Handbook of Confucianism in Modern Japan

In mainstream assessments of Confucianism's modern genealogy there is a Sinocentric bias which is in part the result of a general neglect of modern Japanese Confucianism by political and moral philosophers and intellectual historians during the post-war era. The essays in this volume can be read for the insight they provide into the intellectual and ideological proclivities of reformers, educators and philosophers explicitly reconstructing Confucian thought, or more tacitly influenced by it, during critical phases in Japan’s modernization, imperialist expansionism and post-1945 reconstitution as a liberal democratic polity. They can be read as introductions to the ideas of modern Japanese Confucian thinkers and reformers whose work is little known outside Japan—and sometimes barely remembered inside Japan. They can also be read as a needful corrective to the above-mentioned Sinocentric bias in the 20th century intellectual history of Confucianism. For those Confucian scholars currently exploring how Confucianism is, or can be made compatible with democracy, at least some of the studies in this volume serve as a warning. They enjoin readers to consider how Confucianism was also rendered compatible with the authoritarian ultranationalism and militarism that captured Japan’s political system in the 1930s, and brought war to the Asia-Pacific region.

Coordinating nominations: how to deal with an incumbent surplus after electoral reform

How do parties and candidates react to electoral system reform? While the literature on causes and consequences of electoral reforms is receiving increasing attention, we lack a systematic micro-level account on how parties and candidates adopt to changes in electoral rules and district boundaries. This paper examines the case of the Japanese Liberal Democrats to explore how the party has managed to accommodate a surplus of incumbents to a reduced number of nominal tier seats following the 1994 electoral reform. By using micro-level data, I examine how the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has matched candidates based on their expected electoral strength and ideological positioning to new districts. Moreover, I investigate how the newly instituted party-list allowed the LDP to avoid its disintegration at the local level by systematically defusing local stand-offs through the handing out of promising list positions. My findings help to understand how the LDP could avoid its disintegration and could continue to dominate Japanese politics until today.

Nationality and Equal Political Rights: A Necessary Link?

Main justifications for regarding common nationality as a necessary condition for holding equal political rights – Critique of collective self-determination, equal stakes, nature of political activity, and stability justifications – Rejection of the incommensurability of legitimacy and justice – Socioeconomic interdependence and liberal democratic values as the normative grounds for equal stakes – Risk of entrenchment of hostility among national groups as a consequence of a competitive conception of political activity – Instrumental value of stability – Stability through democratic inclusion – Possibility of sustainable pluralism through deliberative democracy – Modified version of the equal stakes argument – Equal political rights on the basis of long-term residence – Association of citizenship with nationality in contemporary European states – Redefinition of citizenship as top-down redefinition of nationality – Need to reconceptualise equal political rights independently of citizenship – Legal argument for interpreting references to popular sovereignty in national constitutions in accordance with long-term residence, rather than nationality – Available legal remedies

The Process of Deterioration of Liberal Democracy in the Visegrad Group Countries: Institutional Perspective

Contemporary changes of liberal democracy affect different countries of the world. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, known as the Visegrad Group countries (V4), are among them. Although the countries seemed to be on a good way to consolidated democracy, about a decade ago the first symptoms of deterioration of liberal democracy became apparent. In the text, attention is focused on the institutional level, which should resist certain challenges in mature democracies. The institutions in V4 were weak and liable to be subordinated by strong political leaders and populist parties, and not strong enough to fight off illiberal tendencies. The analysis reveals that Poland and Hungary were more prone to compromise liberal democratic achievements, while the Czech Republic and Slovakia less so. This paper answers the questions of the institutional causes behind the deterioration of liberal democracy and the effects it brings.

The Demand Side of Democratic Backsliding: How Divergent Understandings of Democracy Shape Political Choice

Why do citizens in democracies fail to punish political candidates who openly violate democratic standards at the ballot box? The bulk of existing research assumes that a common understanding of democracy underpins citizens’ evaluations of different candidates, resulting in a trade-off between undemocratic practices and partisan or economic considerations. We shed doubt on this assumption by showing that divergent understandings of democracy coexist among citizens and affect vote choice. We leverage a novel approach to estimate individual-level citizen commitment to democracy by means of a candidate choice conjoint experiment in Poland, a country experiencing democratic backsliding in a context of deep polarization. We find support for our claim that respondents with less clear-cut liberal democratic attitudes not only tolerate democratic violations more readily, but do so irrespective of a given candidate’s partisan affiliation. Thus, we contend that a lack of attitudinal consolidation around liberal democratic norms explains continued voter support for authoritarian-leaning leaders.

The “populist” foundation of liberal democracy: Jan-Werner Müller, Chantal Mouffe, and post-foundationalism

This article examines the connection between populism and post-foundationalism in the context of contemporary debates about populism as a strategy for the Left. I argue that there is something “populist” about every constitutional order, including liberal democratic ones. I argue so drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s theories of hegemony, agonistic democracy, and left populism. Populism is the quintessential form of post-foundational politics because, rightly understood, populism constructs the object it claims to represent, namely the people. As such, it expresses the fact that, because there is no ultimate foundation, politics consists in the construction of contingent foundations. I develop this argument through readings of Jan-Werner Müller and Chantal Mouffe, showing the differences between their respective post-foundational approaches. I show that Müller cannot uphold the distinction between populism and democracy in the way he seeks to do, but I also argue that this does not mean that we must jettison all normativity, only that it requires that we rethink normativity in hegemonic terms.

Kepemimpinan Perempuan dalam Konstruksi Berpikir Presiden Tiga Negara

<em>This study aims to investigate the thought construction of the leaders of three countries, namely Indonesia, the United States and Russia about women's leadership. This research was done by descriptive method. The data for this study was obtained from the official tweets of the presidents of three countries on Twitter. The keywords in the data search were: leadership, women, politics, human rights, and justice. Data analysis was carried out with the Nvivo 12 Pro. The results show that Joe Biden has a stronger thinking construct about women's state leadership with as many as 51, discussed by Joko Widodo in the second position with as many as 49 and Vladimir Putin in the last position with as many as 25. This also answers the thesis that with a liberal democratic system more open to women's leadership compared to the Pancasila democratic system and socialist democracy.</em>

Exploring mechanisms of whiteness: how counterterrorism practitioners disrupt anti-racist expertise

This article situates the subject of the academic–practitioner (AP) exchange within an International Relations-orientated critique of the imperial dynamics of counterterrorism practices and racial subjugation. It uses an analytical framework that upholds the significance of racial hierarchy to knowledge production. A key contribution of this article is to situate the AP nexus within the circumstances of liberal democratic counterterrorism regimes, to demonstrate how race becomes meaningful to the knowledge that is produced about Islamophobia. The main argument of this article is that in present policy debates concerning the existence of systemic racism, one of the mechanisms enabling counterterrorism practitioners to regulate the AP exchange is that of institutionalized whiteness. Exploring two scenarios of AP exchanges in the United Kingdom and Canada, where counterterrorism practitioners were challenged to reconcile with academic explanations of Islamophobia as a systemic issue, this article uses colour-line inspired critiques of white logic to identify instances where anti-racist knowledge was subjugated in the name of imperialism. The article finds that in each scenario discussed, practitioners demonstrate trajectories of white logic by contesting the suitability of anti-racist knowledge put forward by academics, on the basis of racial hierarchy and self-aggrandizement. It concludes by discussing how a lack of practitioner–academic consensus continues to affect the dissemination of knowledge concerning systemic racism, thus prompting considerations of what this means for an anti-racist future.