Two papers on regional party leadership in Taiwan and the administration of North Korean enterprises are headed to APSA 2026 in Boston.
Two papers headed to Boston
Two Organization of Power research papers were accepted for presentation at the 2026 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Boston. This will be my first time presenting at APSA.
Regional party leadership in Taiwan
The first paper, coauthored with Chia-Lin Kao, compares regional leadership and party management in Taiwan’s two major parties. The project has since developed into the preprint Organizational Inheritance and Conditional Centralization: Regional Party Leadership in Taiwan.
The study asks why national party leaders rely on locally rooted officials in some regions while installing personnel who depend more directly on the center in others. Using 349 regional party-leader spells from 1978 to 2025, it compares how the Kuomintang and Democratic Progressive Party’s different organizational inheritances shape regional leadership selection.
Central and regional administration in North Korea
The second paper contrasts the central and regional administration of North Korean enterprises across urban and rural areas. It forms part of the lab’s work on North Korea’s regional economy and the evolving project The Sky is High and the Emperor is Far Away: Regional Economic Innovation in Post-Famine North Korea.
This research combines the North Korea Politics, Enterprises, and Media databases to examine how central control and regional initiative interact within the country’s changing political economy.
Continuing the projects
The APSA presentations provide an opportunity to test both arguments with colleagues working on political organization, parties, authoritarian politics, and regional governance. We look forward to bringing the next versions of the papers to Boston.