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This paper investigates democratic consolidation in East Asia using recently collected survey data. We conceptualize consolidation as a mass-level phenomenon and measure consolidation by asking if citizens accept democracy as the only game in town. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transitioned democracies often exhibit behaviors that mirror their authoritarian pasts. Despite the celebratory transitions, they often erode the values set up by the leading founding figures. This paper suggests that these transitioned democracies ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large number of social capital articles have shown a positive relationship between social trust and democracy. However, applying social capital theory into East Asian countries which are entrenched in Confucian values is problematic in that previous discussions are mostly established on Western democracy settings. I argue that in society of Confucian culture, it is imperative to differentiate particular interpersonal trust (trust on in-groups, including family members and friends) from general interpersonal trust (trust on out-groups, mostly strangers). This is not only because they are substantively different types of social trust as defined by Confucianism, but also have diverse implications for democratic consolidation. Using Asian barometer's first wave of survey in eight East Asian regimes, I found that Confucianism generates particular interpersonal trust, but is negatively related to general interpersonal trust. Moreover, in contrast to conventional wisdom that interpersonal trust facilitates democracy, particular trust impedes citizens' democratic support; I also addressed the "Asian Value" debate and found a robust negative effect of Confucianism on civic culture, namely, Confucianism deters popular support for democracy in East Asian democracies by impeding their rejection of authoritarian values, if it is not necessarily an obstacle for citizens to embrace democratic values. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the international effects on the process of democratization and attempts to provide coherent and systematic accounts for why there are different external influences and how they have affected at different phases of democratization through a cross-regional comparison between East Asia and Central Europe. By focusing on process-oriented analysis and on interactions between external and internal factors, I argue that we should isolate international influences from common domestically dependent-level factors in national cases, in order to examine the exact effects of key explanatory factors. At the same time, the regional differences provide me enough variations to examine external effects with regional variables. I also challenge the mainstream “domestically biased” assumption that democratization is an exclusively domestic affair by arguing that external influences are a crucial part in democratic transition and consolidation especially through assessing regional and international impacts on regime change in the two regions. Furthermore, some scholars provide systemic and comprehensive approaches to explore the major mechanisms of the external impacts on regime change, but their generalizations are based on comparisons within only one geographic or cultural region. Thus, there are limits to the applicability and credibility of their general frameworks. Therefore, this study is a first effort to compare the international effects on democratization between the East (Confuciandom) and the West (Christendom). It attempts not only to refine current theoretical frameworks, but also to enhance the literature on democratization in breadth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]