How do citizens evaluate government performance in environmental governance? Existing scholarship has predominantly examined public perceptions of environmental governance through static or period-specific lenses, thus lacking a thorough longitudinal perspective. This study employs an Age-Period-Cohort framework to investigate evolving trends in local environmental governance satisfaction in China. Leveraging nine waves of nationally representative Chinese Social Survey data from 2006 to 2023, this study uses Generalized Additive Model, complemented by Age-Period-Cohort Interaction models as robustness checks. The analysis yields several key findings: First, older respondents generally report higher satisfaction with environmental governance than younger respondents. Second, period variation is the most pronounced temporal pattern, with satisfaction showing a general upward tendency despite a non-monotonic trajectory characterized by a decline to a 2013 trough followed by a marked increase. Third, evidence of cohort differentiation is less consistent, with nonlinear cohort variation evident in the primary analysis but more limited evidence of differences associated with specific cohorts in the robustness analysis. Additional analyses reveal urban–rural differences in these temporal patterns. These insights enrich the nuanced longitudinal understanding of public evaluations of government performance.
The United Nations peacekeeping mission has faced increasingly complex situations to manage since its first mission in 1948. The paper analyzes the reasons for the United Nations’ failure to establish sustainable peace and stability in the Central African Republic. Over the past two decades, the United Nations has fielded three different peacekeeping operations in the Central African Republic, the current one being Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic. The study reviewed existing documents such as policy reports, conference notes, and archival records. It examines how these missions are less successful because of conflicting goals between local groups and international actors and the difficulty of achieving sustainable peace.
This study examines how Confucian cultural orientations shape public support for crisis governance in East Asia. Using Asian Barometer Survey Wave 6 data from Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam, it models familialism, collectivism, harmony, and hierarchism as latent traits via item response theory and relates them to COVID-19 policy attitudes using fixed-effects ordinal regression. Confucian orientations are strongest in Vietnam and Singapore. Collectivism and hierarchism are associated with greater trust in government pandemic information, more favorable evaluations of crisis management, and stronger support for emergency measures. Harmony is associated only with support for emergency measures; familialism shows no significant association. The findings suggest that Confucian culture does not operate as a unified orientation toward authority; relational obligation and morally grounded deference are the principal cultural channels shaping public responses to state action during crises.
Land expropriation systems are policy tools to address market failures, but local governments’ monopoly power triggers compensation conflicts. Breaking from the production–distribution dichotomy, this study constructs an evolutionary game model between governments and farmers, using two Chinese datasets. The findings of the study are as follows: (1) under monopoly power, compensation is more associated to fiscal revenue than agricultural land value or geographic location, with no significant interaction between the latter two, and (2) farmers resist only if governments lose sanction power and conflict costs are low. Compensation is not significantly related to farmers’ conflict capabilities. Reforms should strengthen farmers’ land rights, reduce government monopoly, and enhance oversight.
This article explains Equatorial Guinea’s movement from late colonial institutional shallowness to resource authoritarianism, understood as rents enlarging executive fiscal, infrastructural and diplomatic capacity while limiting accountability. It advances a pre-rent state fragility thesis: oil did not create the state-formation problem, but reorganized weaknesses produced by Spanish colonial underdevelopment, compressed decolonization and the Macías-era collapse. Drawing on historical institutional analysis and process tracing of colonial legislation, United Nations records, Equatoguinean historiography, human rights reports and International Monetary Fund and World Bank assessments, the article distinguishes government capacity from public statehood and links the case to Asia–Africa debates on resource authoritarianism.
