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Existing commentaries on government responses to COVID-19 have focused on such factors as competent leadership, policy instruments, or cultural dispositions. Yet, few have provided a synthesis that examines how these factors relate to each other. This article fills this gap in the debate by comparing COVID-19 responses among five advanced economies in East Asia: Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan. Although agile actions and competence of top leadership are necessary to confront an unprecedented crisis, they are by themselves insufficient. Equally critical is whether a society has the necessary institutional infrastructure in place when a crisis strikes. Policy instruments are more likely to succeed when existing institutional infrastructure supports their administration and implementation. For an instrument to generate enduring impact, it must be compatible with a polity's underlying culture; instruments that accommodate the underlying cultural orientations are more likely to elicit public cooperation and voluntary compliance over time. Policy instruments must also address equity issues by reaching marginalized groups across all layers of the population. Progress in emergency management may be visible in mainstream society but masking brewing problems among marginalized groups. A comparison across the five advanced economies in East Asia yields several implications for comparative research and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how various aspects of institutional context, including the regulatory environment, government affiliation, and government work experience, shape environmental nongovernmental organizations’ (eNGOs) managerial networking in China. Data from a nationwide survey of 267 eNGOs and in-depth interviews in 2014-2015 are analyzed. The findings show that China’s restrictive political environment suppresses eNGOs’ peer and business networking but is not associated with government networking. Compared with government-organized NGOs (GONGOs), civic eNGOs network more with peers, businesses, and government agencies. Furthermore, eNGOs with leaders having government work experience conduct more government networking. Theoretically, these findings point to the importance of the political and institutional context of managerial networking. Empirically, this study provides the first set of quantitative data analysis demonstrating how institutional factors affect NGO managerial networking under authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nonprofit sector has become an arena of increased political contestation. Rather than being shaped passively by global trends and broader power relationships among social classes and organizations, the nonprofit sector and the larger civil society have increasingly become forces shaping social and political developments. To account for how these forces unfold in different countries, one needs to go beyond social origins theory, the power-distributional account, and sociological institutionalism and draw on concepts from historical institutionalism that explicitly consider how dynamic interactions between institutional forces and long-term historical changes shape patterns of political contestation. By examining the developmental trajectories of environmental NGOs in South Korea, this article explains how political contestation—embedded within institutional and historical processes of critical junctures and path dependence—may shape developmental trajectories of the nonprofit sector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]