A Comparative Survey of DEMOCRACY, GOVERNANCE AND DEVELOPMENT Working Paper Series: No. 85 Jointly Published by The Stagnated Development of Liberal Democratic Values Yu-Tzung Chang Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, National Taiwan University [email protected] & Yun-Han Chu Distinguished Research Fellow, Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica Professor, Department of Political Science, National Taiwan University [email protected] Asian Barometer A Comparative Survey of Democracy, Governance and Development Working Paper Series Jointly Published by Globalbarometer The Asian Barometer (ABS) is an applied research program on public opinion on political values, democracy, and governance around the region. The regional network encompasses research teams from thirteen East Asian political systems (Japan, Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia), and five South Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal). Together, this regional survey network covers virtually all major political systems in the region, systems that have experienced different trajectories of regime evolution and are currently at different stages of political transition. The ABS Working Paper Series is intended to make research result within the ABS network available to the academic community and other interested readers in preliminary form to encourage discussion and suggestions for revision before final publication. Scholars in the ABS network also devote their work to the Series with the hope that a timely dissemination of the findings of their surveys to the general public as well as the policy makers would help illuminate the public discourse on democratic reform and good governance. The topics covered in the Series range from country-specific assessment of values change and democratic development, region-wide comparative analysis of citizen participation, popular orientation toward democracy and evaluation of quality of governance, and discussion of survey methodology and data analysis strategies. The ABS Working Paper Series supercedes the existing East Asia Barometer Working Paper Series as the network is expanding to cover more countries in East and South Asia. Maintaining the same high standard of research methodology, the new series both incorporates the existing papers in the old series and offers newly written papers with a broader scope and more penetrating analyses. The ABS Working Paper Series is issued by the Asian Barometer Project Office, which is jointly sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences of National Taiwan University and the Institute of Political Science of Academia Sinica. Contact Information Tel: 886 2-3366 8456 Asian Barometer Project Office Fax: 886-2-2365 7179 Department of Political Science E-mail: [email protected] National Taiwan University Website: www.asianbarometer.org No.1, Sec.4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan, R.O.C. The Stagnated Development of Liberal Democratic Values Yu-tzung Chang National Taiwan University Yun-han Chu Academia Sinica and National Taiwan University Introduction For new democracies, Liberal democratic values (LDV) are critical for the process of democratic consolidation(Linz and Stepan, 1996). LDV incorporate the basic principles of democratic governance, in other words, they tell us by what principles people believe a democracy should be run (Thomassen, 2007). This chapter will focus on why the growth of LDV in East Asia has stagnated, and in some countries even reversed by comparing key findings from the ABS three Waves with relevant data from 13 countries. Our measure of LDV is a seven-item battery. None of the items in this battery mentions the “d” word (democracy). Instead, they tap into respondents’ value orientations toward four fundamental organizing principles of liberal democracy: popular accountability, political liberalism, political pluralism, and separation of power. Indicators designed around these core LDV measure respondents’ support for specific values without assuming that they have the same cognitive understanding about the meaning of the word “democracy” (Schedler and Sarsfield, 2007). The chapter looks at all seven measures and compares them to find out where and how attitudes are consistent and where they are not by employing the four-level classification of regime types defined earlier. We then focus on LDV, to explore how it works as a dependent variable. LDV is in turn influenced by institutional change 1 as well as by processes of modernization and by citizens’ political participation. Incomplete Democracy Before we present some empirical data comparing East Asia countries, we need to familiarize our readers with the region’s geo-political setting in which East Asian young democracies have found them. First, over the last three decades the region has in a significant way defied the global trend of concurrent movement toward democracy. The bulk of the region has been and still is governed by various forms of authoritarian and semi-democratic regimes. In 2013, measured by standards of political rights and civil liberties developed by Freedom House, among the eighteen sovereign states and autonomous territories in the region, only five are ranked “free”. Among the five, only four (South Korea, Taiwan, Mongolia and Indonesia) became democratized within the time span typically referred to as the third wave. Two other East Asian third-wave democracies, Thailand and the Philippines, have suffered serious backsliding and were downgraded by Freedom House to “partially free”. This means that while the region had defied the global trend of third-wave democratization but it is not immune from the worrisome and more recent trend of global democratic recession. Furthermore, with the shift of the center of regional economic gravity from Japan to China, East Asia has become one of the few regions in the world where characteristics of political system pose no barrier to trade and investment (or even migration) and perhaps the only region in the world where newly democratized countries become economically integrated with and dependent on non-democratic countries. Next, few of the region’s former authoritarian regimes were thoroughly discredited. In people’s recent memory, the old regimes had delivered social stability 2 and miraculous economic growth and were seemingly less susceptible to money politics. Also during the authoritarian years, most of East Asia’s emerging democracies had experienced limited pluralism, allowing some forms of electoral contestation as well as the existence of an opposition. As a result, citizens in many East Asian new democracies did not experience as dramatic an increase in the area of political rights and freedom during the transition as did citizens in many other third-wave democracies. In terms of regime performance, many of East Asia’s new democracies have been struggling with overwhelming governance challenges -- political strife, bureaucratic paralysis, recurring political scandals, financial crises and sluggish economic growth. At the same time, the region’s more resilient authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes, such as Singapore, Malaysia, China and Vietnam, are seemingly capable of coping with complex economies, diverse interests, economic globalization and more recently financial crises. These historical and contemporary benchmarks tend to generate unreasonably high expectations for the performance of democratic regimes. Last but not least, the region’s traditional culture, according to some cultural relativists such as Lucian Pye and Samuel Huntington, might pose obstacle to the acquisition of democratic values. The so-called “Asian values”, which privilege group interests over individual interests, political authority over individual freedom, and social responsibility over individual rights, is sharply different from Western civilization and intrinsically incompatible with the organizing principles of liberal democracy (Pye 1985; Huntington 1996). In a nutshell, while many East Asian democracies are endowed with some favorable socio-economic conditions -- such as a sizable middle class, well-educated population and highly internationalized economy -- that are in principle conducive to 3 the growth of democratic legitimacy, the region’s overall geo-political configuration, political history and culture could put a strong drag on the development of a robust democratic culture. Measuring LDV Mishler and Pollack borrow Wildavsky’s concept of cultural hierarchy to produce a framework for researching political culture. They argue that the study of political culture cab be classified into three different types. The first belongs to the tradition of anthropology, and involves the study of thick culture. This approach is based on the fundamental orientations of political culture, and study various identity issues, including national identity, religious identity, ethnic identity, party identity, and ideological identity. A different approach from the psychological tradition is thin culture. This approach is based on social and political attitudes, including interpersonal trust, trust in the political system, and evaluation of government performance. The final type is somewhere between the preceding two approaches, and focused on value systems, including collectivism vs. individualism, democratic values vs. authoritarianism, and social order vs. individual