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The People's Republic of China (PRC), the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the Republic of Singapore represent different types of political regimes and provide a fascinating contrast concerning their performance with regard to the global conflict between liberal democracies and autocracies. This paper examines briefly their common historical backgrounds and provides a detailed analysis of common 'Asian' cultural features and popular support for democracy on the micro-level. It then systematically assesses their performance concerning liberal democracy and quality, governance scores, and socio-economic development. Finally, the reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic are documented showing again specific regime characteristics. We use most recent V-Dem, World Bank, United Nations Development Programme, World Values Surveys and similar data. The conclusions point to possible international consequences and the crucial position of Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do Taiwanese officials view democracy and culture and how do they plan to utilise these two soft power resources as part of advancing the island's international position? Based primarily on interviews conducted with state officials in Taiwan, this paper analyses Taiwan's soft power repositioning in the regional and global soft power competition and examines its advantages and disadvantages. It discusses the institutional and geopolitical constraints Taiwan faces when trying to implement its soft power policy and addresses the internal disagreements over utilising its cultural and democratic achievements. It concludes that despite the utility of soft power in pursuing its foreign policy agenda, Taiwan faces a few major institutional and conceptual obstacles, keeping Taiwanese diplomacy in a transitional period from old thinking about culture and diplomacy while hesitantly evaluating its soft power resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars generally agree that regionalization and regionalism are different phenomena; however, unresolved arguments remain as to whether there is a causal relationship between the two. In particular, whether or not regionalization promotes regionalism is a subject of debate. This paper aims to comprehensively clarify and explain the relationship between regionalization as embodied in trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) and regionalism as characterized by preferential trade agreements (PTAs) using event history analyses of East Asian economic data from 1985 to 2018. The paper concludes that although a positive and significant relationship exists between FDI and some types of PTAs, trade has no relationship with the latter. This conclusion challenges extant literature, which has argued that an increase in PTAs in East Asia (the outcome of regionalism) is the consequence of economic interdependence (regionalization). Moreover, these findings indicate that political factors such as territorial disputes and joint democracy negatively affect certain types of PTAs. This result is contrary to the conventional wisdom that predicts increased cooperation and lower tariffs between democracies and therefore suggests further investigations of the determinants of PTAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper comments on Naoki Ikegami's editorial entitled "Financing long-term care: lessons from Japan." Adding to the editorial, this paper focuses on analyzing the political and cultural foundations of long-term care (LTC) reform. Intergenerational solidarity and inclusive, prudential public deliberation are needed for the establishment or reform of LTC systems. Among various lines of ethical reasoning related to LTC, Confucian ethics and other familist ethics are specifically important in the societies that share these values. The core issue in the debates around LTC reform is how to (re-)define the scope of social entitlements and accordingly to allocate the responsibility for care between states and families, between social groups, and between generations with limited resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of democratisation, it is expected that a former dominant party, at least one which abides by the rules of electoral contestation, will transition into a 'catch-all' party. A catch-all party aims to attract the votes of all social cleavages and classes of voters outside what would be considered their traditional voter base. As part of the wider debate about democratisation in East Asia, this paper examines how two of East Asia's liberal democracies-Japan and South Korea, the LDP and GNP/Saenuri, respectively, have adapted to electoral defeat and in what ways they have transitioned into catch-all parties in the Kircheimer mould. This paper finds that while intra-party reforms which could fit a catch-all model have yet to be institutionalised, data from the Comparative Manifesto Database shows that there has been a significant change in which policies both parties promote and that these are designed to appeal to a broad base of voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to connect the issues of pluralism, Confucianism, and democracy in East Asia. Through engaging with empirical evidence, I will argue that although Confucianism still has a strong yet shallow moral and cultural hold on East Asian societies, it no longer has dominance over how citizens in East Asian societies envision their political future. Then, I will examine the idea of pluralism and argue that neither the Confucian classicists nor the liberal-minded Confucian political theorists take pluralism truly seriously, because both sides ultimately adopt the same internal view of pluralism that contains and addresses pluralism from within Confucianism. In contrast, an external view of pluralism is needed to treat Confucianism as one of many comprehensive doctrines coexisting with one another in East Asia. Finally, I will conclude by proposing a two-track strategy that takes advantage of two distinct approaches toward a better understanding of pluralism, Confucianism, and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an advocate of 'comparative political theory,' Fred Dallmayr has long engaged with Confucianism with a new vision for democracy suitable in East Asia but little attention has been paid to his idea of Confucian democracy, which he presents as a specific mode of ethical or relational democracy. This paper investigates Dallmayr's ethical vision of Confucian democracy, first, by articulating his postmodern reconceptualization of democracy in terms of posthumanism and, second, by examining his post-humanist reevaluation of Confucian virtue ethics as a critical resource for ethical democracy. It argues that the ethical vision of Confucian democracy, though morally appealing, should not dismiss the important instrumental value of democracy as a political system and, rather, find a way to integrate democracy's instrumental and intrinsic values in a way that can enhance the qualitative relationality between people, political agents, and the common good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the conflicts between Western and Eastern values, especially focusing on a question: Why do Asians stress economic development over democracy? To address this question, I analyze the social and cultural backgrounds for Eastern values and assume that Asian soft authoritarianism is based on social consent and is endorsed by traditionalism and authoritarianism in Asian society. To examine the arguments, I test the hypotheses against the second wave Asian Barometer Survey. The analytical result provides empirical evidence for my hypotheses, showing that economic development not only fulfill authoritative leaders' promises of satisfying people's material demands but also encourage people to prioritize higher economic development and persuade them into complying with government authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is democracy emerging as the universally preferred political system, as advocates of the global democratization thesis claim? This paper seeks to explore this question in the context of East Asia, a region known for democratic underdevelopment. To this end, we first provide a critical review of how previous survey-based studies were conducted to estimate the relative preference of democracy as a political system. We then introduce hybridization as a new conceptual tool for ascertaining the emerging patterns of political orientations among citizens of authoritarian and post-authoritarian societies. Finally, we analyze the latest, third wave of the Asian Barometer surveys conducted in 11 East Asian countries conducted in 2010 and 2011. On the basis of this analysis, we argue that it is premature to claim that democracy is emerging as the universally preferred system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to explain public support for democracy in six East Asian societies using the 2006 AsiaBarometer data. The project investigates whether East Asians' support for democracy is primarily based on perceived political performance, such as satisfaction with human rights, or perceived economic performance. The work also examines whether East Asians' support for democracy is constrained by traditional values or the postmodern value of post-materialism. The analysis shows that for three democracies, satisfaction with human rights, i.e. perceived political performance and an intrinsic value embodied in democracy, counts more in shaping public support for democracy than perceived economic performance. Because support based on perceived economic performance is more volatile than support based on firm commitment to human rights, this finding sheds positive light on the prospects for democratic stability for the three East Asian democracies. For three East Asian autocratic societies, democratic support is based more on perceived economic rather than political performance, casting a pall on the future prospects for democratization of them. That said, these dim prospects are balanced by the finding of very weak and negative effects of some traditional Asian values on democratic support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article challenges the view that democratisation is a recipe for regional disorder in East Asia. This view is not supported by evidence. Critics of democratisation fail to consider a number of mitigating factors that may check the destabilising consequences of democratisation while accentuating its peace-causing effects. These factors are not necessarily other liberal forces, like economic interdependence, or regional institutions, although these do matter. Certain dynamics associated with democratisation, such as focus on economic rebuilding for regime legitimation, positive nationalism ('democratic pride'), involvement of civil society, etc., may lessen the potential for inter-state conflict. These mitigating factors do not necessarily correspond with the normative and institutionalist logic underpinning the democratic peace theory, and they have been largely overlooked by the critics of that theory. After identifying them, this paper shows that the East Asian experience does not show that democratisation leads to greater conflict between states. On the contrary, democratisation might create better prospects for cooperative peace in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to explore the implications of social capital in East Asia for the citizens' attitudes toward political engagement and the quality of governance using the fourth wave of the Asian Barometer Survey. Using multilevel analysis, it attempts to disentangle individual level and country level factors in explaining generalized trust and other political involvement variables. In doing so, it aims to enrich the theory of social capital based on the experience and evidence from East Asia. The analysis finds that formal membership tends to decrease generalized trust, which independently increases political involvement. It also finds that Confucianism at the country level tends to dampen political engagement. It suggests that most formal group in this region might be characterized as bonding and the citizens in Confucian culture might still be characterized as allegiant rather than assertive citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike in China and Korea, Tocqueville and his works have been known in Japan for more than a century. Of course he has not had such a wide and lasting influence on Japanese intellectual life as Karl Marx or Max Weber. And his popularity as a classical thinker never attained such national fame in this country as in the United States and France. His intellectual influence has not spread over a great many people of the country. But several key figures of Japanese intellectual history sharply reacted to certain Tocquevillian ideas. In the fairly long history of Japanese reading of Tocqueville, I would like to concentrate on two significant periods, the early Meiji era and the post-war period, and choose two key figures to focus on, Fukuzawa Yukichi and Maruyama Masao, who at each period played a leading role in Japanese intellectual life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of citizens’ perceived salience of inequality on political trust in East Asian new democracies. The link between inequality and trust in new democracies has yet to receive appropriate attention in empirical research. We argue that citizens’ perceived salience of inequality has a trust-eroding effect where increasing inequality is a politically salient issue and there is a norm of fairness among the citizenry. When citizens perceive that the government and political elites are responding to the citizens’ demand for fair shares, citizens’ political trust increases. Our analysis of the 2006 Asia Barometer data finds that perceived salience of inequality has a negative effect on political trust among the citizens in Taiwan, but not in Korea. Our results suggest that the political salience of inequality on citizens’ minds is of crucial importance for political trust and political consequences of inequality has to do with the pace of rising inequality and the norms of distributive justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the effect of regime type on democratic support among political winners and losers? Existing studies on the winner-loser gap in political attitudes mostly discuss satisfaction with democracy and political trust without testing the conditional effect of political regimes. We argue that because winners and losers have different understandings of the word "democracy," support for democracy as an ideal political system is not a valid measurement of democratic support in autocracies. In this article, we examine support for liberal democratic values in different regime types. We find a clear winner-loser gap in competitive authoritarian regimes since supporters of the ruling parties are less enthusiastic about democratic principles that would constrain executive power than those who support the opposition. In democracies, this gap is much smaller as all voters may become political underdogs after free and fair elections; both winners and losers prefer civil liberties and limited executive power, therefore they uphold democratic values at similar levels. We test our argument using four waves of the Asian Barometer Survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Has trade openness made East Asian countries more or less democratic? Although numerous studies have explored the economic effects of market integration in the region, few have systematically examined the political consequences of trade liberalization. This research extends previous work by empirically investigating not only direct but also indirect links between trade globalization and democracy in East Asia. I find that the direct negative effect of trade integration on democracy is mitigated by its indirect positive impact via inequality. Empirical evidence is provided by the three-stage least squares method and pooled time-series data from 1975 to 2015 for 13 East Asian states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Asian values thesis describes the cultural exceptionalism and alternative political development of East Asia. This study used four rounds of Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) datasets (spanning 2001–2016) to empirically examine the effects of Asian values on citizens' support for democracy in four East Asian societies—mainland China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—based on the theoretical distinction between the private and political spheres in which Asian values operate. The analysis produced three major findings. First, no remarkable gap exists between the citizens of China and those of other East Asian societies in terms of Asian values in the private sphere. However, Asian values in the political sphere are prevalent in China, while citizens in the other three societies have abandoned them. Second, supporting democracy is not incompatible with accepting the family and social ethics implied by Asian values, whereas Asian values in the political sphere have significantly negative associations with preference for democracy. Third, although most citizens in East Asia support democracy, the strongly positive evaluation of its suitability for local societies observed at the beginning of the twenty-first century has weakened in the region over the last 20 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses East Asian democracies and a reported increase in income inequality in South Korea and Taiwan as of September 2012, focusing on an analysis of the cross-national differences between the inequality issue in both countries since the 1990s. The impact of income distribution on a country's economic development is addressed, along with an analysis of reported increase in wage inequality in most of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Labor power and market inequality are also mentioned.

Sungmoon Kim's I Democracy After Virtue i is an impressive contribution to comparative political thought and the burgeoning literature on the relationship between East Asian Confucian traditions and liberal democracy. Footnotes 1 Kim ([6], 1-2). 2 Kim ([6], 6). 3 Kim generally characterizes this instrumental value as a "second-order value", following Jack Knight and James Johnson, see Kim ([6], 6, and discussion at 36-39). 4 Kim's emphasis, Kim ([6], 37, and see 6-7). 5 Kim ([6], 6). 6 Kim ([6], 6-7). 7 Kim ([6], 7). 8 MacIntyre ([7]). [Extracted from the article]

Given Asia-Pacific's diversity and the large variance of potentially relevant causal factors, the region presents social scientists with a natural laboratory to test competing theories of democratic erosion, decay and revival and to identify new patterns and relationships. This introductory article offers a brief review of the relevant literature and introduces the different categories of analysis that build the analytical framework considered in various forms in the special issue. The article discusses the reasons for the renewed pessimism in democratization and democracy studies and provides a survey of different conceptualizations intended to capture forms of democratic regression and the autocratization concept to which the contributors to this special issue adhere. We discuss how Asia-Pacific experiences fit into the debate about democracy's deepening global recession and examine assumptions about the causes, catalysts and consequences of democratic regression and resilience in the comparative politics literature. Finally, the remaining twelve articles of this special issue will be introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article will argue that neither what may be called 'multiple legitimacies' nor what Leigh Jenco refers to as the hybrid view of legitimacy provides substantial guidance in reconceiving legitimacy in the increasingly pluralistic region of East Asia. Instead, a more helpful view of political legitimacy can be drawn from John Rawls's liberal principle of legitimacy. I will demonstrate that Rawls's classic formulation can be deprived of its liberal connotation by taking constitutional essentials as the source of legitimation for political authority. On the basis of this principle of pluralistic legitimacy, it will become clear that a pluralistic understanding of political legitimacy does not rule out Confucian meritocracy, but it does make a strong case for an antiperfectionist state, even if it might be nondemocratic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proponents of the "China Model" suggest that autocracies, particularly in East Asia, reward competence more than democracies. However, a competing literature argues that autocracies are less likely to reward competence because autocrats fear that competent officials could challenge for power. We argue that autocracies do not fear technical competence ; they fear political competence. As such, autocracies may promote ministers with technical competence but punish the politically competent. Democracies, by contrast, place a premium on political competence when deciding whom to promote. We provide the first test of this theory on how ministerial behavior is rewarded using a unique data set of political performance and promotions in nine East Asian countries. Our findings show that autocracies promote officials with technical competence as long as the ministers limit their political behavior. In democracies, parliamentary and presidential democracies promote those displaying political competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of cabinet appointments in controlling the bureaucracy in presidential democracies. I demonstrate how administrative challenges stemming from the structure of the bureaucracy shape presidential choice of ministers. Analyzing a sample of four East Asian cases from 1986 through 2013, I find that presidents are more likely to select ministers from the civil service as bureaucracies are more professionalized, controlling for several political factors. Further evidence from qualitative interviews and case studies suggests that, in professionalized systems equipped with a sizable pool of talent but lacking responsiveness, presidents tend to promote ideologically aligned senior civil servants. However, in politicized systems, where presidents easily obtain responsiveness but face a low level of competence, policy experts tend to be selected from outside the bureaucracy. My findings have important implications for the regulatory governance and state capacity of East Asia, demonstrating the value of balancing between responsiveness and competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decades, East Asian states have enjoyed economic development and progress toward democracy through extensive economic transformation: trade and financial liberalization. To explain the theoretical mechanism of these variables, we investigate the direct and indirect effects of globalization on democratic development via economic development. To this end, a two-equation model is specified and estimated using data from 1972 to 2010 for 12 East Asian countries. The results show that globalization has not only a direct effect, but also an indirect effect on democracy via economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research responds to the need to study trust in the national government (national trust) and in local government (local trust) simultaneously and investigates how decentralization reshapes political attitudes toward different layers of government. The argument is that decentralization contributes to variant patterns of political trust, defined by the relative strength of national trust and local trust, across countries. A multilevel analysis of East Asian countries shows that decentralization nurtures local trust in democracies, but decreases local trust in autocracies. Further, decentralization boosts national trust in autocracies, but not in democracies. Such a variant effect of decentralization sheds light on regime stability and viability in democratic and authoritarian countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do electoral outcomes influence views on democracy among East Asian countries? A sizable literature assesses differences between electoral winners and losers, but few cover East Asian cases. Using cross-national survey data from the Asian Barometer (ABS), this article analyzes the extent to which losers are less satisfied with democracy. Unlike much of the literature, this analysis also addresses a third category: those that did not vote. Empirical analyses controlling for demographic and institutional factors find that both losers and non-voters consistently have lower evaluations of democracy than winners, while losers appear to have less satisfaction than non-voters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If perfectionism is understood as the state's non-neutral promotion of a valuableway of life, Confucian political theory, often pursued as a pluralist correction to global monism of liberal democracy, is ineluctably perfectionist. But how can Confucian perfectionism, committed to particular Confucian values, reconcile with the societal fact of value pluralism within the putative Confucian polity? This article argues that a potential tension between Confucian perfectionism and value pluralism can be avoided by making Confucian perfectionist goods the core elements of public reason with which citizens can justify their arguments to one another and by which the state can justifiably exercise its public authority to reasonable citizens who otherwise subscribe to various comprehensive doctrines. By defining a mode of Confucian perfectionism working through Confucian public reason broadly shared by citizens as public reason Confucianism, this article attempts to balance the Confucian polity's internal societal pluralism and the people's collective self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political elites in East Asia have opted for a set of democratic institutions with a strong majoritarian bias that privilege efficiency and accountability over representativeness. Some have labeled these democracies "democratic developmental states." Because the political architects of East Asia's democratic developmental states have met at least some of their objectives, it is time to ask, What has been the impact of the shift to majohtarianism on growth? I answer this question empirically by demonstrating that the contribution to growth from majoritarian democratic institutions in East Asia is as large as that from the region's develop-mentally oriented authoritarian governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the assessment of ASEAN's success in the past is difficult, speculations on whether ASEAN will be a success will be close to impossibility. Yet this is what is intended in this article. However, this is done by first defining robust criteria of success of conflict prevention. Conflict prevention is successful if conflicts and battle deaths can be avoided, either by means of conflict resolution or transformation, or simply by means of conflict avoidance. By starting with this criterion the article will argue that ASEAN peacefulness cannot be explained by durable objective conditions. Instead, it is built on imagined realities. The imagined realities of the ASEAN Way are getting more difficult to sustain due to their interaction with material and normative/institutional developments. Many of the constructed foundations of the ASEAN Way are unsustainable in the new realities where communication has become easy and uncontrollable, and societies have become wealthier and more democratized. However, the article will show that evidence of existing conflict violence suggests that ASEAN has started to reformulate its approach to conflict prevention and that this has largely been successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an overview of the types and level of institutionalization of party systems in seven young democracies in East and Southeast Asia. By applying Alan Siaroff’s typology of party systems, the analysis demonstrates that the party systems in Asia do not converge on a single format. The party systems under consideration also differ in the level of institutionalization. Party systems in Thailand, the Philippines and especially South Korea are stuck in an inchoate state. Even though there is considerable variation among the cases, the party systems in Indonesia, Mongolia and Taiwan can be considered as well institutionalized relative to the rest of Asia and moderately institutionalized when compared to Latin America. Furthermore, weak institutionalization correlates with volatile structures of party competition and cooperation in Thailand, whereas in South Korea and the Philippines party systems seem to be paradoxically stabilizing in a situation of protracted under-institutionalization, as both cases combine more or less stable party system patterns with weak institutionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The debate over the future of East Asian democracy centers largely on the fit between democratic values and the Confucian way of life. Some interpret Confucianism's hierarchical, communitarian, and anti-pluralistic values as a roadblock to democratic consolidation. Others interpret the Confucian traditions of dissent and accountability as comparable to liberal institutions. This article surveys this scholarly debate by dividing the literature into three theoretical camps: compatibility, incompatibility, and convergence. Additionally, the few available empirical works on the Confucian-democratic dynamic are discussed and the findings are applied to the three categorizations. This review article maintains that a consensus on the relationship between Confucianism and democracy remains elusive due to the divergent conceptualizations and operationalizations of the two doctrines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Both general publics and elites have long used labels of left and right as cues for political communication and vote choice in Western democracies. This study examines the utility of these spatial semantics as means of encapsulating major political cleavages in East Asian democracies. Through analysis of public opinion surveys, we investigate the influence of organizational affiliation; views on socio-economic, religious, and ‘new politics’ issues, as well as attitudes toward the political system, as anchors of public understanding of the left–right dimension in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan. Patterns found in these countries are compared with two ‘Western’ nations in the region, Australia and New Zealand. Results show that citizens’ left–right positions in Japan and the Australasian countries are more clearly structured by well-defined cleavages, such as socio-economic issues and post-materialism, and that parties in these countries compete on the basis of clearer ideological profiles. In contrast, despite high rates of cognition of the left–right scale in South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan, left–right orientations are less firmly anchored in attitudes and policy preferences. These differences in publics’ level of ideological conceptualization are likely related to party system development and democratic experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political regimes in East and Southeast Asia run the full spectrum from liberal democracy through various hybrid democratic-authoritarian types and on to full-blown authoritarianism and totalitarianism. While political scientists have invested much effort and ingenuity in creating typologies of regimes to better understand the empirical diversity of political structures and processes, much less attention has been paid to what the citizens think. How do people in East and Southeast Asian countries perceive their own institutions and performance of governance? This article uses public opinion data derived from the AsiaBarometer 2006 and 2007 Surveys of 12 East and Southeast Asian countries to map what citizens actually think about their structures, processes, and outcomes of governance and compare these with the regime classifications of political scientists. The results revealed universal commitment to elections but disillusionment with political practice, positive estimations of the institutions of governance in Southeast Asia but much less enthusiasm in East Asia, and a preference for moderate opinions. There is no clear overall correlation between regime type and popular perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on survey results of East Asian support for democracy. It states that overwhelming majorities in eight East Asian nations expressed a high desire for democracy, but that many East Asians did not feel their nation was ready for democracy. It mentions that most East Asians felt economic development was more important than democracy. It talked about the disillusionment with government of Japan's citizens, with non-government organizations and the mass media trusted considerably more than government organizations. It comments on Chinese support for both democracy and their government and mentions that many Chinese felt corruption was focused on the local level instead of the national level. It suggested that democracy needs better performance to gain citizen support.

This article addresses institutionalized instabilities and declining democratic legitimacy in East Asia. It argues that a wide range of reforms could improve democratic governance in the region. Specifically, the article analyses the importance of constitutional design and the need to promote 'good' democracy. It suggests that East Asian democracies should strive for constitutional systems that avoid gridlocks and promote effective governance. Although adopting the parliamentary system represents the optimal strategy, reforming second-tier political institutions can also improve performances of presidential regimes in these countries. Moreover, these democracies need to develop the institutions and processes that encourage greater rule of law, system responsiveness, meaningful citizen participation, and socioeconomic equality. If taken, these reforms could provide East Asian democracies with enhanced stability, efficacy and legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do attachments to political parties among the mass publics of East Asia affect the process of democratization in the region? Analyses of the East Asia Barometer surveys reveal that partisanship motivates East Asians to endorse the democratic performance of their political system and embrace democracy as the best possible system of government. These findings accord, by and large, with the socialization, cognitive dissonance, and rational choice theories of partisanship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares partisanship across East Asian nations, with four indicators reflecting different dimensions of the concept. Across these indicators, partisanship in East Asian nations was found to be relatively weak compared with most Western democracies, reflecting the less institutionalized nature of their party systems. This could be caused by insufficient time to develop partisanship through mechanisms such as electoral experience and parental socialization. Further breakdowns of income, gender, age groups, and educational levels of partisans showed that more advanced democracies share a relatively uniform pattern across demographics, while young democracies in East Asia showed a more skewed distribution of partisan identifiers, unevenly distributed across income and gender groups. This pattern suggests partisanship is likely to start its development from certain segments of the population and then spread into other segments of the society as a party system becomes more institutionalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the social transformation in many East Asian democracies is altering the value priorities of their publics, and how these values are affecting party choice. Our analyses are based on the newest wave of the World Values Survey. We find that the emergence of an authoritarian-libertarian value cleavage is clearly associated with level of development, but these values emerge well before what prior research indicated. In addition, we show that party loyalty among the East Asian citizenry is shaped by a mix of social values, economic issues, left-right ideology, distrust in governmental institutions, and proclivities to engage in protest activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, numerous East Asian states have undergone transitions to democracy. One of the most distinctive aspects of democratization has been the way East Asian democracies have sought to manage political change by institutional innovations that aim to influence the development of the region's party systems. These reforms have typically tried to promote more centrist and stable politics by encouraging fewer, and hence larger, political parties. The result is an increasing evolution of the region's electoral and party system constellations toward more majoritarian elections and, in some cases, nascent two-party systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much recent analysis of the political economy of development in East Asia focuses on questions of market liberalization and the adequacy of the international institutions involved in the economic crisis of the 1990s. Focusing on political institutions, this article urges an emphasis on liberal constitutionalism as a long-term strategy. Authoritarian regimes with markets and currencies that were protected fared reasonably well. Democracies with liberal institutions were resilient. The combination of authoritarian developmentalism and market liberalization fared the worse. But authoritarian developmentalism is not sustainable. Constitutionalism, if properly conceived, may provide the institutional reliability and accountability upon which sustained development depends. Liberal constitutionalism, including democracy, human rights and the rule of law, appears to provide the tools to engender the degree of public engagement and political reliability needed for sustained development. Finding the proper institutional balance is by no means an easy task. The constitutional fundamentals are essential.

This article examines policy networks in South Korea and Taiwan during the democratic era. Policy networks are the core mechanisms of developmentalism in the two countries. However, democratization affects policy coordination differently in the two countries. By focusing on policy networks as their core mechanisms of developmentalism, this article shows that the fate of developmental states in the democratic period is not fixed. The Korean state fails to maintain policy networks, thus becoming less developmental. Its economic policies become inconsistent, short-term-oriented, over-politicized and poorly monitored. Meanwhile, Taiwan further develops policy networks, so becoming more developmental. These two contrasting experiences of network management and policy choice help account for the differential impacts of the financial crisis on South Korea and Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why do countries democratize? Why does the military intervene in politics? The development of a country from an authoritarian regime to a system of democratic governance is a process which has fascinated scholars and politicians alike. In the following article, Fidel V.Ramos, former president of the Philippines (1992–1998) and president of the Ramos Peace and Development Foundation, Inc., provides his own perspective on the role of the military in shaping and protecting a society, delving into his own experiences as a former army general and defense secretary. He also examines the rationale behind, and current status of, East Asian countries in the process of transformation from a military regime to a democratically governed society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The progress that has been made in securing greater freedom of expression in China, especially since 1979, is reviewed. The review considers how the factors driving this improvement can be identified, described and understood. The aim in studying such factors is to develop some theoretical insights concerning how to encourage positive, realistic change. This development of theory is not meant to displace mainstream democratic rights theory. Rather it is meant to act in a subsidiary role, although it may also feed back into mainstream theory. The theoretical structure proposed here is not confined in its application to freedom of expression issues, nor is it specific to East Asia, but the origins lie in a study of media regulation in East Asia, notably China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]