The COVID-19 pandemic has left international cooperation and liberalistic values in crisis. As liberalism’s downfall is widely discussed, international collaborations like the European Union are criticised for their inability to operate adequately during the pandemic. The four examples in this paper are middle power countries (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore) in terms of economic scale and influence. The purpose of this study was to uncover possibilities for and limitations of these middle powers within international cooperative efforts during and after the pandemic. The unknown factor is the path the post-pandemic world will follow. Will nations focus on independent survival? Or will international cooperation shape the new world? Globalisation already seems to have progressed too far for the national egoism of the great powers to prevail. Even if face-to-face is replaced by virtual and offline meetings move online, the social nature of humans remains unchanged, and international cooperation remains valid. The four middle power countries in Asia, which are included among the most economically successful countries, are important to international society based on their relatively excellent quarantine performance. What is important in the diplomacy of middle power countries is not traditional security and hard power but the soft power of international law, human rights, health security, and international cooperation.

Since the referendum in 2016, Brexit has become the most controversial conundrum in the UK. This study aimed to revisit this issue by focusing on the communicative patterns of Brexit-related parties (the Conservatives, Labour, and UK Independence Party). Firstly, it attempted to provide the conceptual backgrounds of Brexit by explaining its development process from Cameron’s pledge of an in/out referendum to the present. Subsequently, it reviewed empirical studies on Brexit in diverse areas of social science. Most empirical studies point out that British political practitioners’ perceptions about Brexit were the root cause, but they were not able to provide an overview of these perceptions. The novelty of this study lies in examining the patterns of these perceptions by focusing on communicative framings embedded in the posts created in their official Facebook pages from the date of the referendum to that of the Brexit withdrawal agreement. To extract these framings, this study adopted an automated semantic network analysis geared by NodeXL—software for data collection and visualisation. The results show that these parties emphasised that they were the only legitimate political party to solve the Brexit crisis without providing concrete solutions or measures. These parties’ ill-founded communications endanger sustainable social media communications and interactions in the UK. Hence, it is vital to establish a more reliable fact-checking information-sharing system between the political elite and the general public.

On 23 June 2016, the UK's ‘Brexit’ referendum saw a majority vote to leave the EU—a result that shocked the world. Using European Social Survey data, we argue that Brexit was not simply decided by less‐educated voters who did not understand the EU's value. Pro‐Brexit votes were determined by economic interests as well as emotional, psychological, and attitudinal factors related to European integration. We demonstrate that skill level played a more important role in voter decision than education, gender, age, and political stance.

This study investigates the North Korean defector phenomenon by approaching YouTube as an internet forum for public discourse, using the novel analytic approaches of social network analysis, text mining and semantic analysis. The research produced three main findings. First, individual YouTube content creators are most influential in the video networks pertaining to the subject of North Korean defectors. Second, on YouTube space, the image of North Korea tends to be negative because of the prevalence of defectors' testimony of their life experiences. Finally, such negative narratives of North Korea on YouTube might have a negative influence by blocking the reunification of Korea. In conclusion, this study suggests the South Korean government and other relevant global actors should conduct thorough and continuous examinations of North Korean defectors' perceptions of South Koreans and vice versa. This study calls for the international community to take further action to formulate proper policy instruments.

The Korean local autonomy system has a unique feature in that it grants councils, mayors, and governors the right to submit bills. Because of Korea’s extensive experience with authoritarianism, the relative legislative productivity of the assembly with respect to the head of the group—that is, the person who has the legislative initiative—has become an evaluation criterion for the activities of local councils in Korea. In this study, we address the question of why the relative legislative productivity of individual councils appears to be the cause of problematic awareness in situations where the legal and institutional conditions—for example, the organization and function of local councils, operating methods, and support systems—are very similar. Accordingly, regarding the 4th to 6th parliamentary period (2006–2018) of 15 parliaments, panel data analysis was performed to understand how the structure of party competition between the heads of the group and parliament and the structure of party competition within the assembly affects the relative legislative productivity of the assembly from a macro perspective. It was found that the relative legislative productivity of the parliament for mayors increases when there is a divided government rather than unified one and when the seat share of the first party in parliament increases. However, it was also found that the greater the difference in seat share between the first party in parliament and the second party in parliament, the higher the index of party concentration in parliament and the lower the relative legislative productivity of parliament. In Korea’s political reality, it was confirmed that the political structure of a divided government at the local level does not necessarily lead to a decrease in legislative productivity. The significance of this study is that these ideas were verified.