The debates on Asian democracy began 30 years ago. Western countries have often promoted liberal democracy as being the genuine democracy, giving justice to the people and being able to meet the needs of their communities. However, at the same time, some Asian countries practice democracy that promotes Asian values, which are very different from Western values. Western countries describe Asian democracy as an excuse for some leaders to maintain power in their respective countries, for example Malaysia. Critics have pointed out that some Asian leaders have used authoritarianism or despotism in order to mitigate the weaknesses of their rule. Asian democracy is practiced in Kelantan where the PAS (Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party) continued to maintain power for 23 years, from 1990 to 2013. Factors that have contributed to the long rule of the PAS party include socio-political stability, including political parties who were clean and competent and leaders who are knowledgeable and pious.

Although the importance of public satisfaction is well documented, few studies have been conducted on the diversity of citizens’ evaluations of the various levels of government. This study explored hierarchical government satisfaction among the public in two culturally Chinese societies, namely China and Taiwan. Basing the analysis on the perspective of responsibility attribution, this paper proposes that the two publics’ distinctive perceptions, which are shaped by different information flows, lead hierarchical government satisfaction in the two societies in separate directions. This argument is supported by the empirical findings from the sixth wave of the World Values Survey. The findings confirm that personal evaluations, including household economic satisfaction, democratic evaluation, and public service confidence, exert more influence over local government satisfaction in China, but conversely have a greater impact on central government satisfaction in Taiwan. Moreover, these evaluations are shown to affect hierarchical government satisfaction differently in the two societies. The evidence reveals that the two publics attribute blame for problems to different administrative objects: Chinese citizens tend to blame local governments, whereas Taiwanese citizens are inclined to criticize the central government.

The concept of late development is ubiquitous in political science. Scholars generally use the term to explain the state's role in the economy based upon the timing of a country's industrialization. Many consider Japan a quintessential example of state-driven late development. This article surveys the late development theories of Alexander Gerschenkron and Alice Amsden. It then appraises these theories based upon Japan's experience, demonstrating that neither accurately describes the state's role in Japan's industrialization.

To be clear, the argument is not that the state played no part in Japan's economic development. The question is whether late development offers an effective conceptual tool for explaining the causes, content, and timing of state action. There are many possible explanations of Japan's industrialization. Late development is only one of them, and not a very good one.

Recent scholarship of comparative authoritarianism suggests that party institutions contribute to regime resilience by facilitating power-sharing among the party elites and preventing the paramount leaders’ abuse of power that undermines political stability. Existing studies tend to focus on the empirical association between party organizations and regime resilience, whereas the actual effects of institutions on elite behavior receive less attention. This paper conducts an in-depth study of China's appointment system to examine whether the CCP's power-sharing institutions indeed constrain the person- nel authority of the party's paramount leader. Using a unique dataset of provincial leadership appointment from 1992 to 2014, the empirical analysis reveals that the General Secretary enjoys what can be described as ‘constrained supremacy’ in the making of personnel decisions: the leader can boost his own position by providing favorable treatment to key supporters, but the formal arrangement of collective decision-making constrains rampant reward of patronage that would unsettle the balance among the regime's top elites. The findings of the paper lay bare the diffculty of capturing the inner workings of authoritarian politics with broad, cross-national indicators of regime type; they also illustrate the complicated interaction between formal institutions and informal, personal logic of exercising power in authoritarian regimes.

How is modern constitutionalism related to anticolonialism? This Article takes into account this question with a special reference to the case of Hồ Chi Minh. It argues that modern constitutionalism offers a powerful ideational and discursive weapon for the colonized people to struggle against colonialism. To understand this, the Article introduces the concept of ‘anticolonial constitutionalism’, defined as a form of political discourse in which anticolonialists employ the language and ideas of modern constitutionalism to combat the predatory colonial government and to express the aspirations to a constitutional government. Anticolonial constitutionalism emerges under three conditions, namely exploitatory and arbitrary colonialism, anticolonialism, and constitutional enlightenment. The case of Hồ Chí Minh illustrates this phenomenon well. When Vietnam was under French colonialism as a part of French Indochina during the first half of the twentieth century, Vietnamese anticolonialism was vehement, and different anticolonialists employed the language and ideas of constitutionalism to oppose the colonial government. One of them was Hồ Chí Minh, considered by many Vietnamese as the father and icon of the nation. A tremendously influential anticolonialist, he was enlightened with constitutionalist knowledge and employed key ideas of modern constitutionalism, namely a written constitution, the rule of law, popular sovereignty, and fundamental rights to struggle against French colonialism and to express such aspirations to a constitutional government in Vietnam. This study has implications for the trajectory of constitutionalism in contemporary Vietnam given the continuing influence of Hồ Chí Minh's constitutionalist discourse in the country nowadays. More generally, this study has implications for the relationship between constitutionalism and anticolonialism.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, individual scholars and research institutes have conducted numerous public opinion surveys to monitor how global citizenries react to the process of democratization taking place in their own countries and elsewhere. This article reviews the various issues surrounding the divergent conceptions of democracy among political scientists and ordinary citizens, and synthesizes significant findings of the conceptual and empirical research based on these surveys. It also raises a set of new questions that future surveys should address to broaden and deepen our knowledge about citizen conceptions of democracy.

Performance-based retrospective voting is a fundamental mechanism of democracy. A good deal of scholarship has examined this electoral mechanism, but the extant studies have two omissions. First, there is little research that considers several retrospective evaluations together using an incumbent voting model. Second, there is little research that examines the difference in the effects of voters’ retrospective evaluations on two different ballots in mixed electoral systems. To fill these omissions, this article tests a comprehensive retrospective performance voting model in a mixed electoral system. Specifically, this article examines the effects of voters’ retrospective economic evaluations of economic performance at the national and personal levels, human rights, corruption, welfare protection, and foreign policy on vote choice for the incumbent party in the 2016 Korean legislative election in which voters had two ballots: one for the party list vote and one for the district vote. By using multinomial logistic regression models, this article finds that among the six retrospective evaluation categories, judgments of national economic performance at the national level, human rights, and foreign policy have a statistically significant impact on the likelihood of voting for the incumbent party in party list vote choice, whereas only voters’ evaluation of foreign policy matter in the district level vote decision. The results imply that Korean voters consider various aspects of government performance, such as the conditions of human rights and relationships with other countries, rather than just focusing on the economy. The retrospective voting behavior of Korean voters differs between party list and district level ballots.

This article applies the concept of hybrid regimes to evaluate the state of political transition in Indonesia and Thailand. It aims to answer why the transition to democracy in Indonesia during 1999–2004 was successful, while the transition in Thailand during 1997–2006 culminated in a reversion to authoritarianism by examining the social profiles and formation of cabinet and parliament members as well as the design of constitutions. The study suggests that the lack of inclusiveness helps explain why democratization in Thailand was in failure. During the transition period, inclusiveness has not markedly increased because of the leadership strongman style, the flaws in the recruitment process, and the problem with the party system. This was unlike Indonesia, where cabinet, parliament, and multiparty system were able to include a variety groups and broad societal segments that played a significant role in deliberating political rules of the game. Indonesia's institutional rearrangements appear to sustain popular participation and engender momentum for fostering democracy, while Thailand's constitutional re-engineering contains many provisions to disempower the elected bodies. The perpetuation of the hybrid regime in Thailand is foreseeable as the hybridity satisfies the needs and concerns of the traditional elites and the urban middle class.

This paper theoretically presents a new structure from the perspective of information on international standards with regards to the actual impact that election monitoring has on political change. Specifically, there is the point of view that after the election monitoring, a report is published, and as a result information relating to international standards of electoral integrity becomes clear in the countries subject to monitoring. Then if it becomes clear, for example, to one country that it is unable to meet the standards required by the international community then that country might abandon trying to meeting international requirements and its inclination toward authoritarianism might strengthen. Therefore, the clarification of information on the international standards of fair electoral integrity as a result of election monitoring could result in a shift toward authoritarianism. Through a case study, this paper shows that new interpretations of democratization in Africa can be advanced by its theoretical framework. Many African countries started to get rid of one-party systems or military dictatorships in the 1990s and to introduce multi-party elections. As a result, they held founding elections. What is often pointed out is that compared to the founding elections, the degree of fraud increased at the second elections. Although there has been no appropriate explanation, this paper suggests a theoretical explanation for this puzzling trend.

‘Rightful resistance’ has become a mainstream theoretical framework for understanding social protests in contemporary China. However, the middle class in Shanghai is more inclined to protect its rights through ‘loyal appealing’ than rightful resistance. The middle class has had to express its loyalty and its ‘voice’ at the same time to minimize its political risk. Rightful resistance and ‘loyal appealing’ differ in several respects. First, rightful resistance professes loyalty only to the central government, whereas loyal appealing professes loyalty to the local government. Second, rightful resistance considers the local government an object to confront, whereas loyal appealing considers it a potential ally. Finally, activists who engage in rightful resistance use central government policies as their weapon, whereas activists who engage in loyal appealing use the local government's political performance as a bargaining chip. However, the middle class has not completely relinquished its right to rightful resistance; instead, rightful resistance is a backup to ensure the effectiveness of loyal appealing.