How East Asians View Democracy

How East Asians View Democracy
ISBN-10
0231145357
ISBN-13
9780231145350
Category
Democracy
Pages
330
Language
English
Published
2010
Publisher
Columbia University Press
Author
Yun-han Chu

Description

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.

Other editions

Similar books

  • Approaching Democracy
    By Larry Berman, Bruce Allen Murphy

    Charles Babington , “ Supreme Court Lets Stand Ban on Blacks - Only Scholarships , " Washington Post , May 23 , 1995 , p . 1. The affirmative action case is Adarand Constructors v . Pena , 115 S.Ct. 2097 ( 1995 ) . 57.

  • American Democracy in Peril: Eight Challenges to America's Future
    By William E. Hudson

    In this Eighth Edition of American Democracy in Peril, author William E. Hudson provides a perceptive analysis of the challenges our democracy faces in the current era: economic crisis, partisan gridlock, rising economic inequality, and ...

  • Neo-liberalism Or Democracy?: Economic Strategy, Markets, and Alternatives for the 21st Century
    By Arthur MacEwan

    ( Stanley Fischer [ 1993 ] provides much of the basis for the discussion here . Fischer does recognize that causation can be in the other ... link certain taxes to the rate of growth . Increases in income taxes , for example , lower the ...

  • Foundations of Democracy
    By Thomas Vernor Smith, Robert Alphonso Taft

    Delegates presented recommendations through six working groups that addressed the issues of judicial independence, judicial ethics, judicial administration and the role of court administrators, governance of the judiciary, ...

  • The Economics of Transition: From Socialist Economy to Market Economy
    By Marie Lavigne

    21, no. 1 (March), pp. 1–33. Bornstein, Morris (1992), “Privatisation in Eastern Europe', Communist Economies and Economic Transformation, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 283–320; revised in Bornstein (1994), pp. 468–510. Bornstein, Morris (ed.) ...

  • The Politics of Representation: Election Campaigning and Proportional Representation
    By Juliet Roper, Christina Holtz-Bacha, Gianpietro Mazzoleni

    In this important new book, an international team of experts critically examines issues of democratic representation in three culturally diverse nations whose governments are elected under systems of proportional representation - New ...

  • Debating Democracy: A Reader in American Politics
    By Bruce Miroff, Raymond Seidelman, Todd Swanstrom

    The text marks the metes and bounds of official authority and individual autonomy . When one studies the boundary that the text marks out , one gets a sense of the vision of the individual embodied in the Constitution .

  • Explaining Democracy: Comparative Politics and Latin America
    By Todd Landman

    Explaining Democracy: Comparative Politics and Latin America

  • Economy and Anti-democracy in Russia
    By Neil Robinson

    Economy and Anti-democracy in Russia

  • Democratizing Innovation
    By Eric von Hippel

    Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centred innovation.