The developmental states of Asia—South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore—have been widely recognized for their successful COVID-19 governance. However, despite these successes, a closer examination reveals significant differences in their strategic responses and the medical resources mobilized. This article explains the different governance approaches taken by the three developmental states. We argue that the pre-crisis industrial coordination capacity of each developmental state plays a crucial role in determining both whether and which medical resources can be mobilized during emergencies. Through comparative case studies and within-case process tracing, we demonstrate how pre-established industry-level coordination capacities enabled Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore to strategically prioritize the production and mobilization of test kits, masks, and vaccines, respectively, especially in the initial phase of the pandemic. This article emphasizes that a country’s domestic production capacity, an often-overlooked institutional factor, can facilitate a more efficient response in a short period of time and significantly strengthen crisis management efforts.

Why did Meiji Japan succeed in modernizing its state apparatus while Qing China failed? According to neorealists, states respond to threats by balancing. Successful balancing requires an efficient bureaucracy to extract enough resources from society to sustain a formidable military. Yet not all states are equal when it comes to modernizing. We argue that a state’s ability to adopt best practices depends on its past position in the international system. States suffering from a longstanding material weakness will tend to adopt new practices from abroad more quickly than states that have enjoyed a dominant position for a long time. Embeddedness decides whether or not the state perceives its model’s crisis. Therefore, we propose a theory of neorealist imitation success or failure that counts three variables: embeddedness as the independent variable, political leadership’s willingness to adopt best practices, and elite cohesion as intervening variables.

What shapes the ways in which citizens participate in politics? This article investigates the association between private homeownership and the forms of citizens’ political behaviors using a Chinese nationwide social survey. Exploiting the abolishment of the welfare housing system in the late 1990s as a quasi-natural experiment, I find that owning a home and experiencing home value appreciation increases citizens’ willingness for political engagement as well as participatory behaviors through formal channels, but reduces their confrontational behaviors towards government such as participation in protests. Further evidence on political attitudes suggests that homeowners are more critical of government performance, yet they report higher political trust in the state and a stronger preference for maintaining the status quo. These findings highlight the critical role of asset ownership in preventing conflict and promoting stability by shaping the political behaviors and beliefs of citizens.

Using data from the seventh wave of the World Values Survey, this study examines how social media use shapes the negotiation of transnational identity in South Korea and Taiwan—two countries characterized by distinct forms of nationalism—and whether social capital moderates this relationship. A two-dimensional model encompassing local–global attachment and protectionism–openness was employed to identify latent classes of transnational identity. The findings reveal that nationalism significantly influences identity negotiation in both countries, with Taiwanese citizens exhibiting stronger global ties compared to Koreans. In addition, social media use reinforces local and protectionist identities in these countries, limiting transnational solidarity and amplifying exclusivity through algorithmically mediated digital networks. Notably, social capital moderates this dynamic by fostering global openness, particularly when trust in out-groups is high. This study highlights the intricate interplay between social media use, social capital, and transnational identity negotiation, contributing to a nuanced understanding of the cultural response to globalization in East Asia.

Throughout the twentieth century, Taiwan and South Korea underwent rapid economic development and successfully democratized without reversal to authoritarianism. Despite their similar trajectories, the two countries diverge significantly in political and public support for gender equality. Taiwan is widely seen as the most gender-equal country in Asia, while South Korea remains deeply polarized, with uneven progress in women’s representation. What accounts for this divergence between two democracies? This article advances a political institutions thesis, arguing that differences in democratic institution-building—particularly the actors and modes of democratization—have shaped the contour of gender politics of each country. Contrasting the histories of party-driven democratization in Taiwan and mass-driven democratization in South Korea, this article shows that the process of building democracy has had lasting effects on the institutionalization and sustainability of gender equality.

The East Asian democracies (EAD) of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have received little attention from the international political science community working on populism. By analyzing the last two to three decades of research on EAD we look for clues to help us explain why there is so little interest. In our review we encounter cases of eclectic conceptualization, suboptimal data, innovative categorization, binary analytics, and even political bias, all of which may weaken the persuasiveness of the respective research in the eyes of critical colleagues. Our key finding, however, is that all studies on EAD implicitly refer to local political standards as the baseline from which alleged populist behavior is identified and labeled. In direct comparison, the populist characteristics of East Asian politicians appear to be less pronounced than those of sledgehammer populists like Donald Trump, Hugo Chavez, or Boris Johnson. Consequently, scholars working on the latter may be less curious about the former. Our findings, therefore, confront us with the question of what to use as a baseline for the measurement of potentially populist phenomena. We argue for the application of what is locally considered standard political behavior and conclude that such a practice has the potential to draw more attention to cases from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

We introduce a novel dataset mapping career transitions of 505 elites in North Korea. Despite ample attention to granular data on elites, there is a lack of comprehensive information spanning state, party, military, and parastatal sectors. Granular rank and position data enable tracing intra- and inter-institutional elite transitions, opening new research avenues on North Korean elite studies and leader-elite dynamics in personalist autocracies. Exploiting within-regime threat-level variation during successions, we test hypotheses on dictators’ use of intra- versus inter-institutional elite management. We conclude with implications for new research directions in North Korean studies and authoritarianism literature.