Suchergebnisse

In the the spring 2018 issue of Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Martin Gainsborough's "Malesky vs. Fforde" offers to adjudicate a supposed dispute between two highly cited scholars of modern Vietnamese politics. Purportedly drawing on the philosophical traditions of ontology and epistemology, Gainsborough claims that we can gain traction as a field by looking closely into the preexisting belief systems that scholars bring to their research questions. Along the way, Gainsborough questions the plausibility of my own work and claims that I smuggle "liberal" values into my writing on Vietnam. In this response, I discuss five dimensions in which Gainsborough and I disagree and why they matter for studying Vietnamese politics. I do so by contrasting my choices with Gainsborough's scholarship (both in "Malesky vs. Fforde" and other work), illustrating how Gainsborough's research decisions lead him to faulty and damaging conclusions about my work.

This essay reviews Vietnamese politics in 2013 through the lens of the constitutional drafting process and the unprecedented confidence vote in the National Assembly. Both events were framed by the country's ongoing economic struggles, elite political contestation, international integration, and a more informed public, fueled by an increasingly active blogosphere. The events foreshadow how future Vietnamese leaders can no longer rely on deep reservoirs of patriotism for legitimacy. Performance matters now more than ever.

Victory has finally been declared after a fierce internecine struggle, but the conflict will never be recorded in the Correlates of War dataset. In fact, except for a few notable exceptions, news of the battle has hardly seeped into political science journals at all; and its impact has certainly not been appreciated by the group best positioned to capitalize on the terms of victory—comparative scholars with deep country knowledge.

AbstractThe article seeks to measure and explain provincial autonomy in Vietnam during the reform era, arguing that the absence of an effective measure of autonomy to date has limited the scope for developing an overarching theory capable of explaining autonomy across a range of settings. The article pioneers a method for measuring autonomy involving a content analysis of Vietnamese newspapers over a ten-year period, noting whenever provinces are reported for engaging in a series of carefully defined autonomous acts. Having developed the measure of autonomy, the article seeks to test four hypotheses for explaining it, namely geographical location, relations with central government, initial conditions on the eve of reform, and the dominant source of economic activity in terms of ownership. The article finds that no single factor accounts for autonomy on its own but also that there is only a weak relationship between autonomy and a province's geographical location and that provinces heavily represented in central government tend to be among the least autonomous.