Cheol-Sung Lee

Incubating Innovation or Cultivating Corruption? The Developmental State and the Life Sciences in Asia

A substantial body of literature purports to document the growth of scientific misconduct in Northeast Asia. This article traces the apparent growth of research fraud and falsification to two distinct features of the national innovation systems common to the region: liberal research regimes adopted by developmental states and marked by freedom from government oversight, and illiberal laboratory cultures imported from Germany and marked by all-powerful lab directors and their vulnerable underlings. Based on comparative, qualitative case studies of pioneering countries in bio-medical research, as well as cross-national quantitative analyses of the permissiveness of national stem-cell research policies, we argue that Asias scientific pathologies are the products of two institutional factors: funding and freedom offered to scientists by developmental states, and the lack of informal control prevalent in the German model of higher education. We conclude that, while Northeast Asian officials offer their biomedical researchers funding and freedom to take advantage of opportunities that rarely exist in the West, their scientists stifle open debate and criticism, and thereby hinder the growth of informal as well as formal control mechanisms that are critical for deterring and detecting scientific fraud.

The Limit of Equality Projects: Public-Sector Expansion, Sectoral Conflicts, and Income Inequality in Postindustrial Economies

In this study, we investigate how structural economic changes constrain an equality project, the public-sector expansion strategy. First, we describe a three-stage process in which a growing productivity gap between the private-manufacturing and public-service sectors disrupts traditional class solidarity. We contend that emerging conflicts between private and public sectors due to public-sector expansion and a growing inter-sectoral productivity gap eventually lead to employment and budget crises, as well as the weakening of coordinated wage-setting institutions. Furthermore, political, institutional, and economic transformations originating from sectoral cleavages and imbalance lead to increased income inequality. We test this argument using an unbalanced panel dataset on 16 advanced industrial democracies from 1971 to 2003. We find that public-sector employment has a strong negative effect on income inequality when the productivity gap between sectors is low. In such situations, public-sector employment fulfills its promise of equality and full employment. However, as the inter-sectoral productivity gap increases, the negative effect of public-sector expansion on income inequality evaporates. The findings suggest that severely uneven productivity gaps due to different degrees of technological innovations significantly weaken and limit the effectiveness of left-wing governments’ policy interventions through public-service expansion.

Welfare States and Social Trust

This article tests the linkage between institutional configuration and social trust, highlighting the role of the welfare states in coordinating interests among different labor market actors. This study initially builds a theoretical framework distinguishing training-supplemented welfare regimes from transfer-based welfare regimes. Evidence from descriptive and multivariate analyses of World Values Survey based on 17 advanced industrial democracies supports my argument that public investment in skill provision prevalent in training-supplemented welfare states leads to higher accumulation of social trust, whereas passive social transfers result in lower social trust. Especially, high investment in public skill provision leads to a decreased gap in social trust between employers and low-skilled workers, as well as among different occupational groups. In addition, the negative effect of passive social transfers on trust is greatly ameliorated when it is jointly configured with high active labor market policies. The findings lend credibility to my claim that specific social policies aiming to upgrade citizens’ skill levels provide employees with better prospects for managing life chances (and risks) and therefore building higher social trust.

Pathways to Empowerment Repertoires of Women’s Activism and Gender Earnings Equality

This article examines how different repertoires of women’s activism influence gender earnings equality across countries. We develop a typology of three forms of mobilization—professionalized women’s activism, labor women’s activism, and women’s activism in popular movements—emphasizing distinct actors, patterns of claims-making, and inter-organizational ties among women’s organizations and other civil society groups in multi-organizational fields. Based on data on membership and co-membership ties built using World Values Surveys, we test the effects of different repertoires of women’s activism on earnings equality between women and men in 51 countries. We also consider a gendered development model and the role of welfare states as main explanatory variables in accounting for the gap in earnings. Our findings suggest that even in the presence of these alternative explanations, women’s activism matters. Furthermore, women’s organizations with access to institutional politics, through either direct advocacy or ties to unions or professional associations, have had the most success in promoting gender earnings equality. Our research contributes to prior work on social movement outcomes by conceptualizing women’s mobilization in the context of fields and further testing its effects on distributional outcomes in a comparative perspective.

Associational Networks and Welfare States in Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan

This article investigates the structures of civic networks and their roles in steering the political choices of party and union elites regarding the retrenchment or expansion of welfare states in four recently democratized developing countries. Utilizing coaffiliation networks built upon two waves of World Values Surveys and evidence from comparative case studies for Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan, the study develops two explanatory factors that account for variations in welfare politics: cohesiveness and embeddedness. In Argentina and, to a lesser degree, in Taiwan, party and union leaders’ cohesive relationships, being disarticulated from the informal civic sphere, allowed them to conduct elite-driven social policy reforms from above, by launching radical neoliberal reforms (Argentina) or by developing a generous transfer-centered welfare state (Taiwan). In Brazil and South Korea, however, party and union leaders’ durable solidarity embedded in wider civic communities enabled them to resist the retrenchment of welfare states (Brazil) or implement universal social policies (South Korea) based on bottom-up mobilization of welfare demands. This article demonstrates that elites in the formal sector make markedly different political choices when confronting economic crisis and democratic competition depending upon their organizational connections in formal and informal civic networks.

Going Underground The Origins of Divergent Forms of Labor Parties in Recently Democratized Countries

This study explores how different forms of civic solidarity emerge during authoritarian eras and how they evolve into diverse labor-based political institutions after transitions to democracy. I initially explore the modes of choices that radical intellectuals make—go underground or cooperate—in their responses to coercion and co-optation by authoritarian elites. Based on comparative historical evidence of institutionalization processes of labor-based politics in four recently democratized developing countries, I identify three types of solidarity and one absence case, each reflecting a different combination of strengths and divisions in the informal civil society of its respective nation: participatory solidarity, top-down solidarity, clique-based solidarity, and co-optation (no solidarity). This study shows that radical intellectuals’ early actions play critical roles in the evolution or devolution of institutionalization of different forms of labor politics during the democratic consolidation.