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Full-Text Articles in Political Science

Motivations, Policies And Performance: A Review Of China’S Culture ‘Going Out’ Strategy, Jihua Yang, David Ocon Oct 2023

Motivations, Policies And Performance: A Review Of China’S Culture ‘Going Out’ Strategy, Jihua Yang, David Ocon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Few countries have advanced their culture globally as China has done in the last two decades with its culture ‘going out’ strategy. Promoting cultural goods and services overseas and fostering cultural exchanges, the strategy is also part of the country’s efforts to advance its soft power abroad. Broadly, there are two contrasting perspectives on the strategy’s performance. Because of its stability and financial muscle, local analysts generally praise it, while the overarching official involvement provokes suspicion in some international contexts. This article provides a neutral assessment of the implementation, achievements, and impact of China’s culture ‘going out’ strategy, investigating its …


Public Perceptions Of Cross-Sector Collaboration And Sector Bias: Evidence From A Survey Experiment, Seulki Lee, Minjung Kim Oct 2023

Public Perceptions Of Cross-Sector Collaboration And Sector Bias: Evidence From A Survey Experiment, Seulki Lee, Minjung Kim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In recent years, public service delivery models have changed to include non-state actors and cross-sector collaboration as service providers. Using a survey experiment, we investigate if service providers’ sector (including single-sector and cross-sector providers) and their performance information shape public perceptions of their legitimacy. We find that cross-sector collaboration does not produce legitimacy gains over traditional public service provision. While providers’ sector has overall little impact on legitimacy perceptions, we find an anti-for-profit sector bias regarding value-laden aspects of perceived legitimacy. Additionally, performance information affects legitimacy perceptions. These findings have implications for legitimacy build-ing in contemporary governance settings.


Visualizing Affective Democracy: Learning Community In China And Taiwan Through Images Of Foreigners, William A. Callahan Oct 2023

Visualizing Affective Democracy: Learning Community In China And Taiwan Through Images Of Foreigners, William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In the past few years, cross-strait relations have been in the news again, especially in terms of China’s hard power reunification strategy and its sharp power influence operations. Indeed, much ink has been spilled about what lessons Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has for a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Taiwan’s presidential election in January 2024 has also led to increased analysis on Beijing’s use disinformation, misinformation, and other influence operations to favor candidates more friendly to the PRC. Indeed, Chinese military’s daily testing of Taiwan’s air and sea defense is both a hard power and a sharp power strategy because …


Commentary: Black Or White? Wrong Or Right? Don't Rush To Take Sides On Complex Issues Such As Israel-Hamas Conflict, Siow-Heng Ong, Benjamin Joshua Ong Oct 2023

Commentary: Black Or White? Wrong Or Right? Don't Rush To Take Sides On Complex Issues Such As Israel-Hamas Conflict, Siow-Heng Ong, Benjamin Joshua Ong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

While responses to the Israel-Hamas conflict have been bitterly divided, they showcase a common phenomenon of people viewing complex situations in black-and-white terms. But how did we get here?


Demographic Structure And Voting Behaviour During Democratization: Evidence From Malaysia's 2022 Election, Sebastian Carl Dettman, Thomas B. Pepinsky Sep 2023

Demographic Structure And Voting Behaviour During Democratization: Evidence From Malaysia's 2022 Election, Sebastian Carl Dettman, Thomas B. Pepinsky

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Malaysia’s fifteenth general election (GE15) was a milestone in the country’s democratization process, with new parties and political movements competing with established political coalitions. In this paper, we investigate how Malaysia’s cleavage structure—a central feature of Malaysia’s prior authoritarian regime—shapes electoral competition in a newly competitive political environment. We find that the “race paradigm” (Milner, Embong, and Tham 2014) remains central to explaining party strategy and coalition behavior in GE15, but that more democratic competition has increased the salience of regional differences—both between peninsular Malaysia and East Malaysia, and within peninsular Malaysia itself. Our analysis reveals the structural foundations of …


Chinese Visions Of Self And Other: The International Politics Of Noses, William A. Callahan Sep 2023

Chinese Visions Of Self And Other: The International Politics Of Noses, William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

How does China view the world? While much has been written about how China's international relations are best seen as intercultural relations that do not exclude the Other, this article examines how self/Other relations are visualized in terms of the human face in China, in particular through iconic images that construct the Chinese self with and against foreigners with large noses. It employs interpretivist methods to consider the interplay of social relations and international relations in order to see how ‘external appearance’ and ‘external relations’ inform each other in Chinese theory and practice. It mobilizes the classical Chinese concept ‘deep-set …


What Drives The Perceived Legitimacy Of Collaborative Governance? An Experimental Study, Seulki Lee, Marc Esteve Aug 2023

What Drives The Perceived Legitimacy Of Collaborative Governance? An Experimental Study, Seulki Lee, Marc Esteve

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study explores the perceived legitimacy of collaborative governance from a citizens’ perspective. We use a preregistered online survey experiment to test the effect of three factors—representation, performance information, and issue complexity—on the perceived legitimacy of a collaboration. Findings from 1,470 U.S. respondents show that representation and positive performance information influence citizens’ perceptions of collaborative governance legitimacy, while issue complexity has little impact. Additionally, heterogeneous treatment effects were found: respondents with low trust in public organizations factor representation more into their legitimacy perceptions of collaborative governance, while those with high trust in public organizations show little influence of representation.


Mobilizing For Elections: Patronage And Political Machines In Southeast Asia, Sebastian Carl Dettman Aug 2023

Mobilizing For Elections: Patronage And Political Machines In Southeast Asia, Sebastian Carl Dettman

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Mobilizing for Elections is an exciting and ambitious mapping of the contours of modern patronage in the region. The book provides a conceptual framework to understand patronage in the context of electoral mobilization and answers a variety of questions about the mechanics and patterns of patronage in Southeast Asia: what kinds of patronage are distributed and how, the response of voters to patronage, and variation within and across the cases they consider. The authors examine patterns of what they call “electoral mobilization regimes” in three primary cases: Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, with additional evidence provided from Singapore, Thailand, and …


Islamic Political Parties And Election Campaigns In Indonesia, Colm A. Fox, Jeremy Menchik Jul 2023

Islamic Political Parties And Election Campaigns In Indonesia, Colm A. Fox, Jeremy Menchik

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Islamist political parties are a structural feature of politics across the Muslim world, raising persisting questions for scholars of democracy. Under what conditions will Islamists moderate to support democracy and pluralism? Under what conditions will they adopt more exclusive behavior? Taking a fresh approach, we focus on electoral competition and the conditions under which Islamic party candidates campaign using either inclusive nationalist appeals or exclusively Islamic appeals. Using a unique data source, we coded the appeals contained on the campaign posters of 572 Islamic party candidates in Indonesia. We found that demographics, urban–rural differences, and the level of government office …


Whom Do We Learn From? The Impact Of Global Networks And Political Regime Types On E-Government Development, Beomgeun Cho, Karl R. Rethemeyer Jul 2023

Whom Do We Learn From? The Impact Of Global Networks And Political Regime Types On E-Government Development, Beomgeun Cho, Karl R. Rethemeyer

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study investigates the impact of global networks on e-government development and the role of political regime types in e-government diffusion through international networks. We built a unique social network dataset that covers 148 countries for the years between 2003 and 2014. Our network dataset is rooted in two assumptions: 1) international organizations serve as peak organizations for international policy networks, 2) public managers who participate in international e-government conferences held by the UN and OECD work as boundary spanners. Our empirical evidence suggests that countries well embedded in global e-government networks receive ideas for public sector innovation from international …


Integration Taxes And Gestural Integration: Access And Limits To Integration Through New Citizens’ Participation In State-Sponsored Grassroots Volunteerism In Singapore, George Wong Jul 2023

Integration Taxes And Gestural Integration: Access And Limits To Integration Through New Citizens’ Participation In State-Sponsored Grassroots Volunteerism In Singapore, George Wong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Integration is a contested topic in Singapore’s public discourse. One such area is integration through state-sponsored grassroots community volunteerism. Little is however known about such experiences of grassroots volunteerism to integration outcomes. This paper addresses the gap by exploring how new citizen and permanent resident grassroots volunteers make sense of their experiences through ‘integration taxes' and ‘gestural integration'. In doing so, this paper argues that while grassroots volunteerism offers lower barriers to entry for new citizens, it constraints the diversity of integration by and through new citizen volunteers due to discrimination, marginalisation and staged integration faced in grassroots work.


Is Democracy Good For Growth? Development At Political Transition Time Matters, Di Sima, Fali Huang Jun 2023

Is Democracy Good For Growth? Development At Political Transition Time Matters, Di Sima, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Is democracy a better political regime for economic prosperity than autocracy? This paper shows that the answer depends on the initial economic development level during the democratic transition when the foundation of institutions was laid. Democracy facilitates growth only in countries that already have adequate development at transition time. These countries are more likely to create and sustain growth-enhancing institutions than others. Without appropriate development, democracy does not improve growth; this applies to about 40% of the third-wave democratized countries. These results are based on a sample of 153 countries in 1960–2010 and robust to various specifications and endogeneity issues.


Chinese Global Orders: Socialism, Tradition, And Nation In China-Russia Relations, William A. Callahan Jun 2023

Chinese Global Orders: Socialism, Tradition, And Nation In China-Russia Relations, William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

While many use rational IR theory to explain Chinese foreign policy behavior, this paper follows global IR to employ interpretivist theory to examine how Chinese elites understand their country’s role in the world. In particular, it explores the Chinese global order ideas of socialism, tradition, and nation through a comparative analysis of how they work in China–Russia relations, especially after China’s 20th Communist Party Congress in 2022. The first section presents a critical analysis of the realist understanding of the China–Russia–U.S. strategic triangle. It argues that the socialist concept of “united front work” better explains Chinese (and Russian) policy in …


Bibliometric Analysis Of Academic Papers Citing Dunleavy Et Al.’S (2006) “New Public Management Is Dead—Long Live Digital-Era Governance”: Identifying Research Clusters And Future Research Agendas, Beomgeun Cho May 2023

Bibliometric Analysis Of Academic Papers Citing Dunleavy Et Al.’S (2006) “New Public Management Is Dead—Long Live Digital-Era Governance”: Identifying Research Clusters And Future Research Agendas, Beomgeun Cho

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

I trace the bibliometric evolution of “New Public Management Is Dead” by Dunleavy et al. to investigate how the seminal paper influenced the administrative reform debate. They suggested Digital-Era Governance as the main post-NPM idea. My bibliometric analysis discovers public value, administrative reform trajectories, and digital government as influential themes. Unlike Dunleavy et al., the literature found the managerial reform wave is not linear, reform ideas are supplementary, and NPM remains a major toolkit. Future research should focus on reintegration and need-based holism, linking digital government to administrative reform, and the negative impact of digital government on democracy.


Authoritarian Propaganda Campaigns On Foreign Affairs: Four Birds With One Stone, Andrew Chubb, Frances Yaping Wang May 2023

Authoritarian Propaganda Campaigns On Foreign Affairs: Four Birds With One Stone, Andrew Chubb, Frances Yaping Wang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Why do authoritarian states sometimes play up dangerous internationalcrises and embarrassing diplomatic incidents in domestic propaganda? Isit to mobilize, threaten, divert or pacify? Recent studies in comparativepolitics have focused on regime legitimacy and stability as key drivers ofauthoritarian propaganda practices, overlooking other possiblemotivations such as mobilization of the regime’s domestic allies orstrategic signaling aimed at foreign audiences. Foreign policy analysts,meanwhile, have emphasized international dimensions of thepropaganda behavior of China — the contemporary world’s mostpowerful and technologically sophisticated authoritarian state — but haveoften mistakenly framed complementary theories as competingalternative explanations. Paying attention to the multiple domestic andinternational audiences for authoritarian propaganda, …


Revisiting Tocqueville's American Woman, Christine Dunn Henderson Apr 2023

Revisiting Tocqueville's American Woman, Christine Dunn Henderson

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This paper revisits Tocqueville’s famous portrait of the American female, which begins with assertions of her equality to males but ends with her self-cloistering in the domestic sphere. Taking a cue from Tocqueville’s extended sketch of the “faded” pioneer wife in “A Fortnight in the Wilderness” and drawing connections to Tocqueville’s criticisms of the division of industrial labor, I argue that the American girl’s ostensibly free choice to remove herself from public life is not an act of freedom. Rather, it is a manifestation of a particular type of unfreedom that reveals underappreciated connections between the two great dangers about …


Continuity, History, And Identity: Why Bongbong Marcos Won The 2022 Philippine Presidential Election, Dean C. Dulay, Allen Hicken, Anil Menon, Ronald Holmes Mar 2023

Continuity, History, And Identity: Why Bongbong Marcos Won The 2022 Philippine Presidential Election, Dean C. Dulay, Allen Hicken, Anil Menon, Ronald Holmes

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In May of 2022, Bongbong Marcos won a commanding 59 percent of the vote to become president of the Philippines. His victory was, on some level, shocking to scholars and analysts of Philippine politics. As a result, a plethora of different theories have been proposed, in an attempt to explain why Marcos won. In this paper, we use nationally representative survey data to explore which factors predict (and do not predict) voting intention for Marcos. We find that, a) support for former President Rodrigo Duterte, b) positive perceptions of the late President Ferdinand Marcos and martial law, and c) ethnic …


Two Responsibilities To Protect, Patrick Quinton-Brown Feb 2023

Two Responsibilities To Protect, Patrick Quinton-Brown

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The purpose of this paper is to re-theorize the evolution of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) in the UN through to 2011, the apogee of liberal interventionism in the post-Cold War period. Contrary to a common argument in existing literature, and notwithstanding the adoption of the concept as an annual agenda item of the General Assembly, international contestation is not about implementation as neatly separated from meaning, but rather definition or interpretation. To better understand the boundaries of intergovernmental understanding, we need to interrogate the language or terms of the debate, particularly the ways in which those terms have been …


The Persistence Of Ethnopopulist Support: The Case Of Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines, Dean C. Dulay, Allen Hicken, Ronald Holmes Jan 2023

The Persistence Of Ethnopopulist Support: The Case Of Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines, Dean C. Dulay, Allen Hicken, Ronald Holmes

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The past few years have seen an emergence of populist leaders around the world, who have not only accrued but also maintained support despite rampant criticism, governance failures, and the ongoing COVID pandemic. The Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte is the best illustration of this trend, with approval ratings rarely dipping below 80 percent. What explains his high levels of robust public support? We argue that Duterte is an ethnopopulist who uses ethnic appeals in combination with insider vs. outsider rhetoric to garner and maintain public support. Moreover, we argue that ethnic affiliation is a main driver of support for Duterte, and …


China’S Global Strategy As Science Fiction, William A. Callahan Jan 2023

China’S Global Strategy As Science Fiction, William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Xi Jinping is leading China in a new direction, but how are we to understand the PRC’s global strategy? To understand domestic and international politics in most countries, we would look for clues in authoritative sources—leaders’ speeches, official documents and statistics, elite interviews and essays, and public opinion surveys. In the 2000s this method worked well to probe Chinese politics. But since civil society and independent thought have been severely restricted over the past decade under Xi, it’s necessary to go beyond such “factual” sources. To understand China’s global strategy, it’s best to read fiction, especially Chinese science fiction.


America's 'Chinese Problem' In Southeast Asia And The Emergence Of The Domino Theory [Come Tessere Del Domino: Il Pericolo Comunista E La “Questione Cinese” Nel Sud-Est Asiatico Negli Anni Cinquanta], Wen-Qing (Wei Wenqing) Ngoei, Raimondo (Translator) Neironi Dec 2022

America's 'Chinese Problem' In Southeast Asia And The Emergence Of The Domino Theory [Come Tessere Del Domino: Il Pericolo Comunista E La “Questione Cinese” Nel Sud-Est Asiatico Negli Anni Cinquanta], Wen-Qing (Wei Wenqing) Ngoei, Raimondo (Translator) Neironi

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This essay traces how race thinking in US foreign policy, combined with war memories of Japanese imperialism in Southeast Asia, shaped American strategy toward the region and the rise of the domino theory in US Cold War ideas.


The Search For Spices And Souls: Catholic Missions As Colonial State In The Philippines, Dean C. Dulay Dec 2022

The Search For Spices And Souls: Catholic Missions As Colonial State In The Philippines, Dean C. Dulay

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

A growing literature posits that colonial Christian missions brought schooling to the colonies, improving human capital in ways that persist to this day. But in some places they did much more. This paper argues that colonial Catholic missions in the Philippines functioned as state-builders, establishing law and order and building fiscal and infrastructural capacities in territories they controlled. The mission-as-state was the result of a bargain between the Catholic missions and the Spanish colonial government: missionaries converted the population and engaged in state-building, whereas the colonial government reaped the benefits of state expansion while staying in the capital. Exposure to …


British Neo-Colonialism In Malaya And Singapore, And U.S. Empire In The Pacific, Wen-Qing Ngoei Dec 2022

British Neo-Colonialism In Malaya And Singapore, And U.S. Empire In The Pacific, Wen-Qing Ngoei

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay places the Vietnam War upon the larger canvas of Southeast and East Asian history by studying the long shadow that Britain’s Empire cast over U.S. entanglements across the region. It shows how British officials in Malaya and Singapore directly contributed to the expansion of US involvement in post-1945 Southeast Asia, as well as the overall pro-US trajectory of the region well before the Americanization of the Vietnam conflict.


From Guo To Tianxia: Linking Two Daoist Theories Of International Relations, Devin K. Joshi Dec 2022

From Guo To Tianxia: Linking Two Daoist Theories Of International Relations, Devin K. Joshi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study examines the international relations theory (IRT) of Daoism, one of Asia’s long-standing traditions to have theorized international politics. Drawing upon Laozi’s Dao De Jing, this study elucidates two Daoist IR theories. First, Laozi provides a state-focused guo-based IRT for conducting foreign policy and managing inter-state relations with emphasis on yielding and softness to overcome violence and domination. Second, Laozi offers a Utopian and globalist tianxia-centered IRT based on following the Dao whereby inter-state rivalry is dissolved in favor of peaceful planetary governance in harmony with the natural rhythms of the cosmos. Whereas previous scholarship often concentrates on only …


How Do Filipinos Remember Their History? A Descriptive Account Of Filipino Historical Memory, Dean C. Dulay, Allen Hicken, Anil Menon, Ronald Holmes Dec 2022

How Do Filipinos Remember Their History? A Descriptive Account Of Filipino Historical Memory, Dean C. Dulay, Allen Hicken, Anil Menon, Ronald Holmes

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

How do Filipinos remember their history? To date this question still has no systematic answer. This article provides quantitative, descriptive results from two nationally representative surveys that show how Filipinos view three of the country's major historical events: the Spanish colonization of the Philippines; martial law under President Ferdinand Marcos; and the 1986 People Power Revolution. The descriptive results include several takeaways, including: first, the modal response towards all three events was indifference (versus positive or negative feelings); second, positive feelings towards martial law were highest among those who were alive at that time; third, the distribution of feelings towards …


Understanding South Korean Middle Power Diplomacy Discourses Through The Concept Of Sadae (Serving The Great), Young Chul Cho, William A. Callahan Dec 2022

Understanding South Korean Middle Power Diplomacy Discourses Through The Concept Of Sadae (Serving The Great), Young Chul Cho, William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study aims to examine South Korean middle power diplomacy discourses using premodern Korea’s diplomatic thinking-cum-practice of sadae (serving the great) as a heuristic device. It is argued that current discourses of South Korea as a middle power resonate with sadae because they strive to secure the existing liberal international order led by the West and the United States. It also argues that it is both necessary and healthy for South Korean middle power diplomacy studies to denaturalize its self-evident faith in the existing liberal international order—a not universal but particular order among several possible others in history—with South Korea …


Politically Speaking: Ethnic Language And Audience Opinion In Southeast Asia, Jacob I. Ricks Nov 2022

Politically Speaking: Ethnic Language And Audience Opinion In Southeast Asia, Jacob I. Ricks

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Language is one of the quintessential markers of ethnicity. It allows co-ethnics to easily identify one another and underscores in-group and out-group boundaries. Recognizing this, politicians frequently employ ethnic tongues to enhance their political appeal. To what extent does this shape the opinions of their audiences? Utilizing a survey experiment, I test the impact of an ethnic tongue against that of the common political language among the Javanese in Indonesia, the Tagalog in the Philippines, and the Isan people in Thailand. The experiment demonstrates that the ethnic language has a significant impact in both Thailand and Indonesia, but there appears …


The Privacy Of Hak-Shing William Tam: Imagining Asian Families In California’S Proposition 8, Justin Kh Tse Nov 2022

The Privacy Of Hak-Shing William Tam: Imagining Asian Families In California’S Proposition 8, Justin Kh Tse

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In terms of Asian Americans whose reputations have been popularly derided, the concerned parent activist Hak-Shing William Tam perhaps ranks among the top. Tam was a citizen proponent of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008 to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage and became a hostile witness for the plaintiffs in the subsequent 2010 lawsuit to overturn the amendment, Perry v. Schwarzenegger. In this paper, I explore Tam’s claim to privacy in his understanding of these events, both in terms of his sexualized imagination of liberal civil society and his suffering from what he understood as violations of his …


Geopolitical Geometries In China-Russia Relations, William A. Callahan Oct 2022

Geopolitical Geometries In China-Russia Relations, William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Strategists in Beijing tend to think of geopolitics in terms of geometries, especially strategic triangles and the concentric circles of tianxia (“all under heaven”).China’s strategic triangles should be understood as United Front Work, which are intended to join with one group of ‘friends’ to isolate and attack another group of ‘enemies’.Both China and Russia present their own models of global concentric circles. Here China and Russia are each at the centre of their own world orders, and each is at the periphery of the other’s, which eventually will lead to conflict.


Fueling Green Connections: Networked Policy Instrument Choices For Sustainability Regulation, Ishani Mukherjee Sep 2022

Fueling Green Connections: Networked Policy Instrument Choices For Sustainability Regulation, Ishani Mukherjee

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper presents a policy network analysis study that examines policy subsystem interconnectedness and cohesion, to explore three constituent regulatory policy instruments that have a combined impact on governing sustainability. The network surrounding the environmental sustainability of biodiesel policy in Indonesia is marked by high interconnectedness and relatively weaker cohesion, properties that impact how policy solutions are formulated through policy actor interactions and define prevailing policy formulation styles. Using primary policy network data on 46 organizations and the review of national regulations, laws, and directives, this paper tests established hypotheses on how instruments that are formulated within the same policy …