Extant literature on authoritarian legislatures argues that dictators set up quasi-democratic institutions to co-opt opposition and attract investors. We argue that dictators also nurture clientelistic ties with social groups useful to their rule, a previously overlooked function of authoritarian legislatures. Drawing on the case of Chinese local legislatures—namely, the local People's Congress and the local People's Political Consultative Conference—we find that Chinese local governments use these institutions to channel patronage to and gain political support from the private sector. Field interviews and an analysis of a nationwide firm-level survey show that private firms owned by local legislative members, while obtaining more bank loans, provide more support to the local government in various forms than those owned by nonmembers. This finding suggests that authoritarian legislatures, even those with weak policymaking efficacy, can help authoritarian states build stable alliances with social groups, thereby contributing to regime resilience.

Patterns of party switching in Taiwan have played an important role in the development and relative stability of its party system. In this study I aim to track key patterns of how politicians switched their partisan affiliation during the critical periods of party system change. I examine the level of party switching, where party switching was most prevalent, when switching was most common, and the most common types of switching since the advent of multiparty politics in Taiwan. Party switching is an important phenomenon in the development of party politics in Taiwan but thus far it has received surprisingly little systematic attention. This is the first comprehensive attempt to tackle this understudied topic.

Formally institutionalized party organization is usually considered a prerequisite for the development of programmatic linkages between parties and voters. However, in this article I show that political parties in South Korea have succeeded in stabilizing interparty competition through programmatic linkages without making any significant efforts to build a formal organizational base. In fact, it could be argued that South Korea is a “partyless” democracy, as political parties get easily captured by the interests of ambitious politicians, thus failing to establish themselves as independent actors. I therefore make a more general argument about the concept of party system institutionalization: we need to rethink the current practice of aggregating the different attributes of party system institutionalization into a single scale, as these attributes do not seem to be connected in a linear fashion.

In this article we set out a fine-grained measure of the formal authority of intermediate subnational government for Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand that is designed to be a flexible tool in the hands of researchers and policymakers. It improves on prior measures by providing annual estimates across ten dimensions of regional authority; it disaggregates to the level of the individual region; and it examines individual regional tiers, asymmetric regions, and regions with special arrangements. We use the measure and its elements to summarize six decades of regional governance in Southeast Asia and conclude by noting how the Regional Authority index could further the dialogue between theory and empirics in the study of decentralization and democratization.

In this article we explore the state of the discipline of comparative Asian politics. In particular we analyze five aspects of research on Asia: whether the empirical scope of research is largely noncomparative; the extent to which that research is empirical rather than theory-generative; whether it pertains to public or foreign policy; if it relies on qualitative rather than quantitative methods; and the gender and geographic concentration of those conducting the research. After coding and analyzing data from 461 articles from eight different journals, we demonstrate that research on comparative Asian politics is more likely to be empirical, qualitative, focused on the country as unit of analysis, and disproportionately written by male academics educated and/or working in North America, Western Europe, or Australia.