over time. Lee ultimately concluded that the Kuomintang's political survival depended on major reforms. Consequently, the status quo-oriented bureaucracy—hitherto an important source of support for Lee and his key constituencies—became an impediment. Lee supported Taiwan's Administrative Procedure Act in order to reduce the bureaucracy's capacity to impede reform. More generally, I argue that administrative procedures designed to open up the bureaucracy to the public, including previously excluded groups, can serve politicians' goal of redirecting the bureaucracy. Archival data, secondary sources, and interviews with key presidential advisers, senior career bureaucrats, and politicians support my argument.

This article explores the evolution of social movement politics under the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government (2000–2004) by using the perspective of political opportunity structure. Recent “contentious politics” in Taiwan is analyzed in terms of four changing dimensions of the opportunity structure. First, the DPP government opens some policy channels, and social movement activists are given chances to work within the institution. Yet other features of the political landscape are less favorable to movement activists. Incumbent elites' political orientation shifts. As the economic recession sets in, there is a conservative policy turn. Political instability incurs widespread countermoblization to limit reform. Last, the Pan-Blue camp, now in opposition, devises its own social movement strategy. Some social movement issues gain political salience as a consequence of the intervention of the opposition parties, but its excessive opportunism also encourages the revolt of antireform forces. As a result of these countervailing factors, social movements have made only limited gains from the recent turnover of power.

This article reexamines the period of the Japanese bubble (1985–1990) and emphasizes ill-supervised and ill-sequenced financial deregulation as a key proximate factor. Given the subsequent costs of this political choice, what explains such a path of domestic financial deregulation without the establishment of corresponding supervisory institutions? I argue that the suboptimal Japanese outcome represents the equilibrium point for political leaders who had to balance global pressures to deregulate the economy, corporate pressures to liberalize finance, and domestic resistance by an array of politically connected interest groups. The government chose ill-supervised financial deregulation as the path of least political resistance and the golden bullet that could both defuse trade tensions with the United States and readjust the Japanese political economy in a harmless way. Instead, as they interacted with other factors, the choices made in the early 1980s destabilized the Japanese system and carried the seeds of the ensuing financial crisis.

The Dokdo issue has constituted a popular area of academic enquiry in both Korea and Japan, but few studies have extended their research parameters beyond the question of who is the rightful owner of this island. Whatever the legal merits of competing claims to Dokdo, the Dokdo issue has expanded to represent an important political focus in the domestic affairs of both states, and it remains an omnipresent irritant in Korea-Japan relations. A full understanding of this complex issue cannot be gained simply through legal and historical argument. With the aim of overcoming these existing inadequacies in the academic coverage of Dokdo, this article attempts to identify the dynamics in which extralegal and extrahistorical factors have interacted and complicated this contentious issue.

How important have Thai parties and intraparty factions been in Thailand's fast-evolving democracy? What role do they play today, especially since the enactment of the latest constitution? What has accounted for the fragmentation in Thailand's party systems and coalitions? How did Thai democracy allow for the rise to power of Thaksin Shinawatra? This article analyzes these questions, presents a theory of Thai coalition behavior, and offers some predictions for Thailand's democratic future.