2025/10/01

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Regime Resilience in the 21-Century of East Asia

Guest Editors
Yu-Tzung Chang (Professor, Department of Political Sciences, National Taiwan University)
Kai-Ping Huang (Associate Professor, Department of Political Sciences, National Taiwan University)

About the Journal
The Journal of Social Sciences and Philosophy (JSSP) is published quarterly by the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences (RCHSS), Academia Sinica. It is a tier 1 core journal in the multidisciplinary field indexed in the Taiwan Social Sciences Core Index (TSSCI).

About the Special Issue
Overview
Global governance has shifted, challenging assumptions about regime trajectories. Democratic backsliding led scholars to first diagnose causes of democratic erosion, then pivot to understanding democratic resilience. This acknowledges that some countries resist decline and even strengthen democracy, contrary to predictions (Levitsky and Way 2023). This conceptual shift fundamentally re-evaluates democracy. Historically, consolidation theories posited a stable end-state. However, contemporary analysis shows democracy is never fully consolidated; its protection is continuous. This reframing moves from a teleological to a pragmatic, process-oriented view, recognizing that democratic stability is not given, even in established systems, and requires active adaptation and defense (Merkel and Lührmann 2021).
Concurrently, authoritarian regimes have demonstrated remarkable endurance in the face of internal and external pressures, defying earlier theories that often predicted their inherent fragility due to factors such as weak legitimacy or over-reliance on coercion (Nathan 2003). Andrew Nathan's seminal concept of "authoritarian resilience" proved instrumental in explaining the unexpected survival and reconsolidation of regimes, notably the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), following significant challenges like the Tiananmen crisis. These regimes have not merely survived the third-wave of democratization but have actively developed sophisticated tactics for power concentration and opposition containment (Sinkkonen 2021). This goes beyond mere survival; it suggests a sophisticated, adaptive, and even innovative capacity within authoritarianism, where regimes proactively learn from each other and from perceived democratic weaknesses to fortify their own rule (Curato and Fossati 2020). This dynamic challenges simplistic views of authoritarianism as static or inherently fragile, highlighting them as formidable and enduring political systems that demand a deeper comparative analysis of their adaptive mechanisms.
The concept of "resilience" has thus emerged as a central analytical lens in contemporary regime studies, providing a framework for understanding how political systems, regardless of their type, withstand, adapt to, and recover from challenges, threats, and crises without compromising their core principles. This special issue aims to deepen this understanding by bringing together research on both democratic and authoritarian resilience. While these regime types fundamentally rely on distinct institutional arrangements to function, a common core lies in their capacity to deliver tangible and intangible benefits to their citizens or subjects. This collection of contributions will delve into the sources, consequences, and broader implications of resilience for regime survival in 21st century East Asia. A particular emphasis will be placed on studies focusing on individual citizens and ordinary people’s attitudes toward their regimes, and how these attitudes evolve in response to elite actions of tightening controls or, conversely, pursuing liberalization.

Key research themes
●    Citizen Support for Regimes: Instrumental vs. Normative Legitimacy
●    Political Trust and its Impact on Resilience
●    Citizen Engagement and Resistance in Democratic Backsliding
●    Impact of Economic Performance on Support
●    Elite Actions and Public Opinion Control in Authoritarian Contexts

References
Curato, Nicole, and Diego Fossati. 2020. “Authoritarian Innovations: Crafting Support for a Less Democratic Southeast Asia.” Democratization 27 (6): 1006–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2020.1777985
Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A. Way. 2023. “Democracy’s Surprising Resilience.” Journal of Democracy 34 (4): 5–20. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2023.a907684
Merkel, Wolfgang, and Anna Lührmann. 2021. “Resilience of Democracies: Responses to Illiberal and Authoritarian Challenges.” Democratization 28 (5): 869–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2021.1928081
Nathan, Andrew J. 2003. “Authoritarian Resilience.” Journal of Democracy 14 (1): 6–17. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2003.0019
Sinkkonen, Elina. 2021. “Dynamic Dictators: Improving the Research Agenda on Autocratization and Authoritarian Resilience.” Democratization 28 (6): 1172–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2021.1903881

Submission Process
All papers are to be submitted online through the JSSP submission system (http://jssp.rchss.sinica.edu.tw/) by January 20, 2026. The format of submissions must comply with submission guidelines posted on the JSSP website: https://www.rchss.sinica.edu.tw/jssp/app/bannerbar.php?Sn=1. To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified for consideration for this special issue, it is important that authors select “Special Issue: Regime Resilience in the 21-Century of East Asia” in the “Request an Online Submission” section of the submission system. All submitted manuscripts will be subject to the Journal of Social Sciences and Philosophy’s double-blind review process.

Contact 
Editorial Assistant:  Hsinyi Chien
Tel: 02-2789-8143    Email: issppub@gate.sinica.edu.tw