This paper is a detailed case study of China's first direct election of the township heads, examining the driving forces for and obstacles to direct township election, and Chinese utilitarian approach toward local democracy. The paper discusses the prospect of direct township election in China and highlights the Chinese paternalist model of democracy being implemented in practice.

The constructivist turn in the study of world politics provides new impetus to studies of the political deliberations of human agents. The co-constitution of agents and structures implies the non-acceptability of accounts that fail to consider the interpretations human agents provide to structural conditions. But neither can we accept the reverse. Studies of the interpretations of political agents should adequately account for the structural constraints on those interpretations. This paper illustrates how easily agency studies can underestimate structural constraints by reference to a most serious and scholarly account of agency in the Vietnam War commitment decisions, Yuen Foong Khong's Analogies at War: Korea, Munich Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965. The argumentative burden resides with those who offer accounts that hold or imply that agents acted from non-structural motives.

The Republic of Korea (Korea hereinafter) has been widely regarded as one of the most vigorous and analytically interesting third-wave democracies (Diamond and Shin, 2000: 1). During the first decade of democratic rule, Korea has successfully carried out a large number of electoral and other reforms to transform the institutions and procedures of military-authoritarian rule into those of a representative democracy. Unlike many of its counterparts in Latin America and elsewhere, Korea has fully restored civilian rule by extricating the military from power. As is the case in established democracies of North America and Western Europe, free and competitive elections have been regularly held at all the different levels of the government. In the most recent presidential election, held in December 1997, Korea also established itself as a mature electoral democracy by elevating an opposition party to political power. In Korea today, there is general agreement that electoral politics has become the only possible political game in town.

There has been a lack of research into candidate selection outside the developed world. In this paper we attempt to fill this gap, with a detailed examination of the factors leading to the introduction of party primaries, their operations and their future prospects, in a third wave democracy, Taiwan. Although Taiwan is a late democratizer, the high degree of party institutionalization makes it more appropriate to compare its nomination system with those of older political parties, we particularly contrast it with the leading German and British political parties. Our discussion also finds many similar trends with developments of intra-party democracy in European parties, particularly in terms of a decentralization of candidate selection and reduced mediation between party centre and members. In addition, despite technical changes in electoral campaigning, parties in Taiwan have not abandoned the mass membership model. In Taiwan, direct primary elections have been a controversial subject. By analyzing relevant data, we argue that the core problem of the party primary was its lack of fairness, because party cadres tried to monopolize the candidate selection and thus failed to remain neutral. We find signs that leaders in all parties are wary of allowing inner party democracy to go too far and losing their control over nomination. When the party centre fears the wrong candidates will be selected, they are prepared to manipulate the rules in their favour or re-centralize the selection process.

This article examines the case of institutional inertia in Japanese financial regulation, focusing on the reasons why institutions centered on informal modes of organization and interaction proved particularly ‘sticky.’ The Japanese case serves as a particularly tough test for theories of institutional adaptation and change because even crisis – a time when the costs of inaction tend to far exceed the benefits – failed to produce timely institutional change. The paper argues that informal, exclusionary and opaque relational ties served as a functional substitute for formal regulation and promoted cooperative government-bank relationships in an earlier period. Yet, when the informal attributes of the system began to impede the sound functioning of the financial system, the very opacity of these ties and the informational dynamics underlying them meant that the Diet and the general public were less than fully aware of the extent of dysfunction present as time went on.

The central theme of Japanese subnational governmental study has been center–local relations. Researchers looked into the question of whether Japanese subnational governments have sufficient autonomy to pursue their own preferences. In other words, the policymaking process of subnational governments in Japan has long been examined in relation to the national government. It is true that, under the centralized governmental system, the national government of Japan exerts a substantial influence on subnational policymaking. Students of subnational governments cannot avoid this issue. However, one cannot understand the reality of subnational policymaking only by looking at the center–local relations and the administrative institutions that define the relations. Indeed, one needs to ask what determines subnational policy outcomes, to what degree the national influence affects the determinants, and under what conditions these determinants function autonomously. The present paper directly examines the subnational policymaking process itself, not the center–local relations, and tries to understand its mechanism. The paper proposes a research framework using a statistical method that has been developed in the area of diffusion study. In the framework, national influence is integrated into an analysis of subnational policymaking as one of the factors that affect policy determinants. Using the framework, the paper analyzes the process of four regional policies, which will lead to a better understanding of subnational policymaking.

To understand the prospects for global order and progress in the coming years, we explore the joint implications of three premises: (1) states advantaged by the current international order have stakes in its regularity and predictability, and thus in moving to counter or prevent threats to those stakes; (2) along impure public and club goods lines, they are more likely to make efforts to do so when some private or club benefits result; and (3) public opinion provides a bounded policy acceptance envelope offering incentives and disincentives to national political elites to act as envisioned by the first two premises. We present a mosaic of public opinion in major OECD countries (the US, Japan, and major EU members) on three policy areas – foreign aid, UN peace-keeping operations, and environmental quality – that contain international public goods elements. Actual contribution tendencies in those areas found in our previous work largely conform to the public opinion patterns reported here. Within the limits of available data, domestic political incentives as represented by public opinion warrant neither extreme optimism nor pessimism about the prospects for continuing contributions by OECD states to sustaining orderly functioning of the current world system.

Patrick Fournier and Masaru Kohno (2000) have considered some apparent differences between my view of strategic voting in Japan (Cox 1997) and Steve Reed's (1990). I think they succeed in showing these differences to be small in most instances. Along the way, they note some problems with the use of the S–F ratio. In this note, I comment briefly on this latter issue.

Five major claims are made in our paper on strategic voting within the context of Japan's multimember single non-transferable vote (SNTV) electoral system (Fournier and Kohno, 2000). Two claims deal with the reconciliation of Steven Reed's (1990) and Gary Cox's (1997) important work on extending Duverger's law to the Japanese case, and three claims deal with the informational effects of partisan labels on strategic voting.

Both the US and China are pressing Japan to tilt its foreign policy in their direction. Japan's response depends on views of China, which turned negative as assumptions proved incorrect. Early expectations were challenged in 1990–94, despite hopes of becoming a bridge between the US and China, and were dashed from 1995. The struggle among four schools of thought intensified. The full engagement group lost the most ground. The predominantly engagement, potential threat group was attacked as the mainstream, but it survived as the best option for global political leverage. The predominantly containment, possible engagement group gained as China allowed rising nationalism to target Japan. The full containment group also gained, boosted by Japanese nationalism anxious to rationalize the war era. More than reacting to Chinese or US actions, Japanese views are driven by instability in national identity. The US should be wary of encouraging containment of China because of its impact on rising Japanese nationalism.

This article examines Thai policy towards Malaysia and Myanmar in the post-Cold War period and argues that bilateral relations between Thailand and these countries have deteriorated considerably. The immediate reason for the change is the collapse of structural arrangements associated with the Cold War, in particular the Indochina Security Complex and domestic political developments in Thailand and Myanmar. Whereas a number of issues like illegal migration, fishing and insurgency have contributed to the deteriorated relations, the situation has been reasonably well managed. Factors contributing to the stability of the situation include regular bilateral dialogue and exchanges as well as common membership in a number of multilateral fora like ASEAN, ARF, AFTA and APEC.

The most important election held in 2001 was that to the House of Councillors. Here, however, I will report on several surprising gubernatorial elections and the shocking LDP party presidential election. Each of these elections sent a similar message from the voters: ‘it is time for a change’. Powerful political machines using tried and true campaign techniques were repeatedly defeated by novices whose primary attraction was that they were not part of the political establishment.

Koizumi Junichiro's sweeping victory in the presidential primary of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) represents a palpable change in the national mood that may substantially affect the parliamentary conditions, although its impact on legislation is yet to be seen. In this essay, I briefly review the Diet in the past one year. In particular, the review deals with the legislative records in the 150–152 Diet sessions.

Political developments in Japan from the latter part of 2000 to the year 2001 were highlighted by the executive transition from unpopular Yoshiro Mori to exceptionally popular Junichiro Koizumu as the nation's leader.