How East Asians View Democracy

How East Asians View Democracy

Language: English

Pages: 328

ISBN: 0231145357

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


East Asian democracies are in trouble, their legitimacy threatened by poor policy performance and undermined by nostalgia for the progrowth, soft-authoritarian regimes of the past. Yet citizens throughout the region value freedom, reject authoritarian alternatives, and believe in democracy.

This book is the first to report the results of a large-scale survey-research project, the East Asian Barometer, in which eight research teams conducted national-sample surveys in five new democracies (Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Mongolia), one established democracy (Japan), and two nondemocracies (China and Hong Kong) in order to assess the prospects for democratic consolidation. The findings present a definitive account of the way in which East Asians understand their governments and their roles as citizens. Contributors use their expert local knowledge to analyze responses from a set of core questions, revealing both common patterns and national characteristics in citizens' views of democracy. They explore sources of divergence and convergence in attitudes within and across nations.

The findings are sobering. Japanese citizens are disillusioned. The region's new democracies have yet to prove themselves, and citizens in authoritarian China assess their regime's democratic performance relatively favorably. The contributors to this volume contradict the claim that democratic governance is incompatible with East Asian cultures but counsel against complacency toward the fate of democracy in the region. While many forces affect democratic consolidation, popular attitudes are a crucial factor. This book shows how and why skepticism and frustration are the ruling sentiments among today's East Asians.

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ComParative PersPectives on democratic legitimacY in east asia  1 better than any other realistic alternative. We employed a set of five ques- tions to estimate the level of support for democracy. These questions address democracy’s desirability, suitability, efficacy, preferability, and priority. We measure the “desirability” dimension by asking respondents to indicate on a 10-point scale how democratic they want their society to be, with 1 being “complete dictatorship” and 10 being.

American Political Science Review 53 (March): 69–105. ———. 1981. Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lo, Shiu-hing. 1995. The Politics of Democratization in Hong Kong. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Logerfo, Jim. 1996. “Attitudes Toward Democracy among Rural Northern Thais.” Asian Survey 36 (9): 904–923. Lu, Xiaobo. 2000. Cadres and Corruption the Organizational Involution of the Chi- nese Communist Party. Stanford: Stanford.

An average score of 5 on political rights and 4.8 on civil liberties (on a seven-point scale with 7 as the lowest) for the five years from 1983 to 1988 and raised the score to an average of 1.8 on political rights and 2 on civil liberties for the five years from 1996 to 2001 (Freedom House 2005). The new regime was more democratic than the old, and respondents from Taiwan knew it. But in other respects they were not so positive. Close to half of our re- spondents felt that there was no.

Are concerned. For the quasi-Leninist features of the KMT, see Tun- jen Cheng. “Democratizing the Quasi-Leninist Regime in Taiwan,” World Politics 42 (July 1989): 471–499. However, it is also important to point out that on many important scores the KMT regime was quite different from the Leninist regimes of the former Soviet bloc. Unlike the communist regime, the KMT was long associated with the West; it had ample experience with private property rights, markets, and the rule of law; and it.

Commitment among Taiwan’s electorate has slightly recovered from the depression observed in 2001. For instance, we found that the percentage of respondents believing that “democracy is always preferable to any other kind of government” has increased from the low of 40.4% (2001) to 42.2% (2003) and 47.5% (2006). But it has not yet climbed over the 50% threshold. Please refer to Yun-han Chu, “Taiwan’s Year of Stress,” Journal of Democracy 16, no. 2 (April 2005): 43–57, and Yu-tzung Chang,.

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