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In recent decades, research on ‘political apology’, wherein the state apologizes to victims of its past wrongs, has multiplied, as redress movements based on human rights have proliferated around the world. Since most of this research has been conducted by political philosophers, however, analyses of political apologies tend to adopt formal and normative perspectives. To propose an alternative, empirically-grounded approach, in this paper, I develop the ‘cultural pragmatics’ of political apology. To this end, I first conceptualize political apology as a social performance aimed to ‘re-fuse’ an impaired relationship between the perpetrator state and the victim individual. This conceptual move enables systematic analysis of political apology in terms of six elements constitutive of social performance: collective representations, actors, audience, means of symbolic production, mise-en-scène, and power. To elaborate this model of the cultural pragmatics of political apology, I then examine the protracted dispute over wartime atrocities that Japan committed against South Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do voters respond to individual worries about the employment situation in elections? This paper examines the effect of issue salience of the employment situation on voter choice. Drawing theoretical insights from the partisan salience of issue voting theories, I argue that voters who previously supported parties on the right are likely to change their political allegiance to support a center-left party when they think the employment issue is one of the most salient issues in the election. Furthermore, I argue that middle income voters are more likely to respond to an increasing salience of the employment issue than other groups are. These theoretical arguments are tested against the post-crisis 2002 Korean presidential election survey data. The empirical evidence from the Korean case suggests that structural reforms of the economy and neoliberal economic policies can evoke particular voting patterns in the voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I reflect on the theoretical rise of the public sphere in the 1990s from the vantage point of South Korea, connecting this approach to the broader context of the global post–Cold War transition. The case of South Korea – a postcolonial, authoritarian country with deep geopolitical connections to the West – offers a node of the global embrace of the public sphere in the 1990s for theorizing the transformation of authoritarian countries into liberal capitalist democracies, elevating the distinction between state and civil society as a prominent focus. However, the establishment of authoritarian public spheres in Asia and the illiberal turn of public spheres in the Global North in the 2010s call upon scholars to identify relevant questions regarding current public spheres while addressing what essential components define the public sphere. Here, I call for critical attention to the loci of power and oppression, to the production of critical practices within a particular social configuration, and to coexistence within a civil society. I end the article by proposing a set of suggestions for reading, theorizing, and teaching public sphere theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflict between factions has been identified as an important factor explaining different procedures of candidate selection. However, the question of what drives factions in choosing certain procedures over others remains under-theorized. This article argues that, when ranking their preferences for candidate selection procedures, factions are influenced by their electoral strategy. While clientelistic factions will push for candidate selection procedures that subordinate themselves to the logic of clientelistic exchange networks, programmatic factions will try to maximize the effectiveness of formal regulations. To demonstrate this relationship, the article studies the recent development of political parties in Taiwan and South Korea, where programmatic factions have ‘outsourced’ the authority to nominate candidates to external actors, thereby moving it beyond the reach of internal patron–client networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article compares and explores forms of ‘public’ participation in the development of bioethical governance of human embryonic stem cell research (hESR) in four Asian societies, and in doing so it contributes to the wider discussions on expertise and public inclusion. The article aims to add nuance to the concept of ‘public consultation’ by focusing on the contested meanings and relationships through which public roles and public debates are defined. The analysis seeks to go beyond a straightforward comparison by interpreting public discussions of hESR as being influenced by both local conditions and interconnected global science institutions. An adequate understanding of the public participation in debates on science requires the analysis of (a) particular reasons for scientific issues to require public discussion; (b) pressures of transnational forces; (c) variability of publics relevant to bioethical regulation; and, (d) the effects of institutionalization of bioethics. This study uses data from fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2010 in four Asian countries. Most of the interviews were conducted in the local languages and concerned various kinds of public participation in bioethics activities, as well as the views of stem cell scientists on the need to involve the public in discussions on the acceptability of their research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is about factory regimes and more particularly about changes in factory regimes in East Asia. Its point of departure is Burawoy's early and highly influential contribution to the understanding of factory regimes (Burawoy, 1985), which has very often been associated with the idea of 'hegemonic despotism' and increased attempts by management at ideological control. The article seeks to go beyond this particular interpretation. Theoretically, it seeks to make explicit and in one case expand elements in Burawoy's original works by distinguishing three aspects of labour regimes; labor control, material support and contract. It then considers three factories in China, Taiwan and South Korea in the light of this reformulation and, by paying due regard to issues related to material support and contract, and not only to control, it advances the claim that some of the most significant changes that are occurring amount in each case to the dismantling of established labour - that is, labour that is generally permanent and relatively privileged not only with respect to wages but usually also other forms of material support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]