| Knowledge-Net for a Better World |
December 2019 |
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| [JEAS] Volume 19, Issue 3
Stephan Haggard, Editor
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| "The Third Issue of 2019 Has Been Released!" |
Issue 19, 3 of the Journal of East Asian Studies leads with two important contributions on politics in Taiwan, the first on the issue of polarization. It is widely assumed that Taiwan voters are sharply polarized between the Blue and Green camps. Austin Horng-En Wang tracks shifts in the level of polarization among partisan voters, noting how and why it has oscillated over time as more centrist and extreme voters shift positions. But overall, he finds that non-partisans make up a significant share of the electorate and they tend to be moderate. As a result of the moderate middle, Wang shows Taiwan is not as politically polarized as is thought, using novel data visualizations to make the point.
The second contribution on Taiwan revisits a widely-cited contribution to the JEAS by Ming-sho Ho on the Sunflower Movement ("Occupy Congress in Taiwan: Political Opportunity, Threat, and the Sunflower Movement." Journal of East Asian Studies 15 (1): 69–97.) Ho had argued that elite rivalry provided a key opening for the Sunflower Movement to exercise influence in the legislature on the controversial cross-Strait services agreement. Charles K.S. Wu looks at how changing public opinion also played a role in strengthening the claims made by social movement forces. In an exchange with Ming-sho Ho, the two contributors outline some of the central theoretical issues around why social movements achieve their objectives.
Two contributions on the determinants of protest in Asia and bellicist theories of state-building in the region show the continuing vitality of cross-national quantitative research. Enze Han and Cameron Thies tackle the long-standing suspicion that the strength of states in the region may be related to the severity of the security challenges they faced. However, they extend this hunch to an analysis of the effects of internal security challenges, and Communist ones in particular. They find that the capacity to extract resources is in fact related to security challenges, a finding that is likely to influence the ongoing debate about "developmental states."
Chonghyun Choi and Dongwook Kim provide one of the first cross-national analyses of the determinants of protest in East Asia, framing the story around grievance, resource mobilization, and political process theories of contentious politics. They endorse some long-standing modernization expectations: that urbanization and the spread of information and communication technology enable protest. Yet they also show that regional demonstration effects are strong catalysts of anti-government protests in Asia, while repressive state capacity dampens them.
Finally, Matthew D. Jenkins makes a contribution to a growing literature on the political effects of natural disasters. Using a use a difference-in-differences identification strategy, he shows that Japan’s 2011 triple disaster resulted in a significant increase in political participation in affected districts, as measured both by engagement with political groups and voter turnout. But the effect of the treatment was uneven at the individual level, with the extent of social networks playing an important mediating role: those with larger social networks were those most likely to be more engaged. Jenkins contribution is not only substantive, but demonstrates a fruitful combination of econometric designs with network analysis.   |
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