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33 results

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  • Some head starts are bigger than others: dynastic legacies and variation in candidate quality in Taiwan's local elections

  • Nathan F. Batto, Benjamin L. Read
  • Journal:
    Japanese Journal of Political Science , First View
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    08 April 2024, pp. 1-18
    • Article
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      • Open access
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  • Candidates from established political families are more likely to win than their non-dynastic counterparts because their political inheritance often includes significant advantages in resources and reputation. Yet dynastic candidates also bring their own set of experiences and qualities to the game. Is it the case that their individual characteristics can explain their electoral success, or is their success due to their family legacy? Theoretically, how and when are political resources transferred to the new generation? We examine these questions by looking at non-incumbent candidates in city and county council elections in Taiwan from 2009 to 2014, drawing on unique data on politicians' backgrounds. The profile of dynastic candidates differs from that of non-dynastic candidates: they are younger, have less electoral experience and list experience in different sorts of organizations and jobs. However, these differences are not what drives their electoral success; indeed, they tend to win despite these qualities rather than because of them. Even after controlling for candidate quality, dynastic status remains a powerful predictor, conveying roughly a 20 percentage point increase in the probability of winning. This suggests that while dynastic candidates accrue some of their advantage long before they run for office, a large part of the inheritance is transferred during the campaign.

  • 11 - Problems and Possibilities of Comparison across Regime Types: Examples Involving China

  • from Part II - Developing New Approaches to Comparison through Research
    • By
  • Edited by Erica S. Simmons, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Nicholas Rush Smith, City University of New York
  • Book:
    Rethinking Comparison
    Published online:
    24 September 2021
    Print publication:
    07 October 2021, pp 208-230

  • Summary

    During the Cold War, comparisons between the state-socialist bloc and democracies sparked scholarly controversy. With scholars pursuing innovative comparisons between China and other political systems, it behooves us to revisit some of the questions that such comparisons pose. Specifically, when is it reasonable to pursue them, what is their purpose, and what do they entail? Giovanni Sartori usefully cautioned against comparing unlike entities, yet his advice was overly confining. Sometimes gaps or disjunctures between political phenomena in dissimilar political systems provide opportunities for innovation, even if they complicate Mill-style comparison. In particular, such projects can provide intellectual payoffs through the way in which they frame a topic of study, specify its universe of cases, and scrutinize the gains and risks of including phenomena from disparate contexts in a common category. Further, they provide opportunities for conceptual development by elaborating on and exploring these shared phenomena. Such cross-regime comparisons are not always feasible or useful. When successful, however, they can provide rich and thought-provoking new theoretical and conceptual departures. I illustrate this with examples from research projects comparing China with the democratic systems of India, Taiwan, France, and the United States.

  • Village Dispute Mediation in China, 2002–10: An Enduring Institution amid Rural Change

  • Benjamin L. READ, Ethan MICHELSON
  • Journal:
    Asian Journal of Law and Society / Volume 5 / Issue 2 / November 2018
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    14 February 2018, pp. 433-452
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  • The mediation of disputes by community leaders in China has deep historical roots and has long been among the responsibilities of neighbourhoods and villages. While most research on the topic has looked at cities, mediation is in fact more common in the countryside. This paper draws on a survey conducted in 2002 (n=2,164) and repeated in 2010 (n=2,659), covering 23 villages in five provinces, which provides detailed data on conflict from disputants themselves. We examine the evolution of this much-debated mode of conflict resolution and assess its prevalence and effectiveness relative to alternatives. We find that, even as overall rates of disputing declined, seeking intervention by village authorities remained as common a response to disputes in 2010 as it was eight years prior. The paper thus sheds light on a primary means through which the party-state has tried to maintain stability, tamp down strife, and assert its primacy at the community level.

Field Research in Political Science
  • Practices and Principles
  • Diana Kapiszewski, Lauren M. MacLean, Benjamin L. Read
  • Published online:
    05 April 2015
    Print publication:
    19 March 2015
  • Field research - leaving one's home institution in order to acquire data, information or insights that significantly inform one's research - remains indispensable, even in a digitally networked era. This book, the first of its kind in political science, reconsiders the design and execution of field research and explores its role in producing knowledge. First, it offers an empirical overview of fieldwork in the discipline based on a large-scale survey and extensive interviews. Good fieldwork takes diverse forms yet follows a set of common practices and principles. Second, the book demonstrates the analytic benefits of fieldwork, showing how it contributes to our understanding of politics. Finally, it provides intellectual and practical guidance, with chapters on preparing for field research, operating in the field and making analytic progress while collecting data, and on data collection techniques including archival research, interviewing, ethnography and participant observation, surveys, and field experiments.

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