The Politicization of Social Investment in the Media and Legislature in North East Asia

This chapter examines the agenda-setting politics of social investment issues in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan since 1990, based on newspaper articles and bill sponsorship records. The findings reveal that, in all three countries, social investment issues have increasingly gained legislative and media saliency and presented mostly as a problem-driven valence issue, for example, in tackling an aging society and the low-fertility crisis. However, cross-national differences do exist in terms of the primary function that social investment serves as well as the extent to which the legislature mirrors the media. The chapter’s second half examines the effect of partisanship on social investment agenda-setting in the legislature. The results demonstrate that, on the one hand, partisanship is not an important factor in deciding whether a social investment bill is introduced. On the other hand, the effect of partisanship is visibly related to the choice of the type of social investment strategy.