Knowledge-Net for a Better World	November 2018

[JEAS] Volume 18, Issue 3

Stehan Haggard, Editor

The Third Issue of 2018 Has Been Released!

The most recent issue of JEAS opens with two contributions based on survey experiments, both focusing on China.

It is impossible to censor everything; the debate about the contours of Chinese media censorship centers on what the government does and doesn’t allow. Li Shao conducts an unusual survey experiment on media professionals. The findings confirm the observation that the government is much more sensitive to challenges to its authority than to challenges focused on performance failures, which might reveal useful information.

Tetsuro Kobayashi and Azusa Katagiri address one of the central problems in IR theory: how publics respond to a rising China. They test two competing models, manipulating threats, and find that there is no across-the-board rally-around-the-flag effect: conservatives remain wary of China, but liberals will tend to shift views when confronted with evidence of threat. Yet the study also finds strong evidence of continued reticence among liberals: when primed with images of Prime Minister Abe as commander of the armed forces, support for a more hawkish stance among liberals evaporates.

Two other contributions take up classic issues in comparative politics, and particularly the lines of control between legislators, executives and bureaucrats. Jacob Ricks revisits debates about the “bureaucratic polity” in Thailand, showing how politicians reasserted dominance in the early democratic years following the transition of the early 1990s. More recently, however, bureaucrats have exploited regressive political changes to reinsert themselves into politics more forcefully and effectively.

Don Lee looks at Asia’s presidential systems, and addresses the little-studied subject of how cabinets are formed. In contrast to parliamentary systems, where cabinets are formed from elected politicians, he finds that presidents will assign portfolios that affect perceptions of performance to professionals, while allocating ministries to politicians when it has effect on the ability to influence legislative support; in effect, presidents are continuing balancing performance and politics.

In a highly unusual study based on surveys of party activists in Korea and Mongolia, Sejin Koo looks at the role of parties in forging linkages with voters. When will activists be motivated toward more programmatic linkages? Does it depend on level of economic development and pecuniary motivations or do parties matter? The answer is strongly the latter. One of the most significant findings is that authoritarian successor parties tend to be less programmatic and more oriented toward clientelism, a surprising legacy of dictatorial rule.

In a Research Note introducing a new dataset, Luwei Rose Luqiu and Chuyu Liu provide evidence on the incidence of legislators with business backgrounds. An important finding is that these members of the National People’s Congress vary in an important way: between those that started their own businesses without strong public sector connections and those who came out of the SOE world. They hypothesize that this important distinction will matter for legislative outlook, with those with public sector tie more likely to look favorably on the regime.

The issue concludes with a review essay by Jomo Kwame Sundaram—himself a leading thinker on the issue—of a new book on the developmental states of Southeast Asia by Michael Rock. Rock shows that despite the fact that many Southeast Asian countries do not look particularly developmentalist in political form, developmental coalitions formed once core nation-building tasks were completed.