Abstract:

Both South Korea and Taiwan are considered consolidated democracies, but the two countries have developed very different sets of electoral campaign regulations. While both countries had highly restrictive election laws during their authoritarian eras, they have diverged after democratic transition. South Korea still restricts campaigning activities, including banning door-to-door canvassing, prohibiting pre-official period campaigning, and restricting the quantity and content of literature. Taiwan has removed most campaigning restrictions, except for finance regulations. This study explores the causes of these divergent trajectories through comparative historical process tracing, using both archival and secondary sources. The preliminary findings suggest that the incumbency advantage and the containment of the leftist or opposition parties were the primary causes of regulation under the soft and hard authoritarian regimes of South Korea and Taiwan. The key difference was that the main opposition party as well as the ruling party in South Korea enjoyed the incumbency advantage but that opposition forces in Taiwan did not. As a result, the opposition in Taiwan fought for liberalization of campaign regulations, but that in South Korea did not. Democratization in Taiwan was accompanied by successive liberalizations in campaign regulation, but in South Korea the incumbent legislators affiliated with the ruling and opposition parties were both interested in limiting campaigning opportunities for electoral challengers.

Bio:

Dr. Jong-sung You is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University. His research interests include comparative politics and the political economy of inequality, corruption, social trust, and freedom of expression. He conducts both cross-national quantitative studies and qualitative case studies, focusing on Korea and East Asia. He recently published a book entitled Democracy, Inequality and Corruption: Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines Compared with Cambridge University Press. His publications have appeared at American Sociological Review, Political Psychology, Journal of East Asian Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Asian Perspective, Trends and Prospects, and Korean Journal of International Studies. He obtained his Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University and taught at UC San Diego. Before pursuing an academic career, he fought for democracy and social justice in South Korea.

While Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has emerged as the strongest Japanese leader in a decade, the dark underside of his administration has been widespread accusations of heavy-handed intimidation of the press. Especially in the last year, there have been numerous high-profile cases in which major media organizations have appeared to capitulate to such pressure, often engaging in a preemptive self-censorship known in Japan as jishuku, or “self-restraint.” A close examination of some of these cases reveals that the Abe administration has indeed engaged in an aggressive effort to shape press coverage using both the carrot of access, and the stick of political pressure and unbridled nationalist intimidation. However, much of the blame also belongs in the media organizations themselves, which have appeared unable, at least initially, to resist the administration’s pressure tactics. Indeed, the Abe government has appeared adept at exploiting weaknesses in Japan’s major media that include a competitive obsession with scoops, a heavy dependence on government sources seen in the so-called press club system and the lack of a shared sense of professional ethics and identity. The collapse of political opposition parties, and the strengthening of state secrecy laws during the second Abe administration also play roles. Deeper historical trends will also be considered, including weak notions of civil society and a moral centrality of the state that has its roots in the crash nation-building of the Meiji period.

Martin Fackler is currently Journalist-in-Residence at the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, a Tokyo-based think tank. From 2009 to 2015, he covered Japan and the Korean peninsula as Tokyo bureau chief for the New York Times. In 2012, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for his and his colleagues' investigative stories on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown that the prize committee said offered a "powerful exploration of serious mistakes concealed by authorities in Japan." Martin is also the author (in Japanese) of the bestseller “Credibility Lost: The Crisis in Japanese Newspaper Journalism after Fukushima,” a critical look at Japanese media coverage of the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster. In total, he spent a decade in the Tokyo bureau of the New York Times, where he also served as economics correspondent. Before joining the Times in 2005, he worked in Tokyo for the Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Associated Press and Bloomberg News, and in Beijing and Shanghai for AP. He has Masters degrees in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana and in East Asian history from the University of California, Berkeley.