Understanding Welfare Politics in Northeast Asia with Multiple Cleavages

这个项目考察了韩国、日本和台湾主要政治分裂的起源和发展。分裂使选民在某一问题上分成支持者和反对者，或为某一政党投票。核心的困惑源于东亚的独特背景，在那里，工会和左翼政党并不是最近社会福利扩张的主要政治力量。运用Lipset和Rokkan关于分裂和政党政治的开创性工作（1967），我们的分析表明，三个亚洲国家的主要政治化分裂并没有围绕社会分配问题，而是关注民族主义、地方主义或城乡分裂。具体来说，我们对来自多个数据集的结果进行三角测量，如宣言、精英调查、投票模式、民意调查、点名投票、法案发起人/共同发起人和报纸文章。我们通过观察基本的立法维度，如提交法案的数量、比例、成功率和持续时间如何随着时间的推移而不同，来研究每个国家在民主转型期间形成的主要分歧。此外，使用定量数据集对韩国、日本和台湾发表的15篇关于衡量政治分歧（或明或暗）的英文论文进行了研究。总的来说，这些来源包括大众和精英水平的数据。

This project examines the origin and development of key political cleavages in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Cleavages separate voters into advocates and adversaries on a certain issue or into voting for a certain party. The central puzzle stems from the unique contexts of East Asia, in which encompassing trade unions and left-wing parties have not been the primary political forces of the latest expansions in social welfare. Applying Lipset and Rokkan’s seminal work on cleavage and party politics (1967), our analysis suggests that major politicized cleavages in the three Asian countries have not revolved around social-distribution issues, but instead focus on nationalism, provincialism, or rural-urban divisions.Specifically, we triangulate results from multiple datasets such as manifestos, elite surveys, voting patterns, public opinion surveys, roll call votes, bill sponsor/co-sponsorship, and newspaper articles. We examine the primary cleavages formed during each country’s democratic transition by looking at how basic legislative dimensions such as the numbers, proportion, success ratio, and duration of submitted bills have differed over time. Moreover, 15 English-language published papers on measuring political cleavages―either explicitly or implicitly―in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are examined using quantitative datasets. Collectively, these sources include both mass and elite level data.