Asian Journal of Comparative Politics

The aim of this article is to review the development of political science, as an academic discipline, in Mongolia. The article is composed of the following parts: The first part provides an overview of Mongolia’s de jure recognition as an Inner Asian “buffer state” in the early Cold War era. The second part describes the Communist ideological disciplines (such as scientific socialism) that were used to study politics and political systems in Mongolia during the Cold War era. The third part presents the process of democratization in post-1990 Mongolia, and its impact on the development of political science. The fourth part examines the focus points of contemporary Mongolian political science, presents the profiles of pioneering scholars, and describes the institutional changes, academic departments, professional associations, and doctoral degree councils in this field. Finally, the fifth part introduces the currently active Mongolian political scientists, their social environment, and their research fields. The conclusion of the article examines the prospects of political science development in Mongolia.

Korea's political science has been initiated and developed under the influence of the United States. It is related to the intention of the US to build a liberal democratic state in the southern part of the Korean peninsula against the Soviet Union-styled communism. However, as the bitter experience of the Korean War created a very narrow ideological space in Korean politics, there were considerable ideological constraints. Moreover, the authoritarian military regime, often took advantage of anti-communism ideology as a cause to justify their rules. All these served as a set of constraints imposed on the study of political science. Korea's political scientists tried to respond to the political demands of the day despite the politically oppressive atmosphere. Democratization and the end of the Cold War provided political scientists a very favorable condition. Political scientists did not need to fear about visible and invisible obstacles on their research any longer. That is, a ‘normal’ situation has finally come to Korea's political studies. Under such political circumstances, political science could widen its scope. Studies of politics became more institutionalized and diversified. Political science in post-democratization era deals with not only political institutions, political processes, and political ideology, but also newly emerging political phenomena such as Internet politics, immigration, ethnic minorities, welfare reform, globalization and social harmony, etc. Based on such academic achievement, it is time that Korea's political science has the task to make theoretical contributions to outside world from the Korea's own experiences.

The DPRK’s progressive nuclearization has evoked different responses in its Northeast Asian neighbors. A comparison across Japan, South Korea, and China offers a useful arena for addressing important debates in comparative and international politics. The three states differ with regards to their political systems and classical power disparities. The article distills general trends in their approach in light of—and sometimes in spite of—these differences. First, notwithstanding differences in regime type, there has been a shared secular trend away from positive inducements. Second, the precise mix of inducements differed significantly across all three cases in tandem with their domestic constraints and levels of political polarization. Third, classical neorealist drivers of international behavior have been rather secondary for explaining approaches to the DPRK’s nuclearization. Finally, the panoply of strategies spanning the positive and negative spectrum has failed to deliver desired objectives. This outcome highlights the centrality of the domestic regime type of target states to the effectiveness of inducements.

Can foreign aid be used to promote democracy in Asia? Because liberalization is costly for the autocratic recipients, they can be expected to resist donor pressure to reform politically. The recipients who have the strategic and commercial attributes that donors value should have an easier time getting aid offers and hence leverage against donors who seek liberalization. By contrast, the recipients who lack such attributes have less leverage. This group of “secondary” recipients can be nudged towards political liberalization. I test this argument using foreign aid from AidData and regime-type information from Polity IV. The evidence bares out the argument even after correcting for the threat of reverse causality. I conclude with policy prescriptions for effective aid allocation.

The Chinese experience following the Cultural Revolution (circa. 1966–1976) in adjusting from a period of great human suffering and civil chaos to one of relative normalcy deserves placement within the larger transitional justice literature. As an early example of conflict transformation and reconciliation that restored legitimacy to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) through not only substantive reforms, but also history revision, controlled outlets for communal venting, and the scapegoating of outgoing officials, the Chinese case challenges scholarly assumptions that competent transition policies must be rooted exclusively in truth and justice. This article thus concludes with a new approach for evaluating reconciliation processes that accounts for the disparate array of national experiences including, amongst others, Germany, Rwanda, South Africa, Guatemala, China, Ecuador, and Spain. Such modeling is necessary to press the transitional justice literature toward a more theoretically driven evaluation of conflict transformation and reconciliation policies.

This article tests hypotheses of the clientelist theory of political participation using both individual level cross sectional survey data and aggregate level data from all 76 provinces in Thailand for the 1996, 2001 and the 2005 General Election timeframes. According to the clientelist theory of political participation, we would expect higher participation among those with fewer resources when there is an incentive for a patron to buy participation, and lower participation where there is no incentive. I use linear and logistical regression to test hypotheses derived from this theory and find there is support enough to suggest clientelism as a cause of political participation during the democratic period of Thailand. The results have important implications for understanding clientelism, regime legitimacy and the prospects for a return to democracy.

This research note re-examines the recent debate on mandate divide hypothesis in Taiwan (Batto, 2012; Rich, 2014). Specifically, I focus on bill sponsorship, which is relatively free from party influence and therefore more suitable for testing whether being elected either in a district or through a party list yields different parliamentary behaviors. For an empirical test, I use an original bill introduction data made by the individual legislators served in the six legislative terms from 1992 through 2012. The result supports for the mandate hypothesis: the nominal tier legislators introduce more bills than the list tier members.