Why are Politically Active People Avoided in Countries with Collectivistic Culture? A Cross-Cultural Experiment

Abstract

Although most democratic theories assume that political participation other than voting constitutes an essential input to the political process, little is known about the cultural universality of this assumption. Drawing on cultural psychology findings derived from the widely shared framework of collectivism versus individualism, the present study tests the hypothesis that political demonstrators in collectivistic countries are socially avoided because they are perceived to be a threat to harmonious interpersonal relationships. A cross-national experiment in eight countries (US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, China, South Korea, and India) and one region (Hong Kong) indicated that political demonstrators are socially avoided, and this tendency was significantly stronger in collectivistic countries. Moderated-mediation analyses suggested that the social avoidance of political demonstrators in collectivistic countries is mediated by the perception that they are a threat to harmonious interpersonal relationships. The cross-cultural validity of democratic theory is discussed.

Keywords

individualism versus collectivism political participation political demonstration cross-cultural experiment

Because most democratic theories posit that political participation constitutes an essential input into the political process (Mansbridge, 1983; Pateman, 1970), a large body of political behavior studies in Western societies have positioned political engagement as a normatively desirable outcome. The theorists of participatory democracy in particular emphasize the importance of political participation other than voting. In fact, public opinion in Western democracies has been strongly influenced by political movements such as feminism, minority empowerment, and environmental protection which largely emerged outside traditional party politics. However, little is known about the extent to which the normative acceptability of political participation other than voting can be generalized to cultural contexts beyond the West.

Democracies in East Asia have developed along remarkably different paths from those in the West. In Japan, which boasts the longest history of democracy in East Asia, totalitarianism came to an end with its defeat in World War II and democracy was externally imposed by a US-led coalition. South Korea’s democratization has also reflected the US strategy, although the process was more bottom-up than that in Japan. Hong Kong was also partially democratized by the British colonial government in a top-down manner in the 1980s. In summary, unlike Western democracy in Europe and North America, democratization in East Asia has often come from the top rather than from the bottom, which might have induced unique adjustments of the democratic political system to local cultural contexts.

We posit that participants in political demonstrations are socially avoided in countries with collectivistic cultures despite the normative importance of political demonstrations as a form of democratic political engagement. More specifically, drawing on the findings of cultural psychology, the present study proposes the hypothesis that political demonstrators in collectivistic countries are more socially avoided than those in individualistic countries because they are perceived to be a threat to harmonious interpersonal relationships.

To test this hypothesis, a cross-cultural online experiment was fielded in eight countries (US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, China, South Korea, and India) and one region (Hong Kong), which provides substantial country-level variation in terms of the cultural orientation; that is, individualism versus collectivism. The results of vignette-based experiments indicate that political demonstrators are socially avoided, and this tendency was significantly stronger in collectivistic countries. Mediated moderation analyses suggest that the social avoidance of political demonstrators in collectivistic countries is mediated not by the general perception that the demonstrators have undesirable personal traits; instead, it is mediated by the specific perception that demonstrators pose a serious threat to harmonious interpersonal relationships. These results imply that although some Western democratic theories presume attending political demonstrations is an essential part of normatively desirable political participation, those who actively join demonstrations are perceived to be socially undesirable from the perspective of people in collectivistic countries.

Normative Desirability of Political Participation

Most democratic theorists regard political participation as a paramount feature of liberal democracies. Synthesizing decades of scholarly writings on modern democratic theory, Birch (2007, p. 145) concluded that “very few people think that political participation is a bad thing.” The belief that “citizens should be active in politics in one way or another” is a point of convergence in the theoretical traditions of elitist, pluralist, citizenship, and participatory democracy (Theiss-Morse, 1993, p. 361), although it is much more prominent among proponents of participatory and citizenship theories of democracy (e.g., Pateman, 1970; Thompson, 1970). Of all of the norms of democratic citizenship—the normative understanding of what citizens ought to do in a democracy—the norm of political participation is seen as essential (Dalton, 2008). The assumption that all of these theorists share is that, the larger participation in political life, the higher the quality of polities and democratic life (Morrell, 1999).

Political participation has been broadly defined as “those actions of private citizens by which they seek to influence or support government and politics” (Milbrath & Goel, 1982, p. 2). Based on this definition, Rosenstone and Hansen (1993) developed a taxonomy of activities to operationalize political participation. These can be divided into two groups: participation in electoral politics (e.g., voting, contributing money, attending political meetings or rallies, and working for parties/candidates) and participation in governmental politics (e.g., signing petitions, attending public meetings, writing letters, and attending rallies). Of these activities, voting has been found to be the most common form of political participation and, as such, it has been widely studied. However, a decline in voter turnout since the mid-1960s, particularly in the US and the UK, and the rise of social movements such as feminism, minority empowerment, and environmental protectionism have opened a debate among students of democracy about the need to look beyond institutionalized forms of political participation to noninstitutionalized forms (such as political protest, demonstrations, strikes, and other forms of collective political action) to understand the changes in citizens’ involvement in political life.¹ In this process, demonstrations, rallies, and boycotts began to make their way into certain normative views of democracy. “Demonstrations,” wrote Thompson (1970, p. 80), are “contributors to the goal of a more constructive ideal of participation.” For Andrain and Apter (1995, p. 2), protests (demonstrations, marches, boycotts, sit-ins, and fights with police) have become “key aspect[s] of political life.”

A common characteristic of the literature examined so far, particularly with respect to normative views of political participation and democratic citizenship, is the dominance of perspectives that are based on research in Western liberal democracies. However, the cultural contingencies of normative desirability of political participation have yet to be fully investigated, except for a few comparative studies (Almond & Verba, 1963; Martin & Stronach, 1992). Almond and Verba (1963)’s classic cross-national study in US, UK, Germany, Italy, and Mexico identified three types of “civic culture”: that is, participant, subject, and parochial, and described the mixture of participant and subject culture in the US and UK as the epitome of liberal democracies. Yet, we have very little empirical evidence to support or refute the oft-assumed supposition that extended political participation is a norm that applies beyond Western democracies such as those in Asia. With much less research on cross-national comparisons of participation in political demonstrations than on other political activities such as voting, we see a need to explore the extent to which the perceived normative desirability of political demonstrations may be culturally dependent. More specifically, contrary to the assumption that political demonstration is a normatively desirable part of democratic social processes, we examine whether involvement in political demonstrations is socially desirable in diverse cultural contexts.

Individualism Versus Collectivism Revisited

Societies across the globe can be roughly mapped onto the individualism–collectivism continuum (Hofstede, 1984; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Previous research has found that individualistic societies tend to give more importance to one’s own opinions, needs, and goals, whereas collectivistic societies place greater emphasis on the opinions, needs, and goals of the group to which one belongs, and on cooperative and harmonious relationships with other members of the group (Triandis et al., 1988; see also, Gardner et al., 1999).

Drawing on these works, a recent development in cultural psychology has revealed that Eastern collectivistic and Western individualistic people have different psychological mechanisms (Nisbett, 2004). People in collectivistic societies such as Japan and China tend to develop interdependent self-concepts in which the self is defined by complex relationships with others, whereas people in individualistic societies such as the US and Australia tend to develop more independent self-concepts in which the self is defined by one’s inner traits (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Furthermore, individuals in collectivistic societies have broad, context-dependent views of the world and tend to interpret the world holistically, whereas people in individualistic societies tend to regard objects analytically, independent of their background contexts, and they believe that “they can know the rules governing objects and therefore can control the objects’ behavior” (Nisbett, 2004, p. xvii).

These cross-cultural differences in psychological mechanisms are also manifested in the types of human relationships that individuals value. In collectivistic cultures, social relationships, norms, and group solidarity are more valued than self-expression, which is the opposite of what occurs in individualistic societies (Fiske et al., 1998). People in collectivistic cultures see the self as “inextricably and fundamentally embedded within a larger social network,” whereas in individualistic cultures “the self is defined as an autonomous and unique individual” (Gardner et al., 1999, p. 321).

Most importantly, interpersonal harmony is a concept of paramount importance in collectivistic societies, in which actions that disturb social harmony tend to be avoided because they might strain relationships and weaken or dissolve social ties (Leung, 1997). While people in individualistic cultures attach more importance to expressing their own opinions in a fair and logical way and to negotiating openly with others to achieve one’s self-interests (Miller, 1999), these assertive actions are sometimes regarded as undesirable threats to social harmony in collectivistic cultures (Midooka, 1990). The undesirability of assertive actions that could erode interpersonal relationships translates into a strong preference for conflict avoidance among East Asians, who are regarded as highly collectivistic. As an illustration, numerous experiments by scholars of conflict management styles across cultures have found that people from collectivistic East Asian societies tend to prefer compromise, conflict avoidance, and nonconfrontational techniques, whereas those from individualistic European and North American societies favor dominating, confrontational, and assertive forms of conflict management (Leung et al., 2011; Ohbuchi & Takahashi, 1994).

Political Demonstration as a Threat to Interpersonal Harmony

In light of the findings that people from collectivistic cultures shun conflict resolution through confrontational self-expressions and assertions of self-interests, it could be inferred that they are more likely than people from individualistic cultures to keep distance from political demonstrators because they tend to regard political demonstrations as a threat to the social harmony that they value.²

The social avoidance of political demonstrators in collectivistic countries stems from at least three mechanisms. First, as scholars of system justification theory have demonstrated, individuals who actively attempt to challenge the social and political status quo through different forms of organized activism are generally perceived as being motivated by self-interest (O’Brien & Crandall, 2005). Because the demonstrative assertion of self-interest often leads to interpersonal conflicts between those who compete for a resource, active demonstrators tend to be perceived as threats to interpersonal harmony. Second, those in collectivistic cultures are less likely to participate in political demonstrations because conflict-avoidant individuals are less likely than conflict-tolerant people to participate in political protests, campaign events, and political discussions (Ha et al., 2013; Ulbig & Funk, 1999). As an illustration, the political culture of Japan has been labeled a “spectator culture” because the Japanese tend to watch “political battles being fought in the national arena from the sidelines with a curious interest but without any signs of emotion or personal involvement” (Flanagan, 1978, p. 142). Even in noncollectivistic societies, individuals who perceive that certain types of political participation might jeopardize interpersonal harmony within a community tend to avoid political activity altogether as a form of conflict avoidance (Mansbridge, 1983). Therefore, those in collectivistic societies who nevertheless participate in demonstrations will be perceived as a potential threat to harmonious human relations. Third, as demonstrated by research in cultural psychology, people in collectivistic East Asian cultures are more likely to be judged by the people in their personal networks; that is, those with whom they interact (Takata, 2003). Therefore, for those from collectivistic societies, socializing with political demonstrators may tarnish their reputation and give others the impression that they themselves are also politically extreme people who may potentially disturb social harmony.

Because of these mechanisms, we expect people in collectivistic societies to socially avoid political demonstrators. In contrast, we do not expect people in individualistic societies to socially avoid political demonstrators because independent self-concepts, the acceptance of opinions asserted by others and the common use of confrontational forms of conflict management combine to yield social tolerance for associations with political demonstrators.

H1: Participants in political demonstrations are more likely to be socially avoided in collectivistic societies than in individualistic countries.

H2: The positive effect of participation in political demonstrations on social distance in collectivistic societies is mediated by the perceived threat to interpersonal harmony.

It is noteworthy that these hypotheses are relevant to a related cultural dimension: tightness versus looseness (Gelfand et al., 2011). The theoretical core of cultural tightness/looseness is conceptualized as the strength of social norms and tolerance of deviant behavior; therefore, political demonstrators will be avoided or even punished in tight cultures to the extent that political demonstrations are perceived as deviant behavior. However, the concept of tightness versus looseness does not specify which social norms are central to the argument. For instance, the vignette used in Stamkou et al. (2019) used lateness for a meeting to illustrate norm deviance, which is not directly relevant to the perceived threat to interpersonal harmony that is the focal mechanism in our study. In contrast, cultural collectivism/individualism clearly emphasizes interpersonal harmony as a central element of the definition of collectivism (Miller et al., 1990; Triandis, 1995; Triandis et al., 1988). Therefore, because this study focuses on the potential threat that political demonstrators pose to interpersonal harmony, individualism/collectivism is more theoretically pertinent than tightness/looseness.

Method

To test these hypotheses, a cross-national online experiment was fielded in nine countries and regions: US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and India. Eligibility was restricted to those who were 20 to 69 years old and citizens of each country and region. Sample characteristics are presented in Table 1.

Table 1.

Sample characteristics.

Data source	US	UK	France	Germany	Japan
Data source	Amazon Mechanical Turk	Prolific	Foule Factory	Clickworker	Crowd Works
Time of data collection	April 2017	October 2017	October 2017	April 2018	April 2017
N	799	807	778	799	812
Gender (female) (%)	55.19	75.71	59.13	44.81	66.87
Mean age	38.03	37.02	37.74	36.96	37.18
Data source	China	Hong Kong	South Korea	India
Data source	Diaoyanba	YouGov	Embrain	Amazon Mechanical Turk
Time of data collection	May 2017	May 2017	September 2017	January 2018
N	800	821	800	817
Gender (female) (%)	45.63	51.04	51.88	36.96
Mean age	37.46	41.29	44.78	29.83

In each country and region, the participants consented to participate in the study and responded to pretreatment measurements including the Instructional Manipulation Check (IMC; Oppenheimer et al., 2009).³ They were then randomly assigned to read one of four vignettes describing a hypothetical person. After carefully reading the vignette, the dependent variables were measured.

Vignettes

The four vignettes served as experimental treatments in which the description of the hypothetical person was manipulated. Specifically, in addition to the baseline description of a very ordinary young male, which was constant across all the conditions, each treatment condition provided unique information about the target person. In the control condition, the vignette included only the baseline description. No other information regarding the person’s political tendencies was provided. The three treatment conditions were the political interest, political demonstration, and environmental activity conditions. Of these three treatment conditions, the political demonstration condition is the most important because, as argued in the previous sections, the focus of the current study is on the social distance between the participants and a hypothetical political demonstrator. The political interest and environmental activity conditions were added to delineate the boundary conditions of the effect proposed in H1. If political demonstrators are socially avoided, it is important to clarify whether they are avoided simply because they are interested in politics or because they call attention to conflict and disturb social harmony by advocating their causes aloud through publicly observable behaviors. In addition, if people participate in demonstrations, are they avoided simply because they participate in collective actions, or is the specific nature of the demonstration important? To address this question, we included the environmental activity condition to see whether people are avoided when they participate in less-contentious collective actions.⁴

In addition to the baseline description, the political interest vignette indicated that the target person “has gradually become interested in social and political issues.” To the baseline description and the increasing interest in social and political issues, the political demonstration vignette added that the target person also “took part in several political demonstrations.” In addition to the baseline description and the additional political interest information, the environmental activity vignette indicated that the target person “took part in several activities related to environmental protection.” As an illustration, the vignettes used in the US are presented below. The target person’s name and background information were customized for each region, and in the example below, the nonitalicized text was identical across the conditions (see OA1 in the Online Supplemental Appendix for the vignettes in each country and region).

Ben Robinson is a 24-year-old from New Jersey. He graduated from college in Ohio, and currently works as a software programmer. He is very busy on weekdays because he must provide a range of clients with quick responses to their questions and requests. On holidays he sometimes dines out with his college friends. [He did not pay much attention to the news when he was a student, but he has gradually become interested in social and political issues]. [Last year he even took part in [several political demonstrations/several activities related to environmental protection]]. While he wants to get married and have a family someday, he thinks it would be difficult unless he can make more money.

Measurements

Social distance

Following Iyengar et al. (2012), social distance between participants and the target person in the vignette was measured by their responses on five-point Likert scales ranging from “Extremely uncomfortable” to “Extremely comfortable” for the following six items: “Working with Ben Robinson as a work colleague,” “Talking with Ben Robinson about politics,” “Talking with Ben Robinson about sports and celebrities,” “Dining out with Ben Robinson,” “Ben Robinson is going out with a member of your family,” and “Ben Robinson is going to marry a member of your family.” Because these six items showed sufficient reliability (Cronbach’s alpha ranged from .79 to .89 at the country-level), we averaged and rescaled them to the range of 0 to 1 (M = 0.34, SD = 0.18).

Perceived threat to interpersonal harmony

We used the semantic differential method and five-point responses to six items to measure the extent to which the target person is perceived as threat to interpersonal harmony. The six items were: “sociable versus unsociable,” “safe versus dangerous,” “logical versus emotional,” “arrogant versus humble,” “calm versus excitable,” and “self-centered versus considerate of others.”⁵ These items were deductively developed with the guidance of findings from cultural psychology. For instance, emotional suppression is valued in pursuit of interpersonal harmony, especially in East Asia (Wei et al., 2013). Similarly, McCrae et al. (1996) showed that Chinese students are less excitable and emotional than their American counterparts. Asians also tend to be less excitable in group interactions than Caucasians (Stover, 1974). In light of the argument of Markus and Kitayama (1991), these differences are arguably due to greater concerns over interpersonal harmony among East Asians. These findings render “emotional” and “excitable” (vs. logical/calm as the antonyms) an appropriate dimension of perceived threat to interpersonal harmony.

The six items were recoded so that larger values indicated a more threatening impression. These six items showed sufficient reliability (Cronbach’s alpha ranged from .61 to .71 at the country-level), except India (.43). All the results of analyses reported below do not change substantially when Indian data is excluded. The six items were averaged and rescaled to the range of 0 to 1 (M = 0.36, SD = 0.13).

Perceived general undesirability (alternative mediator)

To preclude an alternative interpretation of H2 that the social avoidance of political demonstrators in collectivistic countries is mediated not specifically by perceived threat to interpersonal harmony but by more general perception that the demonstrators have undesirable personal traits, perceived general undesirability was measured as an alternative mediator. If the perceived general undesirability of the target person rather than the perceived threat to interpersonal harmony mediates the effect of H1, then the cultural explanation based on the conflict avoidance in collectivistic culture would not hold.

We used the semantic differential method and five-point responses to three items to measure the extent to which the target person is perceived as undesirable in general. The three items were: “bad versus good,” “responsible versus irresponsible,” and “foolish versus wise.” These items were recoded so that larger values indicated a more undesirable impression. As these three items showed sufficient reliability (Cronbach’s alpha ranged from .55 to .79 at the country-level), we averaged and rescaled them to the range of 0 to 1 (M = 0.29, SD = 0.18). Note that these three items measure the general undesirability of the target person, unlike the measurement of perceived threat to interpersonal harmony. The correlations between perceived threat to interpersonal harmony and perceived general undesirability ranged from .56 to .74 at the country-level, suggesting that these two concepts are substantially related but distinct to each other.

Individualism (level-2 variable)

The index of individualism was taken from Wave 5 (2005–2008) of the World Value Survey. Specifically, we used an item; “I seek to be myself rather than to follow others” (V65), which is commonly used as an indicator of individualism (e.g., Eom et al., 2016). The mean values of this item were calculated for each country and region which ranged from 0 to 3. Because this variable was not available for Hong Kong, we generated the value from other country-level measurements. We estimated a regression model to predict the World Value Survey item at the country/region level (N = 8), with three predictor variables: (1) The measure of Suh et al. (1998) (a combination of Hofstede’s individualism scores and the numerical ratings of Triandis); (2) Four measures from Gelfand et al. (2004) of individualism–collectivism, and (3) An indicator from Kashima and Kashima (1998) of individualism–collectivism, which relies on pronoun-drop conventions. Because the model had sufficient predictive power (R² = .95), we used this estimated regression model to compute the value for Hong Kong. The score of individualism we used in each country/region was, US = 2.32, UK = 2.35, France = 2.70, Germany = 2.43, Japan = 2.11, China = 1.98, Hong Kong = 2.15, South Korea = 2.16, and India = 2.21.⁶

Analysis

The means, standard deviations, and correlations among the key variables for each country are reported in OA2 in the Online Supplemental Appendix.

To test H1, we first tested the hierarchical nature of the data. Model 1 in Table 2 was estimated with an intercept as the only independent variable, using ordinary least-squares estimation. Model 2, on the other hand, was estimated only with a random intercept, introducing the hierarchical structure of data by estimating a mixed-effect model. The BIC of Model 2 (–5221.679) is significantly lower than that of Model 1 (–4401.105), indicating the better fit of a mixed-effect model than an ordinary least-squares model. The residual variance also decreased from .032 to .028. The intraclass correlation of Model 2 is .113, which is above the conventional threshold for modeling a hierarchical data structure (e.g., Muthén, 1997).

Table 2.

Mixed-effect regression models to predict social distance and perceived threat to interpersonal harmony.

DV:	Social distance					Perceived threat to interpersonal harmony
	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4	Model 5	Model 6
	Coef. (B)
Political interest (dummy)			0.005(0.006)	0.005(0.006)	0.007(0.005)	−0.003(0.004)
Political demonstration (dummy)			0.022**(0.006)	0.022**(0.006)	0.008(0.005)	0.025**(0.004)
Environmental activity (dummy)			−0.001(0.006)	−0.001(0.006)	0.000(0.005)	−0.003(0.004)
Individualism (level-2)				−0.195**(0.072)	−0.207**(0.072)	−0.147**(0.055)
Political demonstration X Individualism				−0.065**(0.023)	−0.017(0.021)	−0.095**(0.017)
Perceived threat to interpersonal harmony					0.521**(0.015)
Constant	0.340**(0.002)	0.340**(0.020)	0.333**(0.020)	0.334**(0.015)	0.336**(0.015)	0.350**(0.011)
Observations	7,226	7,226	7,226	7,226	7,226	7,228
Number of groups	–	9	9	9	9	9
Variance components
Intercept	–	0.004	0.004	0.002	0.001	0.001
Residual	0.032	0.028	0.028	0.028	0.024	0.016
Intraclass correlation	–	0.113	0.114	0.061	0.071	0.063
BIC	−4401.105	−5221.679	−5216.215	−5212.581	−6383.934	−9455.546

Note. Standard errors in parentheses.

p < .01. *p < .05. +p < .10.

Next, we included the three experimental treatments as the level-1 independent variables (Model 3 in Table 2), with the control group as the reference. The political demonstration treatment demonstrates a significantly positive effect on social distance. Model 4 introduces the level-2 variable, individualism, and its interaction with the political demonstration treatment. The random component was introduced to the intercept only, which was consistent across all the mixed-model regressions.⁷ Individualism was grand-mean centered. By introducing the level-2 variable and the cross-level interaction, we decreased the variance of random intercept to half: from .004 to .002. The intraclass correlation also decreased from .114 to .061, suggesting that individualism explained the between-country variance in social distance.

Model 4 in s 2 indicates a statistically significant negative interaction effect between political demonstration treatment and individualism. More specifically, the political demonstration treatment’s positive effect on social distance is reduced in societies with higher individualism scores. That is, the positive effect of political demonstration treatment on social distance tends to be larger in collectivistic societies, which supports H1. The effect of political demonstration treatment for each country calculated from Model 4 in Table 2 was 0.040 (China), 0.032 (Japan), 0.029 (Hong Kong), 0.028 (South Korea), 0.025 (India), 0.018 (US), 0.016 (UK), 0.011 (Germany), and −0.007 (France). In China, the effect is equal to 0.241 SD of social distance, while that in France was only 0.038 SD.

To examine the possibility that this cross-level interaction is an artifact attributable to the correlation between cultures and political systems, we added different indices of democracy one by one and calculated their interaction with the political demonstration treatment. The index of democracy included the Freedom House index (Repucci, 2020), the three indices from the V-Dem Project (the liberal democracy index, electoral democracy index, and participatory democracy index) (Coppedge et al., 2020), and the Economic Intelligence Unit’s democracy scores (The Economist, 2019) (see OA3 in the Online Supplemental Appendix for the results). The interaction effect between individualism and political demonstration treatment consistently showed a significant effect even after controlling for the democracy indices, suggesting that the cultural contingency of the political demonstration treatment on social distance is not an artifact of correlation between cultures and political systems.

Mediated Moderation Analysis

Next, to test H2, we employed mediated moderation model proposed by Muller et al. (2005). They argue that the following patterns of effect have to be observed for mediated moderation hypothesis to be supported.

(1) The interaction term between the independent variable (X) and the moderating variable (Z) has a significant effect on the dependent variable (Y).

(2) At least one of the following holds

a. The interaction effect between X and Z on the mediating variable (M) is significant AND the effect of M on Y is significant.

b. The interaction effect between M and Z on Y is significant AND the effect of X on M is significant.

(3) The effect of the interaction term between X and Z on Y is significantly reduced when M is additionally included in the specification to predict Y.

We already confirmed that condition (1) holds (Model 4 in Table 2). As we argue that political demonstrators are more likely to be perceived as threat to interpersonal harmony in collectivistic societies, individualism is expected to moderate the relationship between the treatments and perceived threat to interpersonal harmony. Hence, we test if condition (2)a is met by regressing perceived threat to interpersonal harmony on the treatments, individualism, and the interaction term between the political demonstration condition and individualism. Model 6 in Table 2 indicates that the interaction term between the political demonstration condition and individualism has significantly negative effect on the group-mean centered mediator; that is, perceived threat to interpersonal harmony. That is, political demonstrators are more likely to be perceived as threat to interpersonal harmony in collectivistic societies. Furthermore, when the mediator is added to predict social distance (Model 5 in Table 2), it shows significantly positive effect. Therefore, condition (2)a is satisfied.

The magnitude of the coefficient of the interaction term between the political demonstration condition and individualism is reduced from −.065 (p = .005) in Model 4 to −.017 (n.s.) in Model 5 due to the addition of perceived threat to interpersonal harmony, which satisfies condition (3). To test if the reduction is statistically significant, we calculated the standard error of the difference between the two estimates of the interaction effect (i.e., −.065 and −.017) from 5,000 bootstrapped sample. The bias-corrected 95% confidence interval of the reduction of coefficient was [−.066 −.030] which does not include zero, indicating the difference is statistically significant. Therefore, condition (3) is met. In sum, the effect of political demonstration treatment on social distance is moderated by individualism so that the effect is stronger in less individualistic countries. This moderated effect, in turn, is mediated by perceived threat to interpersonal harmony.

These statistical tests clearly support the mediated moderation process proposed as H2. However, as perceived threat to interpersonal harmony is a posttreatment observed mediator that is not experimentally manipulated, we cannot preclude that other potential mediators are at work which are related to perceived threat to interpersonal harmony. More specifically, the above tests of H2 cannot preclude the alternative interpretation that the social avoidance of political demonstrators in collectivistic countries is mediated not specifically by perceived threat to interpersonal harmony but by more general perception that the demonstrators have undesirable personal traits. To test the validity of this alternative interpretation, we reran the mediate-moderation analyses by replacing perceived threat to interpersonal harmony with the group-mean centered perceived general undesirability (Table 3).

Table 3.

Mixed-effect regression models to predict social distance and perceived general undesirability.

DV:	Social distance	Perceived general undesirability
	Model 1	Model 2
	Coef. (B)
Political interest (dummy)	0.004 (0.005)	0.004 (0.005)
Political demonstration (dummy)	0.163** (0.049)	0.022 (0.051)
Environmental activity (dummy)	−0.001 (0.005)	−0.001 (0.005)
Individualism (level-2)	−0.094 (0.058)	−0.256** (0.066)
Political demonstration X Individualism	−0.065** (0.021)	−0.005 (0.022)
Perceived general undesirability	0.391** (0.011)
Constant	0.436** (0.133)	0.867** (0.150)
Observations	7,226	7,231
Number of groups	9	9
Variance components
Intercept	0.001	0.002
Residual	0.024	0.026
Intraclass correlation	0.047	0.054
BIC	−6322.748	−5672.813

Note: Standard errors in parentheses.

p < .01. *p < .05. +p < .10.

As seen in Model 1 in Table 3, the coefficient of the interaction term between political demonstration treatment and individualism (−.065) does not change from that of the model without perceived general undesirability and remained significant (Model 4 in Table 2). Moreover, as indicated in Mode 2 in Table 3, the interaction term between political demonstration treatment and individualism does not have significant effect on perceived general undesirability. Therefore, as neither condition (2) and (3) of Muller et al. (2005) is met, we conclude that perceived general undesirability does not mediate the moderated effect of political demonstration treatment on social distance. Although the two potential mediators are substantially correlated, the results shown in Table 2 and 3 demonstrate remarkable difference between them; the perceived threat to interpersonal harmony mediates the effect of political demonstration treatment in collectivistic countries, whereas the perceived general undesirability does not.⁸ In sum, the social avoidance of political demonstrators in collectivistic countries is mediated specifically by perceived threat to interpersonal harmony, which supports H2.

Robustness Check

For a further robustness check, we replaced individualism with Hofstede’s index (Hofstede et al., 2010) and reestimated Models 4, 5, and 6 in Table 2 (see OA5 in the Online Supplemental Appendix). Hofstede’s individualism index showed a negative effect on social distance and a significant negative interaction effect with the political demonstration treatment on perceived threat to interpersonal harmony, which is consistent with our hypotheses. However, the key interaction term between the political demonstration treatment and individualism did not have a statistically significant effect on social distance, which did not support H1. Thus, the results of Table 2 were only partially replicated. Although this discrepancy warrants careful attention, we argue that our main results in Table 2 are more credible because Hofstede’s index is outdated (Sivakumar & Nakata, 2001) and its sampling frame (i.e., IBM employees) does not match ours (i.e., the general population aged from 20 to 69 years). The index created from the World Value Survey’s representative data is more relevant to and consistent with our level-1 individual data.

We also reestimated Models 4, 5, and 6 in Table 2 by replacing individualism with the tightness–looseness index (Gelfand et al., 2011). The results in OA6 in the Online Supplemental Appendix suggest that the index of tightness has a positive effect on perceived threat to interpersonal harmony, which is in line with our argument. However, tightness did not show statistically significant interaction effects with the political demonstration treatment on social distance and perceived threat to interpersonal harmony, which does not support H1 or H2. In addition to the above argument that the dimension of individualism versus collectivism is theoretically more pertinent than that of tightness versus looseness to this study, the Gelfand et al. (2011) index has a similar issue as Hofstede’s; it was calculated from only about 200 respondents for each country, and half of the overall respondents were students. This sampling frame also does not match this study’s target demographic of people aged from 20 to 69 years.

Discussion

Although participation in political demonstrations is a theoretically important part of the democratic political process, it is not necessarily seen that way in collectivistic countries, such as those in East Asia. As this study demonstrated, political demonstrators are more likely to be socially avoided in collectivistic countries than in individualistic countries. Furthermore, the moderated-mediation analyses suggested that the social avoidance of political demonstrators in collectivistic countries is mediated by the perception that they are a threat to harmonious interpersonal relationships. This result was robust against the inclusion of the country-level variables of democratic performance.

Before discussing the theoretical implications of these overall findings, some caveats need to be addressed in terms of the consistencies of the findings. Although the mediated moderation test with pooled data from nine countries/regions clearly supported the two hypotheses, an analysis of each country indicates that social avoidance of political demonstrators is not found in Hong Kong or South Korea, although it was clearly found in China and Japan, the two most collectivistic countries in our sample (see OA7 in the Online Supplemental Appendix). The null result in Hong Kong can be potentially interpreted by its unique history. Because Hong Kong was under British sovereignty for more than 150 years, people in Hong Kong developed a cultural identity that is notably different from people in Mainland China (Brewer, 1999). In particular, people in Hong Kong tend to have bicultural identities or Eastern and Western selves, and they can switch between them depending upon the context (Hong et al., 2000). It is conceivable that the participants in Hong Kong did not show avoidance of political demonstrators due to their bicultural nature. On the other hand, the experiment in South Korea was fielded in September 2017. From the end of 2016 to 2017, approximately 17 million South Korean people demonstrated against former President Park Geun-hye for her alleged corruption. The sudden surge of large-scale demonstration might have increased the acceptability of demonstration in a short-term and could have overshadowed cultural factors. All these post hoc interpretation are, however, admittedly speculative and more systematic analyses that isolate the long-term cultural effect and short-term political effect are called for.

That said, the results of the present study still indicate a need for qualification of the cross-cultural validity of the democratic theory. Political participation would be naturally suppressed if people realized that they would be socially isolated when they engaged in political activities. As an illustration, Japan has recently seen several political demonstrations, such as the antinuclear power plant movement after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011, opposition to the recent reinterpretation of Article 9 of the Constitution and the subsequent passage of security legislation for effective defense cooperation with the US, but these demonstrations were harshly criticized by both partisans and moderates (Slater et al., 2015).⁹ This aversion to political activism in East Asia implies that the explicit voicing of political claims is not congruent with cultural values that prescribe the resolution of conflicts through compromise and moderation rather than open debate. This cultural explanation is supported by similar patterns found in the Japanese and Chinese samples (see OA7 in the Online Supplemental Appendix). That is, avoidance of political demonstrators was consistently observed not only in the authoritarian regime of China, but also in Japan, which has the longest history of democracy in East Asia, buttressing the validity of the cultural explanation for the avoidance of political demonstrators.

Most theories of democracy originate in Western culture. However, as shared cultural meaning systems are considerably different between the East and the West (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Nisbett, 2004), behaviors that are highly valued in Western countries are not necessarily valued in East Asian countries. As such, although politics inevitably encompasses conflicts of interests, acceptable means of conflict management are remarkably different between the East and the West. East Asians tend to prefer compromise, conflict avoidance, and nonconfrontational techniques, whereas Europeans and Americans favor dominating, confrontational and assertive forms of managing conflict (Ohbuchi & Takahashi, 1994). Therefore, the health of democracy in East Asia may not be gauged simply by importing Western theories of democracy.

This notion is particularly noteworthy, given the history of relatively top-down democratization in East Asia. In East Asian countries where democratization took place in a top-down manner, whether through defeat in World War II or American influence during the Cold War, the way democracy is rooted in the societies may be different from Western democracy won in a bottom-up manner. In contrast to Western democracy, where individual independence and expression of opinions are valued in a manner consistent with their individualistic cultures, democracy as a political institution was transplanted in East Asian countries on top of collectivist culture that values interpersonal harmony. These historical differences may have led to differences in the social desirability of various elements of democracy, resulting in different trajectories of democratic development. In fact, scholars are debating whether Asia’s collectivist tradition makes the region immune to the democratic logic of human empowerment drawn from the tradition of the West (Bomhoff & Gu, 2012; Welzel, 2012). In this regard, our findings support the notion that the mechanism through which democracy works in East Asia is different from that in the West. In nondemocratic collectivistic countries such as China, political demonstrators may be avoided to an even greater degree. In addition to the incongruence with its collectivistic culture, political participation is under strict control in China. Therefore, interacting with those who engage in political activities tends to pose political risk, resulting in greater social distance from the target person when he or she is depicted as politically active.

However, culture itself is a plastic construct. The results for the Hong Kong sample were substantially different from those for the Chinese sample and closer to those for the American sample (see OA7 in the Online Supplemental Appendix). Hong Kong is a place where Eastern and Western cultures have interacted for more than 150 years, leaving it with a unique cultural background that is quite different from that of Mainland China. Thus, culture itself clearly can change over long periods and cultural globalization may eventually mitigate the avoidance of political demonstrators in East Asian regions.

Several important limitations remain to be addressed. First, the validity of cultural explanation of the observed effects should be elaborated. Although we demonstrated that the country-level dimension of individualism versus collectivism moderate the effect of political demonstration treatment on social distance, this cultural dimension might be correlated with other country-level variables such as frequency of political demonstrations per capita. Although it is methodologically hard to isolate the effects of underlying cultural factors from more contemporary related factors such as frequency of political demonstrations by using a cross-national experimental data with a limited number of countries/regions, more rigorous test of cultural influence is needed to bolster our claim.

Second, we could not strictly control the kinds of political demonstrations participants in each country imagined when they read the vignettes. For instance, because Hong Kong participants likely had relatively fresh memories of the Umbrella Movement, a large-scale prodemocratization movement that took place in 2014, they likely interpreted the political demonstration in the vignette as having a prodemocracy orientation. In contrast, there are both liberal (e.g., gay rights) and conservative (e.g., anti-immigration) demonstrations in the US; therefore, the imagined nature of the demonstration may well have been quite diverse for the US participants. Although this is not a fatal drawback because what we are interested in is the effect of describing the target person as a political demonstrator and not the effects of the target person participating in a specific type of political demonstration (see Dafoe et al., 2018 for this distinction in survey experiments), future studies are called for to check the cross-national consistency of the experimental stimuli. In addition to the issue of comparability, the lack of a manipulation check leaves the validity of the vignettes uncertain. For instance, although we assumed environmental activities to be less contentious than political demonstrations when creating the vignettes, these assumptions need to be examined more directly in future studies.

Last but not least, the measurement of individualism has room for improvement. Aggregating a single item to create a country-level index potentially suffers measurement error. Although the estimated reliability of the group-averaged score of the item; “I seek to be myself rather than to follow others” in Wave 5 of the World Value Survey was .98 (Hong Kong was excluded due to the lack of data), suggesting that the country-level average of the index is a reliable indicator of the individualism, future studies should use multiple items to create country-level cultural variables.

In conclusion, this study demonstrated that those who actively join political demonstrations, which are a critical input into the democratic system, are socially avoided in collectivistic countries even when democratic institutions are established. The cultural contingencies of political participation call for a more nuanced understanding of democracy in non-Western countries and regions.

Supplemental Material

sj-doc-1-jcc-10.1177_00220221211008653 – Supplemental material for Why are Politically Active People Avoided in Countries with Collectivistic Culture? A Cross-Cultural Experiment

Supplemental material, sj-doc-1-jcc-10.1177_00220221211008653 for Why are Politically Active People Avoided in Countries with Collectivistic Culture? A Cross-Cultural Experiment by Tetsuro Kobayashi, Asako Miura, Dani Madrid-Morales and Hiroshi Shimizu in Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by the Faculty Research Fund of the Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong.

ORCID iD

Tetsuro Kobayashi

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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