ISSUES & STUDIESPub Date : 2018-12-01DOI: 10.1142/S1013251118400106
Yousun Chung
{"title":"Continuity and Change in Chinese Grassroots Governance: Shanghai’s Local Administrative System","authors":"Yousun Chung","doi":"10.1142/S1013251118400106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1013251118400106","url":null,"abstract":"Since the retreat of the workplace system, Chinese cities have been presented with the important challenge of refurbishing local administrative systems at the sub-district level while meeting the emerging needs of new urban spaces. Building on new institutionalism concepts such as conversion and layering, this study examines conditions in Shanghai to ascertain what has made it a strong administrative city. The study discusses the development of Shanghai’s current local governance structure in terms of historical legacy, formal structure, and informal practices (i.e., two-tiered government and three-tiered management). This study also researches the complex state task of strengthening sub-district governance (so-called “community construction”) in urban China. The results of this study offer theoretical implications for institutional change and continuity related to these matters, thereby indicating that increased attention should be given to the agency-side explanation of endogenous institutional changes in the Chinese polity.","PeriodicalId":53213,"journal":{"name":"ISSUES & STUDIES","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79605908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ISSUES & STUDIESPub Date : 2018-12-01DOI: 10.1142/S1013251118400088
Weiting Wu
{"title":"Adaptive Confrontation? Strategies of Three Women’s Groups for Expanding Political Space in China","authors":"Weiting Wu","doi":"10.1142/S1013251118400088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1013251118400088","url":null,"abstract":"An absence of overt contention has led scholars to question the existence of social movements in China and to agree with the “state corporatism” description of state–social group relations there. This article presents the idea of “adaptive confrontation” to demonstrate that there are women’s and lesbian groups in China that go beyond the idea of state corporatism, as well as to challenge current applications of social movement theories and better understand state–social group relationships in a repressive regime.By applying different strategies, three gender groups have not only confronted a repressive state interference in their affairs that aims to dismiss them, but also have managed to expand their political space. This paper presents three pieces of evidence: the building of alliances, the empowerment of other grassroots groups to do advocacy work, and the building of a community.","PeriodicalId":53213,"journal":{"name":"ISSUES & STUDIES","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86272518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ISSUES & STUDIESPub Date : 2018-12-01DOI: 10.1142/S1013251118400076
K. O’Brien
{"title":"Speaking to Theory and Speaking to the China Field","authors":"K. O’Brien","doi":"10.1142/S1013251118400076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1013251118400076","url":null,"abstract":"Bringing knowledge about China to the disciplines has reduced the outsized role that research on Europe and America has on many topics. But mainstreaming China studies also leads to certain tradeoffs. How should we manage these tradeoffs and produce research that is both true to China and contributes to the social sciences? In the last 40 years, China scholars have developed many strategies to navigate the territory between area studies and the social sciences. I myself have vacillated about how China studies and political science should interact and inform each other. How are scholars addressing this issue now, in an era of mixed methods, sophisticated quantitative research, experiments and “big data?”","PeriodicalId":53213,"journal":{"name":"ISSUES & STUDIES","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86091295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ISSUES & STUDIESPub Date : 2018-09-01DOI: 10.1142/S1013251118020022
Frank C. S. Liu
{"title":"Introduction to the Special Issue — Social Media and Inquiry into Political Change","authors":"Frank C. S. Liu","doi":"10.1142/S1013251118020022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1013251118020022","url":null,"abstract":"The idea for this special issue came to me before the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Taiwan Political Science Association, in which I joined scholars across the globe in a discussion concerning their use of social media data. In the same year, I hosted a year-long workshop series on “thick data” versus “big data,” which allowed me to brainstorm alongside 20 or so Taiwanese social science scholars from a variety of disciplines as we deliberated over the epistemology behind and the value of exploratory and confirmatory research traditions. These two courses of life experience have brought me to the position of Guest Editor and given me the opportunity to present studies that reflect this debate. The three papers presented in this special issue by no means represent the entire spectrum of social media research, but they do present a picture of how authors from different perspectives perceive and make the best use of social media-related data. Before I address the two, it is worth providing a brief overview of what I witnessed during my year of interaction with these several dozen scholars that has led to this special issue.","PeriodicalId":53213,"journal":{"name":"ISSUES & STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77408546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ISSUES & STUDIESPub Date : 2018-09-01DOI: 10.1142/S1013251118400064
J. M. Lee, Youngdeuk Park, Gidong Kim
{"title":"Social Media and Regionalism in South Korean Voting Behavior: The Case of the 19th South Korean Presidential Election","authors":"J. M. Lee, Youngdeuk Park, Gidong Kim","doi":"10.1142/S1013251118400064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1013251118400064","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines the moderating effects of social media use on regionalist voting behavior in South Korea. Analyzing the survey data conducted during the 2017 Korean presidential election, we test how social media functions in electoral processes, particularly with respect to region-based voting in the Korean electorate. The findings of this study reveal that social media use affects region-based voting behavior among the Korean electorate by connecting people with different regional backgrounds in online political communication. That is, social media use can create “bridging” social capital rather than “bonding” social capital in society. In this respect, results differ significantly from findings in the 2012 presidential election. In 2012, only the independent effects of social media existed with a liberal bias, without revealing interaction with regional dummies. These independent effects disappeared in 2017, and different kinds of social media were statistically significant only when they functioned as moderating variables for regional dummies. This implies that as the functions of social media in the Korean election process have evolved in more complexity, they now are able to affect progressive as well as conservative voters.","PeriodicalId":53213,"journal":{"name":"ISSUES & STUDIES","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80986243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ISSUES & STUDIESPub Date : 2018-09-01DOI: 10.1142/S1013251118400052
Kah-yew Lim
{"title":"An Exploration of the Use of Facebook by Legislators in Taiwan","authors":"Kah-yew Lim","doi":"10.1142/S1013251118400052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1013251118400052","url":null,"abstract":"Previous studies have found that how to win an election is always an important question for legislators. Their behavior in lawmaking and constituency service is also associated with their aspirations for re-election. In the era of booming social media, how legislators can use social media to increase their chances for election and re-election has become a compelling issue. This study argues that legislators do indeed maximize the benefits of social media to win elections. On this account, this study intends to explore two main questions: (1) What kind of messages legislators choose to convey to voters on their fan pages; and (2) Whether the political characteristics of legislators affect the types of the messages they convey there. In this study, posts were collected from the fan pages of 25 Taiwanese legislators. These text messages were then converted into numerical data that could be quantitatively analyzed with the content analysis method. It was found that legislators tend to start with soft messages in their communications with the public. They share some details of their daily schedules and everyday lives with their voters before they begin image building and posting political material. This study also found that the political characteristics of legislators, including their party membership, their status either as a district or proportional representation (PR) legislator, and their incumbency all affect the content of posts on their fan pages. For example, compared to Kuomintang (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators who share information from their daily lives, New Power Party (NPP) legislators prefer to share only political information. PR legislators devote more attention than district legislators to criticizing the government on their fan pages. Incumbents are significantly less likely than challengers to share daily information, but more likely to share political information. This study found that the aforementioned differences have resulted from the many ways that different types of legislators use to increase their chances of winning an election.","PeriodicalId":53213,"journal":{"name":"ISSUES & STUDIES","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84459085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ISSUES & STUDIESPub Date : 2018-09-01DOI: 10.1142/S1013251118500066
Hung-Jen Wang
{"title":"China’s Assertive Relational Strategies: Engagement, Boycotting, Reciprocation, and Pressing","authors":"Hung-Jen Wang","doi":"10.1142/S1013251118500066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1013251118500066","url":null,"abstract":"In the past decade, observers in Western countries have been increasingly challenged to describe China’s rising power in one of two ways: as contributing to established world systems, or as a growing threat fulfilling certain predictions made at the end of the Cold War. For some, perceptions of increasingly assertive regional behaviors confirm that China’s self-proclaimed policy of pacifism is being used to cloak selfish national interest and power goals. The current international relations (IR) literature tends to treat China’s assertiveness as evidence that it is indeed a threat, with few attempts to conceptualize assertiveness as a relational strategy. In this paper, the author uses eight current and historical cases involving four relational strategies — engagement, boycotting, reciprocation, and pressing — to examine conventional assessments of assertiveness that focus solely on perceptions of and responses to threatening statements and behaviors made in defense of Chinese national interests. In the end, this paper tries to contribute to the general IR literature that has tended to misinterpret China’s assertiveness, which is actually an identity issue regarding bilateral relationality instead of power or interest calculations.","PeriodicalId":53213,"journal":{"name":"ISSUES & STUDIES","volume":"1205 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81381224","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ISSUES & STUDIESPub Date : 2018-09-01DOI: 10.1142/S1013251118400040
Yue Tan, Ping Shaw
{"title":"Attribute-Priming Effects on Presidential Approval: The Role of Risk Perception and Trust in Government Regulation","authors":"Yue Tan, Ping Shaw","doi":"10.1142/S1013251118400040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1013251118400040","url":null,"abstract":"Combining data from a content analysis of leading newspapers, a random-sampled national survey ([Formula: see text]), and a semantic network analysis of Facebook postings, this study applies Network Agenda Setting and attribute-priming effects to examine how perceptions of risks, benefits, and trust in government regulation influenced the public’s evaluation of the Presidential performance in the 2012 controversy over imports of American beef in Taiwan. The results show that only perceived risks to health directly affected the public’s evaluation of the President; other types of risks damaged the public’s trust in government regulation, which consequently harmed their evaluation of the President’s performance.","PeriodicalId":53213,"journal":{"name":"ISSUES & STUDIES","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85305957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ISSUES & STUDIESPub Date : 2018-08-17DOI: 10.1142/S1013251118400015
H. Weng
{"title":"Entangled Mobility: Hui Migration, Religious Identity and Cultural Capital in Malaysia","authors":"H. Weng","doi":"10.1142/S1013251118400015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S1013251118400015","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, there is an increasing number of Hui migrants in Malaysia. This paper examines the accumulation of various forms of capital (cultural, social and economic) and the intersection of ...","PeriodicalId":53213,"journal":{"name":"ISSUES & STUDIES","volume":"29 1","pages":"1840001"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81199805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}