This study investigates how ideological extremism is portrayed in online and offline communications by using the case of South Korea. We evaluate whether any forms of ideological biases are observed among Twitter users in Korea. We also examine how users are ideologically distinguished from one another in terms of their online political behavior. While most of the existing literature has relied heavily on survey data, we address these questions by means of both survey data analysis and Twitter data analysis using 13,500 tweets during the 2012 Korean presidential election. We find that 1. Twitter users tend to hold more extreme attitudes compared to non-users and the general population in Korea；2. There are more progressive tweets than conservatives ones in Korea； 3. Korean Twitter users differ from each other in terms of their online behavior according to their partisan and ideological preferences.
Regular Issue
Volume #21, Number #2
Published in December, 2017
This paper aims at exploring whether or not the argument of the “natural resource curse” theory also applies to environmental performance. Both academia and policy practitioners all agree that countries with abundant natural resource endowments that significantly rely on these endowments tend to perform poorly in political, economic and social development. This observation not only applies to developing states, but also to advanced ones. However, few scholars have paid attention to the effects of natural resources on environmental governance, which is an issue that has become prominent in recent decades. This deficiency suggests a gap between the argument of the resource curses thesis and the breadth of its application. This article have worse environmental performance. Such a negative relationship is based on two direct explanations-that natural resources encourages states to concentrate on extractive industrial sectors that usually cause environmental damage and economic incentives from natural resource exploitation outweigh incentives to protect the environment. In addition, one further indirect explanation is the higher reliance on abundant natural resource endowments weakens state capacity, thus damaging environmental governance. Based on empirical evidence using data for 214 countries or political entities for the period 1980-2015, such an argument is statistically confirmed. This article offers practical and theoretical contributions to both the natural resource curse and environmental governance.
Since the 1970s, a rapid surge in foreign direct investment ( FDI ) has become one of the most important factors shaping the landscape of the global political economy. While theroists of commerical liberalism place emphasis on trade and claim the pacifying effects of ecomonic interdependence on interstate conflict, few recognize plausible linkages between FDI and interstate conflict. Differing from the conventional wisdom that merely focuses on the impact of oppurtunity costs on conflict, it argues that states' pro-FDI policies may reveal their reluctance to initate miliary action in interstate disputes. Moreover, this paper also contends that symmetrical FDI interdependence may be a promising factor faciliating peace. Nevertheless, the pacifying effects of the preceding FDI factors may vary in different dyads of state combination between developed and developing countries, due to the structural pattern of FDI flows. This paper analyzes the FDI-conflict realtionship from 1985 to 2001. The findings suggest the institutional feature of property rihts protection in a dyas of states is likely to be a credible indicator promoting the prospect of peace between states.
Social protests have played an important role in the process of political change in Taiwan. Although many studies on Taiwan's social movements are qualitative analyses focusing on specific cases, few explain the variation in the frequency of social protests within Taiwan. To fill this empirical gap, this paper draws hypotheses from the theory of political opportunity structure and subjects it to empirical tests using a unique dataset of subnational protest events. First, the empirical analyses show that the frequency of local protests tends to be higher in a locality where the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is in power. Secondly, the results demostrate that, in an election year, local citizens have stronger incentives to protest. Finally, we find that the share of the seats of the DPP in a locality council does not have a significant effect on local protests. Overall, this study facilitates a better understanding of the development of Taiwan's civil society and provides important insights regarding the political processs in new democracies.
This article intends to present the rich content of the ethic thought in the Warring States period. There are two main features to be noted. First, instead of referring to the continuous development of the ethic thought of the Spring and Autumn period, that of the Warring States period marks the reversal of the former ---- a phenomenon which has been ignored hitherto. Second, the ethnic thought in the Warring States period contains several important points of interest, such as the significant contribution made by Mozi in providing a new outlook for understanding the Chinese-Yi relation, and the idea of winning support from the Yi and Di people not by force, but by peaceful means (e.g., good governmence, tribute-trade, courtesy and respect). Other highly valuable ideas are the views regarding whether human nature differs between the Chinese and the Yi how to deal with their cultural differences , and some other quite unique but enlighting strands of thought regarding identity politics.