Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science

Between Tradition and Myth. Limits and Prospects of the Republican Paradigm The existence of a «republican tradition» in the history of Western political thought has become a historiographic dogma, thanks especially to the work of the so-called Cambridge School. This article provides a critique. First, it shows that the insistence on the tradition's distinctiveness was the product not just of historical research, but of various polemics against liberalism conducted between the 1970s and 1990s. Second, it considers the ways in which a tradition can be conceptualized in the history of thought, and compares them to the main versions of Cambridge-inspired republican historiography. The conclusion will be that, while in some ways it can be acceptable to speak of a republican tradition, the most common ones are methodologically inappropriate and historically misleading.

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) suffered a stunning defeat in the July 2007 upper house elections, creating an unprecedented situation in which the LDP-led coalition lost its majority in the upper house while retaining a two-thirds majority in the lower house. In this new environment of “divided government” Japanese style, the LDP and the opposition jockeyed for advantage in foreign and domestic policy debates while preparing for a critical confrontation in the next lower house election.

Scholars often claim that East Asia is characterized by “hot economics and cold politics.” While economic linkages between East Asian countries proliferate rapidly, mutual distrust and unresolved historical tensions seem to present a continual obstacle to the development of closer interregional political ties. This dynamic is particularly evident in the bilateral relationship between Japan and China. Though it has much to gain from trading with Japan, China continues to experience strong domestic anti-Japanese sentiment and periodic protests over issues such as history textbooks, territorial disputes, controversial Japanese statements about the Nanjing Massacre, and visits by politicians to the infamous Yasukuni Shrine. Despite the frequency with which the “hot economics, cold politics” thesis is invoked, however, there have been few attempts to test its accuracy or to specify the conditions under which it holds true. To what extent do firms react to these political debacles, and to what extent are the latter simply demonstrations of nationalist rhetoric? We tackle these questions by using a combination of event analysis and nonparametric matching techniques to examine the effects of a series of negative shocks in Sino-Japanese relations on specific types of companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Our findings indicate that when shocks are unexpected and have potentially large-scale consequences, companies dependent on the Asian sales market are more negatively effected than otherwise similar companies. This suggests that a firm’s value is partially tied to Sino-Japanese bilateral relations and that political tensions are indeed important for the future of economic linkages in Asia. Our findings help to clarify the relationship between economic integration and political tensions between these two key countries, making a contribution to the understanding of Asian regionalism and the broader relationship between conflict and economic interdependence. Early versions of this paper were presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association. A portion of the research for this project was conducted with the support of the Japan Foundation.

As Russia reasserts itself in an international system still governed by a “Western” conception of order drawn from liberal models of capitalism and democracy, how are the European Union and the United States responding to this re-emerging power? This is the question that we attempt to tackle in the conclusion to this volume; its answer has important implications for the viability of the current international economic and political order.

Part of a series on Japan's leadership in the liberal international order, this paper examines Japan’s changing approach to the global commons, tracing commonalities across the outer space, cyberspace, and maritime domains. As security threats have emerged in these domains, Japan has continued to uphold the principles of the liberal international order based on rule of law, but it has also hedged against risk by securitizing issues, by turning its existing diplomatic and technological tools to new purposes, and by linking the commons with security structures related to the Japan Self-Defense Forces and the U.S.-Japan alliance. This examination of Japan’s approach to the global commons has broad implications for policy. First, there is a clear need for serious attention to the maintenance and/or construction of governance regimes that will promote the use of the global commons in ways that benefit all countries. Second, the increasingly crowded and competitive environment in the global commons presents new challenges in terms of cultivating consensus and regulating activity, but it also offers opportunities to create coalitions of like-minded countries, and middle powers have an important role to play in this process. Third, the clear parallels in changes across the outer space, cyberspace, and maritime domains suggest that there is something valuable to be gained from fostering dialogue among their respective scholars and practitioners, to find best practices that can be shared or transferred across domains. Although the onset of COVID-19 has drawn the attention of many countries away from developments outside their national borders, it has not lessened the importance of these issues — indeed, there is evidence that the global pandemic may be providing a convenient distraction that is enabling additional incursions in these domains and further eroding norms regarding their shared use.

As Russia reasserts itself in an international system still governed by a “Western ” conception of order drawn from liberal models of capitalism and democracy, how are the European Union and the United States responding to this re-emerging power? This is the question that we attempt to tackle in the conclusion to this volume; its answer has important implications for the viability of the current international economic and political order.2 The fall of the Soviet Union, followed by the political and economic liberalization of Russia, prompted many observers to believe that Russia would gradually incorporate itself into Western economic and political systems. Unfortunately, the promise of a diplomatic 1 The authors would like to thank Sarah Garding and Theocharis Grigoriadis for their helpful comments. 2 More generally, how the US responds to rising powers such as India, China, and Brazil poses a central challenge for analysts and policymakers.

How do governments in post-conflict settings provide for policing within their countries? I argue that leaders respond to both electoral concerns and security threats in shaping the geographic provision of policing infrastructure. Focusing on Uganda, I contend that the territorial expansion of policing has followed a distinct political logic. First, I use panel data on police infrastructure to demonstrate increased construction in counties with previously lower electoral support for the incumbent regime. Additionally, I find that counties with violence are more likely to experience increases in construction, but especially in areas where the incumbent has more support. Finally, I show that (1) proximity to police infrastructure is associated with worse individual perceptions of the police and (2) that increased construction of police infrastructure has large significant effects on reducing voter turnout while increasing vote share for the incumbent president. These findings have imp...