The central question of this edited volume is clearly important. Since the 1980s, East Asia has seen numerous transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy. Until recently, however, there have been only very few comparative analyses of citizen orientations toward democracy in this region. How East Asians View Democracy is, therefore, an essential addition that ventures into mostly uncharted terrain.
This volume is the first to arise from the Asia Barometer Survey project, the leading comparative survey of citizens' attitudes, values, and political actions in Asia. It is based on opinion polls conducted between June 2001 and February 2003 in one authoritarian country (China), one semidemocracy (Hong Kong), five emerging democracies (Mongolia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand) and one established democracy (Japan). The same set of questions was posed to significant representative samples, including in China, with only a few exceptions.
The book's main goal is twofold. First, it aims to explore how East Asians understand the meaning of democracy, what their perceptions are concerning how democratic their society is, how they evaluate the characteristics and performances of the current regime in comparison to the past, how deep popular attachment to democracy is in individual societies, and the degree to which populaces are detached from authoritarianism. Related to this aim, the second is to evaluate how much progress democracies in the region have made toward “attitudinal consolidation.”
While it is impossible, in this short review, to do justice to the richness of the case studies, it is necessary to highlight at least some of the most important findings and conclusions. Some are sobering, while others are encouraging. Let us begin with the good news. According to the data presented in the volume, all eight societies generally regard democracy in a positive light. In a great majority of cases, democracy is associated with free elections, fundamental rights and freedoms, and representative institutions. Except for China, East Asians' conceptions of democracy are compatible with the views held by citizens on other continents (p. 13), which indicates that it is not possible to argue that Asia as a sociopolitical cultural unit is allergic to the concept of democracy. Furthermore, the data show that the majority of East Asians (except in Hong Kong) see their new regimes as more democratic than the previous ones, and that they are optimistic about the prospects of democracy inasmuch as they expect some degree of democratic progress in the future.
There is also some bad news for those who believe in democracy's universal triumph over autocracy, however. Probably most important, a political culture supportive of democracy is still fragile and vague in East Asia, allowing the Chinese authorities, for example, to enjoy the apparent support of the majority of their population in maintaining and consolidating a system that is “democratic” in name only. Furthermore, support for democracy in East Asia (except in Thailand) remains dependent on the political and economic performance of the government in place. Moreover, an overall commitment to rule of law is weak in the region, and four-fifths of the people questioned (with the exception of Mongolia) feel that they are capable neither of understanding nor of participating in political affairs.
The contributions in this volume greatly enhance our understanding of the attitudinal dimension of democratization in established and new democracies, and offer valuable insights into the strength of democratic political cultures in nondemocratic regimes. One can only salute the work carried out by the editors and the authors, which is groundbreaking in many respects.
Still, no book is perfect, not even such an excellent volume such as this one. While it answers some important questions, it also leaves a number of questions only partly answered and rather difficult to interpret. Of course, the question that is the most important and difficult to answer is whether we should see the glass as half full or half empty.
In the introduction, the editors present a quite pessimistic interpretation of the findings in this volume. They conclude that most East Asian democracies are not attitudinally consolidated. Instead, “[d]emocracies in Asia are in trouble because they suffer from fragile foundations of legitimacy” (p. 1). Only in Japan, South Korea, and Thailand, they argue, does democracy enjoy a robust foundation of legitimation in which principled believers in democracy constitute majorities. While they acknowledge that the lack of full-blown democratic culture in most of the surveyed countries does not mean that democracy is in imminent danger, they also contend that “the young democracies have yet to prove themselves in the eyes of many citizens” (p. 29).
Nevertheless, the case studies and cross-regional comparisons do not always provide unanimous support for this pessimistic view. For example, in the concluding summary, the editors state that East Asia is not alone in its publics' ambivalent support for democracy (p. 240). Instead, the problems faced by the political regimes of East Asia are shared by the new democracies in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa. In fact, according to the editors, democracy remains attitudinally unconsolidated not only in East Asia but throughout all the regions where it was established after the 1970s, except Western Europe. They also demonstrate that average support for democracy in the six East Asian democracies is higher than the mean levels in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Moreover, on average, more East Asians in the six democracies surveyed (61%) are satisfied with the way that democracy works than in the European Union member states (56% in 2006), Eastern Europe (38% in 2004), Latin America (31% in 2005), and Africa (45% in 2005).
In addition, some aspects of the analysis call for further discussion. For example, in the chapter on Thailand, Robert B. Albritton and Thawilwadee Bureekul claim that “Thai citizens understood democracy consistently as ‘liberal democracy’” (p. 120) and that their “conceptions of democracy are not fundamentally different from those of citizens of the advanced Western democracies” (p. 135). This, however, seems to contradict the editors' conclusion, which argues that strong support for democracy in Thailand “coexists with a weak commitment to liberal democratic values” (p. 34). Furthermore, the conclusion that “strong support for democracy, even in the midst of deep political cleavages over the Thaksin government, made Thailand an ‘attitudinally’ consolidated democracy” (p. 118, also p. 136) can only raise doubts in the reader's mind regarding either the accuracy of judgment or the impact of citizens' opinions on the regimes being studied. Conversely, to write that “authoritarianism remains a formidable potential competitor to democracy” (p. 108) in Taiwan seems exaggerated: Indeed, neither Taiwanese society nor, above all, its elite seriously envisage a reappraisal of the democratic consensus, all the less so in view of the challenge represented by the rising power of authoritarian mainland China.
Another case where the lessons to be learned are not quite clear is Japan, which is the only country studied for which multiple surveys from the mid-1980s to a 2003 are available. While the editors exhibit reservations about public support for democracy in Japan, Ken'ichi Ikeada and Masaru Kohno argue that “Japan's democracy is firmly grounded in the Japanese people's perceptions and values” (p. 185). While they find low levels of overall satisfaction with democracy and institutional trust, those findings “are not exceptional in the recent history of Japan”; with regard to political efficacy, they acknowledge that “there has been virtually no change over the past twenty-five years” (p. 176). Hence, the two authors conclude that “even though the Japanese have long been dissatisfied with incumbent authorities, they nonetheless remain relatively highly committed to democracy as an ideal or principle” (p. 179).
Finally, it is unfortunate that there was no systematic analysis of factors to account for the country-level findings and the variations or similarities arising from cross-national and cross-regional comparisons. While the editors mention some possible explanations, such as the previous authoritarian regimes, levels of socioeconomic modernization, and the political performance of actual regimes, a more in-depth analysis is absent from the volume. But all books have their limits. Overall, this one provides both new data and unique insights into the political cultures of East Asia. It is essential reading for students and scholars who are interested in the politics of democratizing Asia, the comparative study of democratic change, and political culture.
