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An all-digital flexible precision in-memory accelerator for vector matrix multiplication (VMM) is demonstrated in 65 nm CMOS. The design supports flexible precision, floating point, and complex numbers enabling in-memory radio-frequency machine learning and signal processing computation. The measured compute efficiency normalized to memory size is 34 GOPS/W/KB.

This paper presents a design methodology for efficient on-chip acceleration of deep neural network (DNN) for classification of signal modulation in Radio Frequency signals. A low complexity DNN model with ternary weights is developed to reduce computational demand. A digital chip architecture with complex multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) engines are presented to accelerate the DNN model. Simulation results in 28nm CMOS show that the low-complexity DNN model coupled with the on-chip accelerator increases allowable instantaneous bandwidth of the RF signals with minimal impact on the classification accuracy.

Since Kim Jong-il officially launched his Songun politics in 1998, conflicting assessments have generated two competing arguments regarding the political role of the Korean People’s Army (KPA). The military garrison state argument suggests that Songun politics brought about the decline of the party and political ascendance of the military, while the party’s army model argues that the KPA is still the party’s army and under the party’s firm control. This article suggests that the debate mischaracterizes the KPA’s political place in North Korea and that the military has not been a politically influential organ from the state-building to the current Kim Jong-un era. This article identifies two distinct patterns of military control mechanisms—namely partisan (1960s–1990s) and personalistic (1998–2008)—and argues that the different control methods have little to do with the KPA’s political strength or weakness. Rather, they merely reflect the dictator’s ruling method of choice for regime survival. The analysis illustrates that the current Kim Jong-un regime is more stable than many outside observers may estimate, and a military coup is highly unlikely in the near future.

Whether Confucianism is compatible with liberal democracy has been a topic of heated debate among scholars and politicians alike, but with little meticulous empirical analysis. The incompatibility thesis, represented by the Asian value argument, suggests that as a political culture Confucianism hinders the deepening of democracy in Confucian Asian countries. The compatibility or convergence thesis, in contrast, argues that Confucianism is compatible with, and even compensates for the shortcomings of liberal democracy. This article investigates the relationship between South Koreans’ attachment to Confucian values and their attitudes towards a (non)democratic form of government. Unlike previous studies that treat Confucianism as a unitary value system, this article argues that Confucianism is multifaceted - its teachings on social hierarchy, morality, primacy of community, and social harmony - have different relationships with democratic and authoritarian values. This empirical analysis demonstrates that, at least in South Korea, certain Confucian values are compatible with democratic values of political participation and individual rights and liberty. In contrast to previous literature that focuses on institutional and performance variables as key variables that explain individual attachment to (non)democratic forms of government, this study illustrates that culture has consistent and long-lasting impacts on individual political orientations.

While the importance of social and political trust has been well documented, there is a lack of scholarly consensus over where trust originates. This article tests three theoretical arguments – social-psychological, social-cultural, and political institutional – on the origin of political trust against three East Asian democracies (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan). The empirical analysis from the AsiaBarometer survey illustrates that political institutional theory best explains the origin of political trust in East Asian cases. Citizens of these East Asian democracies have a high level of political trust when they believe that their governments perform well in management of the national economy and political representation of elected officials. Meanwhile, social-psychological and social-cultural theories explain the origins of social trust, but not political trust. The evidence reveals that socially trusting people are not automatically politically trusting; social trust and political trust originate from different sources and do not transform from one to the other.

At the heart of the unexpected regime stability in post–Kim Il-sung Pyongyang is the expanded role of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) as the protector of the regime and the leader, under the slogan of military-first (songun) politics. There is, however, a wide gap between the KPA’s role and its limited political significance. This article examines how Pyongyang’s political systems were designed to enable the leader to firmly control the military and security organizations by focusing on three of the most important institutions related to control over the KPA: the General Political Department, the Central Military Commission, and the National Defense Commission.

This chapter explores the post-democratization politics in South Korea, or the era of democratic consolidation. From a minimal or procedural viewpoint, South Korea is undoubtedly a consolidated democracy, as the nation has achieved two peaceful turnovers of power without interruption, and the possibility of a return to dictatorship does not seem feasible. However, the post-democratization politics in South Korea have been marked by political dysfunction, including extreme political, economic, and ideological polarization, rampant political corruption, constrained civil liberties and rights, and security threats from North Korea. After three decades of democratic trials, both ordinary citizens and experts now express a sense of democratic crisis. This chapter focuses on the political processes during the era of democratic consolidation, which has experienced a full swing from two progressive governments (1998–2008) to two conservative ones (2008–2017). Post-democratization politics have suffered from extreme political polarization and an ensuing crisis in democratic governance.

This article uses theoretical insights from neoclassical realism to explain how the end of the Cold War shaped North Korea's domestic political structures and foreign-policy strategies. It suggests that political leaders are uniquely positioned at the nexus of domestic politics and international politics and employ two different strategies: utilizing international politics for domestic political gain and mobilizing domestic resources to further international ambitions. In the politicking process, political leaders are interested in maximizing both the state security and the regime security; leaders’ concern for regime security outweighs their protection of the national interest when threats to the regime appear more serious. In North Korea, the end of the Cold War forced Kim Jong-il to adopt military-first politics, in which the political power and authority of the Korean Worker's Party waned and the Korean People's Army gained the upper hand in the governing process. In foreign policy, Kim Jong-il and his son Jong-un pursued nuclear weapons to maximize national security at a lower cost and to secure the legitimacy of their rule through successful nuclear tests and mobilization of international threats.

Military-first politics has been at the heart of the unexpected regime stability in North Korea under Kim Jong-il and his son Jong-un. This article analyzes Kim Jong-il’s military-first politics as a strategic choice for regime survival, in which the locus of political power switched from the party to the military. At the same time, Kim Jong-il formulated a complex system of circumventing the possibility of the armed forces’ political domination, including personalistic control using sticks and carrots, fortifying security and surveillance institutions, and compartmentalizing the security institutions for intra- and inter-organizational checks and balances to prevent the emergence of organized opposition to the regime. Although an effective short-term solution, military-first politics could never be a long-term strategy for building gangseongdaeguk (a powerful and prosperous nation). The current Kim Jong-un regime needs to conduct sweeping reforms to address dire economic difficulties, which might result in a departure from his father’s legacy and downgrade the military’s power. In this process, the current regime’s (in)stability will depend on how it maintains a balance between revoking military-first politics and preserving the armed forces’ allegiance.

In the past few decades, post-democratization politics in South Korea have witnessed an upsurge in authoritarian nostalgia, called the “Park Jung-hee syndrome.” This paper examines the origins of public nostalgia for the authoritarian dictator by putting two theoretical arguments, i.e., the socialization thesis and the system output thesis, to an empirical test. This paper utilizes the 2010 Korea Democracy Barometer from the Korea Barometer and the 2010 and the 2015 Korean National Identity Survey from the East Asia Institute. The empirical analysis of the South Korean case strongly supports the political socialization argument, suggesting that citizens’ yearning for Park Jung-hee is not merely an outcome of the negative evaluations of the democratic governments’ performances. Rather, their authoritarian nostalgia is in large part an outcome of their political socialization during the Park dictatorship. The analysis implies that, although a resurgence of the Park Jung-hee syndrome in post-democratization South Korea is not expected to derail the country’s route to democratic deepening, it may continue to be a main source of political division in partisan and electoral politics in the future.

South Korean politics has been haunted by numerous corruption scandals as well as the prosecution of politicians and their cronies for their corruption. Yet despite the prevalence and salience of political corruption, many citizens of South Korea tend to overlook the problem by continuing to support corrupt politicians and administrations. This study defines under what circumstances political corruption shapes citizens' judgment of government and the political system as a whole in South Korea. The results indicate that national economic conditions as a perceptual screen mediate the effect of political corruption on the evaluation of democratic governance.

How does economic liberalization — or a country’s integration into the global economy — affect its economic performance and the distribution of wealth? There have been heated debates on positive and negative sides of globalization. This article seeks to fill the existing gap in the study of globalization and its socio-economic outcomes by focusing on the mediating effect of political corruption in countries from Asia and Eastern Europe. The authors suggest that, in countries with high levels of corruption, extensive economic liberalization brings faster economic growth. However, the economic growth does not improve the corrupt countries’ distributive justice, increasing poverty and leaving the level of inequality intact after the economic development. On the other hand, economic liberalization in less corrupt countries neither generates fast economic growth, nor significantly improves the countries’ poverty and inequality. The empirical result implies that neoliberal economic reform per se does not have direct impact on a country’s distributive justice. This article studies 40 developing countries from Asia and Eastern Europe.

This article explores how a military's organizational character (cohesion or lack thereof) shapes military officers' attitudes toward new civilian leadership in democratizing South Korea and the Philippines. It suggests that a factionalized military makes civilian control much more difficult and the route to democratic consolidation highly unstable and incomplete for three reasons. First, in the factionalized army, individual officers' allegiance is directed toward their factional leaders, not toward the military as a unified body and the civilian leadership. Second, factionalized military will create ‘monitoring’ and ‘sanctioning’ problems for civilians. Finally, competition among various factions in the military promotes officers' appetite for political domination. The structured-focused analysis of democratization in South Korea and the Philippines clearly sustains the theoretical arguments. The study implies that the institutionalization of civilian control of the military in democratizing nations dep...

The current study examines how the incumbent government's economic performance plays a role in mediating the impact of political corruption on electoral outcomes in 115 developing countries with relatively higher levels of corruption than Western consolidated democracies. Borrowing theoretical insights from the information-processing theory of voting, this study finds that political corruption becomes a formative electoral factor when the regime fails to sustain a sufficient level of economic growth. Otherwise, political corruption is not a significant factor that shapes electoral outcomes, irrespective of the level of perceived corruption, because the economy occupies voters' minds as the most important issue, making it a more accessible issue than political corruption.