Authority Orientations and Democratic Attitudes: A Test of the ‘Asian Values’ Hypothesis

Japanese Journal of Political Science

Volumn 6, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 211-231

  Dalton, Russell J ^a   Ong, Nhu Ngoc T ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33344467326     PISSN: 14681099     EISSN: 14740060     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1468109905001842     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. Donald Emmerson, ‘Singapore and the ‘Asian Values’ Debate’, Journal of Democracy, 6 (1995): 95- 105
2. Lucian W. Pye, Asian Power and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985)
3. Robert Scalapino, The Politics of Development: Perspectives on Twentieth Century Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
4. Kim Dae Jung, ‘Is Culture Destiny? The Myth of Asia's Anti-Democratic Values’, Foreign Affairs, 73 (1994).
5. Lee Kuan Yew, ‘Culture is Destiny, an Interview with Fareed Zakaria’, Foreign Affairs, 73 (1994): 109–126;
6. Donald Emmerson, ‘Singapore’
7. Surain Subramaniam, ‘The Asian Values debate: Implications for the spread of liberal democracy’, Asian Affairs, 27 (2000): 19–35.
8. Siu-Kai Lau and Shin-Chi Kuan, The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese (HongKong: The Chinese University Press, 1988)
9. Gilbert Rozman (ed.), The East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and Its Modern Adaptation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
10. Lucian W. Pye, Asian Power.
11. Robert Scalapino, The Politics of Development.
12. Yung-Myung Kim, ‘Asian-style democracy: A critique from East Asia’, Asian Survey, 37 (1997): 1125. One could also note, however, that the other aspects of Confucian traditions appear more compatible with democracy. The emphasis on harmony and the responsibility of leadership, for instance, are consistent with classic democratic theory. Similarly, the value of the community also may be beneficial in developing a democratic culture.
13. Edward Friedman, ‘Democratization: Generalizing the East Asian Experiences’, in Edward Friedman (ed.), The Politics of Democratization: Generalizing East Asian Experiences (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994)
14. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999)
15. Francis Fukuyama, ‘Confucianism and Democracy’, Journal of Democracy, 6 (1995).
16. William DeBary, Asian Values and Human Rights: A Confucian Communitarian Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
17. Roger Ames, The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999).
18. Scott Flanagan and Aie-Rie Lee, ‘Value Change and Democratic Reform in Japan and Korea’, Comparative Political Studies, 33 (2000): 626–659
19. Scott Flanagan and Aie-Rie Lee, ‘The New Politics, Culture Wars, and the Authoritarian-Libertarian Value Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies’, Comparative Political Studies, 36 (2003): 235–270.
20. Also see C. Neher and R. Marlay, Democracy and Development in Southeast Asia: The Winds of Change (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995).
21. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
22. John Nathan, Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation's Quest for Pride and Purpose (New York: Hougton Mifflin, 2004)
23. Doh Chull Shin, Mass Politics and Culture in Democratizing Korea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
24. Lucian W. Pye, Asian Power.
25. Harry Eckstein, ‘Congruence Theory Explained’, in William Reisinger et al. (eds), Can Democracy Take Root in Post-Soviet Russia? Explorations in State-Society Relations (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
26. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963)
27. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
28. Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)
29. and Ronald Inglehart, ‘Culture and Democracy’, in Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (eds), Culture Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
30. Theodore Adorno, et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950)
31. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
32. The four Western democracies examined here are not markedly different from the findings in Europe from the 1999 European Values Survey that included these same questions. See Loek Halman, The European Values Study: A Third Wave (Tilburg: Tilburg University Press, 2002).
33. In a presentation of these findings, a discussant claimed the questions were insufficient to tap attitudes toward authority in East Asia since they were derived from a survey first conducted in Europe. We disagree because we see these questions as broadly applicable across diverse national contexts, as was the intent of the World Values Survey. In addition, previous published studies of East Asia have interpreted these data as valid, and other studies have compared East Asia to the West using some of these WVS items (see Flanagan and Lee, ‘The New Politics’
34. Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy).
35. Chung-Si Ahn and Won-Taek Kang, ‘South Korea's Political Culture at the Dawn of the New Millennium: Undoing or Reinventing a Developmental State?’, Discussion Paper No. 5, Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, 2003.
36. Scott Flanagan and Aie-Rie Lee, ‘Value Change and Democratic Reform in Japan and Korea’.
37. Andrew Nathan, ‘Patterns of traditionalism in East Asia’, paper presented at the conference on ‘How East Asians View Democracy’, Taipei, Taiwan, 2003, p. 9.
38. Harry Eckstein, ‘A Culturalist Theory of Political Change’, American Political Science Review, 82 (1988): 797.
39. Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2003: The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
40. Hans-Dieter Klingemann, ‘Mapping Political Support in the 1990s’, in Pippa Norris (ed.), Critical Citizens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
41. The Taiwanese survey did not ask this question in the urban half of the sample (in towns greater than 10,000 population). Since urbanization is related to support for democracy (see Russell J. Dalton, ‘Democratic Aspiration’), this likely depresses the overall support for democracy registered in Taiwan. This rural sampling also applies to the democratic process variable described below.
42. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy
43. Hans-Dieter Klingemann, ‘Mapping Political Support.’
44. Samuel Huntington and Joan Nelson. No Easy Choice: Political Participation in Developing Countries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986)
45. Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2000).
46. For additional discussion of these two democracy indices and their component questions see Russell J. Dalton, ‘Democratic Aspiration’. We used the democratic process index for Vietnam in the following analyses since the Vietnamese survey did not include the democratic regime index.
47. Surveys from Eastern Europe in the early 1990s detected similarly positive sentiments toward democracy, but mixed evidence on whether the public understood what democracy really required of elites and the citizenry. See Robert Rohrschneider, Learning Democracy: Democratic and Economic Values in Unified Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
48. Richard Rose, Christian Haerpfer, and William Mishler, Democracy and its Alternatives: Understanding Post-communist Societies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
49. Doh Chull Shin and Jason Wells, ‘Is Democracy the Only Game in Town? Testing the Notion of Democratic Consolidation in East Asia’, Journal of Democracy, 16 (2005)
50. Yun-Han Chu and Yu-tzung Chang, ‘Culture Shift and Regime Legitimacy: Comparing Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong’, in Shiping Hua (ed.), Chinese Political Culture, 1989–2000 (Armonk: ME Sharpe, 2001).
51. Tianjian Shi, ‘Cultural Values and Democracy in Mainland China’, China Quarterly, 62 (2000): 540- 559
52. Andrew Nathan and Tianjin Shi, ‘Cultural Requisites for Democracy in China’, Daedalus, 122 (1993): 95–124;
53. David Zweig, Democratic Values, Political Structures and Alternative Politics in Greater China(Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 2002).
54. Doh Chull Shin, Mass Politics and Culture, and The Dynamics of Democratization in Korea: The Korea Democracy Barometer (Honolulu: East-West Center, 2000)
55. Chung-Si Ahn and Won-Taek Kang, ‘South Korea’. Perhaps, the most interesting new evidence comes from the East Asian Barometer project. In a paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago in 2003, Robert Albritton and Thawilwadee Bureekul find strong support for democracy among the Thai population. They also asked an open-ended question about the meaning of democracy. They found that most Thais define democracy in terms that are apparently similar to Western meanings of this term. Nearly half the respondents replied with examples that fit traditional notions of liberal democracy, and an additional third mentioned personal freedoms or civil liberties that are very consistent with traditional definitions of civil liberties. Also significant was what was not mentioned: ‘Most surprising was the low response rate in terms of traditional “Asian values” as commonly understood - good governance, social equality, or duties to society. Only one respondent mentioned “openness or government transparency”, and no one mentioned “solving employment”, “providing social welfare”, or “finding someone a job”.’
56. Robert Rohrschneider, Learning Democracy.
57. Robert Albritton and Thawilwadee Bureekul, ‘Impacts of Asian values on Support for Democracy in Thailand’, paper presented at the annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies, San Diego, 2004.
58. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, p. 248.
59. Harry Eckstein, ‘Congruence Theory Explained’
60. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work
61. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture.
62. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy.