Cultural change in the Asian Pacific

The contributions

The issue opens with Christian Welzel and Russell Dalton’s (2016) “Cultural change in Asia and beyond: From allegiant to assertive citizens”. Welzel and Dalton challenge the classic civic culture definition of the ideal democratic citizen as an allegiant, trustful, and modestly participatory person. Using new evidence from the sixth wave of the World Values Survey, they argue that a new model of assertive citizenship spreads as nations experience social modernization. Moreover, these new norms have potentially positive consequences for government performance for affluent democracies and developing nations.

Doh Chull Shin and Hannah June Kim’s (2016) article, “Liberal democracy as the end of history: Western theories versus Eastern Asian realities”, offers a more critical view on the enduring question of Asian democratization. Challenging the universalistic assumptions in the “End of History” thesis and modernization theory generally, Shin and Kim use the third wave of the ABS to show that while large majorities of Asian citizens identify strongly with democracy and its ideals, only about one in five actually support the basic principles of popular control of government. This, they contend, makes the “D-word” problematic in the measurement of political system preferences. Digging into the data, they show that Asians actually prefer hybrids of authoritarianism, meritocracy, and liberalism. Their analyses reveal, strikingly, that the preference for hybrids increases with education and liberal value orientations.

The structure of Asian allegiance—the extent to which citizens support and trust their political institutions—is explored in the next two articles. Chong-min Park (2016) turns to the ABS to examine the relationships between citizen evaluations of regime execution. He posits that perceptions of poor performance should result in an erosion of popular support. Park finds that the expectation holds in the region’s affluent democracies, but is challenged by publics in authoritarian systems who tend to evaluate their governments better. The paradox is illustrated by the linkage between perceptions of electoral competitiveness and allegiance in countries like Singapore and Malaysia, which observers typically consider to be non-competitive. Yet the quality of law-based governance (perceived impartiality, law abidingness, and ethical behavior) holds across citizens under different regime types, suggesting a common basis on which publics may hold leaders and ruling parties accountable for their performance.

Mark Hutchison and Ping Xu (2016) expand on this theme in the case of China. Wondering whether the substantial trust in government found among Chinese is being driven by the country’s remarkable economic growth, the authors develop and test a multi-level model that incorporates public attitudes from the World Values Survey with provincial-level data on personal income growth, inequality, and the proportion of employees who work for foreign enterprises (as a proxy for “openness”). Income and openness have the strongest effects and there are noteworthy differences between wealthy and poor provinces. Hutchison and Xu conclude by noting the considerable risks the Chinese government will encounter as it attempts to balance its gradual opening to the global economy with the pressure of maintaining high levels of economic performance.

The final two articles present findings that reveal continuity and change in the politics of generations and the effects of globalization. Willy Jou and Masahisa Endo (2016) examine three decades of data from the Japan Election Studies series in considering how ideology and social factors have influenced participation across generations. They find important differences between Japanese who engage in system-affirming activities (like voting) and elite-challenging activities (like demonstrations). While partisanship has manifestly declined in importance, ideology appears to be filling the void: extremists on both ends are more engaged in electoral campaigns than moderates, while progressives are driving grassroots activism. Jou and Endo call attention to the gap between politically passive youth and their more reliable parents and grandparents, driven wider by the former’s weakening party attachments and disconnection from the political system.

If the detachment of Japanese youth presents a puzzle for a democratic world that appears to be more assertive, the citizens of Southeast Asia raise different questions about the effects of allegiance and globalization on political change. Taking an emerging movement for LGBT rights in Vietnam as a starting point for understanding the potential of liberalization, Christian Collet (forthcoming) examines what, if any, influence modernization has on a key democratic value: tolerance. Collet finds that globalization—measured as foreign exposure—and allegiance have contrasting effects among the region’s Sinic- and Indic-influenced publics. Increases in cross-cultural interactions among the former leads to greater tolerance, whereas in the latter it leads to greater intolerance. Moreover, as patriotism and trust in civil society increase in Sinic countries, tolerance increases. The effect is most evident among those under 30, suggesting that some of the change anticipated by Welzel and Dalton may be occurring through generational replacement. At the same time, Collet cautions that the Vietnamese case also represents the significant power of authoritarian governments to shape and moderate self-expressive politics.