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Something remarkable has occurred in Asia with little fanfare over the past twenty-five years. Considered severely underinstitutionalized at the end of the Cold War, Asia’s regional architecture is now characterized by a complex patchwork of overlapping alliances and multilateral institutions. How did this happen? Why should we care? And what does this mean for the future of regional order and Asian security? Adopting a new framework grounded in historical institutionalism, this book examines the transformation of Asia’s regional architecture from 1945 to the present. The book traces institutional and political developments in Asia beginning with the emergence of the postwar US bilateral alliance system and covers the debate and contention behind the rise of several post–Cold War multilateral initiatives. These include the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, ASEAN Regional Forum, East Asian Summit, Trans-Pacific Partnership, China-Japan-Korea Trilateral Summit, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Belt and Road Initiative, among others. Asian policy makers have endeavored to create a set of rules, norms, and institutions to build confidence, facilitate cooperation, improve governance, and ultimately bring peace and order to a region fraught with underlying historical and political tensions. Although Asia’s complex patchwork of institutions may exacerbate regional rivalries, the book demonstrates how overlapping institutions may ultimately bring greater stability to the region.

The global rise of political religion is one of the defining and most puzzling characteristics of current world politics. Since the early 1990s, religious parties have achieved stunning electoral victories around the world. This book investigates religious politics and its implications for contemporary democracy through a comparison of political parties in Israel and Turkey. While the politics of Judaism and Islam are typically seen as outgrowths of oppositionally different beliefs, the author's comparative inquiry shows how limiting this understanding of religious politics can be. Her cross-country and cross-religion analysis develops a unique approach to identifying religious parties' idiosyncratic and shared characteristics without reducing them to simple categories of religious/secular, Judeo-Christian/Islamic, or democratic/antidemocratic. The author shows that religious parties in both Israel and Turkey attract broad coalitions of supporters and skillfully inhabit religious and secular worlds simultaneously. They imbue existing traditional ideas with new political messages, blur conventional political lines and allegiances, offer strategic political choices, and exhibit remarkably similar political views. The book's findings will be especially relevant to those who want to pass beyond rudimentary typologies to better assess religious parties' capacities to undermine and contribute to liberal democracy. The Israeli and Turkish cases open a window to better understanding the complexities of religious parties. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that the characteristics of religious political parties—whether Jewish, Muslim, or yet another religion—can be as striking in their similarities as in their differences.

This book examines the prospects for advancing reform in Ukraine in the wake of the February 2014 Euromaidan revolution. It examines six crucial areas of reform: identity-memory divides, corruption, constitution, judiciary, patrimonialism and the oligarchs, and the economy. On each of these topics, the book provides one chapter that focuses on Ukraine’s experience and one chapter that examines the issue in the broader context of other international practice. Placing Ukraine in comparative perspective shows that many of the country’s problems are not unique and that other countries have been able to address many of the issues currently confronting Ukraine. The chapters provide an in-depth analysis of Ukraine’s challenges and describe the difficulties Ukrainians will have in overcoming the numerous obstacles to reform. As with the constitution, there are no easy answers, but careful analysis shows that some solutions are better than others. Ultimately, the authors offer a series of reforms that can help Ukraine make the best of a bad situation. The book stresses the need to focus on reforms that might not have immediate effect, but that comparative experience shows can solve fundamental contextual challenges. Finally, the book shows that pressures from outside Ukraine can have a strong positive influence on reform efforts inside the country.

This book argues that the interaction between urban political economies and patterns of armed territorial control shape the nature and trajectory of the ways in which developing world cities confront the challenge of urban violence. The study introduces business as a pivotal actor in the politics of urban violence, and shows that private sector mobilization can either support or subvert state efforts to stem and prevent urban violence and, more broadly, urban governance. The effects that private sector mobilization have on the institutional outcomes of the politics of urban violence are contingent on how business communities are institutionally configured within cities and the nature of their relations with political actors and parties. A focus on city mayors finds that the degree to which politicians rely upon clientelism to secure and maintain power weighs heavily on whether they favor responses to violence that perpetuate or weaken exclusionary local political orders. The book builds a new typology of patterns of armed territorial control within cities, each of which poses challenges and opportunities for sustaining distinct political projects in response to urban violence. To demonstrate the framework’s analytic utility the book develops subnational comparative analyses of variation in the institutional outcomes of the politics of urban violence across Colombia’s three principal cities –Medellin, Cali, and Bogota –and over time within each. The analysis shows that the politics of urban violence is a powerful new lens on the broader question of who governs in major developing world cities.

The incongruity between territory, citizenry, and nation has long preoccupied students of international migration, nationalism, and citizenship, including the state’s transborder relationship with its “external” members (e.g., emigrants, diasporas, and ethnonational “kin”). This book is a comparative, historical, and ethnographic study of the complex relationships among the states in the Korean peninsula, colonial-era Korean migrants to Japan and northeast China and their descendants, and the states in which they have resided. Despite a widespread and quasi-primordial belief in Korean ethnic nationhood, the embrace of these transborder coethnic populations by the Japanese colonial state and the two postcolonial states (North and South Korea) has been shifting and recurrently contested. Through analyses of transborder membership politics in the colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods, the book explores under what circumstances and by what means the colonial and postcolonial states have sought to claim (or failed to claim) certain transborder populations as “their own,” and how transborder Koreans have themselves shaped the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties as they have sought long-distance membership on their own terms. Extending the constructivist approach to nations/nationalisms and the culturalist/cognitive turn in recent theorizing on the modern state to a transnational context, it demonstrates that being a “homeland” state or a member of the “transborder nation” is not an ethnodemographic fact, but an arduous and revocable political achievement, mediated profoundly by the historically evolving and mutually interlinked bureaucratic practices of the state.

This book explains why Latin America’s pattern of protective labor regulation has been surprisingly resistant to fundamental reform over the course of the last century, especially during the period of intense pressure from globalization. It develops a theory based on two factors – the skill distribution in the economy and the organizational capacity of labor – to explain the remarkable continuity in national-level labor codes. It argues that where workers have mid- to high-level skills and sufficient leadership or ties to political parties, they can be most effective in forming coalitions that preserve or increase the protectiveness of labor legislation. Where unskilled labor predominates, and where ties to political parties are weak, labor regulation is less developed and less protective. This theory is tested in two ways. First, the book takes a quantitative approach, conducting a systematic analysis of the determinants of 23 different labor law provisions in 18 Latin American countries over the period from the 1980s to the 2000s. Second, it employs a longer-term qualitative historical analysis to trace out labor law development and attempted reform over the last century in three representative countries: one which had highly developed protections for individual workers, but whose laws fragmented collective action by unions (Chile), one which provided only narrow protection of individual workers but accorded unions significant freedom (Peru), and one that was strongly protective of both individual workers and the unions that represented them (Argentina).

The essays in this book analyze and explain the crisis of democratic representation in five Andean countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. In this region, disaffection with democracy, political parties, and legislatures has spread to an alarming degree. Many presidents have been forced from office, and many traditional parties have fallen by the wayside. These five countries have the potential to be negative examples in a region that has historically had strong demonstration and diffusion effects in terms of regime changes. The book addresses an important question for Latin America as well as other parts of the world: Why does representation sometimes fail to work?

Democracy is supposed to be the antithesis of hereditary rule by family dynasties. And yet “democratic dynasties” continue to persist in democracies around the world. They have been conspicuously prevalent in Japan, where more than a third of all legislators and two-thirds of all cabinet ministers in recent years have come from families with a history in parliament. Such a high proportion of dynasties is unusual and has sparked concerns over whether democracy in Japan is functioning properly. This book introduces a comparative theory to explain the causes and consequences of dynasties in democracies like Japan. Members of dynasties enjoy an “inherited incumbency advantage” in all three stages of a typical political career: selection, election, and promotion. However, the nature and extent of this advantage, as well as its consequences for elections and representation, varies by the institutional context of electoral rules and candidate selection methods within parties. In the late 1980s, roughly half of all new candidates in Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party were political legacies. However, electoral system reform in 1994 and subsequent party reforms have changed the incentives for party leaders to rely on dynastic politics in candidate selection. A new pattern of party-based competition is slowly replacing the old pattern of competition based on localized family fiefdoms.

How and why does a semi-democratic regime—one that developed as a result of significant degree of democratization—collapse without experiencing further democratization? This book answers these questions through a case study of the collapse of the semi-democratic regime in prewar Japan. Japan's gradual democratization after the Meiji Restoration in 1867 led to the rise of the semi-democratic regime in 1918. It was characterized by the rule of party government and electoral participation by a significant portion of the population. Confronted with a series of threats from the military, it collapsed in 1932 after the May Fifteenth Incident. This book explains the collapse of this regime as a result of shift in the balance of power between the party government and the military. It focuses on Meiji Constitution's institutional constraints as well as legitimacy and the semi-loyalty of political parties and their memebers as factors that affected the relationship/Although the Meiji Constitution placed the party government in a weak position institutionally with respect to the military, the high legitimacy that it claimed initially enabled it to sustain the regime from the outset. Gradually, however, its legitimacy eroded and political parties became semi-loyal to the regime, tolerating or encouraging the military’s challenge against to it. This led to the collapse of the semi-democratic regime.

Nations have powerful reasons to get their military alliances right. When security pacts go well, they underpin regional and global order; when they fail, they spread wars across continents as states are dragged into conflict. We would, therefore, expect states to carefully tailor their military partnerships to specific conditions. This expectation, Raymond C. Kuo argues, is wrong. Following the Leader argues that most countries ignore their individual security interests in military pacts, instead converging on a single, dominant alliance strategy. The book introduces a new social theory of strategic diffusion and emulation, using case studies and advanced statistical analysis of alliances from 1815 to 2003. In the wake of each major war that shatters the international system, a new hegemon creates a core military partnership to target its greatest enemy. Secondary and peripheral countries rush to emulate this alliance, illustrating their credibility and prestige by mimicking the dominant form. Be it the NATO model that seems so commonsense today, or the realpolitik that reigned in Europe of the late nineteenth century, a lone alliance strategy has defined broad swaths of diplomatic history. It is not states' own security interests driving this phenomenon, Kuo shows, but their jockeying for status in a world periodically remade by great powers.

Populism is a key feature of contemporary democratic politics, and is on the rise across the world. Yet current approaches to populism fail to account for its shifting character in a rapidly changing political and media landscape, where media touches upon all aspects of political life, a sense of crisis is endemic, and where populism has gone truly global. This book presents a new perspective for understanding populism, arguing that it is a distinct ‘political style’ that is performed, embodied and enacted across a number of contexts. While still based on the classic divide between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, contemporary populism’s reliance on new media technologies, its relationship to shifting modes of political representation and identification, and its increasing ubiquity has seen the phenomenon transform in new and unexpected ways. Demonstrating that populism as a political style has three central features – appeal to ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’; ‘bad manners’; and crisis, breakdown or threat – the book uses a performative framework to examine its key actors, stages, audiences and mise-en-scène. In doing so, it draws on illustrative examples from across the globe, moving beyond the usual cases of Western Europe and the Americas to also take in populism in the Asia-Pacific and Africa. Working across the fields of comparative politics, media communications and political theory, it seeks to account for populism’s complex relationship to crisis, media and democracy, ultimately offering an important and provocative new approach for understanding populism in the twenty-first century.

Why do some countries in the developing world achieve growth with equity, while others do not? If democracy is the supposed panacea for the developing world, why have Southeast Asian democracies had such uneven results? In exploring these questions, the author of this book argues that the realization of equitable development hinges heavily on strong institutions, particularly institutionalized political parties and cohesive interventionist states, and on moderate policy and ideology. The book is framed as a structured and focused comparative-historical analysis of the politics of inequality in Malaysia and Thailand, but also includes comparisons with the Philippines and Vietnam. It shows how Malaysia and Vietnam have had the requisite institutional capacity and power to advance equitable development, while Thailand and the Philippines, because of weaker institutions, have not achieved the same levels of success. At its core, the book makes a claim for the need for institutional power and institutional capacity to alleviate structural inequalities.

Courts, like other government institutions, shape public policy. But how are they drawn into the policy process, and how are patterns of policy debate shaped by the institutional structure of the courts? Drawing on the experience of the Brazilian federal courts since the transition to democracy, this book examines the judiciary's role in public policy debates. During a period of energetic policy reform, the high salience of many policies, combined with the conducive institutional structure of the judiciary, ensured that Brazilian courts would become an important institution at the heart of the policy process. The Brazilian case thus challenges the notion that Latin America's courts have been uniformly pliant or ineffectual, with little impact on politics and policy outcomes. The book also inserts the judiciary into the scholarly debate regarding the extent of presidential control of the policy process in Latin America's largest nation. By analyzing the full Brazilian federal court system—including not only the high court, but also trial and appellate courts—it develops a framework with cross-national implications for understanding how courts may influence policy actors' political strategies and the distribution of power within political systems.

This book offers a detailed account of the way that social democracy today makes sense of capitalism. In particular, it challenges the idea that social democracy has gone “neoliberal,” arguing that so-called Third Way policies seem to have brought out new aspects of a thoroughgoing social interventionism with roots deep in the history of social democracy. The author develops the claim that what distinguishes today's social democracy from the past is the way that it equates cultural and social values with economic values, which in turn places a premium on individuals who are capable of succeeding in the knowledge economy. Offering a study of Britain's New Labour and Sweden's Social Democratic Party, and of the political cultural transformations that have taken place in those countries, the book looks seriously into how the economic, social, and cultural policies of contemporary social democracy fit together to form a particular understanding of capitalism and capitalist politics.

The developments of early 2011 have left the political landscape of the Middle East changed but recognizable. Even as urgent struggles continue, it remains clear that authoritarianism will survive this transformational moment. The study of authoritarian governance, therefore, remains essential for our understanding of the political dynamics and inner workings of regimes across the region. The contributors to this book consider the Syrian and Iranian regimes—what they share in common and what distinguishes them. Too frequently, authoritarianism has been assumed to be a generic descriptor of the region, and differences among regimes have been overlooked. But as the political trajectories of Middle Eastern states diverge in years ahead, with some perhaps consolidating democratic gains while others remain under distinct and resilient forms of authoritarian rule, understanding variations in modes of authoritarian governance and the attributes that promote regime resilience becomes an increasingly urgent priority.

The exceptional experiences of South Korea and Taiwan in combining high growth and liberal democracy in a relatively short and similar timetable have brought scholarly attention to their economic and political transformations. This new work looks specifically at the operation of workers and unions in the decades since labor-repressive authoritarian rule ended, bringing Taiwan, in particular, into the literature on comparative labor politics. South Korean labor unions are commonly described as militant and confrontational, for they often take to the streets in raucous protest. Taiwanese unions are seen as moderate and practical, primarily working through formal political processes to lobby their agendas. In exploring how and why these post-democratization states have come to breed such different types of labor politics, the book traces the roots of their differences to how unions and political parties operated under authoritarianism, and points to ways in which those legacies continue to be perpetuated. By pairing two cases with many similarities, the book persuasively uncovers factors that explain the significant variation at play.

Most party systems are relatively stable over time. Yet in the 1980s and 1990s, established party systems in Peru and Venezuela broke down, leading to the elections of outsider Alberto Fujimori and anti-party populist Hugo Chavez. Focusing on these two cases, this book explores the causes of systemic collapse. To date, scholars have pointed to economic crises, the rise of the informal economy, and the charisma and political brilliance of Fujimori and Chavez to explain the changes in Peru and Venezuela. This book uses economic data, surveys, and experiments to show that these explanations are incomplete. The author argues that party-system collapse is motivated fundamentally by voter anger at the traditional political parties, which is produced by corruption scandals and failures of representation. Integrating economic, organizational, and individual considerations, he provides a new explanation and compelling new evidence to present a fuller picture of voters' decisions and actions in bringing about party-system collapse, and the rise of important outsider political leaders in South America.

Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork in a rural southwest China county, this book examines the unwritten rules of Chinese officialdom and suggests that these rules have helped to hold the one-Party state together during decades of tumultuous political, social, and economic change. While scholars have long recognized the importance of informal institutions in Chinese politics, this study goes behind the scenes to explain how informal institutions actually operate. The book pays special attention to the role of patronage networks in political decision making, political competition, and official corruption. While patronage networks are often seen as a parasite on the formal institutions of state, this book argues that patronage politics provides a supplementary set of rules that enables China's political system to function. In a system characterized by fragmented authority, personal power relations, and bureaucratic indiscipline, patronage networks play a critical role in facilitating policy coordination and bureaucratic bargaining. They also help to regulate political competition within the state, which reduces the potential for serious conflict. Understanding the role of patronage networks in Chinese politics is essential for understanding the resilience of the Chinese state through decades of change.

Participatory democracy institutional innovations aimed at bringing citizens back into local governance processes are now at the core of the international democratic development agenda. Around the world, and especially in Latin America, many local governments, from left and right, have implemented mechanisms to formally include citizens’ input in decision-making processes at the local level. How is the assumed democratization potential of participatory mechanisms actually realized in practice? Institutionalized participatory mechanisms are not, in fact, a panacea against all of democracy’s ills. They have had mixed results in practice at the municipal level, between countries but also between municipalities within a single country, as is the case for Mexico’s participatory planning mechanisms and for Brazil’s participatory budgeting programs. Under what conditions is such institutional change more likely to succeed? Drawing from a comparative study of five participatory democracy experiences located in two Mexican cities and two Brazilian cities, the book develops a conceptual and comparative framework to better understand democratic success by looking at the variety of state-society relationships observed within these institutions. It offers a set of theoretical tools that grasp the variety of empirical realities observed in practice, and seeks to explain them. The novel comparison undertaken reveals that if institutional design matters, then how these institutional mechanisms are appropriated by political and social actors is even more important as it conditions the potential for an autonomous civil society to emerge and actively engage with the local state.

China plays a variety of status games, sometimes emphasizing its status as an emerging great power and other times highlighting its status as a fragile developing country. The reasons for this are unclear. Drawing on original Chinese sources, social psychological theories, and international relations theories, this book provides a theoretically informed analysis of China’s global rebranding and repositioning in the twenty-first century. Contrary to offensive realism and power transition theory, the book argues that China is not always a status maximizer eager to replace the United States as the new global leader. Differing from most constructivist and psychological studies that focus on the status seeking of rising powers, this study develops a theory of status signaling that combines both rationalist and constructivist insights. The book argues that Chinese leaders face competing pressure from domestic and international audiences to project different images. The book suggests that China’s continual struggle for international status is primarily driven by domestic political calculations. Meanwhile, at the international level, China is concerned about over-recognition of its status for instrumental reasons. The theoretical argument is illustrated through detailed analysis of Chinese foreign policy. Examining major cases such as China’s military transformation, China’s regional diplomacy, and China’s global diplomacy during the 1997 Asian and 2008 global financial crises, this book makes important contributions to international relations theory and Asian studies.