ABSTRACT
This paper investigates why Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have adopted distinct care strategies, despite shared demographic challenges and developmental legacies. It advances a dual-layered framework of state autonomy that distinguishes between elected and unelected state actors and integrates cross-national differences in electoral competition and civil society mobilisation. Drawing on a most-similar systems design and comparative process tracing of critical reform episodes, the analysis shows that electoral competition functions as an expansion driver by increasing the political salience of care, while civil society mobilisation shapes policy design by advocating and framing care strategies. These mechanisms produce three distinct modes of state autonomy transformation: bureaucratically steered and socially informed autonomy in Japan, politically responsive and socially embedded autonomy in Korea and politically responsive but weakly constrained autonomy in Taiwan. These findings demonstrate that care regime variation reflects the dynamic interaction between electoral incentives, civic advocacy and developmental state legacies—thereby bridging state-centred and society-centred approaches to welfare politics.