Published papers

Democratic backsliding by incumbents is one of the most prevalent forms of backsliding in recent global trends of democratic erosion. Understanding the attitude of voters toward backsliding incumbents is crucial because popular support is the basis of legitimacy for these incumbents. This article studies voter attitudes in the Philippines, where democracy was subverted by the incumbent president, Rodrigo Duterte, who served from 2016 to 2022. Specifically, we examine the validity of the claim that Filipino voters are acquiring a “taste for illiberal rule” made by some scholars. First, we analyzed the survey data regarding the support for various types of political systems, where part of the data comes from our originally commissioned survey at the Social Weather Stations. Second, we explored Pulse Asia's longitudinal survey data on martial-rule support. Our investigation of these survey data did not find substantive support for the “taste for illiberal rule” proposition. Further, we argue that Filipino voters are contingent supporters of illiberal politics while supporting the procedural principles of democracy at the baseline.

Effective message framing motivates individuals to act for and defend human rights. What effective message framing motivates individuals to defend human rights? Recent experiment-based framing studies show that personal frames are more successful than informational or motivational frames in increasing the advocacy activities of human rights organizations. This study tested the justice frame using the Philippine case of extrajudicial executions. Employing internet-based survey experiments, we tested the effects of the justice frame on consensus and action mobilizations as well as the three frames mentioned above. Our results showed that combining justice and the personal frame is more effective. We also examined emotions inflicted by framing. Our results reveal an association between empathy and anger as a reaction that connects exposure to personal frame and mobilization.

Why are some electoral authoritarian regimes immune to democratization for decades while others not? This article explores the impact of executive selection systems on democratic transitions from electoral authoritarianism. We argue that under electoral authoritarian regimes, Parliament-based systems permit dictators to more effectively deter democratization compared to Presidential systems. This is because Parliament-based systems indirectly allow electoral manipulation to achieve a victory at the ballot box, such as through gerrymandering and malapportionment. Parliament-based systems also make it difficult for opposition parties to coordinate and incentivize autocrats and ruling elites to engage in power-sharing and thus institutionalize ruling parties. We test our hypothesis as well as the underlying mechanisms employing a dataset of 93 electoral authoritarian countries between 1946 and 2012. Cross-national statistical analyses with instrumental variables estimation provide supporting evidence for our theory.

A ‘majoritarian turn’ identified by scholars of Asian democracy in the 1990s saw the rise of mixed-member majoritarian electoral systems and more centripetal party competition across both Northeast and Southeast Asia. In this paper, we argue that since the 2000s, the institutional pendulum has shifted, with more consensual approaches to democracy appearing to better represent key identity cleavages of gender, ethnicity, and territory—a trend evident not just in East Asia but South Asia as well. This new ‘Asian model’ typically involves increasing the proportional components of existing electoral formulas and grafting gender quotas, multiethnic party lists, and quasi-federal elements onto ostensibly majoritarian state structures. We show that these reforms have, as intended, mostly increased female and ethnic minority representation and decentralized governance structures. At the same time, however, these de jure changes are not associated with de facto political development in terms of greater democratic quality, counter to theoretical expectations. Indeed, democracy has declined across most of Asia at the same time as its democratic institutions have become more consensual.

Political family dynasties are a staple part of Japanese politics. According to one study, Japan has the fourth highest number of dynastic politicians among democratic countries, after Thailand, the Philippines, and Iceland. As a result, many scholars have qualitatively studied how these political families are born and managed. In contrast to the wealth of qualitative studies on this subject, however, few quantitative studies on Japanese political dynasties focus on how voters view them. To understand this question, we conducted two nation-wide surveys. Our major findings are that while the majority of respondents dislike dynastic candidates, they also value certain attributes of those candidates, such as their political networks, their potential for ministerial appointments, and their ability to bring pork projects to their constituencies. These results fill a gap in benchmark information on dynastic politics in Japan and are a departure from existing studies that show Japanese voters are neutral regarding whether a candidate is from a dynastic family in voting decisions.

Existing studies on legislative malapportionment often conceptualize and measure this phenomenon with little regard to intertemporal variations and the malapportionment-generating process (MGP). Our conceptualization leads us to introduce a measure called α-divergence that can identify the vote inequality derived from various stages of MGP. Using an originally created database that covers 440 elections in 112 countries, we decompose the overall degree of malapportionment into three stages: malapportionment that arises at the stages of interstate apportionment, intrastate districting, and allotment of seats to special districts. We also provide analyses that can decompose the demographic and political factors contributing to the trends of the overall degree of malapportionment for selected countries.

Scholars frequently dichotomize continuous measures of democracy by setting a regime cut-off. However, such cut-offs often lack theoretical or empirical justifications, making the resulting classifications difficult to interpret conceptually. We investigate this challenge involving three major continuous democracy measures: the Freedom House score (FH), the Polity score, and the Regime of the World (RoW) that is based on the V-Dem's Electoral Democracy Index (EDI). We develop a framework to empirically derive thresholds using categorical democracy measures as benchmarks. Our analyses find that the cut-offs that yield the highest consistency with the classifications of BMR, CGV, and GWF are 3.5 for FH, 5 for Polity and 0.39 for EDI/RoW. These levels are lower than the conventional cut-offs, implying less demanding democratic standards. Consequently, the conventional cut-offs (2.5 for FH, 6 for Polity and 0.5 for EDI/RoW) endeavour to reflect more stringent standards of democracy than what these dichotomous measures employ.

This introductory essay outlines the core themes of the special issue on the rise and fall of Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. In the essay, we highlight several theoretical and empirical contributions the featured papers make to our understanding of the protest–repression nexus from the onset of the movement to the imposition of the National Security Law. First, we describe the political and social contexts of the movement. Second, we present our empirical findings on Hong Kongers' political preferences. Finally, we highlight new research avenues arising from this special issue.

The May 13, 2019 midterm elections were generally seen as a referendum on the first three years of the presidency of Rodrigo R Duterte. The elections tested and consolidated the political strength of Duterte as the country’s populist strongman president. Most of the national and local candidates he endorsed won their contests for the 18,066 national and local positions. The election also resulted in a victory for the administration’s nine senatorial candidates (out of 12 seats) and a majority of its governors, mayors, and local legislators. The results follow the historical patterns of midterm elections in the post-authoritarian period. But unlike previous Philippine presidents, Duterte did not personally endeavor to consolidate his political support under his dominant party solely through the systematic mobilization of patronage. Duterte eschewed patronage-based political party building in favor of populist mobilization or the rallying of mass supporters toward contentious political action with minimum institutional intermediation. With a record high trust rating, Duterte was not only an active endorser of candidates, but he was also both a staunch defender of his allies and a relentless attacker of the opposition. In the end, the biggest winners in the 2019 midterm elections were not the candidates but Duterte himself.

In this article, we argue that a consequence of Duterte's presidency is the further weakening of the party system in the Philippines, or the emergence of "anarchy of parties." Traditionally, Philippine presidents used their power of patronage in a quidpro-quo manner vis-A-vis the legislators to achieve presidents' goals, and this executivelegislative transaction was coordinated mainly through the president's party. However, evidence suggests that Duterte bypassed Congress to achieve his policies by riding on his popularity and did not have to use his power of pork to co-opt politicians. As a result, the president's party decreased its value as a coordination device for congressional affairs and party nominations at elections. Consequently, what we observe is an anarchy of parties where inter-party competition has become even more fluid and fragmented than before the Duterte presidency. We provide corroborative evidence to support our claim by mainly focusing on the 2019 midterm elections.