Party Politics in East Asia: Citizens, Elections, and Democratic Development 9781626374058

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Party Politics in East Asia

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PARTY POLITICS IN E AST A SIA Citizens, Elections, and Democratic Development

EDITED BY

Russell J. Dalton Doh Chull Shin Yun-han Chu

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

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Published in the United States of America in 2008 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2008 by the East Asia Institute. All rights reserved by the publisher Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Party politics in East Asia / edited by Russell J. Dalton, Doh Chull Shin, Yun-han Chu. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58826-570-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Political parties—East Asia. 2. Democratization—East Asia. 3. East Asia—Politics and government—21st century. I. Dalton, Russell J. II. Sin, To-ch'ol. III. Zhu, Yunhan. JQ1499.A979P37 2008 324.2095—dc22 2008007133 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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Parties, Party Choice, and Partisanship in East Asia Russell J. Dalton, Yun-han Chu, and Doh Chull Shin

1

Electoral Systems and Party Systems Benjamin Reilly

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The Patterns of Party Alignment Russell J. Dalton and Aiji Tanaka

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The Development of Partisanship Emile C. J. Sheng

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Social Structure and Party Support Ian McAllister

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Value Cleavages, Issues, and Partisanship Aie-Rie Lee

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Partisanship and Citizen Politics Yun-han Chu and Min-hua Huang

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Partisanship and Democratization Doh Chull Shin and Rollin F. Tusalem

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Citizens, Political Parties, and Democratic Development Doh Chull Shin, Russell J. Dalton, and Yun-han Chu

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Appendix Bibliography The Contributors Index About the Book

187 191 199 201 207 v

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T

he current wave of democratization reached the shores of East Asia more than a decade after it began to spread from southern Europe in the mid-1970s. East Asia’s participation in this wave began in 1986 with the removal of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos through the bloodless people’s power movement in the Philippines. In 1987, Korea ended military rule and elected a new president in a free and competitive election for the first time in nearly three decades. In the same year, Taiwan lifted martial law and ushered in an era of highly competitive multiparty democracy after ending more than three decades of the Kuomintang’s one-party rule. In 1990, Mongolia became a Third Wave democracy by abandoning its sixty-year-old communist one-party system and holding competitive multiparty elections. In 1992, Thailand reestablished democratic rule after massive protests pushed the military-backed government out of power. In 1999, Indonesia joined the current wave of democratization and became the third largest democracy in the world by ending Suharto’s personal dictatorship, which had lasted more than three decades, and thereafter holding democratic elections. By the end of the twentieth century, this wave, which produced numerous democracies in such inhospitable places as Mali and Senegal in Africa, brought about only six new democracies in the vast region of East Asia. With the dawning of the new millennium, all six of these new East Asian democracies are facing their own struggles of democratic development. In Indonesia, the National Assembly impeached President Abdurahman Wahid and elected Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri as his successor. In South Korea, the National Assembly impeached President Roh Moo-hyun and suspended his executive powers. In Taiwan and the Philippines, the losers of presidential elections tried to bring down their democratically elected governments through the

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extralegal means of mass protests. In Thailand, the military staged a coup and overthrew the democratically elected Thaksin government. With the dissolution of parliament and the banning of all political activities, the country constituted the first (albeit temporary) reversal of a Third Wave democracy into authoritarian rule in East Asia. Ethan Scheiner, for example, has described how in Japan, the region’s oldest democracy, decades of democratic rule have failed to root out political corruption and establish a truly competitive multiparty system. This book focuses on a key element in the development of democracy in any nation—and especially the nations of East Asia: the institutionalization of a stable, democratic, competitive party system. Democratization is often equated with the functioning of free and open elections, and parties are the basis of the electoral process. Moreover, parties play a central role in the entire process of representative democracy, from structuring political debate, to selecting political elites, to competing in elections, to organizing the affairs of government. Thus, a good indicator of the health of democracy is the health of the party system. The chapters that follow use a set of three cross-national surveys of public opinion (the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, the East Asia Barometer, and the World Values Survey) to examine three central aspects of party politics in East Asia: the degree of institutionalization of these party systems, the correlates of party choice, and the consequences of partisanship on citizen political behavior. Our investigation finds that there are worrisome signs of uneven development of democratic party systems and democratic politics in the formal democracies of East Asia. Political parties should be key institutions in expanding the democratic process and consolidating democracy. Our findings indicate that the development of democratic institutionalized party systems is still lagging in East Asia, and we outline the changes that can strengthen party politics in the future. *** The book results from a research conference held at the East-West Center in Honolulu in 2006. The conference assembled leading international scholars on political parties to examine the development of parties and party politics in East Asia. We want to acknowledge Chung Nam Kim and the POSCO program, the East Asian Barometer Program, and the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California–Irvine for their support of this project. We were exceptionally fortunate to have access to the cross-national surveys mentioned above.

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The initial findings were published as a special issue of the Journal of East Asian Studies (JEAS) (May–August 2007). We greatly appreciate Stephan Haggard’s support for this project, the development of the special issue of JEAS, and the JEAS reviewers who provided advice to improve our research. Thanks also go to Willy Jou and Alix van Sickle, for valuable assistance in the preparation of the manuscript, and to Dorothy Solinger, who offered comments and advice as the project progressed. Because of the importance of this topic and the limited amount of empirical information available on East Asian party systems, Lynne Rienner supported the expansion of the special issue into the present book. A new concluding chapter compares findings across chapters and discusses the larger implications for the development of democratic party systems in East Asia. Each of the chapter authors reviewed their earlier contributions and made appropriate revisions. We also added a bibliography of key research sources. We appreciate Lynne Rienner’s support for the project and the opportunity to work with Marilyn Grobschmidt of Lynne Rienner Publishers in the publication of the book. —Russell J. Dalton Doh Chull Shin Yun-han Chu

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1 Parties, Party Choice, and Partisanship in East Asia Russell J. Dalton, Yun-han Chu, and Doh Chull Shin

P

olitical parties are widely seen as “a sine qua non for the organization of the modern democratic polity and for the expression of political pluralism.”1 The manner in which parties articulate political interests largely defines the nature of electoral competition, the representation of citizen interests, the policy consequences of elections— and ultimately the functioning of the democratic process.2 Consequently, the linkage between citizens and parties is an essential aspect of democratic politics—and the focus of the chapters in this collection. By connecting citizens to the democratic process, political parties should give voice to social groups and their policy interests. Electoral choice is a vehicle for expressing the policy interests and political values of the public. Electoral studies in Western democracies have demonstrated how partisanship is a core element in political identities and behaviors, as well as a heuristic for organizing political information and guiding political choice.3 Partisan ties also supposedly motivate citizens to participate in the political process. Thus, partisanship is routinely a strong predictor of a wide range of political predispositions and participatory actions ranging from political efficacy, to political involvement, to voting choice. These various linkages between citizens and parties are the main theme of this collection of chapters, which is motivated by an overarching question: are the theoretical presumptions about the nature of electoral choice and the impact of partisan attachments equally applicable to the consolidated and emerging democracies of East Asia? To answer this question, we assembled a group of leading comparative 1

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scholars using a set of new cross-national public opinion surveys of East Asian nations.4 Needless to say, East Asian political parties and party systems are quite diverse and were created under very different historical conditions. Therefore, the context of party competition differs across nations, and perhaps in comparison to other developing democracies. The trajectories of regime evolution also produce cross-national differences. Any sweeping region-wide generalization about the nature of electoral choice and the implications of partisanship is unlikely to be fully accurate. However, some characteristics are widely assumed to apply to many of these party systems. These features are salient enough to generate some reasonable assumptions about the “normality” of the region while bearing in mind that most nations deviate from this “normality” at least to some extent. Several East Asian democracies have experienced socioeconomic modernization in a compressed time. East Asian parties thus did not follow the same development trajectory as political parties in Western democracies, which gradually emerged from preexisting social cleavages and patterns of elite politics.5 A firm social group base can provide a foundation for party ideology and identity, and without such group connections, parties may be more personalistic or patronistic organizations. Thus, much of the literature on East Asia notes the shallow social base of most parties, although this literature is typically limited to a single nation and election.6 There are frequent claims that most East Asian party systems do not exhibit institutionalized programmatic electoral competition. Many Asian parties appear more pragmatic than programmatic. Many try to be all things to all people. The traditional left-right economic cleavage or similar broad ideological frameworks that are familiar in Western democracies appear underdeveloped in most East Asian democracies. Political parties often compete based on valence issues, such as anticorruption, prosperity, efficiency, or personal charisma of the party leader, or based on clientelism and district service. In South Korea and Taiwan, for example, cleavages anchored on regionalism and national identity respectively have structured party politics. The extent of party system institutionalization also varies greatly among these democracies.7 Institutionalized party systems are emerging in Japan and Taiwan and to some extent in South Korea and Mongolia. However, the evidence of electoral system change and party system change in East Asia indicates continuing volatility (see Chapter 2

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by Benjamin Reilly). Similarly, Scott Mainwaring and Edurne Zoco find that interelection party volatility in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and the Philippines is approximately two and a half times the level of volatility in established Western party systems, although comparable to many Latin American nations.8 Lastly, most of the major political parties in East Asia are of recent creation. With few exceptions (such as the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan and the Kuomintang in Taiwan), most parties have a life span shorter than twenty years. In addition, the founding of these parties was usually synchronized with the rise of a new political leader. The condition under which these leader-centered parties were created makes it very difficult to distinguish voters’ partisan attachment from the popularity of their charismatic leaders. Most East Asian parties also appear organizationally thin. The degree of organizational structure, mass member support, and a party administrative elite—as exists in most Western parties—still appear rare in most Asian democracies. Even in the longest-established democracy in East Asia, Japanese membership in political parties is only a fraction of the level in most Western democracies.9 In a nutshell, the nature of political parties in East Asia may weaken the linkage between parties and citizens, as well as attenuate the usefulness of partisanship in structuring citizens’ political orientations. In addition to these formative factors, East Asia parties may be experiencing the seemingly global trend of the decreasing relevance of parties as vehicles of political mobilization and interest articulation. The “decline of parties” literature argues that parties are increasingly failing in their capacity to engage the ordinary citizen, people are increasingly reluctant to commit themselves to parties, citizens are less likely to show up at polling stations, and they vote with a weaker sense of partisan consistency.10 At the same time, interest associations and social movements are becoming much more vigorous competitors to parties for the opportunity to represent and mobilize citizens outside the electoral arena.11 We began our research with these questions about the strength of citizen-party linkages in East Asia. However, there are also reasons why parties and partisanship may become more central to contemporary East Asian politics. As the number of elections increases, parties have stronger incentives to develop an institutional base to perpetuate their voter base—and party stability and constancy should increase.12 In addition, the past decade has witnessed other signs of democratic

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maturation, such as the transition in the control of government in Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. Thus, our research tries both to test past theories of partisanship as applied to East Asia and to provide an initial cross-national comparison of the bases of party choice, and the implications of partisanship for these publics.

The Framework of Comparison A decade ago, broad cross-national comparisons of voting choice, party preferences, and the impact of partisanship in East Asia would not have been possible because the necessary research resources did not exist. Our comparative analyses are possible only because of the recent development of several cross-national public opinion surveys in East Asia. Indeed, one of the major research lessons of these chapters is to demonstrate the rich range of cross-national surveys that now exist. The chapters of this book draw upon three different cross-national public opinion surveys (see Table 1.1).13 The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) focuses on electoral choice and partisan images; it asks a common battery of questions in postelection surveys. Four East Asian nations were included in the second module of the CSES. A consortium of public opinion scholars conducted the East Asia Barometer (EAB) survey, which included six East Asian democracies. Finally, the 1999–2002 World Values Survey expanded its data collection in East Asia to incorporate most of the democracies in the region, thereby increasing the potential to compare Asia to other regions of the world. From these surveys we include all the East Asian nations that qualify as electoral democracies where party competition and partisan behavior can be meaningfully compared.14 Each chapter in this volume typically draws on the one survey project that best addresses the theoretical concerns of the chapter, and in some cases compares results between surveys. Moreover, the existence—and continuance—of these three large projects signals a new era of potential comparative public opinion studies of East Asia. Our theoretical interests focus on the electoral choices and partisanship of East Asian publics. However, much of the theorizing on party choice and partisan behavior is derived from literature and theories from established democracies. For example, theories of social cleavage voting in established party systems provides a benchmark for judging the extent of cleavage voting in East Asian democracies, just as the level of party identifications in established Western democracies is

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Parties, Party Choice, and Partisanship Table 1.1

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Survey Projects on East Asia and the Nations Surveyed

Nations Surveyed East Asia Indonesia Japan Mongolia Philippines South Korea Taiwan Thailand Established democracies Australia New Zealand

CSES

EAB

WVS

Year

Sample N

Year

Sample N

Year

Sample N

— 2004 — 2004 2004 2001 —

— 2,010 — 1,200 1,500 2,022 —

— 2003 2003 2002 2003 2001 2002

— 1,408 1,144 1,200 1,500 1,415 1,546

2002 2000 — 2001 2002 1995 —

1,004 1,362 — 1,200 1,200 1,452 —

2004 2002

1,769 1,740

— —

— —

1995 1998

2,048 1,201

Note: This table describes surveys’ field dates and sample sizes from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, module 2 (CSES); the East Asia Barometer, wave I (EAB); and the World Values Survey (WVS).

a benchmark for comparing the extent of partisanship in East Asia. Comparison is the essence of comparative politics, and many of our theoretical interests imply the need for cross-regional comparisons to Western democracies or other emerging democracies. We address this point in two ways. First, several of the chapters have explicit comparisons to other nations available through these international survey projects, such as the comparisons of partisanship in Chapter 4 by Emile C. J. Sheng. In addition, we cite literature from other developing democracies as a comparison to East Asia. Second, we selected two established democracies—Australia and New Zealand—that were part of both the CSES and World Values Survey, as specific comparisons. We are not arguing that Australia and New Zealand are typical established democracies, because there is not a single typical Western nation. Elements of both electoral systems and party systems are distinct.15 However, including these nations in several chapters allows us to see how these two established Western democracies compare with East Asian nations in various models of individual-level behavior. In summary, the contributions in this book vary in the set of nations they examine because these three datasets only partially overlap, but together these surveys provide valuable perspectives on parties and public opinion in East Asia.

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Studying Partisanship in East Asia Despite the fundamental importance of the topic of party development and institutionalization for the democratization process, there is little systematic cross-national evidence on the linkage between citizens and political parties in East Asia. Individual country studies are often insightful, but it is difficult to draw broad conclusions from separate studies that use different theoretical or empirical approaches to this topic. Moreover, just as party politics is still relatively new in several emerging democracies of East Asia, research on public opinion and voting behavior is also developing. The contributors to this volume focus on three broad themes. First, we begin by describing the structure of party systems across East Asia. In Chapter 2, Benjamin Reilly describes the electoral systems of Asian democracies and how electoral reforms have recently reshaped the framework of party competition. Reilly notes that reformers enacted these changes to counterbalance the lack of institutionalization and representation of East Asian parties described above; later chapters examine in more detail whether such countertrends are observable. Russell Dalton and Aiji Tanaka describe the polarization of parties in these systems in Chapter 3, and find that the clarity of electoral choice varies substantially across these nations, almost independent of the electoral structures that Reilly describes. In Chapter 4, Sheng describes the extent of partisanship on four different indicators among Asian publics as a measure of party system institutionalization. He finds that when compared to most Western democracies, partisanship in East Asian nations is relatively weak, reflecting the less institutionalized nature of Asian party systems. A second set of chapters examines the sources of party preferences. Ian McAllister analyzes the social group bases of party choice. He concludes that traditional social cleavages—such as class, religion, and urban/rural differences—exert a weak overall impact on party choice in East Asia, while age differences in party support emerge in several nations as a residue of the transition to democracy. Aie-Rie Lee presents a parallel analysis of how values and policy attitudes guide party preferences. She shows that a new authoritarian-libertarian value cleavage is emerging as a consequence of social modernization, and these values now have more weight than traditional economic policy attitudes in shaping party preferences. The third and final section considers the consequences of partisanship on citizen behavior. Yun-han Chu and Min-hua Huang examine

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whether partisanship mobilizes individual participation in electoral and nonelectoral participation. Despite weaker party ties among Asian publics, they demonstrate that partisanship has a similar mobilizing effect as in established democracies. This implies that party system institutionalization in Asian democracies will generate similar consequences as in the established democracies. Doh Chull Shin and Rollin Tusalem describe how partisanship is linked to popular images of the democratic process. They demonstrate that partisanship motivates East Asians to endorse the democratic performance of their political system and embrace democracy as the best possible system of government. This is not a complete agenda of the ways that partisanship affects citizens and the political process, but we feel this research provides the first systematic comparisons of key features of partisan political behavior across Asian democracies. In summary, this collection attempts to move forward the comparative study of political behavior across East Asia. We understand that citizen connections to parties and the implications of these ties are essential for judging the vitality of democracy. In addition, we believe that only by comparing nations can we understand the nature of party politics in any single nation and their overall development in the region as a whole. We hope the findings in this book make progress in moving us forward.

Notes 1. Ingrid van Beizen, “How Political Parties Shape Democracy.” Center for the Study of Democracy, University of California, Irvine, working paper 04-16. 2. Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner, eds., Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther, eds., Political Parties and Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Russell J. Dalton and Ian McAllister, eds., “Political Parties and Political Development,” special issue of Party Politics (March 2007). 3. Angus Campbell et al., The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960); Warren Miller, “The Cross-National Use of Party Identification as a Stimulus to Political Inquiry.” In Ian Budge, Ivor Crewe, and Dennis Farlie, eds., Party Identification and Beyond (New York: Wiley, 1976); Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds., Parties Without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4. These articles were first presented at a research conference held at the East West Center in Honolulu. We want to acknowledge Chung Nam Kim and

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the POSCO program, the East Asian Barometer Program, and the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine, for their support of this project. 5. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967). 6. Scott Flanagan et al., The Japanese Voter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Yun-han Chu and Tse-min Lin, “The Process of Democratic Consolidation in Taiwan: Social Cleavages, Electoral Competition and the Emerging Party System.” In Hung-Mao Tien, ed., Taiwan’s Electoral Politics and Democratic Transition (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996); Doh Chull Shin, Mass Politics and Culture in Democratizing Korea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 7. Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair, “Challenges to Contemporary Political Parties.” In Diamond and Gunther, eds., Political Parties and Democracy, pp. 327–343. 8. Scott Mainwaring and Edurne Zoco, “Political Sequences and the Stabilization of Interparty Competition,” Party Politics 13 (March 2007): 155–178. 9. Only 3.5 percent of Japanese reported a party membership, which was about half the average among the fifteen European Union member states in 1999 (5.6 percent). Ronald Inglehart et al., Human Values and Beliefs: A Cross-Cultural Sourcebook (Siglo XXI Editores, 2004). 10. See Dalton and Wattenberg, Parties Without Partisans; Dalton and McAllister, “Parties and Political Development.” 11. Philippe Schmitter, “Parties Are Not What They Once Were.” In Diamond and Gunther, eds., Political Parties and Democracy. 12. See Mainwaring and Zoco, “Political Sequences,” pp. 164–167. 13. The data used here were generally downloaded from the websites of each project, which also include further documentation for each survey. These data are available free to other researchers: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (www.cses.org), East Asia Barometer Survey (eacsurvey.law.ntu.edu .tw/), and the World Values Survey (www.worldvaluessurvey.org). We express our appreciation to all the relevant principal investigators for sharing their data with the research community. 14. Using 2002 as the approximate date for most of our survey data, the Freedom House ranked Mongolia, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand as free. Of course, Thailand then experienced a coup in 2006, but this occurred subsequent to the EAB Thai survey. Indonesia was rated as only partly free, but because of the rapid advance of electoral democracy since 1998, we include Indonesia in our study where possible. 15. Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); David Farrell, Comparing Electoral Systems (London: Macmillan, 1998); Pippa Norris, Electoral Engineering (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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2 Electoral Systems and Party Systems Benjamin Reilly

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n this chapter, we begin by describing the organizational structure of party systems in East Asian democracies to provide a framework for the analyses of parties and citizen political behavior that follow. The number of East Asian regimes that can be considered to meet the basic Schumpeterian definition of democracy—that is, governments chosen via open and competitive elections—has snowballed over the past twenty years.1 At the end of the Cold War, only Japan could claim to be an “established” East Asian democracy, but since then a new era of democratization has spread across the region.2 Major transitions from authoritarian rule toward democracy began with the popular uprising against the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1986 and the negotiated transitions from autocratic governments in Korea and Taiwan in 1987. This trend moved on to Mongolia’s first multiparty election in 1990, the resumption of civilian rule in Thailand in 1992, the UN’s intervention in Cambodia in 1993, the fall of Indonesia’s Suharto regime in 1998, and the international rehabilitation of East Timor culminating in 2001. Because of these transitions, more East Asian governments today are chosen through competitive and freely contested elections than ever before. Nonetheless, there are significant variations in the extent and timing of democratization and party system development across the region. In Northeast Asia, Korea and Taiwan appear to have joined Japan as the more consolidated East Asian democracies. It is notable that Korea, for example, showed no sign of flirting with a return to authoritarianism during the severe economic downturn of the late 1990s—and in fact elected the region’s foremost democracy activist, Kim Dae-jung, to the presidency in 1997. The election of opposition leader Chen Shui-bian to 9

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Taiwan’s presidency in March 2000, the island’s first transfer of executive power to the opposition, was a similar watershed for Taiwan. Even Mongolia, which as a post-Soviet state appeared to enjoy few of the facilitating conditions for democracy, has now experienced five competitive elections and several peaceful democratic transfers of power. In Southeast Asia, the Philippines stands out as the longest-established democracy, with several decades of competitive elections and constitutional (if not always trouble-free) turnovers of governing power. Thailand, too, had experienced fourteen years of competitive multiparty democracy, until the bloodless military coup of September 2006 removed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra from power. Indonesia, with a population of some 220 million people, is East Asia’s largest emerging democracy, while East Timor is the smallest, with fewer than 1 million citizens. As the recent Thai coup highlighted, despite their progress to date, it is doubtful whether any of these emerging democracies could be considered consolidated, in the sense that democracy is accepted as the “only game in town” and any reversion from it unthinkable.3 In the long-standing “semidemocracies” of Malaysia and Singapore, there have been no turnovers of power since independence, and none appears likely in the immediate future. While both of these states maintain regular and basically fraud-free elections, the fairness of the electoral process is severely compromised by heavy-handed restrictions on the rights of opposition parties to campaign openly, as well as a compliant judiciary and a progovernment press. Cambodia is a borderline member of this semidemocratic group. Since its transitional UN-administered elections in 1993, it too has yet to experience a change of government, and the elections of 1998 and (to a lesser extent) 2003 were marred by significant voting irregularities and campaign violence. What binds these nations together for analytical purposes is not that their elections are meaningless, but that they have never led to a change of governing power. Taking an inclusive approach, this chapter examines the electoral and party systems of the long-term democracy of Japan, the consolidating democracies of Korea and Taiwan, the emerging democracies of East Timor, Indonesia, Mongolia, Thailand, and the Philippines, and the semidemocracies of Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia.4 Collectively, this enables us to examine changes to the electoral system and party formation laws across East Asia, which also introduces the electoral context for the subsequent chapters in this collection. This chapter next describes the various electoral institutions used across the region, and recent reforms that have particularly increased the convergence in electoral system designs. Then, we look at the na-

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ture of the region’s political parties, and the link between party systems and social structure across the region. We conclude by examining how institutional engineering has shaped the development of the region’s political architecture.

Electoral Systems in East Asia There is a great deal of variation in East Asia’s systems of government. There are three clearly presidential democracies—Indonesia, Korea, and the Philippines. Of these three, the Philippines, which modelled its constitutional arrangements on those of the United States, has the longest experience with presidentialism, having introduced a presidential constitution in the 1930s. More recently, reforms in Korea and Indonesia have resulted in their transformation to full presidential democracies, via the direct election of their previously nonelected executive presidents in 1987 and 2004, respectively. In addition, three other new democracies—Mongolia, Taiwan, and East Timor—have adopted “semipresidential” systems of government, with executive power split between a directly elected president and a prime minister, both of whom have their own separate arenas of authority. All the other cases examined herein—Cambodia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand—are parliamentary systems. Despite this divergence in political systems, there has been something of a convergence in electoral system design in recent years. Surprisingly congruent electoral reform patterns are evident across the East Asian region, with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Thailand all choosing markedly similar “mixed-member” electoral system models during the last decade.5 Under such systems, part of the legislature is elected, usually at a national level, by proportional representation, and the rest from local districts. While mixed systems have become common around the world, they are a particularly popular choice in Asia’s new democracies.6 In sharp contrast to similar reforms in other parts of the world, most of East Asia’s mixed-member systems are highly majoritarian in both design and practice, leading to quite distinctive outcomes compared with other regions. East Asia’s turn toward mixed-member systems has occurred in two different contexts. In Northeast Asia, governments have introduced mixed systems as a replacement for or supplement to the single nontransferable vote (SNTV) previously used in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. In Southeast Asia, by contrast, mixed systems often replaced plurality or plurality-like systems, such as the block vote in Thailand and the

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Philippines. Both SNTV and block vote systems share a common drawback: they tend to encourage parties to put forward multiple candidates for election in the same district, thus encouraging intraparty competition. By forcing candidates from the same party to compete against each other for the same pool of voters, both systems emphasize personalistic attributes over and above those of the party. East Asian reformers hoped that these new electoral models would undermine the institutional foundations of patronage politics and personalistic politics that the Introduction described as part of the region’s electoral history. This was done by moving away from a situation where members of the same party ran against each other, privileging personal ties, toward an environment in which more stable party allegiances and programmatic strategies could emerge. Thai reformers, for instance, hoped that the 1997 shift to single-member districts would undercut the prevalence of “money politics,” since local candidates would not have to rely on local agents to the same extent as they had in multimember electorates. Reform advocates therefore argued that a change to a single-member system would reduce the impacts of vote-buying, pork-barrel politics, and corruption.7 In Japan, similarly, reformers hoped that electoral reform would foster the development of a twoparty system and generate centripetal competition focused on policy rather than patronage.8 The rejection of SNTV and block vote systems therefore led to the introduction of mixed systems combining plurality and proportional elements. Korea, which adopted a parallel mixed-member system in 1963, should probably be seen as an instigator of this movement, although it was not until 2004 that the allocation of list seats became truly proportional. The Philippines adopted a mixed-member model as part of its 1987 constitution, although these were not implemented until 1998. Taiwan next introduced the mixed-member option, moving to an SNTV–proportional representation (PR) combination in 1992, followed by Japan in 1994. Since then, Thailand and East Timor followed suit. Japan’s electoral reforms highlight a number of the broader political concerns felt across the region. Reformers intended the new electoral laws to reorient Japanese politics away from special interests and to foster a two-party system that would be more responsive to the interests of the median voter. In 1994, after a long debate about the political impacts of its existing electoral arrangements, Japan replaced SNTV with an overtly majoritarian form of mixed system. Under the new system, 300 of the parliament’s 480 seats are elected from singlemember constituencies, and the remaining 180 seats (reduced from 200

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in early 2000) chosen from a regional PR list in eleven multimember districts. Unlike the mixed systems used elsewhere in Asia, the Japanese system allows candidates to transfer between tiers—a provision that enables so-called zombie candidates who lose their district contest to then “rise from the dead” on the party list.9 A concurrent logic has driven recent electoral reforms in Taiwan. Taiwan first adopted a mixed model for its Legislative Yuan elections in 1992, but continued to use SNTV rules to elect most of the legislature. However, the same problems of personalized and factionalized party politics that plagued Japan under SNTV also afflicted Taiwanese politics.10 In 2002, Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian advanced a similar reform to those in Japan, proposing that two-thirds of Taiwan’s parliament be elected by plurality rules and the remainder from a national list. Electors have a separate vote for the district and list ballots (previously, list seats were simply allocated to parties polling more than 5 percent in proportion to their vote share at the district level). Under this new model approved in 2005, the parliament was halved in size to 113 seats; two-thirds of the seats are elected in single-member districts, 34 seats are selected from a national PR list, and 6 seats are reserved for aboriginal voters. This has brought Taiwan’s electoral system design squarely into line with other East Asian democracies.11 The South Korean experience of mixed systems has, until recently, represented a third approach to electoral reform in the region. Over the years, Korea has experimented with different combinations of local districts and national lists, all of them strongly majoritarian in practice. Since March 2004, of the Korean National Assembly’s 299 seats, 243 are elected from single-member constituencies by plurality rules, while the remaining 56 are allocated from a national constituency by proportional representation. Whereas previously voters received only one ballot, they now receive separate votes for the district and list seats. Since the two components are unlinked, this has only a marginal impact upon overall proportionality, but it means that smaller parties with a dispersed vote share are likely to receive some seats if they can surmount the 3 percent threshold. Thus, divergent approaches to electoral reform have resulted in highly congruent electoral systems in these three nations. A similar conclusion applies to the Philippines and Thailand, which also implemented major electoral reforms during the 1990s. Under its 1987 constitution, the Philippines was the first Asian democracy to adopt a mixed-member system, with up to 52 seats (20 percent of the legislature) allocated to a national list. Uniquely, however, list seats in the

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Philippines are not open to established parties but are designed to represent “sectoral interests” and marginalized groups such as youth, labor, the urban poor, farmers, fishermen, and women. First used in 1998, the party list regulations restrict each group to a maximum of 3 seats. These rules have generated widespread confusion, and the list seats have been dogged by problems, with less than half the winning list candidates taking up their seats after the 1998 and 2001 elections.12 The list seats have, however, resulted in more diversity within parliament than previously, with list members of parliament (MPs) playing an increasingly prominent role in the media and on legislative committees.13 Like the Philippines, Thailand moved to a mixed-member majoritarian system in 1997, with 400 of the parliament’s 500 seats elected from single-member districts by plurality rules, and the remainder chosen by PR from a national list. Constituency MPs represent local districts and need to bring development opportunities to them. The list MPs are supposed to concentrate their energies on issues of national, not local, importance, and are expected to provide a wellspring of ministerial aspirants. Party list MPs who join the cabinet are replaced in parliament by the next person on the list, while district vacancies create a by-election. Consequently, elected members of the Thai cabinet come disproportionately from this relatively small group of national list MPs, rather than district representatives. Whether this mixed-member system is reinstated under the new constitution currently being drafted in Bangkok, however, remains to be seen. Four other cases of recent democratization in Asia—Indonesia, Cambodia, Mongolia, and East Timor—also demonstrate some of the underlying issues driving electoral reform across the region. Both Indonesia and Cambodia use straight party list PR systems, but demands for closer links between voters and their elected representatives have led to a drastic reduction in “district magnitude”—that is, the number of members elected from each electoral district. In contrast to previous years, where provincial units defined constituency boundaries, Indonesia’s 2004 elections featured a maximum of 12 members per district. This raised the threshold for electoral victory considerably and made it much more difficult for smaller parties to win seats than at previous elections.14 The overall effect—as in the other Asian cases—makes Indonesia’s current electoral arrangements considerably more majoritarian than previously. A series of reforms in Cambodia have also lowered the proportionality of the electoral system. Prior to the 1998 elections, the elec-

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toral formula was changed to allocate seats according to the “highest average” method at the provincial level, rather than the nationwide “largest remainder” system used in 1993. This change discriminated against smaller parties. In response to calls for greater local accountability, district boundaries were also adjusted, so that over one-third of all Cambodian parliamentarians now represent single-member districts.15 As in Indonesia, these changes eliminated many small political parties, to the advantage of the larger incumbents. Mongolia’s experience of electoral reform has been rather different. Since the first multiparty elections in 1990, the nation has employed a number of different electoral systems with varying political consequences. The 1990, 1992, and 1996 elections used a block vote system. In 2000, the dominant Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) won an overwhelming victory in the legislature after introducing an unusual two-round runoff system, which required a plurality of 25 percent of the vote for candidates to be elected. This allowed the MPRP to secure 72 seats in the 76-member parliament with around 52 percent of the popular vote—a hugely unbalanced outcome that has stimulated further reform proposals.16 East Timor also used a mixed-member system for its founding elections in 2001. However, the East Timorese model stands apart from the region’s other mixed systems by electing most seats from the party list rather than from districts. For the August 2001 constituent assembly elections, 75 seats were elected on a nationwide basis by proportional representation, and only 13 seats (one for each district) by plurality rules. In the 2001 elections, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin) captured 55 of the 88 Assembly seats, winning 43 of the 75 national seats and all of the available district seats. The Assembly then transformed itself into a legislature and passed a new constitution for the new nation, which specifies that future elections must be held by proportional representation for a much smaller parliament. Finally, we can briefly summarize the electoral arrangements of Malaysia and Singapore. The core features of the electoral system have remained unchanged since independence in both states, but a succession of apparently technical changes have tilted the electoral playing field increasingly in favor of incumbents. Malaysia uses a standard Westminster system with plurality elections, but constituency boundaries are gerrymandered to favor rural communities, and the electoral commission is a compliant servant of the government. The government has never lost an election and, with one exception, has always held the

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two-thirds majority needed to amend the constitution. At the 2004 elections, the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition won over 90 percent of seats on 63 percent of the vote. The situation is even more advantageous to the ruling party in Singapore. Today, most Singaporean MPs are elected from multimember Group Representation Constituencies, each returning from four to six members. Voters choose from competing party lists rather than candidates, and the highest-polling list wins all seats in the district. Combined with heavy restraints on opposition movements and a compliant progovernment press, this “party block” system has hugely benefited Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), which regularly wins over 90 percent of seats in parliament. At the 2001 elections, for example, the PAP won 82 out of 84 parliamentary seats with 74 percent of the vote. Table 2.1 sets out changes in East Asian electoral systems since 1990. Several reform patterns stand out when examining East Asia as a whole. First, in almost all cases, the region’s mixed-member systems are heavily weighted in favor of the district element of the system—making them operate more like straight plurality systems than mixed-member models elsewhere. In all cases bar one, the bulk of legislative seats are chosen from local districts rather than the national list. As Table 2.2 shows, this means that all the East Asian mixed systems (with the exception of East Timor) are highly majoritarian in practice. This directly contrasts with the international norm, where mixed systems such as Germany and New Zealand feature an equal or nearly equal split between the district and list components. East Asian states have also rejected the compensatory mechanisms used by these countries, in which list seats are allocated to produce proportionality of outcomes. Rather, every Asian mixed-member system runs the list component of elections in parallel with the district contest, but with no interchange between the two. The limited number of proportional representation seats in most Asian nations compared with other regions can be explained in part by the desire of incumbents to minimize the threat of political fragmentation by restricting the electoral prospects of minor parties, particularly those based around ethnic or regional criteria. While smaller parties can hope to gain some representation from the list seats, overall levels of proportionality in such systems are more like those of a plurality system than a proportional one. Most East Asian nations also use vote thresholds or seat caps on the party list seats to further restrict the electoral prospects of smaller parties. The combination of these characteristics with the lack of any compensatory mechanisms and the relatively small number of proportional seats available reinforces these majoritarian tendencies.

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Electoral System Changes in East Asia Since 1990

Country

Former Electoral System

New Electoral System

Cambodia

Closed-list PR (largest remainder method) — Closed-list PR SNTV Block vote Plurality/block vote Modified pluralitya Mixed SNTV-PR Block vote

Closed-list PR (highest average method) (1998) Mixed plurality-PR (2002) Open-list PR (2004) Mixed plurality-PR (1994) Two-round system (2000) Mixed plurality-PR (1998) Mixed plurality-PR (1996/2003) Mixed plurality-PR (2005) Mixed plurality-PR (1997)

East Timor Indonesia Japan Mongolia Philippines South Korea Taiwan Thailand

Notes: PR = proportional representation, SNTV = single nontransferable vote. a. South Korea’s 1988 system delivered list seats to the party that won the most seats in the district contest, assuring it an overall majority in the assembly. Since 1996, list seats have been allocated on the basis of each party’s vote (rather than seat) share at the district level. In 2003, Korea adopted a standard mixed-member model, with separate votes for each tier.

Despite their marked similarities, it is important to emphasize the different motivations that lay behind these various reforms. In Thailand, the party list seats are supposed to produce high-quality candidates who may not be suited to the cut and thrust of electoral campaigning, and thus to strengthen the party system. In Japan, the motive was to lower the value of the heavily weighted rural seats that unduly encouraged pork-barrel politics and to encourage a move toward twoparty politics. The reasoning in South Korea and Taiwan was similar to Japan’s, but with one important addition. Regionalism is a problem in both countries, especially in South Korea, and so the party list is elected on a nationwide basis, encouraging parties to pitch their policy messages to a national audience rather than concentrate on a regional one. In the Philippines, the core problem has long been the domination of politics by traditional elites, and the party list system is therefore only open to disadvantaged groups. Nonetheless, a common thread across all cases appears to be the desire to strengthen party systems and reduce incentives for clientelism and corruption.

Party Systems in East Asia How have these various electoral reforms affected the region’s party systems? As noted in the Introduction, analysts traditionally saw many of these nations as lacking the kind of broad-based, institutionalized,

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Table 2.2

Mixed-Member Electoral Systems in East Asia District Seats

District System

List Seats

List System

Total Seats

Japan Korea Taiwan Thailand Philippines

300 243 73 400 209

Plurality Plurality Plurality Plurality Plurality

180 56 34 100 up to 53

480 299 113a 500 262

East Timor

13

Plurality

75

List PR List PR List PR List PR List PR, with 3-seat limit List PR

Country

88

Note: a. Includes six additional seats reserved for aboriginal minorities.

programmatic political parties necessary for democracy to work effectively. With a few exceptions such as the KMT in Taiwan or the LDP in Japan, the region’s parties have typically been described as inchoate, organizationally thin, and possessing only shallow roots in society.17 One reason is the diverse cultural makeup of many East Asian states, which encourages weak and fragmented party systems. For instance, since its return to democracy in 1986, the Philippines has suffered from the consequences of a weak party system: transient and personalized parties, clientelistic and elite-dominated politics, and an ongoing crisis of underdevelopment.18 Democracy in Indonesia has also been hampered recurrently by the consequences of party fragmentation—both in recent years and during the country’s initial democratic interlude— when shifting coalitions of secular, Islamic, nationalist, communal, and regional parties led to six changes of government in seven years.19 The fragmentation and fluidity of these party systems also appear in the public’s weak attachment to parties in most of these nations (see Chapter 4 by Emile C. J. Sheng in this volume). Problems of weak parties can also afflict relatively unstratified societies. For instance, although Thai-speaking Buddhists comprise over 90 percent of the population, Thailand has had a highly unstable democratic system, with frequent changes of governing coalitions, small parties holding larger ones to ransom under the threat of withdrawing support, and no government lasting the full length of its parliamentary term.20 This political fragmentation exacerbated underlying problems of vote buying and corruption: since the outcome of the elections was usually unclear, and all governments were coalitions of five or more parties, money became an essential lubricant for politicians and those seeking political favors. As Duncan McCargo put it, “the electoral sys-

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tem had become a massive exercise in benefit-sharing, the slicing up of a cake which grew larger and more sumptuous with each election. Most of the eating, however, was done by elites.”21 Even in highly homogeneous societies such as Korea, regional cleavages have strongly influenced the nature of political parties and hence political development. For instance, because most Korean parties continue to be associated with distinct territorial strongholds, “regionalism is the key mobilizing element on which politicians base their appeal and to which the voters respond.”22 Such regionalism tends to encourage personalized political parties focused on sectoral rather than national interests, to the detriment of the country as a whole. Thus, Ahn Chung-Si and Jaung Hoon lament how “the legacy of authoritarian rule, regional cleavages, and the lack of institutionalization of political parties has blocked Korea’s path towards a mature democracy.”23 To illustrate this relationship, Figure 2.1 examines the correlation between the number of political parties and social diversity across East Asia’s electoral democracies. Social diversity is measured by Fearon’s index of ethnic and cultural fragmentation, which indicates the probability of two randomly drawn citizens within a country being members of different ethnic or cultural groups. The index of ethnic heterogeneity ranges from 0 (completely homogeneous) to 1 (completely heterogeneous).24 Party fragmentation is measured by the mean “effective” numbers of parliamentary parties for all elections held in the country.25 As Figure 2.1 shows, there is considerable variation in both phenomena across East Asia. At one end, culturally diverse societies such as Indonesia feature relatively fragmented party systems. This is no surprise: because political parties in theory represent the political expression of underlying societal cleavages, we would expect that more fragmented societies tend to have more fragmented party systems too.26 The comparative literature on democratization maintains that more diverse societies tend to produce more fragmented party systems.27 While this pattern is also evident in Asian nations, the overall relationship between the two factors in East Asia is not strong, with an R-square of just 0.12. One reason for this pattern is that the countries with the smallest number of effective parties are not the most socially homogeneous states (such as Japan or Korea), but rather the semidemocracies of Singapore and Malaysia, which feature one-party dominant systems sustained by restrictions on opposition parties. In addition, in states such as Korea, social cleavages are not based around ethnolinguistic variables but around other issues such as regionalism, which are not captured by this measure,

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Ethnolinguistic Fragmentation

Figure 2.1

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Party Politics in East Asia Political Parties and Social Diversity in East Asia

Singapore

Japan

Effective Number of Parties

while social cleavages in cases such as Taiwan are relevant to the extent that they reflect deeper political divisions over national identity.28 In sum, while there is a positive relationship between party numbers and social diversity, it appears mediated by other factors. One of these factors is the institutional rules of the game within which the formation and operation of political parties take place. As well as the electoral reforms described above, a number of East Asian governments have introduced new laws regarding the formation, composition, and funding of political parties. In Indonesia, for example, new party registration laws discourage regionally based parties from competing in elections, and revised arrangements for presidential elections require successful candidates to gain cross-regional support.29 Under the 1997 constitution, Thailand required parties to maintain membership and branch networks in each of the country’s five main regions, which must also be “equitably represented” on Senate candidate lists.30 Similar cross-national thresholds on party formation exist in the Philippines:

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new parties must have regional offices in at least nine of the country’s sixteen regions and must gain support in more than half of the cities and provinces where their candidates run.31 But can measures such as these really influence the way political parties and party systems develop? One way of gaining traction on this question is to look at changes in the party systems over time. As Table 2.3 shows, there has been a sharp reduction in party fragmentation across the region in recent years. In cases such as Thailand, this change has been dramatic: there, the effective number of parties declined by almost 50 percent, from an average of 7.2 in the ten-year period from 1986 to 1996 to 3.8 at the 2001 elections held under the new constitution, and just 1.65 in 2005. In Indonesia, the absolute number of parties dropped from 48 in 1999 to 24 parties at the 2004 poll—again, a 50 percent decline over one parliamentary term—although the effective number of parliamentary parties actually rose, from 5.4 in 1999 to 8.3 in 2004, as votes were spread more evenly across the large parties. In Japan, the mixed-member majoritarian electoral reforms have steadily decreased the effective party numbers—from an average of 3.7 effective parties over the postwar period to an average of 2.9 parties for the three elections since the 1994 reforms—a 20 percent decline over nine years.32 Mongolia, too, has seen a marked shift in recent years toward two-party politics compared with the lopsided outcomes of the past, with an ENP in 2004 of 2.01. Asian reformers have often invoked the image of the stable and cohesive two-party systems of Britain and the United States when advocating political change.33 Based on the changes in the effective number

Table 2.3

Changes in the Effective Numbers of Political Parties

Country Indonesia, 1999–2005 Thailand, 1992–2005 East Timor, 2001–2005 Cambodia, 1993–2005 Malaysia, 1957–2005 Mongolia, 1992–2004 Philippines, 1986–2005 Taiwan, 1992–2005 Korea, 1988–2005 Singapore, 1968–2005 Japan, 1949–2005

Effective Number of Political Parties (all elections)

Effective Number of Political Parties (most recent election)

6.85 5.03 2.42 2.36 1.57 1.31 4.90 2.56 2.83 1.03 3.43

8.30 (2004) 1.65 (2005) 2.42 (2001) 2.29 (2003) 1.22 (2004) 2.01 (2004) 3.48 (2004) 2.18 (2004) 2.36 (2004) 1.05 (2001) 2.40 (2003)

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of parliamentary parties, a number of East Asian polities appear to be in a process of transformation toward becoming embryonic two-party systems. This trend is particularly apparent in Japan, Mongolia, Taiwan, and Korea, each of which has seen increasing party system consolidation. Mongolia today appears to be closest to a true two-party system, with both the MPRP and the main opposition party, the Motherland Democracy Coalition, winning an almost equal number of seats in the 2004 elections, and with virtually no other parties represented.

Conclusion What are the broader implications of East Asia’s shift toward more majoritarian democracy? Political scientists have believed that pluralitylike electoral rules will, over time, encourage the development of two large, aggregative parties.34 In a two-party system, the most successful parties will tend to be those that command the middle ground. As a consequence, office-seeking candidates in such systems need to adopt policies that appeal to the broadest possible array of interests, avoiding extreme positions and focusing instead on widely shared demands: for example, the need for economic growth, competent bureaucracy, clean government, and so on. Thus, in theory, majoritarian parliamentary elections and two-party systems should produce centripetal politics focused on the political center and characterized by stable and predictable majority rule (also see Chapter 3 by Russell J. Dalton and Aiji Tanaka in this volume). These tendencies are reinforced in those nations that have also adopted direct elections for president, which similarly promotes majoritarian politics. However, party consolidation may also lessen the representation of diverse social groups as the number of party options decreases, which is discussed in Chapter 5 by Ian McAllister. These factors are likely to have important longer-term impacts on political development. Analysts of democratization increasingly argue that the optimum conditions for democratic consolidation included a “settled and aggregative” party system in which “one or two broadlybased, centrist parties fight for the middle ground.”35 Political economists also extol the virtues of settled, aggregative party systems for generating public goods, social welfare, and economic development. Stephan Haggard, for instance, has consistently argued that a system of two large parties or coalitions is the most propitious arrangement for democratic durability during periods of economic adjustment, while

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fragmented or polarized party systems represent a major barrier to achieving economic reform.36 The potential emergence in many Asian countries of nascent twoparty systems in what were previously either one-party autocracies or unstable multiparty democracies thus has important developmental implications, particularly if the changing institutional environment encourages stronger and more programmatic parties with stable roots in society. As such, East Asia’s shift toward not just majoritarian political systems but also increasingly majoritarian political outcomes is likely to have profound longer-term consequences for the region’s governance, with the emergence of what appears to be a distinctive model of electoral democracy.37

Notes 1. See Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1947), 269. 2. See Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 3. This is the definition suggested by Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 4. However, we should also note that the chapters on citizen attitudes and electoral behavior in the rest of this collection exclude the semidemocracies and focus on the democratic polities that are included in each of the three major public opinion surveys of East Asia. 5. For excellent recent surveys of Asian electoral systems, see Aurel Croissant, Gabriele Bruns, and Marei John, eds., Electoral Politics in Southeast and East Asia (Singapore: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2002); Allen Hicken and Yuko Kasuya, “A Guide to the Constitutional Structures and Electoral Systems of East, South and Southeast Asia,” Electoral Studies 22 (2003): 121–151; and Dieter Nohlen, Florian Grotz, and Christof Hartmann, eds., Elections in Asia and the Pacific, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 6. Also see Andrew Reynolds, Ben Reilly, and Andrew Ellis, Electoral System Design (Stockholm: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 2005). 7. Surin Maisrikrod, “Political Reform and the New Thai Electoral System.” In John Fuh-sheng Hsieh and David Newman, eds., How Asia Votes (New York: Chatham House, 2002), p. 196. 8. Takayuki Sakamoto, “Explaining Electoral Reform: Japan Versus Italy and New Zealand,” Party Politics 5, no. 4 (1999): 431–432. 9. Ellis S. Krauss and Robert Pekkanen, “Explaining Party Adaptation to Electoral Reform: The Discreet Charm of the LDP?” Journal of Japanese Studies 30, no. 1 (2004): 7.

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10. John Fuh-sheng Hsieh, “The SNTV System and Its Political Implications.” In Hung-Mao Tien, ed., Taiwan’s Electoral Politics and Democratic Transition (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). 11. See Jih-wen Lin, “Party Realignment and the Demise of SNTV in East Asia,” unpublished paper, Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan (2005). 12. R. J. May, “Elections in the Philippines, May 2001,” Electoral Studies 21, no. 4 (2002): 673–680. 13. Steven Rood, “Elections as Complicated and Important Events in the Philippines.” In Hsieh and Newman, eds., How Asia Votes, p. 152. 14. Stephen Sherlock, “Consolidation and Change: The Indonesian Parliament After the 2004 Elections” (Canberra: Centre for Democratic Institutions, 2004), p. 4. 15. At the time of writing there were eight single-member constituencies in Cambodia, up from six in 1993. 16. See Reynolds, Reilly, and Ellis, Electoral System Design, p. 27. 17. See Chapter 7 by Yun-han Chu and Min-hua Huang in this volume. 18. Paul D. Hutchcroft and Joel Rocamora, “Strong Demands and Weak Institutions: The Origins and Evolution of the Democratic Deficit in the Philippines,” Journal of East Asian Studies 3 (2003): 259–292. 19. This provided the pretext for the declaration of martial law by Sukarno in 1957. See R. William Liddle, “Coercion, Co-optation, and the Management of Ethnic Relations in Indonesia.” In Michael E. Brown and Sumit Ganguly, eds., Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in the Asia-Pacific (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 20. David Murray, “Thailand’s Recent Electoral Reforms,” Electoral Studies 17, no. 4 (1998): 527. 21. Duncan McCargo, “Introduction: Understanding Political Reform in Thailand.” In Duncan McCargo, ed., Reforming Thai Politics (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2002), p. 7. 22. Ahn Chung-si and Jaung Hoon, “South Korea.” In Ian Marsh, Jean Blondel, and Takashi Inoguchi, eds., Democracy, Governance and Economic Performance (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1999), p. 152. 23. Ibid., p. 162. 24. James D. Fearon, “Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country,” Journal of Economic Growth 8 (2003): 195–222. As with all such exercises, Fearon’s index includes some questionable classifications: the majority population in the Philippines, for instance, is categorized as “lowland Christian Malays,” which effectively elides many salient subnational ethnolinguistic cleavages. I therefore recalculated the Philippines measure using data from Asian-Pacific Cultural Center, A Handbook of Asian-Pacific Countries and Regions (Taipei: Asian-Pacific Cultural Center, 1995). 25. The effective number of parties is the inverse of the sum of the squared proportions of the vote or the seats of all parties. For n parties, and for pi representing the proportion of seats won by party i,

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ENP =

25

1 ∑n pi 2

See Markku Laakso and Rein Taagepera, “Effective Number of Parties,” Comparative Political Studies 12 (1979): 3–27. 26. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction.” In Lipset and Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1967). 27. G. Bingham Powell, Contemporary Democracies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 84. 28. In addition, the calculation of the number of parties also has an impact. In Malaysia, for example, the Barisan Nasional is counted as one party, in line with electoral statistics, rather than as the 14-party coalition that contested the 1999 elections. 29. Benjamin Reilly, “Political Parties and Political Engineering in the Asia-Pacific Region,” Asia Pacific Issues: Analysis from the East-West Center 71 (December 2003): 1–8. 30. Constitution, Art. 99 and Electoral Law, Art. 35. 31. Christof Hartmann, Graham Hassall, and Soliman M. Santos Jr., “Philippines.” In Nohlen, Grotz, and Hartmann, eds., Elections in Asia and the Pacific, p. 195. 32. My thanks to Yusaku Horiuchi for these Japanese data. 33. See Sakamoto, “Explaining Electoral Reform,” pp. 431–432. 34. The classic statement of this is Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (New York: Wiley, 1954). 35. Larry Diamond, “Toward Democratic Consolidation.” In Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., The Global Resurgence of Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 239. 36. See Stephan Haggard and Steven B. Webb, Voting for Reform: Democracy, Political Liberalization and Economic Adjustment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 37. See Benjamin Reilly, Democracy and Diversity: Political Engineering in the Asia-Pacific (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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3 The Patterns of Party Alignment Russell J. Dalton and Aiji Tanaka

F

or a party system to offer reasonable and meaningful political choices to the voters, and for democratic elections to function, the parties must present significant policy choices and distinct governing programs. Party systems should reflect the enduring structure of democratic competition and thus should represent the significant political and social cleavages in the nation. For instance, research on the formation of democratic party systems in Europe argued that parties provided an opportunity for existing social divisions to find political expression—and resolution—through electoral competition.1 Without such content and a clear programmatic structure, elections could become ephemeral expressions of opinions or personality contests, rather than instrumental acts of governance. This logic is embedded in the discussions of electoral system reform that Benjamin Reilly described in the previous chapter. Furthermore, the relative positions of parties in terms of cleavage or ideological dimensions have fundamental implications for electoral politics. For instance, Giovanni Sartori maintained that the degree of party polarization affected the patterns of governing and the legitimacy of the democratic process.2 Extremely polarized systems typically experience higher levels of political conflict and popular protest.3 In contrast, converging party positions may reflect the ability of government to build consensus among competing political factions. Yet, the nature of party alignments in East Asian party systems remains uncertain. These party systems are incredibly diverse in their organizational structure, the number of parties, and the types of parties that compete (also Reilly, this volume). As others in this collection have noted, most of the party systems in this region are characterized by fluidity and volatility. But does this fluidity reflect shifts in voter preferences 27

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for parties with distinct policy profiles or the lack of clear programs for voters to choose among? In other words, the clarity of party positions remains uncertain, and much of our present evidence is based on the observations of political analysts rather than the perceptions of democratic electorates. Sartori’s observations about the potential impact of party system polarization on the democratic process may be especially relevant as East Asia party systems attempt to consolidate their democratic systems. This chapter examines the structure of party systems in East Asian democracies. We first describe the distribution of the public along the left-right dimension. Like other spatial modeling studies using the leftright scale, we presume that left-right positions summarize citizen and party positions on the political issues of relevance in a nation, even though the term left-right can have different meanings for different voters.4 We next describe how these electorates position the major parties on the left-right scale, which maps the pattern of party competition. Third, we use these electorate and party positions to describe these party systems in terms of their polarization and representation. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings. We analyze data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems that surveyed citizens across several Asian democracies.5 This is the first comparative election survey of East Asian democracies and now includes two waves of surveys. The findings systematically compare how East Asian publics perceive the structure of party system competition and describe the party positions within these systems.

The Left-Right Framework While each election comprises a unique set of issues, candidates, and activities, party systems should provide a stable structure for discussing and addressing the broader social conflicts in a nation. For example, Seymour Lipset noted that the conflict between the economic “haves” and “havenots” seemed a fundamental element of most democratic party systems; Lipset and Stein Rokkan developed a more comprehensive framework that described the evolution of Western party systems in terms of the social cleavages existing in these societies.6 New quality of life issues or issues of nationality provide other potential sources of social and party division. As new party systems have formed during the Third Wave of democratization, this raises the important question of whether the parties offer distinct policy choices in these new democracies.7 Clearly, there are many different frameworks (ideological or social group competition) that might structure party competition. Often these

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multiple frameworks are combined (or compressed) into a unidimensional structure of party competition. This approach is most clearly identified with Anthony Downs’s spatial modeling of party competition and research that builds on his framework.8 In established Western democracies, party alignments are often described in terms of the left-right dimension. The logic of this Downsian spatial model is that parties and voters can be aligned along this dimension to map the pattern of party competition. Even if this is an oversimplification of political reality, it provides a good first approximation of the nature of party competition.9 Knowing whether a party is “left” or “right” helps citizens to locate themselves in relation to the party. Left-right position thus provides a cue to orient individuals to political issues and personalities. When citizens face a choice at election time, the Downsian logic implies that they will select the party that is closest to their own position along this continuum. A leftist will select a party nearby on the left end of the continuum, while a rightist will select a party near his/her position. Moreover, the distances between voters and parties along the dimension can predict the likelihood of voting and satisfaction with government policies. Thus, this is a theoretically powerful model of party competition. Both the Downsian spatial analyses and survey researchers using the left-right framework do not presume that citizens have a deep understanding of ideological concepts embedded in these concepts of left and right. Instead, such a simple structure provides a shorthand for summarizing the enduring issues of political debate in a nation.10 And the left-right framework is not limited to traditional socioeconomic issues. For instance, to a Japanese blue-collar worker, left may mean social welfare policies; to a young Japanese college student it may mean environmental protection and other quality of life issues. Along with other public opinion researchers, Ronald Inglehart finds that most citizens in most nations can locate themselves on a left-right scale, and he describes the scale as representing the “major conflicts that are present in the political system.”11 Even if the specific definitions of left and right may vary across individuals and even nations, the simple structure of a general left-right scale provides a basis of comparison.12 When one turns to East Asian democracies, however, the existence of a simple left-right framework of party competition is uncertain. Previous research suggests that parties in several Asian democracies have not developed strong institutional ties to a social base or a firm ideological identity. Most citizens in East Asia can position themselves on a left-right scale, which implies they can relate to these terms, but the content of this framework is less clear. For example, the most extensive evidence exists for Japan. Several dimensional analyses have identified what appears to

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be a left-right framework to the Japanese party system;13 the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) and other leftist parties are at one end of this continuum, and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) at the other. But at the same time, few analysts maintain that a Marxist-capitalist debate or other social cleavages are strongly related to electoral choice in Japan.14 The evidence from the newly consolidated democracies of Korea and Taiwan is also ambiguous. Doh Chull Shin and Byong-Kuen Jhee show that the left-right terminology is widely accepted and these orientations are primarily linked to political and economic reform attitudes.15 A complicating factor is the turnover in Korean parties; new parties constantly entering the system make it more difficult to position parties along a left-right dimension. Most Taiwanese can also position themselves on a left-right scale, yet there is less consensus on the meaning of this dimension in Taiwanese politics. National identity issues are strongly related to Kuomintang (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) support, while polarization on economic and social welfare issues appears modest.16 The relative weight of distinct issues is uncertain, and perceptions of party differences may have moderated over the past two decades.17 For the Philippines, there is limited evidence that social cleavages (and the policies they reflect) actually structure party positions.18 However, systematic cross-national comparisons have been limited because national studies use different methods to assess the structure of party competition and the meaning of this structure. Even if a clear description of party alignments is available for one nation, the lack of similar analyses for other East Asian nations has impeded cross-national comparisons—and limited our understanding of how party systems may be similar or different. Therefore, we will systematically compare the framework of party competition across East Asian party systems using the leftright dimension. We realize the meaningfulness of the left-right dimension in East Asia is still an open research question, but this can be evaluated by assessing its ability to increase our understanding of these party systems.

Measuring Left-Right Positions Until recently, it was difficult to compare party systems in the relative position of parties and the overall level of polarization because this required measuring the ideological position of parties as well as their vote shares. Typically, researchers estimated polarization from indirect indicators, such as the number of parties in an electoral system, the size of extremist parties, or the vote share for governing parties. Some previous

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studies coded parties into ideological families (e.g., communist, socialist, centrist, fascist) and used this to categorize the diversity of party systems.19 These methods provide broad approximations of the actual ideological position of parties, but treat all parties of a family as identical and differences between families as equal interval differences. Another option is the use of party manifestos or expert opinion to estimate parties’ left-right positions.20 However, the comparative manifesto project focused on the salience of issues rather than party positions, and thus there is debate about the validity of this methodology.21 The party manifesto study also included only two East Asian nations in their project, and few expert studies include more than one or two East Asian nations. We therefore turn to another source to measure the positions of voters and parties: the perceptions of the electorate in the nation. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a cooperative international project that asks a common questionnaire in the national election studies of many contemporary democracies. The CSES includes surveys of Japan (1996, 2004), South Korea (2000, 2004), Taiwan (1996, 2001), and the Philippines (1998, 2004).22 We also examine Australia (1996, 2004) and New Zealand (1996, 2002). These two latter nations provide a reference standard for comparing East Asian party systems with those of two established Western democracies.23 The CSES asks respondents to position themselves along a leftright scale using the following question:24 In politics people sometimes talk of left and right. Where would you place yourself on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means the left and 10 means the right? 0 Left

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10 Right

The ability to position oneself on the left-right scale does not imply that citizens possess a sophisticated conceptual framework or theoretical understanding of liberal-conservative philosophy. We simply expect that positions on this scale summarize the issues and cleavages that primarily structure political competition in a nation. The meaning of this dimension can, and indeed likely does, vary across nations. To one person, political identities may be shaped by economic concerns; for another it may involve social issues, or other matters. The left-right dimension thus provides the metric for our cross-national comparisons.

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Initial evidence on the validity of the left-right dimension comes from the percentage of the public who can position themselves on this dimension. Across most East Asian systems, large majorities in the second CSES wave can locate themselves in left-right terms: Korea (83 percent), Japan (91 percent), and the Philippines (97 percent). These levels compare favorably to left-right understanding in both Australia (82 percent) and New Zealand (81 percent), where this terminology is widely used by citizens and elites. Only the Taiwanese public is hesitant to place themselves on the left-right scale; but even here, almost half have a left-right position (48.5 percent).25 The generally high levels of left-right self-placements across Asian party systems are consistent with evidence from the World Values Survey that asked the same question in many of these same nations.26 The distribution of left-right attitudes among each national sample is presented in Figure 3.1. The horizontal bars in the figure represent a two standard deviation range of individuals along the left-right scale— that is, an estimate of the ideological range that encompasses approximately two-thirds of the public. The vertical hash mark on each bar shows the mean score for respondents who place themselves on the scale. The figure shows that most publics tend to locate themselves near the center of the scale, with most national mean scores ranging between 5.0 and 6.0. The Korean public falls outside of this range to the left (mean = 4.89) and becomes more leftist between 2000 and 2004. The Philippine public, in contrast, is the most conservative (7.16), with 29 percent placing themselves at the rightmost category in 1998. The range of left-right opinions (i.e., the length of the horizontal bar) tends to be fairly similar across nations. The Korean and Philippine publics are slightly more polarized than average, and the Taiwanese public is slightly less polarized—but these differences are fairly modest. In addition, longitudinal comparisons for the Asian nations find that the changes between surveys are fairly modest. The ability of most East Asian citizens to locate themselves along a left-right dimension is a first indication of the validity of this scale as a method of political orientation in East Asia. This provides a common metric. However, we also recognize that the content of these selfidentities varies across nations.27 In Australia and New Zealand, leftright is strongly linked to economic issues and traditional/modern values. In contrast, economics plays a significantly weaker role in structuring left-right identities in East Asia, and cultural factors seem more influential. However, what is important for our analyses is that the left-

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33

Mean Left/Right Position of Electorate and Standard Deviation

Japan 1996 Japan 2004 Korea 2000 Korea 2004 Philippines 1998 Philippines 2004 Taiwan 1996 Taiwan 2001 Australia 1996 Australia 2004 New Zealand 1996 New Zealand 2002

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Left / Right Scale

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, modules 1 and 2. Note: Figure entries are mean scores for entire public and standard deviations in left-right placement: 0 (left) to 10 (right).

right dimension summarizes important aspects of political cleavage in a political system, even if they vary across nations.

Mapping Party Positions The next step of our analyses is to map and compare the position of political parties along the left-right dimension. Besides asking individuals to locate themselves on the left-right scale, the CSES asked them to position the major parties in the just-completed election. Since most chapters in this collection study citizen political behavior, the public’s perceptions of the parties’ positions should be the framework that guides their voting choices and other political judgments, more so than alternative estimates of the party space from experts or party manifestos. Figure 3.2 displays the mean location of the voters as the thick black arrows. In addition, it plots the citizens’ placement of the major political parties in both elections, with the thickness of the arrow indicating the party’s approximate voter share in the election.

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Figure 3.2

Citizen Placement of Parties on the Left-Right Scale JCP

SDP

DPJ Voters

NKP

LDP

Japan 2004 Left |-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|------------------|-------------------|------------------| Right 1996 3 4 5 6 7 8

JCP

SDP DPJ Voters Vote NFP NFP

DLP

UD

Voters

LDP

MDP

ULD GNP

Korea 2004 |-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|------------------|-------------------|------------------| 2000 3 4 5 6 7 8

DLP

Voters NK GNP MDP DPP

TSU DPP

ULD

PFP CNP Voters KMT

Taiwan 2001 |-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|------------------|-------------------|------------------| 1996 3 4 5 6 7 8

DPP

CNP Voters KMT

continues

One measure of the validity of the left-right framework is the ability of the public to use this scale to position the parties. Even in established democracies of Australia and New Zealand, approximately 20 percent of the public cannot locate the two major parties on the leftright scale, which is typically cited as evidence of limited political engagement or sophistication by some individuals. By comparison, the levels of party recognition in most East Asian democracies are quite similar, with 80–90 percent locating the major parties on the left-right

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35

Cont. AD LDP LIB NPC LAKAS Voters

Philippines 2004 |-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|------------------|-------------------|------------------| 1998 3 4 5 6 7 8

LIB LAKAS LAMMP PADER AD PROMDI

GRN

LAB DEM

Voters ONE

NAT

Voters

LIB

Australia 2004 |-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|------------------|-------------------|------------------| 1996 3 4 5 6 7 8

GRN

LAB DEM

Voters

LIB NAT

GRN ALL LAB Voters UF NZF NAT ACT New Zealand 2002 |-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|------------------|-------------------|------------------| 1996 3 4 5 6 7 8

ALL

LAB

NZF Voters

CHR

NAT

ACT

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, modules 1 and 2. Note: Arrows in the figure are the mean of citizen self-placement on the left-right scale (black arrow) and the mean placement of parties on the scale. The width of the arrows is roughly proportionate to the party’s vote share in the election. The striped arrows are the party ofSource: the prime minister who formed the government. Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, Modules I and II.

Note: Arrows in the figure are the mean of citizen self-placement on the left-right scale (bl

scale.28 Taiwan again lags in the recognition of left-right terminology, but half the public still locates the DPP and KMT on this scale. In terms of the actual placement of parties, in the 1996 Japanese election the public perceived the conservative LDP toward the right end of the scale, while the JCP was located at the very left end of the dimension. The average voter (5.38) is slightly to the right of center. This is an example of a polarized system, because the major party competi-

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tors were seen as quite distant from the medium voter. Although the NFP (New Frontier Party) and the DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan) were closer to the average voter, the vote shares of these two parties combined do not match the votes gained by the conservative LDP. In 2004, the same general pattern persists. The NFP was dissolved and some of its members merged into the DPJ and others went back to their original body of Komei, now called the NKP (New Komei Party). The LDP and the NKP formed a coalition to govern, but the public perceives their government as still far to the right of the average voter. And while the LDP and JCP were seen as moving slightly toward the center by the 2004 election, the small parties in the center moved toward the ideological poles. Consequently, the overall polarization of the Japanese party system persisted from 1996 to 2004. Perhaps the most dramatic restructuring of the party system has occurred in Korea. In the 2000 election, the Korean system represented an anomaly in terms of Downsian party competition. The second panel in Figure 3.2 shows that the Koreans on average located themselves just to the left of center of the left-right scale (4.89). However, Koreans saw virtually all the significant parties as positioned to their right. The Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) was the major liberal party, and the Grand National Party (GNP) was the major conservative party. Both of these parties were positioned half a scale point or more to the right of the average Korean, along with the United Liberal Democrats (ULD), the Democratic People’s Party (DPP), and the small New Korean Party of Hope (NKP). Thus, rather than a balanced choice between left and right parties, in 2000 the voter saw only degrees of conservative choice.29 The election was fought over evaluations of the presidency of Kim Dae-jung, who led the MDP and was opposed by the GNP. Moo-hyun Roh’s election to president in 2003 as a representative of the MDP sowed the seeds of a rapid restructuring of the Korean party system. Roh’s policies as president and the parliament’s attempted impeachment of Roh in 2003 dramatically polarized the party system and shifted Korea’s center of gravity to the left. Between 2000 and 2004, the average voter moved three-tenths of a scale point to the left. The MDP sustained large losses in the backlash following its leading role in the impeachment of Roh. The GNP, which also favored impeachment, saw its vote share drop slightly. Moreover, the public perceived both of these parties as moving dramatically to the right in 2004; the MDP was seen as shifting 0.81 point and the GNP by 1.67 points (a dramatic shift by a major party). Counterbalancing these trends, the newly formed Our Party (UD) supported Roh and emerged with the largest vote share and

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the largest number of parliamentary seats. The UD’s support for closer ties with North Korea and its identification with Roh led voters to place it well to the left (3.72) on the scale. In Taiwan, the right means a position closer to the traditional authority (the KMT), whereas a leftist orientation means a position farther away from the traditional authority. Therefore, the left-right dimension does not fully capture party positions on policy orientations. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is the main contender to the KMT. The TSU (Taiwan Solidarity Union) is very strongly oriented toward independence from China, while the PFP (People First Party) and the CNP (Chinese New Party) are strongly oriented toward unification with China. Indeed, analysts of Taiwanese politics often frame political competition in terms of the nationalist issue, which presumably shapes left-right identities. Therefore, the left-right dimension of the party system in Taiwan coincides with the feelings of anti- (left) and pro- (right) traditional authority, plus pro-independence vs. pro-unification. The two major parties, the KMT and the DPP, are seen as converging slightly between 1996 and 2001, but this was already a centrist party system in ideological terms. A set of new parties emerged after the 1996 election, and they contributed to a slight increase in party diversity. (Subsequent to the 2001 survey, there was an apparent polarization of the Taiwanese parties as a result of the Chen administration and reelection.) One of the most surprising party landscapes exists in the Philippines. Philippine democracy has experienced a continuing struggle since Ferdinand Marcos was deposed in 1986. Even though several national elections had occurred by the 1998 survey, the party system remained fluid and weakly structured.30 In 1998, the LAMMP (Struggle of the Patriotic Filipino Masses) party received the most seats, and Joseph Estrada was elected president as head of the party. Lakas-NUCD (Lakas–Christian Muslim Democrats) was the previous governing party, and other parties represented liberal (LIB, AD) or regional (PROMDI) interests. However, the distinctive feature of the Philippine system is the location of the average voter to the right of all the significant political parties! This is an anomaly that Downs would not have predicted possible, at least as a sustained element of party competition. Yet, the 2004 election also displays an un-Downsian party space. The party space had shifted to the left, possibly in reaction to Estrada’s impeachment and his replacement in office by Gloria Arroyo. The Nationalist People’s Coalition (NPC) included elements from the LAMMP as the major opposition party, and Filipinos saw this party to the left of

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the LAMMP position in 1998. The net result is that there is now an interpretable left-right ordering between the NPC and Lakas. However, there is substantial overlap between the Philippine parties, with citizens seeing little distinction between their electoral choices. Moreover, the average Philippine voter is still positioned to the right of all the established parties. We suspect that this pattern reflects a combination of several factors. The Philippine voters themselves may embrace “the right” as a normative statement or a reflection of their religious beliefs more than an ideological position. (It appears that the only other nation in the CSES that follows a similar pattern is Mexico, where the self-placement of the average citizen is also to the right of the major parties.) In both CSES surveys and other cross-national surveys, the Philippine public expresses a rightist tendency, so this seems to be a persistent trait and not a passing pattern in a single public opinion survey.31 Rightist orientations in the Philippines also may contain populist appeals that are typically identified as leftist in cross-national comparisons or in elite discourse. For instance, expert observers would place the LAMMP to the left of Lakas in 1998, but the Philippine public reversed the ordering of these two parties. If the mass of the Philippine public saw themselves as located on the right, and they perceived the LAMMP as closest to their position in 1998 because of its populist rhetoric to represent the masses, then this is a consistent ordering. Finally, elite competition in developing democracies can sometimes exist with weak ties to voter interests. Philippine parties appear more centrist than the voters at large and the public does not see them as offering very distinct policy alternatives. This fits other interpretations of Philippine elections as candidate-centered contests with little firm programmatic content. Overall, however, citizens see a substantial gap between themselves and the parties, which implies that parties are not presenting alternatives that reflect the public’s political preferences. At least briefly, we want to compare the East Asian democracies with the established Western democracies of Australia and New Zealand. Both of these party systems have been traditionally polarized along traditional class lines (and other policy cleavages), and left-right terminology is part of common political parlance. Thus we would expect both systems to display a fairly wide span of party choices. The Australian Labor Party and Liberals were fairly polarized in the 1996 election, and the long-serving Labor government was forced from office because of the conflicts over economic reform. This began a period of heightened competition on economic reforms and then further polarization over cultural issues such as

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immigration and terrorism. Thus, by 2004 the two major Australian parties are even more clearly divided, and new contenders such as the Greens and One Nation have entered the party fray. Similarly, in the wake of the shift from a majoritarian to a proportional representation (PR) system, New Zealand party differences increased as the major parties sought to differentiate themselves.32 The PR system has also allowed new parties to compete for parliamentary seats, such as the Greens and the populist New Zealand First party. Thus, the 2004 election offered New Zealanders a wide array of party choices, and eight parties won seats in parliament. Indeed, of all the party systems in the figure, the New Zealand system appears to offer the voters the widest range of choice, spanning both traditional economic cleavages and new cultural issues. In summary, most Asian party systems follow a Downsian model of party competition. The average voter is typically located near the center of the left-right dimension, with the parties aligned to the left and right along this continuum. There are, however, two notable exceptions. In 2000, the Korean party space defied Downsian logic. Voters perceived the two major parties in similar positions on the left-right continuum, and both were located to the right of the average Korean. This presumably reflects Kim Dae-jung’s decision to ally with the conservative ULD. By the 2004 election, however, a Downsian space had reestablished itself, with the new UD perceived as the leftist alternative and the GNP on the right. Even more un-Downsian is the Philippine system, where voters locate themselves on the right, but see the parties as located to their left. Such a pattern seems unsustainable, since eventually a party should move to offer a clear choice to voters. Such patterns have emerged in other new democracies and it potentially indicates the importance of personality or nonideological factors in the structuring of party competition. Such lack of ideological choice also signifies a democracy deficit in the party system.

Party System Characteristics We have described the location of the average voter and political parties in this set of nations. In addition, when taken together these data also describe the characteristics of the party system as the combination of these elements. Party research has stressed that the degree of polarization in a system is important for several reasons. Sartori, for instance, argued that the stability and legitimacy of a democracy were related to its degree of polarization; G. Bingham Powell claimed that polarization affects the

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stability of a democracy.33 A highly polarized system produces clearer party choices but presumably also is more fractious and has more intense partisan competition. In a highly polarized system, the ideological gap between winners and losers is generally greater, and the policy implications of government control are more substantial because the parties are offering more distinct programs. Conversely, a centrist party system should reflect greater consensus within the electoral process—at least in left-right terms—and less interparty conflict. Another central element of the dimensional model of party competition is the calculation of the representation gap; that is, the gap between the average voter and the government on the left-right dimension. The democratic ideal holds that this difference should be small, so that government is close to the average voter. But the party choices presented to voters can systematically affect this representation gap. For instance, highly polarized party systems may systematically generate a larger representation gap, since alternative governments tend toward the extremes. Typically these party system characteristics are intuited from indirect indicators, such as the number of parties in an electoral system, the size of extremist parties, or the vote share for governing parties. However, we can directly measure both characteristics. The polarization of a party system can be conceptualized as the distribution of parties along the left-right scale, weighted by each party’s vote share.34 A few large parties near the center of the scale should thus generate a low polarization score, with a number of large parties at the left-right extremes producing a high score. Similarly, the representation gap can be easily measured by the absolute value of the left-right difference between individual citizens and the governing party. Table 3.1 presents estimates of polarization and the representation gap for the Asian nations in the CSES.35 The statistics on polarization restate what is apparent from the party locations in Figure 3.1. In broad cross-national terms, East Asian publics perceive their party systems as less polarized than do the citizens in the established democracies and the new democracies of Eastern Europe that are included in the CSES project.36 To the extent that clear party positions reflect and reinforce voter and social group alignments, the limited dispersion of parties in the Philippines and Taiwan may explain why Aie-Rie Lee (in Chapter 6) finds that a set of political attitudes weakly predicts voting choice in these nations. At the same time, the greater party polarization in Japan facilitates greater voter differentiation (and a higher percentage of explained variance).

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Party System Characteristics Party System Polarization

Nation Japan South Korea Taiwan Philippines Australia New Zealand Average of Western nations Average of East European nations

Voter-Government Representation Gap

CSES 1

CSES 2

CSES 1

CSES 2

3.30 0.70 1.18 1.33 2.04 3.81 3.30 3.67

3.30 3.55 1.14 0.46 1.96 3.35 3.18 5.14

2.68 2.19 1.51 1.94 1.92 2.91 — —

2.44 2.06 2.26 2.34 2.42 2.45 — —

Source: Calculated by authors from CSES, modules 1 and 2. Note: See note 35 for the calculation of the polarization and representation indexes.

For the East Asian party systems, the most dramatic pattern is the increase in party system polarization in South Korea between 2000 and 2004 as we discussed above. The Philippine party system displays convergence between waves, which means a further narrowing of the distinctions between parties that citizens can observe. Beyond these cases, there is a general continuity in the level of polarization across CSES waves, implying that we are seeing fairly stable traits of these party systems. Moreover, the cross-national pattern does not seem clearly linked to aggregate features of party systems that are typically used to imply levels of polarization. For instance, the nature of electoral systems, old/new democracies, and the number of parties are not distinctly related to the level of polarization for this set of nations.37 A second characteristic of party systems is the distance between the average voter and the government—what we call the representation gap. The right side of Table 3.1 presents the average absolute difference between the voter and the left-right placement of the prime minister’s party. The greatest representation gaps emerge in the consolidated democracies of Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, where party systems are relatively polarized and the governing parties are perceived as located toward the outer range of party choices. By comparison, the representation gap is smaller in the newer democracies of South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The 2000–2004 Korea trend is again especially striking. The anomalous party pattern in 2000 produced exceptionally low party polarization of a non-Downsian

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form. Even though polarization increased dramatically in 2004, the development of clearer party alternatives actually decreased the representation gap slightly.

Conclusion Party competition in free and fair elections remains the prerequisite for a meaningful democratic order. This essay has provided a first comparative mapping of the party alignments in several East Asian democracies and comparisons to the patterns in established democracies. Our findings add both to our understanding of party competition in East Asia and to broader theories of partisan politics. Our central analyses focused on the distribution of citizens and their perceptions of political parties along the left-right scale. By asking voters to locate themselves and the major parties along the left-right continuum, we can describe the structure of the party system as perceived by the public. There is considerable variation in these patterns across Asian party systems. This is not unusual since variation in polarization exists across European party systems as well. But it is noteworthy that the greatest party polarization exists in the consolidated democracies of Japan and New Zealand, not in the new democracies of Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea. This pattern is exceptional, because political conflicts in recent elections in these three latter nations imply a highly divisive political environment. One possible explanation for the lower polarization in East Asia’s new democracies is that conflicts in these new party systems are not ideologically based (but linked to personal or nonideological alignments), and thus are not reflected in left-right positions. The Lee contribution to this volume, which demonstrates the weak policy base of party support in these nations, reaffirms this point. Alternatively, new party systems typically, especially in Third Wave democracies, may begin as nonideological movements in left-right terms, and the process of democratization involves the development of clear programmatic choices in the party system. Thus, ideologically based partisan cleavages may actually increase in the early stages of democratization, as seem apparent among East European party systems. In more specific terms, there are problematic examples of party competition that apparently violate the basic logic of Downsian party competition. The clearest case is the Philippines, where the public sees

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all the parties as located to the left of their own position. The Korean election of 2000 is another example of a non-Downsian party space because of the opportunistic strategizing of Kim Dae-jung. Such anomalies raise doubts about the ability of elections to make authoritative policy choices and for voters to hold governments accountable for their policy actions in such cases. A distinct and institutionalized system of party competition seems essential to meaningful democratic elections. In broader theoretical terms, the degree of party polarization is often indirectly measured by the number of parties in a political system, and impressionistic evidence of their ideological differences. Our findings suggest that left-right party polarization can be quite distinct from the number of parties existing in a party system. We also expect that the institutional reforms to produce party cohesion that Benjamin Reilly described in his chapter will be less influential than the parties’ strategic electoral choices in how they present themselves to voters. Parties may choose to diverge in majoritarian electoral systems, and they may choose to converge in proportional systems. The impact of electoral system rules appears secondary to parties’ electoral calculations.38 Finally, our cross-national comparisons yield the surprising finding that the gap between the average voter’s position and the perceived position of the governing party is greatest in established democracies. The distance from the voter to the government in the most recent Australian, Japanese, and New Zealand elections is significantly greater than in South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. This, too, seems to be a consequence of greater left-right polarization in these party systems—so that with a bipolar pattern of competition, either selected government represents a more distinct ideological position that distances it from the opposition’s supporters. In summary, beyond the substantial diversity in the pattern of party competition across specific Asian party systems, these data suggest a general pattern of democratic development. Clear and enduring party choices often evolve as part of the democratization process, until voters, parties, and elites find a stable structure for electoral competition. Where this structure exists—as in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand—voters can more effectively translate their policy preferences into government programs, and clear party positions probably structure policy preferences as well. But where parties do not offer clear options, the potential for the democratic process to function is severely limited.

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Notes 1. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967); see Chapter 5 by Ian McAllister. 2. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 3. Arend Lijphart, Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); G. Bingham Powell, Contemporary Democracies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 4. Dieter Fuchs and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, “The Left-Right Schema.” In M. Kent Jennings and Jan van Deth, eds., Continuities in Political Action (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989); Russell Dalton, “The Quantity and the Quality of Party Systems,” Comparative Political Studies (forthcoming, 2008); Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Oddbjørn Knutsen, “Left-Right Party Polarization Among the Mass Publics.” In H. Narud and T. Aalberg, eds., Challenges to Representative Democracy (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 1990). 5. We are using modules 1 and 2 from the CSES. These data were downloaded from the CSES website (www.cses.org), which includes the questionnaires and other documentation. 6. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 230; Lipset and Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments. 7. Herbert Kitschelt et al., Post-communist Party Systems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Scott Mainwaring, Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999); Alejandro Moreno, Political Cleavages: Issues, Parties and the Consolidation of Democracy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999); Shaheen Mozaffar, J. Scarritt, and G. Galaich, “Electoral Institutions, Ethnopolitical Cleavages, and Party Systems in Africa’s Emerging Democracies,” American Political Science Review 97 (2003): 379–390. 8. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Wiley, 1957). 9. Gary Cox, “Centripetal and Centrifugal Incentives in Electoral Systems,” American Journal of Political Science 34 (1990): 903–935; Knutsen, “Left-Right Party Polarization.” 10. Other research describes the different correlates of left-right self-placement across nations, and thus the different interpretation of this scale: Ronald Inglehart and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, “Party Identification, Ideological Preference and the Left-Right Dimension Among Western Mass Publics.” In Ian Budge, Ivor Crewe, and Dennis Farlie, eds., Party Identification and Beyond (New York: Wiley, 1976); Inglehart, Culture Shift; Russell Dalton, “Social Modernization and the End of Ideology Debate: Patterns of Ideological Polarization,” Japanese Journal of Political Science 7, no. 1 (2006): 1–22. We also conducted more detailed analyses of the correlates of left-right for the six nations in this chapter; this methodological appendix is available from the authors.

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11. Inglehart, Culture Shift, p. 273. 12. Inglehart and Klingemann, “Party Identification, Ideological Preference”; Inglehart, Culture Shift; Dalton, “Social Modernization”; Oddbjørn Knutsen, “Left-Right Materialist Value Orientations.” In Jan van Deth and Elinor Scarbrough, eds., The Impact of Values (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 13. Scott Flanagan, “Electoral Change in Japan.” In Russell Dalton, Scott Flanagan, and Paul Beck, eds., Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Herbert Weisberg and Aiji Tanaka, “Change in the Spatial Dimensions of Party Conflict: The Case of Japan in the 1990s,” Political Behavior 23 (2001): 75–101. 14. Scott Flanagan et al., The Japanese Voter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 15. Doh Chull Shin and Byong-Kuen Jhee, “How Does Democratic Regime Change Affect Mass Political Ideology?” International Political Science Review 26, no. 4 (2005): 381–396. Kang surveyed members of the National Assembly in 2002 and 2004, and argued that the Roh administration was increasing the ideological polarization of the Korean political parties. Won Taek Kang, “Ideological Clash of Progressives and Conservatives in Korea,” Korea Focus 13, no. 5 (2005). 16. John Fuh-Sheng Hsieh, “Continuity and Change in Taiwan’s Electoral Politics.” In John Fuh-Sheng Hsieh and David Newman, eds., How Asia Votes (New York: Chatham House, 2002); Yun-han Chu, “Taiwan’s Year of Stress,” Journal of Democracy 16 (April 2005): 43–57. 17. Hsieh, “Continuity and Change”; Dafydd Fell, “Measurement of Party Position and Party Competition in Taiwan,” Issues & Studies 40, nos. 3/4 (September/December 2004): 101–136. 18. Steven Rood, “Elections as Complicated and Important Events in the Philippines.” In Fuh-Sheng Hsieh and Newman, How Asia Votes; also see Chapter 5 by McAllister in this volume. 19. Lee Sigelman and S. Yough, “Left-Right Polarization in National Party Systems: A Cross-National Analysis,” Comparative Political Studies 11, no. 3 (1978): 355–379; Donald Gross and Lee Sigelman, “Comparing Party Systems: A Multidimensional Approach,” Comparative Politics 16, no. 4 (1984): 463–479. 20. Hans-Dieter Klingemann, “Political Parties and Party Systems.” In J. Thomassen, ed., The European Voter: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Miki Caul and Mark Gray, “From Platform Declarations to Policy Outcomes.” In R. Dalton and M. Wattenberg, eds., Parties Without Partisans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 21. Michael Laver and J. Garry, “Estimating Policy Positions from Political Texts,” American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 3 (2000): 619–634; Matt Gabel and John Huber, “Putting Parties in Their Place: Inferring Party Left-Right Ideological Positions from Party Manifestos Data,” American Journal of Political Science 44 (2000): 94–103.

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22. Additional information on the CSES surveys, fieldwork, and questionnaires is available from the project website (www.cses.org). Both CSES modules include Thailand, but the Thai survey did not include the left-right scale. 23. See Ian McAllister, Political Behaviour (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992). 24. The Japanese survey used a progressive/conservative scale as an equivalent to left-right. The left-right question is widely used in electoral research. Inglehart and Klingemann, “Party Identification, Ideological Preference”; Fuchs and Klingemann, “The Left-Right Schema”; Dalton, “The Quantity and the Quality of Party Systems.” 25. However, in the World Values Survey, 97 percent of the Taiwanese respondents positioned themselves on the left-right scale. 26. Dalton, “Social Modernization.” In addition, nineteen Western democracies were included in module II of CSES, and on average 89 percent of these publics positioned themselves on the left-right scale. Among the four East European democracies in this module, 88 percent positioned themselves on the scale. 27. See the regional comparisons in Dalton, “Social Modernization.” 28. The percentage of the public able to locate two major parties is as follows: Australia, Liberals (83 percent) and Labour (80 percent); New Zealand, Labour (82 percent) and National (80 percent); Japan, LDP (85 percent) and JCP (80 percent); Korea, GNP (93 percent) and UD (90 percent); Philippines, Lakas (83 percent) and NPC (81 percent); Taiwan, DPP (49 percent) and KMT (49 percent). 29. In part, this reflects the unusually personalist nature of Korean party politics. The progressive, democratic reformer Kim Dae-jung ran for the presidency in 1998 as the head of a centrist/conservative coalition. 30. Rood, “Elections as Complicated and Important Events.” 31. For instance, in the 2001 World Values Survey, the Philippine leftright mean is 6.44, which is between the CSES mean of 7.16 in 1998 and 6.01 in 2004. 32. Jeffrey A. Karp and Susan A. Banducci, “Issues and Party Competition Under Alternative Electoral Systems,” Party Politics 8, no. 1: 123–141. 33. For example, Sartori, Parties and Party Systems; Powell, Contemporary Democracies. 34. Dalton, “The Quantity and the Quality of Party Systems.” 35. We thank Rein Taagepera for his assistance in developing these statistics. The polarization index is measured as P = Σ (party vote sharei) * (party L-R scorei – party system average L-R score/5)2 (where i represents individual parties). This P index has a value of 0 when all parties occupy the same position on the left-right scale, and 10 when all the parties are located at either 0 or 10 on the scale. The representation index is measured as R = Σ (governing party L-R score – voter L-R scorei)/n (where i represents individual voters). The representation gap is measured as the absolute difference between the average voter and the perceived position of the governing party. The governing party is defined as the party of the prime minister.

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36. These cross-national comparisons are based on a different set of nations in both timepoints, and thus changes over time may reflect a different mix of nations. There were fourteen Western democracies (Western Europe and North America) in module I and seventeen in module II. There were seven Eastern European nations in module I and four in module II. For additional analyses, see Dalton, “The Quantity and the Quality of Party Systems.” 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid.

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4 The Development of Partisanship Emile C. J. Sheng

T

he development of partisanship can be viewed as an indicator for the level of party system institutionalization.1 Party ties bind individuals to specific parties and provide a source of cues guiding individual political behavior from the decision whether to vote to the choice of party.2 Thus, some scholars claim it is the most important attitude in the study of citizen political behavior. Our prime interest is whether this key measure of political behavior also exists among East Asian publics, and how partisanship should be measured. As we note below, there are basic reasons to doubt that the party systems and publics of East Asia have developed the level of party attachments normally found in established Western democracies. However, the percentage of citizens subjectively identifying with a party is only one of many possible indicators of partisanship. This research also utilizes other measures of partisan strength to capture partisanship’s actual influence in different countries and electoral systems. In addition, we compare the demographic composition of partisan identifiers across East Asian nations and discuss possible reasons affecting the level of partisanship as well as the demographic makeup in each country. We hope this analysis can provide an empirical reference for the level of partisanship in East Asian nations. This chapter is divided into four further sections. The next section provides a literature review of cross-national partisanship comparison and theoretical expectations of partisan strength in East Asian nations. The following section introduces the data and variables used in the analysis. The next section analyzes partisan strength across nations with four indicators, to examine how East Asian nations compare with 49

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Western democracies. The final section compares the demographic makeup of partisan identifiers across East Asian countries, including age, income, gender, and education. Then we conclude the chapter with a discussion of our findings.

Literature Review Since the introduction of the concept and its measurement, party identification has occupied the center stage of American electoral research as the crucial attitude influencing other political attitudes and behaviors. Partisanship has generated extensive research either as the main theme or as a supplemental factor.3 Thus, a recent review of the party identification literature states: “Party identification is the linchpin of our modern understanding of electoral democracy, and it is likely to retain that crucial theoretical position.”4 However, the applicability of the partisanship concept across nations has generated debates among researchers. Some scholars claim that party identification is merely a US concept and does not exist in European and other political cultures, while others acknowledge its existence yet view it as a short-term factor with no durability.5 Early empirical studies tried to apply the US measurement questions of partisanship to European countries and found that “party identification is clearly less stable than vote preference,” which led the author to conclude, “party identification is not causally prior to the vote, but simply a reflection of the vote and therefore causally posterior to the vote.”6 There are other applications of partisanship outside the United States. Harold D. Clarke and colleagues found that Canadian voters identify with more than one party.7 Several studies have examined the generational transition of partisanship, often compared to other political identities.8 Other research has described the levels of partisanship across Western democracies, and the implications of these partisan attachments.9 The concept of partisanship is so central to our understanding of political behavior that as new democracies have recently emerged in Eastern Europe, this has generated attention to whether partisanship is developing in these nations.10 Most of the literature on comparative partisanship focuses on North America and European countries. This chapter adds to the literature by studying the level and social distribution of partisanship for East Asian democracies. Comparing partisanship across nations can

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shed light on the influence and limitations of the concept to East Asia. Theoretically, we expect East Asian nations to have weaker partisanship than most Western democracies for several reasons. First, the social learning model of partisanship argues that electoral experience and parental socialization are strong sources of partisanship.11 Many East Asian nations are relatively young democracies with limited competitive electoral experience or parental socialization process to fully cultivate partisan identification to the extent of the more advanced Western democracies. Second, many East Asian party systems have not fully completed the institutionalization process to form a stable social support basis (see Chapter 5 by Ian McAllister in this volume). For example, two Taiwanese parties, the People First and the Taiwan Solidarity, could be eliminated in the 2007 legislative election under new rules, despite getting 15 percent and 4 percent in the 2004 election, respectively. In addition, the ruling party of more than five decades, Kuomintang (KMT), lost the presidential election in 2000, prompting a wave of partisan realignment in the past few years. In Korea, the party realigning process is also evident in recent presidential elections, especially with Roh Moo-hyun’s creation of the new Our Party (UD) (see Chapter 2 by Benjamin Reilly and Chapter 3 by Russell J. Dalton and Aiji Tanaka). Japan’s longtime ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was defeated in 1993 and reformed its electoral system in 1994.12 Under the old single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system, the opposition on the left in Japan has difficulty in coordination,13 therefore the conservative LDP has always enjoyed an electoral advantage with better efficiency of vote distribution.14 The current party system has only twelve years to develop under the current electoral rule. Studies indicate that Japanese party identification would switch over successive elections along with vote choices, and thus Japanese partisanship has been weakening over the past two decades.15 The Philippines democracy started as a peaceful transition of power at all elected levels of government only after 1986.16 In addition, the 2006 coup demonstrated the uncertainty of the Thai party system. In all these examples, the ever-changing political environment and electoral rules leave less than enough time to develop stable party systems like those of Western European nations. For partisanship to be institutionalized, time is needed for electoral experience and parental socialization to develop, and for the party system to stabilize. Therefore, we expect East Asian nations to have relatively weaker partisanship than most European nations.

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In addition, we argue that there are multiple ways to measure partisanship, and the choice of indicators may affect our conclusions about the state of partisanship in East Asia. Theoretically, partisanship can be demonstrated in numerous ways. For instance, the most commonly used indicators are percentage of party identifiers and partisan stability across time. Other possibilities include the extent partisanship affects vote choices and candidate evaluation,17 defection percentage of partisan politicians, and so on.18 Each of these concepts reflects a certain aspect of partisanship or its influence. Partisan stability is one of the most common features used in crossnational studies of political behavior. To compare whether respondents from different countries possess partisanship as a long-term psychological attachment, Donald Green and Bradley Palmquist estimated partisan stability for British, German, and Canadian parties across panel surveys. They found that once measurement error is taken into account, rates of partisan change in these countries closely resemble those in the United States, and they concluded that there is considerable partisan stability across these countries.19 In addition, partisanship is not only an attitude, but also a prominent cause of important political behaviors (see Chapter 7 by Yun-han Chu and Min-hua Huang and Chapter 8 by Doh Chull Shin and Rollin F. Tusalem). In other words, people with or without partisanship should demonstrate different patterns of political behavior, if partisanship were to have substantive effects. Therefore, aside from the more static measurement of the self-proclaimed identification, this chapter examines how partisanship differs across East Asian nations with multiple indicators, since partisan strength can be conceptualized from various aspects and examined through its political consequences. However, not all these concepts can be easily measured empirically, and the availability of data constitutes another major constraint. This chapter compares partisanship across nations using four indicators from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) study. Each indicator might not provide a conclusive or complete delineation of partisanship. However, taken as a whole, these indicators should provide us with a broader picture of the relative partisan strength across these East Asian nations. The essay also compares the demographic patterns of partisan support across East Asian nations, including income, education, age, and gender breakdown, to enhance our understanding of their relative political landscape. These demographic analyses also suggest where there are processes of partisan learning that will strengthen party ties in Asian democracies.

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Data and Method This chapter utilizes data collected by the CSES, module 1, consisting of surveys from almost three dozen countries.20 This research focuses on Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. In addition, we include data from Australia and New Zealand as benchmarks of the patterns typically found in Western democracies. We will now explain the four indicators used to illustrate partisan strength and the corresponding variables used in the analysis. Some of these indicators are self-evident, while others need further elaboration. Partisanship. This is the percentage of respondents identifying with a party: the higher the percentage of the population identifying with a party, the stronger partisanship is in that country. This is the most commonly used measure for partisanship in the literature. (A3004 “Do you usually think of yourself as close to any particular political party?”) Strong partisanship. This is the percentage of respondents feeling “very close” to a party (strong identifiers): the higher the percentage strongly identifying with a party, the stronger partisanship strength. This measure captures the intensity of partisanship in each country. (A3012 “Do you feel very close to this [party/party block], somewhat close, or not very close?”) Party voting. This is the percentage of respondents actually voting for the party they identify with. This indicator examines the behavioral influence of party identification. If more people actually voted for the candidate of their most supported party, it indicates that partisan attitude can be translated to actual political behavior, and thus political influence. On the other hand, if partisanship does not translate to vote choice, then partisanship is merely a psychological attachment with limited political influence.21 Party liking. This is the average like/dislike score for respondents’ most identified party; we compute the mean like/dislike score that respondents give to the party they identify with most. If a country’s respondents give a higher mean score to their most preferred parties, it shows that partisanship has a stronger effect in that country. This is calculated with the 0 to 10 like/dislike scale.22

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Unfortunately, data are not available for all countries on all four indicators. Missing values indicate that the data needed to compile a particular indicator for that country are unavailable. In addition, research across multiple countries is bound to encounter problems of comparability, including question wording and important institutional as well as political differences among the nations, and important intricacies of actual political operation will influence the analysis. Nevertheless, with these cautions in mind, we proceed with our analyses.

Partisan Strength Across Nations Table 4.1 shows the result using the four indicators comparing partisanship across nations. We included all thirty-three countries in the first CSES module to show the relative positions of these East Asian countries. The last column of the table indicates the year of the survey, matching countries listed in the next-to-last column. We can draw several observations from the analysis. First of all, these indicators show a relatively low level of partisan strength for East Asian democracies. Aside from a few exceptions, most of the East Asian nations rank at the bottom third among all nations under comparison. For example, on the percentage of party identifiers (indicator one), Japan is highest among East Asian nations, yet still ranks below average of all nations under comparison. Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, Philippines, and Hong Kong all rank among the bottom tier of percentages of party identifiers, with the two benchmarks Australia and New Zealand leading in the ranking. One possible reason might be that East Asian democracies started fair and competitive elections only in recent decades, contributing to lower overall partisanship. Australia and New Zealand, two countries with more mature levels of democracy in the region that can be viewed as benchmarks, are ranked in the upper/middle tier in most indicators. However, the new democracies of East Asia also generally rank below the new democracies of Eastern Europe in their levels of partisanship. Another possible reason could be East Asian nations’ weak partisanship is due to their constitutional design or electoral rule influence.23 One needs to examine these institutional differences among countries of various levels of partisanship to determine whether and how these factors might affect partisanship, which is beyond the scope of this study. We will focus our discussion on other noninstitutional influences in later sections.

Percentage Very Close to a Party

Percentage Voted for Party Liked Most

Mean Score for Party Liked Most

Australia (83.5) Ukraine (69.4) Israel (64.2) United States (57) Russia (55.9) New Zealand (55.6) Sweden (53.1) Poland (52.7) Norway (52.5) Iceland (51.2) Canada (50.1) Denmark (49.9) Czech Republic (48.8) Mexico (47.6) Portugal (47.1) Romania (46.8) UK (46.1) Spain (42.3) Japan (37.5) Switzerland (36.2)

Israel (37.4) Mexico (36.5) Belarus (31.9) Peru (24.8) Denmark 23.8 Taiwan (23.4) Japan (23.2) Chile (22) United States (21.6) Spain (20.7) Romania (20.6) UK (19.6) Hungary (19.1) Australia (19) Canada (18.5) Ukraine (17.8) Portugal (17.3) Korea (17.3) Iceland (17.1) Russia (17.1)

Czech Republic (91.9) Denmark (90) Sweden (84.7) UK (80.5) Norway (80.5) Iceland (80.3) Netherlands (78.6) Germany (77.9) Spain (76.6) Portugal (76.2) Canada (75.6) Taiwan (72.9) Switzerland (70.6) Korea (70.6) Hungary (69.9) Israel (69.3) Slovenia (68.7) United States (68) Australia (67.6) New Zealand (65.9)

Czech Republic (9.14) Lithuania (9.12) Hungary (8.98) Ukraine (8.92) Denmark (8.85) Russia (8.81) Peru (8.79) Israel (8.74) Thailand (8.7) Sweden (8.6) Norway (8.59) Slovenia (8.59) Poland (8.56) Germany (8.45) Belarus (8.4) New Zealand (8.37) Philippines (8.32) Romania (8.31) UK (8.3) Portugal (8.18)

Year 1996 1997 1998 1998 1998 1999 2001 1996 2001 1998 1997 1996 1997 1998 2001 1996 1998 1996 1997 2002 continues

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

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Cont. Percentage Voted for Party Liked Most

Mean Score for Party Liked Most

Year

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Hungary (35) Lithuania (34.3) Germany (34.3) Taiwan (33.6) Netherlands (27.8) Korea (27.3) Peru (22.7) Slovenia (21.7) Thailand (20.8) Chile (19.9) Philippines (12.8) Belarus (11.5) Hong Kong (7.7)

Sweden (14.8) Czech Republic (14.5) Netherlands(12.6) Switzerland (12.2) Germany (11.4) Lithuania (10.1) Norway (8) Poland (5.8) Philippines (4.9) Thailand (2.6) Hong Kong (1.2) New Zealand (NA) Slovenia (NA)

Japan (64.3) Romania (60.2) Ukraine (59.4) Poland (55) Hong Kong (53.6) Mexico (47.9) Russia (42.6) Peru (34.2) Lithuania (30.7) Belarus (7.6) Philippines (5.3) Thailand (NA) Chile (NA)

Netherlands (8.16) Iceland (8.15) Switzerland (8.14) Australia (8.09) Chile (7.89) Spain (7.7) Canada (7.65) Korea (7.62) Japan (7.38) Hong Kong (7.33) Taiwan (6.71) Mexico (6.6) United States (6.41)

1998 1999 1999 1996 1999 1996 1997 2000 1996 1998 1996 2000 1996

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems survey, module 1; NA indicates the question was not asked in this nation.

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Table 4.1

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Second, the measure of strong partisanship shows that Taiwan and Japan both have relatively higher partisan intensity. Their ranks increase from twenty-fourth and nineteenth respectively, to sixth and seventh among all CSES nations. Korea ranks slightly below average, while the Philippines, Thailand, and Hong Kong rank last among all the nations in the CSES survey. Third, with regard to party voting, Taiwan and Korea are highest among East Asian nations, scoring even above Australia and New Zealand. In contrast, Japan and Hong Kong ranked below average, with the Philippines ranking last. It might not be a coincidence that both Taiwan and Korea are not under single-member district plurality rule. In comparison with other East Asian nations under plurality rule, the rules of these two countries are more lenient to minor parties, giving them seats in proportion to their votes so that most voters are not forced to vote strategically for the two major parties. In contrast, Hong Kong is relatively low in this particular ranking but does not have single-member district rules, showing there are factors other than electoral rules at work. Fourth, the penultimate column shows that with regard to the average like/dislike score given to their favorite parties, Thailand’s respondents gave the highest mean score among the group, followed by the Philippines ranking in the middle tier. Respondents from Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all gave relatively low scores to their favorite parties. Yet even on this indicator, Asian democracies are generally concentrated toward the bottom of the ranking. Table 4.2 presents a simplified version of Table 4.1, showing the average scores of different regions across the four indicators. East Asian nations rank last on the first three indicators, and next to last on the fourth indicator, showing the weakest partisanship among all the regions in the CSES survey. Thus, different indicators yield similar conclusions that East Asian nations have relatively lower levels of partisan strength. Possible reasons affecting partisan strength include the institutional approach emphasizing the importance of institutions and electoral systems,24 and the structural approach emphasizing social cleavages and cultural values.25 Pippa Norris, for instance, found that the mean effective number of parliamentary parties was 2.42 in majoritarian systems and 4.45 in proportional representation (PR) systems.26 She found that levels of partisanship were positively related to the effective number of parties in the system. The personalistic nature of Asian parties may also limit the development of ties to political parties as insti-

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Table 4.2

Average of Different Regions Across Indicators

Region

Percentage Close to Any Party

Percentage Very Close to a Party

Percentage Voted for Party Liked Most

Mean Score for Party Liked Most

N

43.0 39.5 69.6 23.3

16.4 24.7 19.0 13.1

67.5 56.4 66.8 53.3

8.5 7.5 8.2 7.7

19 5 2 6

Europe America Oceania East Asia

Note: The regional classification scheme follows those used by the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems survey, created by United Nations Statistics Division, and can be found at http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm.

tutions.27 In short, there are multiple factors that can influence the partisanship in a nation, such as attitudinal factors, constitutional design, as well as electoral system. In addition, the data in Table 4.1 indicate that partisanship may be multidimensional. While East Asian electorates may display limited partisanship on one dimension, the same public may appear more partisan on another measure. Table 4.3 presents the correlations between these four dimensions across the nations in the CSES. These correlations are quite modest; only the percentages of party identifiers are positively and significantly correlated with the percentage voting for their preferred parties. All other coefficients are not statistically significant, supporting the multidimensional partisanship thesis. Hong Kong’s partisan strength ranked in the bottom tier for all four indicators, which reflects quite accurately Hong Kong voters’ low identification with their parties. Hong Kong started party politics in April 1990, holding direct elections in 1991 in which parties competed for seats by universal suffrage.28 However, due to the current one-country, two-system relationship of Hong Kong and China, Hong Kong’s parties are divided by their attitudes toward Beijing, and elections have nothing to do with the right to govern. According to a survey by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, most people, especially middleclass citizens, do not regard any party as representing their own interest.29 The special noncountry sovereignty status of Hong Kong probably contributed immensely to citizens’ low partisanship. Another country also with weak partisanship is the Philippines. It ranks at the bottom tier of partisanship on the first three of the indicators, not a surprising result given its well-known patron-client relations.30 Most Philippine parties lack consistent ideological positions and are often personality-driven organizations that rise and fall with their

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Correlations Across Four Indicators of Partisanship

Close to any party Very close to a party Voted for party liked most

Very Close to a Party

Voted for Party Liked Most

Mean Score for Party Liked Most

.26

.45* –.03

.08 –.24 –.04

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems survey, module 1 (N range from 29 to 33 countries). Note: Table entries are Pearson’s r correlations of the national scores in Table 1.

standard-bearers.31 This is probably the reason why the Philippines ranks rather low on percentages of party identifiers as well as strong identifiers, but gave rather high scores for their most favorite parties. Thailand also deserves further elaboration. Thailand ranks rather low in the first two indicators, but leads East Asian nations in giving highest average score for their favorite parties, a likely product of their peculiar multiseat, multiple-vote plurality electoral system. Before the 1997 constitutional reform, most of the electoral districts in Thailand had a district magnitude of two or three, with a few single-member districts. Voters were allowed to vote for as many candidates as there were seats in a district but were not required to cast all of their available votes, and seats were awarded to top vote getters by plurality rule. This system could undermine party cohesion since it creates intraparty competition, but the level of intraparty competition is less intensive than those under SNTV or single transferable vote (STV) systems since voters in Thailand can cast more than one vote.32 However, candidates from the same party need not compete against one another. They could enact a team campaign strategy, persuading voters to cast a straight ticket vote to all of them. This could be the reason for Thailand voters’ relatively high affection for their most supported parties.33 The discussion above shows that there are potentially multiple reasons for nations demonstrating varying degrees of partisanship on different indicators; these influencing factors could be electoral rules, constitutional features, political culture, as well as public attitudes.

Comparing the Distribution of Partisanship This section uses the percentage of respondents feeling close to any party to compare the partisan makeup of these East Asian nations. The decision to limit the analysis to this indicator is partly due to space con-

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straints and partly motivated by the fact that this indicator is the most commonly used measure of partisanship. Our analyses compare the level of partisanship across a range of demographic variables that might indicate the social base of partisanship and the potential for partisan learning. By describing the distribution of partisan identifiers we might better understand the processes generating party ties in East Asia. Table 4.4 shows the cross-tabulation for percentages of party identifiers across East Asian nations with regard to age, income, gender, and education.34 The bottom row of each panel shows the correlation between the variable and the percentage of partisan identifiers. From Table 4.4 we can see that in the established democracies of Australia and New Zealand, the percentage of party identifiers increases with age (the respective correlations are .10 and .11, both statistically significant). This is the expected pattern in a stable democracy, where partisan ties strengthen with repeated electoral experience (and presumably repeated voting for one’s preferred party). Japan and Korea also share the same pattern, and the age gradient is actually stronger in these two nations, where partisan learning during the life cycle and generational learning from democratization are reinforcing.35 In contrast, respondents in Thailand, the Philippines, and Taiwan show relatively uniform distribution across age groups. This implies that even with democratic electoral experiences accumulating in these nations, the public is not developing stronger party ties, perhaps because of the volatility of the party system in these nations.36 The next panel of Table 4.4 shows the income breakdown to determine whether there are social status differences in the levels of partisanship. Most nations—including the two Western democracies—display a relatively uniform distribution across income groups. In part, this is what one might expect if some parties are mobilizing the upper/middle classes while other parties are mobilizing the lower classes. The two significant deviations are Taiwan and Thailand. There are increasing percentages of partisan identifiers within income in Taiwan. In contrast, Thailand shows higher percentages of partisan identifiers from the lower income bracket. This may reflect the differences in patterns of how politicians mobilize voters. Taiwanese politicians mobilize voters on national and ethnic identity, while the Thai counterparts mobilize support from the grassroots level, such as Thaksin Shinawatra’s mobilization of rural Thais to support his Thai Rak Thai party in the 2001 election. The next panel of Table 4.4 shows gender gaps in partisanship. The two Western democracies of Australia and New Zealand do not display significant differences in partisanship between men and women. How-

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Table 4.4

Party Identifiers by Social Characteristics Australia

Taiwan

Hong Kong

Japan

Korea

Thailand

Philippines

31.9 32.8 37.4 33.5 25.8 35.7 38.1 –.01

4.3 4.1 7.3 8.2 16.1 2.1 11.8 .28**

8.1 18.0 27.8 42.2 48.1 50.2 58.9 .28**

18.3 20.9 30.0 33.1 30.2 35.3 44.4 .12**

17.2 19.1 21.2 22.6 32.8 11.8 18.2 .04

6.0 10.0 16.4 12.4 19.5 12.5 23.3 .08*

79.8 86.7 85.4 83.6 83.2 .01

52.5 55.3 49.1 50.6 54.3 .00

28.0 28.8 43.5 42.6 40.5 .12**

5.4 8.3 6.6 5.6 12.1 .06

36.5 37.7 40.0 37.0 45.7 .06

28.4 26.6 27.4 26.4 32.5 .00

25.5 27.8 18.4 19.7 11.1 –.12**

14.7 13.7 14.5 8.4 13.6 –.05

82.4 84.5 .03

52.3 52.0 –.01

21.9 19.9 –.08**

9.9 4.7 –.06*

37.1 29.7 –.06*

40.5 34.5 –.03

28.5 26.1 –.03

16.0 9.5 –.94*

69.8 84.9 80.5 –.06*

59.1 50.4 56.0 .02

20.9 38.7 40.5 .17**

6.2 10.0 6.4 –.10**

43.3 37.9 27.5 –.10**

42.9 27.6 21.9 –.12**

24.5 19.6 12.0 –.10**

10.9 12.8 14.4 .05

(1,798)

(4,080)

(1,200)

(1,000)

(1,327)

(1,100)

(1,081)

(1,200)

61

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems survey, module 1. Notes: Table entries are the percentage who say that they are close to a political party; correlations are Pearson’s r; * indicates correlations significant at the .05 level; ** denotes correlations significant at .01 level.

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32.5 45.0 47.0 54.7 62.9 62.4 64.2 .11**

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66.2 84.0 81.7 85.0 88.5 85.5 89.0 .10**

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Age 18–24 25–34 35–44 45–54 55–64 65–74 75+ Correlation Income Lowest Second Third Fourth Highest Correlation Gender Male Female Correlation Education Primary or less Some secondary to technical Some university to graduate Correlation Sample Total N

New Zealand

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ever, four of the six Asian democracies—Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and the Philippines—find that males are significantly more inclined to identify with a party than are women. This may reflect a continuing paternalistic bias in political activity across these nations, where politics is seen as more appropriate for men, and women are not fully incorporated into the political process. Finally, Table 4.4 shows the educational breakdown of party identifiers. In general, we might expect that partisanship will be stronger among the better educated because these individuals are likely to vote more often and follow politics more closely. However, as with income, there are also processes to mobilize lower status individuals to participate in elections and thus develop their own party ties. To simplify the comparisons across different educational systems, the table presents three broad educational groups: those with primary education or less, those with some secondary education to a completed degree, and those with at least some university education. Australia and New Zealand show relatively uniform percentages across educational levels. Similar to the income pattern, Taiwanese respondents with higher degrees of education are more likely to identify with a party. In most other Asian democracies, however, lower education respondents have higher percentages of partisan identifiers. This might reflect the efforts by some parties to mobilize lower social status voters as an electoral constituency, and even the personalistic appeal of party leaders like Thaksin Shinawatra or Moo-hyun Roh to mobilize these voters through their personal charisma. If we combine the income and education breakdown of these countries, we can classify East Asian nations into several patterns. In Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines, neither income nor educational division made a difference in percentages of party identifiers, quite possibly for different reasons. In Australia and New Zealand, the homogeneity across socioeconomic status is most likely a sign of institutionalized democracies, where all sectors of the population are equally engaged in partisan politics. In Taiwan, respondents with higher income as well as education background are more likely to be party identifiers. In Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong, income did not make a difference, but people with lower levels of education are more likely to identify with a party. In Thailand, respondents with lower income and less education are more likely to identify with a party. One possible reason for this difference is that the Taiwanese democratization process is atypical since its main social cleavage is the national identity issue with regard to its relationship with China.37 The

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debate between independence and unification advocates has defined the major political landscape of Taiwan, which is an elite-led political competition. In other nations where the main social cleavages tend to be distribution-oriented, such as tax and welfare issues, people with lower socioeconomic status are more likely to align themselves in partisan politics.

Conclusion This chapter focuses on three topics. First, to assess the development of partisan ties among East Asian publics, we compared East Asian partisanship to a larger cross-national set of democracies. Second, we discussed possible reasons why East Asian democracies lag behind Western democracies in their level of partisanship. Third, to develop our understanding of the process of partisan learning, we analyzed the patterns of partisan support within East Asian nations. We used four indicators to compare the relative partisanship of East Asian nations that include both attitudinal and behavioral measures. Even though these four measures are somewhat distinct empirically, we found rather uniform results across the four indicators. Partisanship is weaker in East Asian countries as compared with Western democracies. As discussed earlier, this could be caused by the relatively short time span of electoral and partisan politics in East Asian countries. There has not yet been enough time to institutionalize partisanship through mechanisms such as cumulative electoral experiences and parental socialization. Also, many party systems in these East Asian countries are still undergoing dramatic changes from one election to another at a relatively early developmental stage. Theoretically, these factors might explain the relatively weak partisanship in these countries. As time goes by, we would expect more institutionalized party systems to emerge in these countries, catching up to the level of Western democracies. Our analysis of the social bases of partisanship shows that more institutionalized democracies share a similar pattern. For instance, New Zealand and Australia have relatively uniform distribution across income groups, gender, and age groups—but that partisanship strengthens with age. This is a sign of the breadth of partisan ties to socially diverse parts of the population that are mobilized by different parties, and the strengthening of these ties with accumulated electoral experience. In contrast, the social bases of partisanship follow a different pattern in several East Asian democracies. In Taiwan and Thailand, the

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level of partisanship is linked to social status—albeit in different directions. This suggests a socially unequal pattern of mobilization within these two party systems. Most Asian democracies also display gender gaps, with male respondents more likely to identify with parties. This pattern suggests a possible model of partisanship formation where partisanship started from certain segments of the population and then spread into other segments of the society as the party system became more institutionalized. Perhaps the most significant finding is the age patterns of partisanship. In two of East Asia’s consolidated democracies—Japan and Korea—partisan ties strengthen with age. This reflects the normal lifecycle pattern that indicates partisan ties are growing and the party system is becoming established in voters’ minds with the passage of time and additional electoral experience. However, this age pattern does not appear in Taiwan, the Philippines, or Thailand. This suggests that partisanship is not being learned, either because the parties remain distant from their voters so that identities do not develop, or because the volatilities of these party systems are impeding party learning. We believe that partisanship is a meaningful factor in shaping the political behavior of East Asian electorates and as a measure of the mass institutionalization of party systems. The results presented here provide a benchmark for judging the current status of partisan ties among East Asian publics, which should lead to further research on the growth and implications of partisanship for these democracies.

Notes 1. Philip E. Converse, “Of Time and Partisan Stability,” Comparative Political Studies 2 (1969): 139–171; Russell J. Dalton and Steven Weldon, “Partisanship and Party System Institutionalization,” Party Politics (March 2007). 2. Angus Campbell et al., The American Voter (New York: John Wiley, 1960); Philip E. Converse and Georges Dupeux, “Politicization of the Electorate in France and the United States,” Public Opinion Quarterly 26 (1962): 1–23; Russell J. Dalton and Martin Wattenberg, eds., Parties Without Partisans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 1. 3. Richard G. Niemi and Herbert F. Weisberg, Classics in Voting Behavior (Washington: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1993), pp. 210–221. 4. Herbert Weisberg and Steve Greene, “The Political Psychology of Party Identification.” In Michael MacKuen and George Rabinowitz, eds., Electoral Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 115.

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5. Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks, The New American Voter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 117. 6. Jacques Thomassen, “Party Identification as a Cross-National Concept: Its Meaning in the Netherlands.” In Ian Budge, Ivor Crewe, and Dennis Farlie, eds., Party Identification and Beyond: Representations of Voting and Party Competition (New York: Wiley, 1976), pp. 63–79. 7. Harold D. Clarke et al., Political Choice in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979). 8. Converse and Dupeux, “Politicization of the Electorate”; Anders Westholm and Richard G. Niemi, “Political Institutions and Political Socialization: A Cross-National Study,” Comparative Politics 25 (1992): 25–41. 9. Dalton and Wattenberg, Parties Without Partisans, chaps. 1–3. 10. Ted Brader and Joshua A. Tucker, “The Emergence of Mass Partisanship in Russia, 1993–1996,” American Journal of Political Science 45, no. 1 (2001): 69–83; John Huber, Georgia Kernell, and Eduardo L. Leoni, “Institutional Context and Party Attachments in Established Democracies,” Political Analysis 13, no. 4 (2005): 365–386. 11. Dalton and Weldon, “Partisanship and Party System Institutionalization.” 12. Machidori Satoshi, “The 1990s Reforms Have Transformed Japanese Politics,” Japan Echo 32, no. 3 (2005): 38; Ko Mishima, “The Failure of Japan’s Political Reform,” World Policy Journal 22, no. 4 (2006): 47–54. 13. T. J. Pempel, ed., Uncommon Democracies: The One-Party Dominant Regimes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 14. Gary Cox, Making Votes Count (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 245–247. 15. Eric Schickler and Donald Green, “The Instability of Party Identification Among Eligible Japanese Voters—A Seven-wave Panel Study, 1993–6,” Party Politics 4, no. 2 (1997): 151–176; also see Ronald J. Hrebenar, Japan’s New Party System (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000). 16. Emil P. Bolongaita, “The Philippines: Consolidating Democracy in Difficult Times,” Southeast Asian Affairs (1999). 17. Pradeep Chhibber and Ken Kollman, “Party Aggregation and the Number of Parties in India and the United States,” American Political Science Review 92, no. 2 (1998): 329–342. 18. Michael Laver and Kenneth Benoit, “The Evolution of Party Systems Between Elections,” American Journal of Political Science 47, no. 2 (2003): 215. 19. Donald Green and Bradley Palmquist, “How Stable Is Party Identification?” Political Behavior 43 (1994): 437–466. 20. Detail information about the dataset can be obtained from www .cses.org. The Philippines is not included in the release. The author would like to thank Russell Dalton for providing the data. 21. Voting Record: there are three types of electoral results in the dataset— presidential election, party list district-level election, and elections where voters can directly vote for candidates. Twenty-one countries held district-level party list elections, and these records are used as an indicator for percentage of party identifiers voting for their supported party. Seven other countries held only elec-

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tions where voters cast votes for candidates instead of parties, and the parties of the candidates receiving votes were identified and used as indicators. Finally, three countries (Lithuania, Belarus, and the Philippines) have only data on presidential elections, and these data were used. (A2029 Party voted for President; A2030 Party list voted for district; A2031 Party of candidate voted for district.) 22. (A3020 “I’d like to know what you think about each of our political parties. After I read the name of a political party, please rate it on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means you strongly dislike that party and 10 means that you strongly like that party. If I come to a party you haven’t heard of or you feel you do not know enough about, just say so. The first party is PARTY A.”) 23. Huber, Kernell, and Leoni, “Institutional Context and Party Attachments.” 24. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties, Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (New York: Wiley, 1954); Douglas W. Rae, The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Arend Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 25. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967); Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Russell J. Dalton, Citizen Politics, 4th edition (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006). 26. Pippa Norris, Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 27. John Curtice, “Elections as Beauty Contests: Do the Rules Matter?” paper presented at Comportamento Eleitoral e Atitudes Políticas: Portugal no contexto Europeu, Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, April 27–28, 2005; Dalton and Wattenberg, eds., Parties Without Partisans, chap. 3. 28. K. S. Louie, “Political Parties.” In T. W. Sung and M. K. Lee, eds., The Other Hong Kong Report 1991 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1991). 29. Information available from www.cuhk.edu.hk/ipro/pressrelease/ 040524.htm (viewed on June 26, 2006). 30. John T. Sidel, Capital, Coercion and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (Standford: Standford University Press, 2002); John T. Sidel, “Siam and Its Twin? Democratization and Bossism in Contemporary Thailand and the Philippines,” IDS Bulletin 27, no. 2 (1996). 31. Clifton Sherrill, “Promoting Democracy: Results of Democratization Efforts in the Philippines,” Asian Affairs: An American Review 32, no. 4 (2006): 211–231. 32. Allen D. Hicken, “The Market for Votes in Thailand,” paper presented at “Trading Political Rights: The Comparative Politics of Voting Buying,” International Conference, Center for International Studies, MIT, August 26–27, 2002. 33. The 1997 new constitution changed the system to a mixed-member system in which 400 seats are elected from single-member districts under plu-

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rality rule, and an additional 100 seats are elected from national proportional representation. Since we believe partisan attitude to be a long-term psychological attachment, we assumed partisanship in 2001 should be influenced more by the previous system, rather than the new mixed-member system first enacted in 2001. 34. Multivariate regression models are also available on request from the author. They were not presented here because of space considerations. 35. See Dalton and Weldon, “Partisanship and Party System Institutionalization.” 36. Perhaps the most unusual case is Hong Kong, where the age gradient is strongest. This may illustrate the predemocratic experiences of the older Hong Kong citizens even without electoral experience. But all age groups also display very weak levels of partisanship because of the unique nature of this system. 37. Yun-han Chu, and Tse-Min Lin, “Elections and Elite Convergence: The Path to Political Consolidation in Taiwan,” paper presented at the 1998 annual meeting of the Taiwanese Political Science Association, December 12–13; Tun-jen Cheng and Yung-ming Hsu, “Issue Structure, the DPP’s Factionalism, and Party Realignment.” In Hung-mao Tien, ed., Taiwan’s Electoral Politics and Democratic Transition: Riding the Third Wave (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), pp. 137–173.

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5 Social Structure and Party Support Ian McAllister

T

he past half century has seen democratic consolidations occur across the globe, from the postcommunist states of Central and Eastern Europe to the “tiger” economies of East Asia. While scholars disagree about many aspects of these transitions, one element that few disagree on is the central role that political parties play in the process. A key to the successful institutionalization of a party system is the creation of an enduring link between the social structure and the main party and policy alternatives in the country. Once such a link has been embedded over successive elections, the coalescence of voters’ loyalties around the main party groupings should ensure long-term continuity in the choice sets open to voters and represent the enduring social interests in the nation. Using the paradigm developed by Stein Rokkan and Seymour Martin Lipset1 to explain how and why parties come to represent social cleavages, this chapter examines the relationship between social structure and party support in four East Asian countries—Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan—using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) dataset. In addition, to illustrate the model of established Western democracies that Rokkan and Lipset described, we include Australia and New Zealand in our analyses. Broadly comparable measures of social structure are available for these nations. The six countries represent a diverse range of Asian democratic experience. Japan is the only long-term democracy in East Asia. Korea and Taiwan appear to have consolidated following lengthy periods of military rule that stunted the formation of their party systems.2 The Philippines is representative of the group of emerging democracies, the other major cases being Indonesia and Thailand. Australia and New 69

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Zealand are two regional examples of how social cleavages affect party choice in established Western democracies. We are not claiming these two nations are archetypical examples, but that they represent the range of variation in the systems that Rokkan and Lipset described. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section examines the normative relationship between social structure and party support and how we might expect this to evolve in the East Asian countries, using the Lipset-Rokkan paradigm as a starting point. The second section outlines our data source and the measurement of social structure and the vote across the six countries. The third section describes the results that emerge from the analyses, presented separately for the six countries, while the final section discusses the implications of the results for democratization across the region.

Social Cleavages and Party Systems The primary theory behind the development of social cleavages and party support comes from Lipset and Rokkan’s influential 1967 essay.3 They identified four social cleavages—center-periphery (region), state-church (religion), land-industry (urban-rural), and owner-worker (class)—which they argued reflected the primary bases of social division in a society. Moreover, these cleavages provided the basis for the emergence of European party systems at the turn of the twentieth century. For a cleavage to become politically salient, three conditions have to be met. First, the cleavage has to distinguish people on at least one potentially important characteristic. Second, individuals have to know which group to identify with on any characteristic. Third, political parties have to compete for electoral support based on the cleavage. Lipset and Rokkan argued that once these conditions had been met, the European party systems became “frozen” around these cleavages, a relationship that has endured ever since. Numerous studies have reevaluated the Lipset and Rokkan paradigm and expanded its application beyond Europe. Research has examined whether the “freezing hypothesis” applies to party systems, or to the cleavage structures that underpin them4—the former leading to a focus on the nature of party competition, the latter to the persistence of social cleavages. Empirical studies have evaluated the strength of the various cleavages, cross-nationally and over time. Early research concluded that parties were most cohesive on religion, followed by

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class,5 while other studies confirmed the remarkable stability of parties and their social bases in a wide range of Western democracies since the 1920s.6 More recently, studies have observed a decline in the correlation between social cleavages and party support in the West.7 The collapse of communism provided a further opportunity to evaluate the Lipset and Rokkan model in newly emerging democracies. The postcommunist democratic consolidations in Eastern Europe largely support the Lipset-Rokkan paradigm.8 For instance, class and religion have emerged as important new bases of voting choice in several East European nations, rivaling relationships in Western Europe.9 Whether the theory explains the dynamic relationship between social structure and party support in East Asia is more problematic, however. East Asia represents a more challenging case study for theories of social structure and voting. In the first place, many of the societies are highly pluralistic, combining Confucian values with economic liberalism with complex consequences for popular views of democracy.10 As noted in the introduction to this volume, the fluid, personalistic party system may attenuate the linkage between social groups and parties. Many of these countries have colonial histories, as well as experiencing extended periods of martial rule, which have influenced party system formation. And not least, several of the countries are democratic in name only, since competition is not free and fair; even when elections are open and competitive, long periods of one-party rule often ensue. Australia and New Zealand represent possible benchmarks against which to evaluate the utility of the Lipset and Rokkan model in East Asia. Both counties are long-standing democracies modeled on the Westminster system, and the development of their party systems and cleavage structures adheres closely to the Lipset and Rokkan model.11 For instance, McAllister and White found that in testing the explanatory power of the four Lipset/Rokkan cleavages among the fourteen Western democracies in the CSES project, Australia was ranked fourth in total variance explained and New Zealand was ranked thirteenth.12 The social cleavages in the emerging democracies in East Asia and other global regions should be generally similar if Lipset and Rokkan were correct that they present the potential bases of social division; the main point of contrast is the relative effectiveness of political parties in politicizing these cleavages.13 Part of potential cross-national differences also may be the condition of civil society in the period immediately prior to democratization, as well as the level of economic development.14

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Data and Measurement To examine social cleavages and voting we use data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems module 2. The analyses are restricted to voters in national elections in each of the six countries.15 To measure the effect of social structure on vote, we use multinomial logistic regression (MNL). MNL is appropriate where a dependent variable has more than two categories and enables estimation of a more complex statistical model; it is especially valuable when analyzing voting in a multiparty system.16 In the analyses of the Philippines, we used logistic regression to measure the presidential vote, since the dependent variable is dichotomous. Lipset and Rokkan identified center-periphery as the first basis for the political divisions that emerged in European party systems. Centerperiphery antagonisms have periodically played a major role in twentieth-century East Asia.17 Center-periphery is measured here by the distance between the capital city in each country and the region or province in which the voter resides, standardized on a 0 to 10 scale, in which 10 represents the region or province most distant from the national capital, and 0 the national capital itself. Center-periphery differences are greatest in the Philippines, reflecting the large proportion of voters living in Visayas and Mindanao, the two island groups most remote from the National Capital Region. The differences are smallest in Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea, the latter case partly because of the state’s strong policy of decentralization that began in the early 1980s.18 State-church divisions based on religion were a main arena of political conflict in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our current analyses rely on church attendance and religious denomination. Church attendance is measured by a six-point scale, ranging from never attends to attends once a week or more; not surprisingly given the predominance of Catholicism, the Philippines has the highest incidence of church attendance across the six countries. Measuring religious denomination is more complex because of the diversity of religions across the six countries. The most straightforward is Australia and New Zealand, where denomination is represented by Catholics and Protestants contrasted with those in other religions or who have no religion. In Japan, where Buddhism has predominated, denomination is measured by Buddhists and other religions contrasted with those with no religion.19 The other three countries have more complex religious compositions. Korea has a diverse set of religious denominations, and traditional religions have remained important as Christianity

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has gained in popularity since the 1960s.20 In Korea, denomination is measured by Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, and other religions contrasted with those with no religion. In Taiwan, Buddhism and Taoism are contrasted with other religions and those with no religion.21 Catholicism has dominated the Philippines since the sixteenth century, and for the Philippines we compare Catholics to those with a religious denomination other than Catholicism. Social divisions over industrialization can also give rise to an urban-rural cleavage. Although it ceased to be politically important in many Western countries after industrialization, the urban-rural cleavage has often remained electorally important through the presence of agrarian parties. Urban-rural differences are measured by a four-point scale derived from the area of residence measure included in the various surveys. The most rural country in Table 5.1 is the Philippines, where 66 percent reported living in a rural area; the most urban is New Zealand, where 64 percent reported living in a city, followed by Australia (53 percent) and Japan (44 percent). Urbanization is also strongly associated with center-periphery relations in the Philippines, but only modestly so in Japan and Taiwan. There is no association in Australia, Korea, or New Zealand.22 The fourth cleavage is the division between owners and workers, reflected in occupation. Two direct measures of occupation are used here: nonmanual workers and farmers, with manual workers and those not in the labor force forming the reference category. Because unemployment is often a major source of political conflict, that is also included. The countries vary considerably in their occupational structure, reflecting in part their differing levels of economic development. As we would expect, Australia has the highest number of white-collar workers (56 percent), followed by New Zealand (46 percent) and Japan (44 percent); the much less industrialized Philippines has the lowest (9 percent) and has three in ten of its voters also employed in agriculture. Unemployment varies between the countries, at least partly as a function of how it is measured across the surveys. In Western democracies, parties of the left emerged from trade union roots, and union membership has been a major predictor of the vote ever since. Union membership in Australia and New Zealand has been of major political importance; across the other four countries membership is modest—10 percent or less—with the exception of Taiwan, where 40 percent of voters reported that they or a partner were a trade union member, reflecting the influence of the state in trade unionism during the period of military rule in the mid-1980s.23 The final

Means Variables Center-periphery

Korea

New Zealand

Philippines

Taiwan

Distance from national capital to region, from zero to 10

2.61

3.92

3.51

1.77

5.17

3.47

1 = yes, 0 = no 1 = yes, 0 = no 1 = yes, 0 = no 1 = yes, 0 = no 1 = yes, 0 = no From 1 (never attends) to 6 (attends weekly) From 1 (rural) to 4 (city)

naa na .25 .43 na 2.42

.61 na na na .07 3.25

.30 na .33 .19 na 2.12

nsb ns .35 .46 na 2.34

na na .83 na na 4.98

.42 .18 na na .07 2.13

3.00

2.79

2.71

3.11

1.57

2.52

1 = nonmanual worker, 0 = other 1 = farmer, 0 = other 1 = unemployed, 0 = other Quintiles 1 = member, 0 = nonmember

.57 .03 .02 1.90 .31

.44 .08 .12 2.01 .09

.23 .03 .07 1.75 .10

.46 .03 .04 1.94 .41

.09 .31 .12 1.83 .07

.29 .04 .04 1.78 .40

.48 50.03 .33 .24 (1,625)

.50 53.79 .61 .18 (1,600)

.51 42.74 .49 .33 (1,174)

.56 49.34 .44 .19 (1,402)

.50 42.07 .31 .11 (1,035)

.50 45.69 .56 .13 (1,638)

1 = male, 0 = female Years 1 = yes, 0 = no 1 = yes, 0 = no

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, module 2. Notes: Estimates are for voters only. Occupation and trade union member are for head of household. a. na = not available. b. ns = not statistically significant.

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Japan

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Urban-rural Owner-worker Nonmanual worker Farmer Unemployed Family income Trade union member Controls Gender Age Secondary education Tertiary education (N)

Australia

2/18/08

Religion Buddhist Taoist Catholic Protestant Other religion Church attendance

Definitions

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74

Table 5.1

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measure of the owner-worker cleavage reflects achievement, in the form of total household income, and is measured in quintiles. These four social cleavages, deriving from the Lipset and Rokkan paradigm, form the theoretical basis for the measurement of social divisions and how they relate to party competition. We included three further measures. Gender and age are control variables, although age itself is a proxy for generation, which we hypothesize might be important in several of the countries, reflecting lifetime political experiences. The age distribution varies considerably across nations; the mean age of voters in Japan is 54 years, more than twice the mean age for the other three East Asian countries, reflecting the aging of the Japanese population.24 Finally, education is measured by the proportion with secondary and tertiary education, with the reference category being those with no education or primary education only.

Measuring the Vote In each of the six countries, we use the vote for the major parties in the lower house parliamentary elections, with the exception of Japan where the vote is for the upper house. The distribution of voters in the surveys is shown in Table 5.2. Since our interest is in voting for the major parties, a rough guide was to include only those parties that attracted the support of 10 percent or more of the voters in the survey. In Japan, this presents few problems and those voting for other than the three major parties made up just 11 percent of the Japanese respondents. In Korea, the pattern is similar, and three major parties account for more than nine out of ten respondents, with President Roh Moo-hyun’s Our Party attracting 46 percent of the reported voters. In Taiwan, three parties meet the 10 percent threshold, making up 82 percent of the respondents’ votes. In Australia, the two major parties attract 88 percent of the total vote, with the Greens attracting a further 8 percent. We include the Greens in the analyses, although they fall just short of the 10 percent threshold, because of their substantive importance in the political system. In New Zealand, the three parties that attracted 10 percent or more of the vote—the Labour, National, and New Zealand First parties—still leave about a quarter of the voters supporting minor parties. The fragmentation of the New Zealand party system began in the 1990s, brought on by a change in the electoral system from first past the post to a mixed-member proportional system.25

The Distribution of the Vote (by percentage) Australia (2004)

Japan (2004)

Korea (2004)

Total (N)

Total (N)

100 (1,625) New Zealand (2002)

100 (1,464)

Grand National Party (GNP) Our Party Democratic Labour Party (DLP) Others Total (N)

Philippines (2004) 45

National

18

New Zealand First Others

10 27 100 (1,402)

Lakas-Christian, Muslim Democrats (CMD) Nationalist Peoples’Coalition (NPC) Liberal Party (LP) Others Candidate’s party not known Total (N)

33 46 13 8

100 (1,114) Taiwan (2001)

17

Kuomintang (KMT)

29

14

Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) People First Party (PFP) Others

36

12 16 41 100 (826)

Total (N)

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, module 2. Note: Statistics are for the lower house parliamentary elections except for the upper house elections in Japan.

17 18 100 (1,311)

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Labour

Total (N)

35 42 12 11

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Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Democratic Party (DJP) Clean Government Party (NKP) Others

2/18/08

Liberal-National Party coalition (LNP) 51 Australian Labor Party (ALP) 37 Greens 8 Others 4

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Table 5.2

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77

The Philippines presents some difficulty in measuring the vote. The May 2004 elections had a bewildering number of parties and groupings competing for positions at three levels of government, resulting in considerable scope for confusion in recalled vote among the survey respondents. In the lower house elections, three parties attracted the support of 10 percent or more of the respondents, but all three were part of the Coalition of Truth and Experience for Tomorrow (or K-4). The main opposition, the Coalition of United Filipinos (or KNP), gained just 3.3 percent support from the respondents. A further problem is that no less than 41 percent of the respondents reported casting votes for candidates for whom party affiliation could not be ascertained. Therefore, we examine presidential vote for this reason. More than eight out of 10 voters cast their ballot either for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who represented the K-4 coalition, or Fernando Poe, representing the KNP coalition.

Results We begin the analyses by focusing on the two Western democracies of Australia and New Zealand, which lie at the edge of East Asia but should represent the broad patterns of the Lipset/Rokkan cleavage alignments for Western democracies. With this benchmark set, we then turn to the other nations in our study. Australia For most of the twentieth century, Australia has represented almost a model European society in terms of its voting behavior. The class cleavage eclipsed an urban-rural divide in the 1920s, giving rise on the one hand to a conservative party aligned with capital, and on the other, a labor party aligned with the trade unions. Through the twin mechanism of compulsory voting and frequent elections, these two groupings have dominated Australian politics to the present day, albeit with some weakening in the class cleavage in recent years, although not to the extent of the other Western democracies.26 The predominance of the owner-worker cleavage in Australian voting is shown in Table 5.3 in the contrast between Liberal-National coalition and Labor voters in the 2004 federal election for the lower House of Representatives. The strongest predictor of Liberal-National versus Labor voting is trade union membership, which is more than three times more important than any other variable in the equation. In-

Social Structure and Voting in Australia, 2004 LNP/ALP (SE)

Estimate

(SE)

Estimate

(SE)

ns

ns

ns

ns

ns

ns

ns ns .114** –.183**

ns ns (.040) (.053)

1.04** 1.06** .224** ns

.408** 1.487** –.827* .229** –.971**

(.138) (.513) (.421) (.053) (.133)

ns ns ns .310** –.761**

ns ns ns –.541**

ns ns ns (.188)

.519* ns ns –2.103**

.099

.579 .201 (1,325)

(.311) (.255) (.082)

(.090) (.234) (.223) ns (.335)

.923** ns ns ns

(.311) ns ns ns

ns –1.607* ns ns ns

ns (.773) ns ns ns

ns .015* ns ns

ns (.008) ns ns

.480

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, module 2. Note: Multinomial logistic regression showing parameter estimates and standard errors (SE) predicting three sets of contrasts between party voters. LNP = Liberal-National coalition party; ALP = Australian Labor Party; ns = not statistically significant; * indicates p < .05, two-tailed; ** indicates p < .01.

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Estimate

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Constant Nagelkerke R-square (N)

ALP/Green

2/18/08

Center-periphery Religion Catholic Protestant Church attendance Urban-rural Owner-worker Nonmanual worker Farmer Unemployed Family income Trade union member Controls Gender Age Secondary education Tertiary education

LNP/Green

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Table 5.3

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Social Structure and Party Support

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come is next in importance, followed by the two occupational measures, non-manual workers and farmers. By contrast, the differences between the two major party voters and Green voters tend to be dominated by religion or (in the case of Liberal-National versus Green) income. In general, the differences between Green voters and Labor voters are the smaller of the two sets of contrasts, mainly because the Greens have recruited most of their support from disaffected Labor supporters. New Zealand Like Australia, voting in New Zealand has historically been dominated by socioeconomic concerns, organized around a two-party system. However, economic recessions in the 1970s, followed by unpopular free-market policies championed by a Labour government, fostered splits within the major parties and the rise of protest parties. This trend was exacerbated by the adoption of proportional representation in 1996, and in the 2002 and 2005 elections seven to eight parties had representation in the singlechamber parliament. In line with changes in voting behavior in the other Western democracies, values and environmental issues have risen in importance to voters, eroding the traditional class cleavage.27 Whatever the importance of other cleavages, socioeconomic differences between voters were the predominant influences underlying Labour and National party support in the 2002 election (Table 5.4). Like Australia, trade union membership was by far the most important predictor of the vote and was almost four times more important than the second most important predictor, income. Vestiges of the cleavages that dominated New Zealand politics early in the twentieth century, religion and urban-rural, are also evident in Table 5.4. Socioeconomic divisions are less important in distinguishing Labour or National voters from voters for the populist New Zealand First (NZF) party. Supporters of both major parties are more likely to have tertiary education compared to their NZF counterparts, and NZF voters are more likely to live in peripheral areas compared to National voters. Japan Studies of voting behavior in Japan have emphasized the absence of any major social cleavages to structure voting behavior.28 As a largely homogeneous society, Japan has not seen the religious, regional, or ethnic divisions found in many other industrial democracies. In addition, candi-

Social Structure and Voting in New Zealand, 2002 Labour/National (SE)

Estimate

(SE)

Estimate

(SE)

–.208*

(.103)

ns

ns

.372**

(.144)

–.672* –.617** ns .155*

(.269) (.202) ns (.071)

–.722* ns ns ns

(.321) ns ns ns

ns ns .151* ns

ns ns (.074) ns

ns ns 1.234* –.230** 1.563**

ns ns (.638) (.075) (.267)

ns ns ns ns .546*

ns ns ns ns (.273)

.503* ns ns .322** –1.017**

(.243) ns ns (.104) (.355)

ns .013* ns ns

ns (.006) ns ns

–.401* ns ns .766

(.208) ns ns (.381)

ns ns ns .873*

ns ns ns (.419)

1.153

.529 .148 (881)

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, module 2. Note: Multinomial logistic regression showing parameter estimates and standard errors (SE) predicting three sets of contrasts between party voters. NZF = New Zealand First; ns = not statistically significant; * indicates p < .05, two-tailed; ** indicates p < .01.

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Estimate

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Constant Nagelkerke R-square (N)

National/NZF

2/18/08

Center-periphery Religion Catholic Protestant Church attendance Urban-rural Owner-worker Nonmanual worker Farmer Unemployed Family income Trade union member Controls Gender Age Secondary education Tertiary education

Labour/NZF

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Table 5.4

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Social Structure and Party Support

81

date-centered politics is important in shaping the vote, one consequence of the long period of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) rule with no credible opposition. Of the three parties included in Table 5.5, the LDP is the oldest and most conservative, occupying government for all but three years of the postwar period. At the time of the survey, the LDP had formed a coalition government with the Clean Government Party (NKP), a conservative party led by the leader of a prominent Buddhist organization opposed to armed conflict and the deployment of the Japanese military overseas. The Democratic Party (DPJ) was formed in 1998 through an amalgamation of four center-left parties and has grown to become the main opposition party. As we would expect from its Buddhist origins, NKP voters differ from both their LDP and DPJ counterparts in exhibiting greater religiosity. The owner-worker cleavage is important via farmworkers, who are significantly more likely to vote for the LDP over both the NKP and the DPJ. Urban-rural divisions are unimportant, and center-periphery is salient only in identifying LDP from DPJ voters, with the former being more likely to live farther away from Tokyo. The most consistently important predictors of the vote in Japan are outside of the four main social cleavages: they are gender, age, and education.29 Being older, male, and better educated are the most important predictors of both the LDP and DPJ vote, compared to the NKP. In turn, LDP voters are more likely to be female and older compared to their DPJ coalition partners. These results underline the importance of religion in Japanese voting, through support from more committed Buddhists for the NKP. The results also confirm those of earlier studies, which show the importance of the farm sector in support for the LDP. However, there are also significant effects for gender, age, and education; indeed, age is the most important factor in the overall model. Korea Historically, elections in Korea have been dominated by regional interests and local candidates.30 This pattern reemerged in the 1987 election, which marked the transition from military rule. While other social cleavages have been periodically important—particularly owner-worker cleavages, as one would expect in the world’s tenth largest economy—their effects have generally been small. Moreover, sustained repression during military rule effectively stifled the growth of any significant labor or centerleft parties. The 2004 Korean parliamentary elections were fought on the issue of the impeachment of President Roh on allegations of corruption.

LDP/NKP (SE)

Estimate

(SE)

Estimate

(SE)

ns

ns

ns

ns

.056**

(.020)

ns ns –.222** ns

ns ns (.051) ns

ns ns –.200** ns

ns ns (.049) ns

ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns

ns 1.119** ns ns ns

ns (.398) ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns 1.127** ns ns ns

ns (.290) ns ns ns

.528** .047** .612* 1.398**

(.204) (.008) (.262) (.439)

.811** .022** .747** 1.615**

(.199) (.007) (.264) (.430)

–.283* .025** ns ns

(.138) (.005) ns ns

–1.652

–.204 .184 (1,219)

–1.448

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, module 2. Note: Multinomial logistic regression showing parameter estimates and standard errors predicting three sets of contrasts between party voters. LDP = Liberal Democratic Party; NKP = Clean Government Party; DJP = Democratic Party of Japan; ns = not statistically significant; * indicates p < .05, two-tailed; ** indicates p < .01.

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Estimate

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Constant Nagelkerke R-square (N)

LDP/DJP

2/18/08

Center-periphery Religion Buddhist Other religion Church attendance Urban-rural Owner-worker Nonmanual worker Farmer Unemployed Family income Trade union member Controls Gender Age Secondary education Tertiary education

DJP/NKP

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82

Table 5.5

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Social Structure and Party Support

83

The newly formed liberal reformist Our Party, which opposed the president’s impeachment, won the largest proportion of the vote, followed by the conservative Grand National Party (GNP), which supported his impeachment. The third party, the center-left trade union–backed Democratic Labour Party (DLP), gained 13 percent of the vote. With the exception of center-periphery, voting patterns in Korea are notable for the weak influence of the four main social cleavages (Table 5.6). There is a modest impact for religion, with Buddhists being more likely to support the GNP over the other two parties. Both the GNP and the DLP are more likely to find their supporters in the Korean periphery, compared to Our Party, whose support is more likely to be found in and around Seoul. This supports other research on regional voting, which shows that GNP support is linked to powerful regional leaders outside of Seoul.31 However, as in Japan, the strongest influences on Korean voting are associated with age and, to a lesser extent, gender. Older voters are more likely to support the GNP over the main alternatives; indeed, in both equations contrasting the GNP with the other two parties, age is as important as all the other independent variables combined. Women are also much more likely to support the GNP and Our Party, compared to the DLP. The strong influence of generation on voting underpins the extent to which age is now supplanting regional and ideological differences in shaping party support in Korea. The Philippines Previous research claims that voting in the Philippines is dominated by local patronage and machine politics, in line with many other developing countries. Corruption is often a major issue in national elections, and an additional factor has been the communist insurgency in the south of the country. As noted earlier, the analysis of voting in the 2004 Philippines elections is first based on the legislative elections, which contrasts the three parties forming the K-4 (Koalisyon ng Katapatan at Karanasan sa Kinabukasan or Coalition of Truth and Experience for Tomorrow). In addition, we examine the presidential election, which was a straight contest between the K-4 coalition and the opposition Koalisyon ng Nagkakaisang Pilipino (Coalition of United Filipinos), or KNP. The results for the legislative elections show that the only consistent predictor of legislative vote is center-periphery. Lakas and Nationalist People’s Coalition (NPC) supporters are more likely to come from

GNP/DLP (SE)

Estimate

(SE)

Estimate

(SE)

–.085*

(.037)

–.070*

(.035)

ns

ns

1.030* 1.013* ns ns ns

(.411) (.492) ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns 2.173* ns ns

ns ns (1.036) ns ns

–.724** .057** ns ns

(.249) (.011) ns ns

–.704** ns ns ns

(.234) ns ns ns

–1.670

1.973 .190 (774)

.836** ns ns ns .187*

(.307) ns ns ns (.082)

ns ns

ns ns

ns ns

ns ns

ns .050** ns ns

ns (.008) ns ns

–3.643

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, module 2. Note: Multinomial logistic regression showing parameter estimates and standard errors (SE) predicting three sets of contrasts between party voters. GNP = Grand National Party; DLP = Democratic Labour Party; ns = not statistically significant; * indicates p < .05, two-tailed; ** indicates p < .01.

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Estimate

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Constant Nagelkerke R-square (N)

GNP/Our Party

2/18/08

Center-periphery Religion Buddhist Catholic Protestant Church attendance Urban-rural Owner-worker Nonmanual worker Farmer Unemployed Family income Trade union member Controls Gender Age Secondary education Tertiary education

Our Party/DLP

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84

Table 5.6

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Social Structure and Party Support

85

the periphery (see Table 5.7), while Liberal Party supporters are more likely to be found in the National Capital Region, which includes Manila. There is a similar pattern in the presidential vote; Arroyo’s supporters are in the outlying provinces, and Poe’s in and around the capital. Indeed, in two of the four equations, center-periphery is by far the most important predictor of the vote. Urban-rural differences are important in distinguishing the K-4 parties, but have no effect on the presidential vote. Focusing on voting in the 2001 presidential election, there are important patterns for education in Table 5.7. The vote for Arroyo was more likely to come from better-educated voters, especially those with tertiary education, while Poe’s supporters were disproportionately found among the less educated. Indeed, the combined effect for education is almost equivalent to center-periphery in its impact on the vote. These effects do not appear in the contrasts between the K-4 parties; the only analogy is income, with Lakas supporters having significantly lower incomes compared to their NPC counterparts. It would appear, then, that Arroyo support was associated with the traditional political elites, while Poe was a more populist candidate. Taiwan Voting behavior in Taiwan has been dominated by the issue of relations with China, and for that reason traditional social cleavages have generally exercised influence only insofar as they are related through, for example, provincial origins to political and national identity.32 The 2001 Taiwanese legislative election resulted in the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) losing its majority for the first time, although along with its main partner in the Pan-Blue Coalition, the People First Party (PFP), it remained in office. The main opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), gained the largest number of votes and seats, but its Pan-Green Coalition with the pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union did not produce sufficient votes to beat its conservative opponents. However, the four potential social cleavages have relatively little effect on the vote. The center-periphery cleavage is significant in distinguishing KMT and DPP voters from PFP voters, with the latter being more likely to live in the areas in or around the capital, Taipei. However, center-periphery considerations are unimportant in distinguishing voters across the main political divide, between the KMT and the DPP. Here the most important factors are age, with KMT voters being older than DPP voters, followed by education, with KMT voters being gen-

Social Structure and Voting in the Philippines, 2004

86

Legislative Election Lakas/LP (SE)

Estimate

(SE)

Estimate

(SE)

.228**

(.053)

.223**

(.053)

ns

ns

ns ns .787**

ns ns (.178)

ns ns ns

ns ns ns

ns ns .602**

ns ns (.172)

ns ns ns

ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns –.434** ns

ns ns ns (.124) ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns

ns .042* .528** 1.217**

ns (.005) (.185) (.346)

–1.866

–.881 .188 (349)

–.985

Estimate

(SE)

.118**

(.127)

–1.077 .084 (818)

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, module 2. Note: Multinomial logistic regressions (first two equations) and logistic regression (third equation) showing parameter estimates and standard errors (SE) predicting vote. The first three equations predict three sets of contrasts between party voters; the dependent variable in the third equation is dichotomous, contrasting the presidential vote for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo with the vote for Fernando Poe. LP = Liberal Party; NPC = Nationalist People’s Coalition; ns = not statistically significant; * indicates p < .05, two-tailed; ** indicates p < .01.

Page 86

Estimate

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Constant Nagelkerke R-square (N)

Presidential Election, Arroyo-Poe

Lakas/NPC

2/18/08

Center-periphery Religion Catholic Church attendance Urban-rural Owner-worker Nonmanual worker Farmer Unemployed Family income Trade union member Controls Gender Age Secondary education Tertiary education

NPC/LP

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Table 5.7

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Social Structure and Party Support

87

erally better educated (see Table 5.8). These results are similar to those reported by Chu for the 1995–2005 time period.33 The stability of the effects suggests the continuing relevance of the independence issue, underpinned by a subethnic cleavage between mainlanders and Taiwanese, and the social factors to which it is related.

The Impact of Social Cleavages in East Asian Electorates There are clearly systematic linkages between social structure and voting across the six countries covered in the analyses presented above. What is their overall impact in predicting the vote? And more important, what is the impact of the four main social cleavages identified in the Lipset and Rokkan paradigm in predicting the vote in these Asian democracies? The models in Tables 5.3 through 5.8 provide an overall measure of the fit of the social factors in predicting the vote, in the form of the percentage of the variance that is explained by each model; by calculating the weight of each group of independent variables in making up that overall R-squared value, we can estimate the contribution of each social cleavage.34 These calculations are shown in Figure 5.1, which displays three sets of results: the overall model fit; the contribution from the four Lipset and Rokkan social cleavages; and the contribution of gender, age, and education. The results in Figure 5.1 show that the social structures of four countries—Australia, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines—exhibit very similar impacts on voting, of around 19 to 20 percent.35 Of these four countries, the most economically developed—Australia, Japan, and Korea—show a broadly similar distribution between the traditional social cleavages and gender, age, and education. In Australia, the Lipset and Rokkan cleavages constitute 14.1 percent of the 20.1 percent total; in Japan, 10.3 percent of the 18.4 percent total; and in Korea, 7.9 percent of the 19 percent total. New Zealand, although having a smaller proportion of the overall variance explained, is almost an archetypal Lipset-Rokkan polity, with most of the 14.8 percent of the variance explained by the four traditional social cleavages. The Philippines shows a separate pattern, with almost all of the total coming from the traditional social cleavages, in this case center-periphery and urbanization. Taiwan represents the exception; with just 8.7 percent of the variance explained by social cleavages, it shows the enduring importance of the independence issue on voting, which of course is not controlled for in the model estimated here.

KMT/PFP (SE)

Estimate

(SE)

Estimate

(SE)

.100**

(.035)

.085**

(.034)

ns

ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns –.281*

ns ns ns ns (.147)

ns .020** ns ns

ns (.007) ns ns

ns ns –.563* –.938**

ns ns (.260) (.342)

–.557

.765 .087 (1,042)

ns .021** .649** .798**

ns (.006) (.202) (.298)

–1.322

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, module 2. Note: Multinomial logistic regression showing parameter estimates and standard errors predicting three sets of contrasts between party voters. KMT = Kuomintang; PFP = People First Party; DPP = Democratic Progressive Party; ns = not statistically significant; * indicates p < .05, two-tailed; ** indicates p < .01.

Page 88

Estimate

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Constant Nagelkerke R-square (N)

KMT/DPP

2/18/08

Center-periphery Religion Buddhist Taoist Other religion Church attendance Urban-rural Owner-worker Nonmanual worker Farmer Unemployed Family income Trade union member Controls Gender Age Secondary education Tertiary education

DPP/PFP

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Social Structure and Voting in Taiwan, 2001

88

Table 5.8

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Social Structure and Party Support Figure 5.1

89

Social Cleavages and Voting in East Asia

Source: CSES, module 2. Note: Percent variance explained by different groups of social cleavages, derived from Tables 5.3 through 5.8. For estimation method, see text.

At best, there is only weak support for the Lipset-Rokkan paradigm outside of Australia and New Zealand. While center-periphery and urban-rural differences are important in three of the four newer democracies, the other cleavages are not, with the partial exception of religion. Nor can it be argued that the four democracies are so different as to obviate any meaningful comparisons. While they differ in economic development and democratic experience, they all display a strong element of localism and personal patronage in their politics,36 at least partly a function of their mixed-member electoral systems. They also have exhibited strong, sometimes authoritarian state intervention to achieve economic goals, which in turn has stifled the development of civil society.37 And their political elites have held a common belief that economic decline can lead to national disintegration, and as a consequence have been prepared to make short-term compromises to achieve economic prosperity.38 The results show the consistent absence of any significant ownerworker cleavage in party support outside of Australia or New Zealand, in direct contradiction to the Lipset-Rokkan model. This stems from the underdevelopment of the political left in three of the countries, the exception being Japan. In Korea and Taiwan, military rule and authoritar-

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ian governments have stultified the growth of the left, and the consequence has been mobilization of voters around the owner-worker cleavage. To the extent that the political left has attracted support, it has been on a policy platform broadly supportive of the prevailing policies of economic liberalization, rather than on traditional union issues of workers’ rights.39 In many respects, the East Asian left is now similar in outlook to the new left in many of the established democracies. A second way in which the East Asian results differ from the Lipset-Rokkan model is in the importance of age—or more properly generation—in shaping party support. What explains the political importance of generation? The answer appears to be the democratic experiences of the publics in the various countries, in much the same way culture and modernization have affected ideological divisions, as Russell J. Dalton and Aiji Tanaka show in their chapter in this volume. This mirrors the experience of the European postcommunist societies, where age was one of the most consistent predictors of ideology in the period immediately following the democratic transition.40 The consistent importance of generational influences on voting emerges across all four of the newer East Asian democracies, where democratic experiences have been more attenuated. This contrasts with the almost total absence of a generational effect in the older, more stable democracies of Australia and New Zealand. There are clearly generational influences at work as voters exhibit the political outlooks and views that were molded by their political socialization in early adulthood. The timing of the democratic transition and the experiences that were associated with it are one of the strongest influences on the institutionalization of the party systems of East Asia.

Notes 1. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, “Introduction.” In Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967). 2. See Uk Heo and Hans Stockton, “The Impact of Democratic Transition on Elections and Parties in South Korea,” Party Politics 11 (2005): 674–688. 3. Lipset and Rokkan, “Introduction.” 4. Peter Mair, “The Freezing Hypothesis: An Evaluation.” In Lauri Karvonen, Stein Kuhnle, and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments Revisited (London: Routledge, 2004). 5. Richard Rose and Derek Urwin, “Social Cohesion, Political Parties, and Strains in Regimes,” Comparative Political Studies 2 (1969): 7–67.

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6. See Arend Lijphart, “Religion vs. Linguistic vs. Class Voting,” American Political Science Review 73 (1979): 442–458; Robert H. Dix, “Cleavage Structures and Party Systems in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 22 (1989): 23–38; and Oddbjørn Knutsen, “Cleavage Dimensions in Ten West European Countries,” Comparative Political Studies 21 (1989): 495–533. 7. See Mark Franklin et al., Electoral Change: Responses to Social and Attitudinal Structures in Western Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Russell J. Dalton, “The Decline of Party Identifications.” In Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds., Parties Without Partisans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 8. Herbert Kitschelt, “Divergent Paths of Postcommunist Democracies.” In Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther, eds., Political Parties and Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Stephen Whitefield and Geoffrey Evans, “Political Culture Versus Rational Choice: Explaining Responses to Transition in the Czech Republic and Slovakia,” British Journal of Political Science 29 (1999): 129–155. 9. Ian McAllister and Stephen White, “Political Parties and Democratic Consolidation in Post-communist Societies,” Party Politics 13 (March 2007): 197–216. 10. See Doh Chull Shin, Mass Politics and Culture in Democratizing Korea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Russell Dalton and Doh Chull Shin, eds., Citizens, Democracy and Markets Around the Pacific Rim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 11. Clive Bean, “Class and Party in the Anglo-American Democracies: The Case of New Zealand in Perspective,” British Journal of Political Science 18 (1988): 303–321; Ian McAllister, Political Behaviour: Citizens, Parties and Elites in Australia (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992). 12. McAllister and White, “Political Parties and Democratic Consolidation,” p. 210. 13. Ibid. 14. Chris Hann and Elizbath Dunn, Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (London: Routledge, 1996); Marc Morje Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Robert Wade, Governing the Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 15. The elections were: 2004 Australia; 2004 Japan; 2004 Korea; 2002 New Zealand; 2004 Philippines; and 2001 Taiwan. 16. Guy D. Whitten and Harvey D. Palmer, “Heightening Comparativists’ Concern for Model Choice: Voting Behavior in Great Britain and the Netherlands,” American Journal of Political Science 40 (1996): 231–260. Strictly speaking, multinomial probit is a more appropriate method for analyzing voting behavior, but it is less easy to interpret and to calculate, and thus we use MNL. 17. John Halliday, “Recession, Revolution and Metropolis-Periphery Relations in East-Asia with Special Reference to Japan,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 7 (1977): 347–363. 18. Hee-Yeon Lee, “Growth Determinants in the Core-Periphery of Korea,” International Regional Science Review 12 (1989): 147–163.

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19. Peter F. Kornichi and James McMullen, Religion in Japan: Arrows to Heaven and Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 20. Andrew Eungi Kim, “Characteristics of Religious Life in South Korea: A Sociological Survey,” Review of Religious Research 43 (2002): 291–310. 21. Philip Clart and Charles B. Jones, eds., Religion in Modern Taiwan: Tradition and Innovation in a Changing Society (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003). 22. The correlation between center-periphery and urban-rural is –.70 (p < .000) in the Philippines, –.32 (p < .000) in Taiwan, and –.19 (p < .000) in Japan. 23. Shyh-Jer Chen, Jyh-Jer Ko, and John Lawler, “Changing Patterns of Industrial Relations in Taiwan,” Industrial Relations 42 (2003): 315–340. 24. One factor affecting these estimates is the age at which individuals are eligible to vote, which is twenty in Japan and Taiwan, nineteen in Korea, and eighteen in the Philippines and Thailand. 25. Jack Vowles et al., eds., Voters’ Veto: The 2002 Election in New Zealand and the Consolidation of Minority Government (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004). 26. McAllister, Political Behaviour; and Don Aitkin, Stability and Change in Australian Politics (Canberra: ANU Press, 1982). 27. Raymond Miller, “New Zealand’s Multi-Party System: Consolidation of the Cartel Model Under Proportional Representation.” In Ian Marsh, ed., Political Parties in Transition? (Sydney: Federation Press, 2006). 28. Scott C. Flanagan et al., The Japanese Voter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); and Steven R. Reed, “Democracy and the Personal Vote: A Cautionary Tale from Japan,” Electoral Studies 13 (1994): 17–28. 29. Flanagan et al., The Japanese Voter, analyzing results from the 1976 lower house elections, found no effect for age, but hypothesized that younger people would be more conservative. That prediction has not been borne out. 30. Shin, Mass Politics and Culture in Democratizing Korea; and Carl J. Saxer, From Transition to Power Alternation: Democracy in South Korea, 1987–1997 (New York: Routledge, 2002). 31. Woojin Moon, “Decomposition of Regional Voting in South Korea: Ideological Conflicts and Regional Interests,” Party Politics 11 (2005): 579–599. 32. Yun-han Chu and Tse-min Lin, “The Process of Democratic Consolidation in Taiwan: Social Cleavages, Electoral Competition and the Emerging Party System.” In Hung-Mao Tien, ed., Taiwan’s Electoral Politics and Democratic Transition (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996); Ching-hsin Yu, “The Evolving Party System in Taiwan,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 40 (2005): 105–123. 33. Chu, “The Evolving Party System in Taiwan.” 34. The weight of each variable is estimated by summing the Wald values in each equation, and then calculating their contribution to the overall variance explained. 35. These total proportions of the variance explained are similar to those found elsewhere: see McAllister and White, “Political Parties and Democratic Consolidation.”

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36. Mikael Mattlin, “Nested Pyramid Structures: Political Parties in Taiwanese Elections,” China Quarterly 180 (2004): 1031–1049. 37. Goeffrey McNicoll, “Policy Lessons of the East Asian Demographic Transition,” Population and Development Review 32 (2006): 1–25. 38. Hilton L. Root, “What Democracy Can Do for East Asia,” Journal of Democracy 13 (2002): 113–126. 39. Joseph Wong, “Democratization and the Left: Comparing East Asia and Latin America,” Comparative Political Studies 37 (2004): 1213–1237. 40. See Richard Rose and Elin Carnaghan, “Generational Effects on Attitudes to Communist Regimes: A Comparative Analysis,” Post-Soviet Affairs 11 (1995): 28–56; and Geoffrey Evans and Stephen Whitefield, “The Evolution of the Left and Right in Post-Soviet Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 50 (1998): 1023–1042.

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6 Value Cleavages, Issues, and Partisanship Aie-Rie Lee

A

s is well known, East Asia has undergone fundamental socioeconomic transformations in the past thirty to forty years. Recently, several nations have transitioned from relatively authoritarian systems to fledgling democratic regimes. As a consequence of these rapid social changes, there may be many conflicting social values among East Asian publics. Existing traditional ideas and cultural predispositions may play a central role in shaping political behavior. To the extent that deferential, conformist values that emphasize respecting authority and avoiding conflict remain primary norms of East Asian societies, they encourage specific political orientations.1 At the same time, modernization and democratization should give rise to new values of self-expression and libertarian orientations. Thus, this chapter argues that social values provide an important clue in understanding the nature of political conflict and its resolution in contemporary East Asian party systems. Certainly scholars disagree about how to measure values and what kinds of value cleavages exist in East Asia and other emerging democracies.2 This study employs Scott C. Flanagan and Aie-Rie Lee’s authoritarian-libertarian (A-L) value cleavage thesis, which has been tested in both the West and East Asian cultural settings.3 The Flanagan and Lee approach argues that the overarching concept that integrates the notion of libertarian values is self-actualization. To achieve the goal of self-actualization, the individual requires freedom in three separate but interrelated domains. These are a social domain to provide freedom from the tyranny of authority, a psychological domain to free the individual from rigidly held traditional beliefs and customs, and a physical domain to afford freedom from material limitations. The drive for self95

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actualization and its expression in the social, psychological, and physical domains then defines the scope of the A-L value change, which occurs along three distinct subdimensions: deference to autonomy, conformity to openness, and austerity to self-betterment. We argue that the A-L value model is valuable for assessing the underlying pattern of value politics in East Asia for several reasons. First, it incorporates both traditional and modern orientations toward authority, which have been a growing source of contention during the democratization process in East Asia. An indirect indication of this process is the strength of age differences in party support found in the previous chapter by Ian McAllister. Second, the A-L model is a continuous model of value cleavage that spans the range of national experiences in East Asia. Third, previous research argues that the A-L value cleavage emerges when nations reach a certain level of socioeconomic development, which has occurred in many East Asian nations over the previous two decades. Simply put, we expect that the A-L value cleavage emerges at an earlier level of socioeconomic development than predicted by Ronald Inglehart’s theory of postmaterialist value change in advanced industrial societies.4 This chapter begins by briefly reviewing the theoretical literature on the values-issues-party preference model. Then, we empirically investigate the emergence and strength of the A-L cleavage in East Asia. We also compare the A-L dimensions to basic economic policy attitudes to determine which provides the best explanation of party preference. Finally, we examine the relationship between value cleavages, economic issues, and party preferences. The study is based on the 1995–1997 and 1999–2001 waves of the World Values Survey (WVS) studies. The four East Asian nations in this analysis exhibit drastically different levels of development levels: Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. We also analyze Australia and New Zealand as our comparison to the patterns in Western democracies. One should expect that this new A-L dimension is stronger in established, affluent Western democracies where Inglehart’s postmaterial theory was developed and the social conditions for libertarian values are more extensive.5

The Values-Issues-Party Linkage Prior research offers concrete evidence of the role of value cleavages in forming partisan preference in both advanced and developing worlds.6 Why do these associations exist? The most immediate answer is that

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values have direct and obvious relationships to voter preferences on contemporary political issues. Those with authoritarian (or traditional) values are more likely to report that a conservative party is closer to their position on A-L issues. Those with libertarian values are more likely to name progressive parties as closer to their position across these policy issues. For instance, similar to the progressive parties in the West, the Japan Socialist Party and Japanese Communist Party have been champions of left-libertarian issues, such as the environment, local citizen rights, greater citizen participation in policymaking, green space, and other quality-of-life concerns. At the same time, the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been more supportive of traditional security and authority perspectives. There are indirect connections for the values/party linkages as well. First, those with libertarian values are more likely to be skeptical and cynical of politicians and government institutions and performance. These higher levels of political cynicism may be associated with lower levels of support for the ruling party. A second indirect link may exist in the association between values and psychological involvement in politics. Libertarian values are strongly related to political interest and efficacy, which may stimulate leftist voting, especially in the democratizing nations of East Asia. Both libertarian (modern, emancipative, or self-expression) values and higher levels of psychological involvement may enhance one’s willingness to engage in direct forms of political participation, such as protest behavior. In turn, those activities are likely to involve one with left partisans and may lead, as an expression of one’s protest, to support for leftist parties. In addition to this A-L dimension, economic issues can provide a basis for party support, especially in a period when the economy is undergoing tremendous economic change and new economic policies are being developed. There are widespread claims in electoral behavior that economic attitudes dominate electoral choices in developing as well as established democracies.7 The economic “miracle” that Taiwan experienced under Kuomintang (KMT) rule is undoubtedly a positive asset for the KMT in fighting against its partisan opponents. In the case of Japan, the LDP reaped the electoral benefits of three decades of tremendous economic growth, and it received the blame when that growth stopped in the late 1980s. It is no coincidence that the LDP’s fall from power occurred in the middle of Japan’s longest postwar recession. Thus, in addition to the A-L dimension, we consider how economic policy positions might influence party preferences of East Asian publics.

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Measuring Values How do we measure the A-L value dimension? In previous work we have defined the A-L dimension and measured it for a set of established Western democracies, Japan and Korea.8 These comparisons can be extended to other East Asian democracies. The A-L cleavage occurs along three distinct subdimensions: deference to autonomy, conformity to openness, and self-denial (or austerity) to self-indulgence (or self-betterment). The first two subdimensions of the A-L cleavage constitute the defining core of the A-L dimension. We selected questions from the World Values Survey that tap each of these three subdimensions based on our earlier cross-national studies (Table 6.1).9 Eight of the twelve items are directly related to the deference-autonomy subdimension. Respondents classified as authoritarians prefer a society that puts more emphasis on respect for authority, maintaining order, teaching children obedience, and following a superior’s instructions regardless of their own opinions. These values are often identified with traditional Asian cultural traditions and a Confucian heritage—although we are suggesting that this broader value dimension exists in Western democracies as well. Conversely, libertarians prefer a society that stresses freedom of speech; gives people more say in government, on the job, and in their communities; teaches children independence; and affords more opportunities for individual initiative in the workplace.10 The second and third subdimensions are not well represented in the World Values Survey. One libertarian and one authoritarian item tap the dogmatism subdimension (or open versus closed belief system). Authoritarians are much more likely to believe that God is important. Libertarians are more likely to stress teaching children to develop their imaginations, encouraging a rich fantasy life. The third subdimension is operationalized by two items that tap self-denial versus self-indulgence. Authoritarians are more likely than libertarians to believe that people should love and respect their parents regardless of the parents’ qualities or faults. Conversely, libertarians are more apt than authoritarians to believe that parents should have a life of their own and should not be asked to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of their children.11 One way to test for the existence of an A-L value dimension is to see how strongly these theoretically selected items form a single dimension of value orientations. Prior to its emergence, the different elements of the A-L dimension would not be expected to load highly on a single factor. As the A-L dimension begins to emerge, the intercorrela-

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Table 6.1

Factor Loading for Libertarian and Authoritarian Items on the First Unrotated Factor Philippines

Indonesia

Australia

New Zealand

–.343 –.666 –.175 –.233 –.377 –.347

–.015 –.587 –.377 –.421 –.381 –.196

–.092 –.842 .056 –.279 –.078 –.141

–.226 –.213 –.709 .156 .040 –.179

–.578 –.558 –.436 –.228 –.473 –.498

–.539 –.665 –.408 –.367 –.366 –.406

.354 .666 .385 .198 .226 .082

.441 .567 .457 .149 .328 .246

.488 .658 .108 –.061 .073 .124

.260 –.120 –.647 –.042 .399 .305

.301 .467 .571 .171 .252 .294

.405 .458 .571 .150 .159 .177

1,157 .337

738 .347

1,191 .230

940 .107

2,000 .402

1,031 .389

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N of Cases Average Loading

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Authoritarian items Respect for authority Maintain order Teach child obedience Must follow superior’s instructions God is important Must love parents Libertarian items Protect freedom of speech More say in government, job, community Teach child independence and imagination Prefer job where can use own initiative Parents should have own life Self-interest over common good

Japan

Source: World Values Survey, 1995–1997, 1999–2002.

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tion of items should be relatively weak. As the dimension more fully emerges, both the number of variables that load on a single dimension and the magnitude of the loadings should increase. To see if there is a single authoritarian-libertarian dimension, we entered these twelve items into a factor analysis. Table 6.1 presents the factor loadings for these items in each of the four East Asian and the two Western democracies.12 The signs of the factor loadings in Table 6.1 are as expected for Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand, with the libertarian item loadings being positive and the authoritarian items negative. However, the A-L item clustering starts to break down when we move to the Philippines; the eigenvalue for the first dimension is substantially weaker than the prior four nations. The factor analysis is telling us, therefore, that the A-L dimension exists in the Philippines, but it is somewhat weakly defined. For Indonesia, the patterns appear to be almost random, with nearly half of the items still exhibiting the wrong sign: only three of the six libertarian and four of the six authoritarian items have the correct sign. Thus, Table 6.1 indicates that the A-L dimension is weakly formed at the lower-middle level of economic development as represented by the Philippines and has not yet emerged below that level as represented by Indonesia. These analyses demonstrate that the A-L value cleavage is not limited to advanced industrial societies in the West, but begins to emerge at earlier stages of industrialization and development.

Measuring Party Preferences Like others in this collection, we are interested in the development of party democracy in East Asia. Therefore, the dependent variable in this analysis is party preference. Our measure of party preference asks, “If there were a national election tomorrow, for which party on this list would you vote? . . . [If don’t know]: which party appeals to you most?” As our colleagues have noted, East Asia’s party systems appear fragmented and weakly institutionalized with the exception of Japan.13 For this study we investigate the sources of partisan vote or preference, which include only those parties that garnered the support of 10 percent or more of the survey respondents. Due to the significant number of respondents who did not choose a party, as happens quite often, we also examine these nonpartisans. The distribution of respondents in the surveys is:

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• Japan, LDP (27 percent), Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) (27 percent), “No Party to Support” (26 percent), and other parties (20 percent); • Taiwan, Nationalist Party (NP) or Kuomintang (KMT) (42 percent), Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) (14 percent), “Other Response” (35 percent), other parties (9 percent); • The Philippines, LDP (Struggle of Democratic Filipinos) (12 percent), LAMMP (Struggle of the Patriotic Filipino Masses) (15 percent), Lakas–National Union of Christian Democrats–United Muslim Democrats of the Philippines (12 percent), “Did Not Vote for a Party” (21 percent), and other parties (40 percent); • Indonesia, Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) (21 percent), Golkar (Party of Functional Groups) (21 percent), United Development Party (PPP) (9 percent), and other parties (49 percent); • Australia, Labor (36 percent), Liberal (34 percent), and other parties (30 percent); • New Zealand, Labour (35 percent), National (27 percent), and other parties (19 percent).14

The Consequences of Values To illustrate the significance of the shift from authoritarian to libertarian values, this section examines how these values are related to a number of key political attitudes and behaviors. We begin by presenting the simple bivariate correlation of A-L values and economic policy attitudes with party preferences. Then, we expand the analysis of the A-L dimension to compare the impact of these values on feelings of political alienation and political involvement that will serve as controls in determining the values-issues-party preference model in the subsequent section. These are variables that have been identified as correlates of AL values in prior research.15 We include economic attitudes to demonstrate that the rising A-L value cleavage is not just an extension of Inglehart’s materialist/postmaterialist framework. The economic policy scale includes four issues that focus on traditional left/right positions on distributive economic issues.16 The old left stresses greater income equality, demanding that the state provide for all, seeing competition as harmful rather than good, and increasing government ownership over private ownership. Such issues defined the party systems of the Western industrial democracies

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for much of the twentieth century and were particularly salient in nations where the left was represented by communist, socialist, democratic socialist, or labor parties. One reason to include Australia and New Zealand is to compare East Asian nations to examples of Western democracies where the economic cleavage is still salient (see Chapter 5 by McAllister). In Table 6.2, the first panel reports the associations between A-L values and economic attitudes with party preferences.17 The A-L dimension is significantly associated with party preferences in all four East Asian party systems. Economic attitudes are also related to party preferences among the four East Asian publics. Much like the evidence presented in the chapter by McAllister, economics has a much stronger impact in the two Western advanced industrial democracies, which is further evidence that economic cleavages are not as developed in East Asian party systems. Moreover, the A-L dimension actually has a slightly stronger partisan correlation than do economic attitudes in three of the East Asian systems, but economic attitudes have a stronger relationship with party in both Australia and New Zealand. Which parties in each nation are most supported by libertarian voters? In Japan, LDP and DPJ supporters exhibit significant differences in their values: the LDP identifiers are more authoritarian than their DPJ counterparts (4.95 vs. 5.56 on a ten-point libertarian scale). For Taiwan, the NP supporters are more authoritarian than DPP supporters (3.99 vs. 4.35). Variations in the Philippines and Indonesia are not as clearly drawn. The next panel in the table displays the association of A-L values and economic attitudes with left-right self-placement. If left and right were defined exclusively in economic terms, then we would not expect to find a substantial correlation here. However, there is a strong relationship between A-L values and a leftist identity in Japan and Taiwan, which suggests that, as Inglehart has shown, the political content of left and right is being redefined by the New Politics issues in these consolidated Asian democracies.18 At the same time, economic issues are only significantly linked to left-right positions in Japan. In Australia and New Zealand, the political left and right are defined by both A-L values and especially economic issues. The remainder of Table 6.2 presents variables that are typically linked to these value dimensions and serve as control variables in our multivariate analyses. Our measure of trust in societal institutions asked respondents to indicate their confidence in four institutions: major companies, the TV, the press, and unions. The trust in government scale in-

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Table 6.2

Authoritarian-Libertarian Values, Economics Issues, and Their Correlates Philippines

Indonesia

Australia

Party preference (Cramer’s V) with A-L values Economic issues

.18 .17

.10 .07

.10 .15

.16 .09

.18 .21

.24 .28

Leftist ideology with A-L values Economic issues

.28 .17

.16 (–.06)

(.02) (.02)

(–.02) (–.02)

.18 .31

.12 .43

.21 .35

.16 .23

(–.02) (.02)

.08 .16

(.04) .07

.08 .16

(.04) .16 (–.06)

.27 .27 –.09

(.03) .08 .06

.08 .10 (–.00)

.19 .35 .07

.13 .39 .11

A-L values with Alienation Societal institutional distrust Government institutional distrust Political involvement Psychological involvement Protest potential Economic issues

New Zealand

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Notes: Coefficients are significant at the .05 level except those in parentheses; those in the bottom panel of the table are Pearson’s corrections.

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cludes six institutions: the parliament, the civil service, the parties, the government, the police, and the armed forces. Libertarians tend to be less trustful of societal and governmental institutions. For the most part, these correlations are the same signs across the first two Asian democracies and two Western democracies: Where the A-L cleavage has emerged in the public’s consciousness, libertarians are less trusting of both social and political institutions. Also, as we might expect, the correlations for Filipinos and Indonesians are small and statistically insignificant, suggesting that the A-L value cleavage has not fully developed in these nations. The association between A-L values and psychological involvement is somewhat surprising. Due to their higher levels of education and their self-expressive values, libertarians tend to be more politically assertive and politically active.19 We thus expected to find libertarians exhibit higher levels of psychological involvement in politics. In fact, in two nations, Japan and the Philippines, there are no significant relationships between values and psychological involvement in politics. It appears that libertarians in several East Asian cases profess neither higher level of interest in politics nor frequency of discussing politics with friends than do authoritarians. The sharpest differences in Table 6.2 are on the protest potential scale.20 Indeed, this protest potential scale is the most consistently significant in all six nations. The association between values and protest potential ranges from a low of .08 in the Philippines to a high of .39 in New Zealand. The A-L value cleavage has a clear impact on citizens’ proclivities to engage in protest activities. Finally, the last row of the table demonstrates that the A-L value cleavage is not meaningfully related to traditional economic policy attitudes. All these correlations are very low to insignificant in the East Asian countries. Thus, in contrast to Inglehart’s material/postmaterialist scale, which combines both authoritarian/libertarian and economic orientations, these are largely independent bases of potential party preferences among these East Asian publics and citizens in the two Western Pacific Rim democracies.

Determinants of Party Preferences As others have suggested in this book, political parties in most East Asian democracies have not yet provided a system with a stable foundation of mass support and thus have not attracted stable party loyalties

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from a large number of individuals. Even the development of the Japanese party system is of recent vintage when compared with European democracies. This section explores two questions: (1) to what extent do values and economic issue orientations determine contemporary party preferences in East Asia, and (2) how do these same factors influence no-party preferences? The theoretical discussion suggests an explanatory model including values, economic policy attitudes, the extent of alienation, and political involvement as predictors of party preferences (the variables in Table 6.2). If the A-L value theory holds, we expect that this value cleavage shapes partisan preferences more clearly in countries with higher levels of development (i.e., Japan and Taiwan) and is weaker in nations at a substantially lower level of development (i.e., Indonesia).21 For economic policy attitudes, we expect that they are salient in determining party preference in all countries, regardless of the level of development when included in a multivariate analysis. The challenges of Asia’s social economic modernization and the difficulties of the fiscal crisis of the late 1990s are likely to increase the visibility of economic concerns on the political agenda in most nations. We employed multinomial logistic regression (MNL) to determine the precise contribution of each determinant in a multivariate model predicting party preferences. MNL is appropriate when a dependent variable has more than two categories and allows the simultaneous comparison of more than one contrast (see Chapter 5 by McAllister). Japan Japan has more recognizably established democratic features with several major parties; the LDP is the oldest and most conservative and has held power for all but a few months since 1955. The DPJ was created in 1998 as an opposition force against the ruling LDP. In contrast to the LDP, the DPJ is a party dominated by young professionals, who draw on a wide variety of experience in formulating policy proposals. The third category in the table is no-party supporters (NPS). Table 6.3 demonstrates that out of seven predictors, the governmental institutional distrust scale is the most consistently important in shaping party preferences and between party supporters and nonpartisans.22 As we would expect from its conservative ideological standing, LDP supporters differ from both the DPJ and NPS in exhibiting more trust in government institutions, albeit the NPS being more trustful than the DPJ. LDP supporters, compared with DPJ supporters, also exhibit

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Values, Issues, and Party Preference in Japan, 2000 LDP/DPJ Estimate

(SE)

Estimate

(SE)

Estimate

(SE)

–.407*** ns ns –.567*** –.554*** ns –1.199***

(.130) ns ns (.299) (.094) ns (.376)

ns .331*** ns –.519* ns –.216*** ns

ns (.117) ns (.298) ns (.067) ns

–.523*** –.433*** ns –1.086*** –.578*** .277*** –.889**

(.146) (.137) ns (.342) (.107) (.080) (.429)

1.934

–3.081 .401 (443)

5.015

Notes: LDP (Liberal Democratic Party), DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan), NPS (No Party to Support), SE (standard error). Analyses are based on multinational logistic regression estimates. For the coding of predictors, see note 22. * indicates P < .10, two-tailed; ** indicates P < .05; *** indicates P < .01; ns = not statistically significant.

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Libertarian Economic issues Social institutions distrust Government institutions distrust Leftist ideology Psychological involvement Protest potential

NPS/DPJ

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Table 6.3

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significant differences in values, left/right position, and protest: the former are less likely to be libertarian, more likely to be rightist, and less willing to engage in protest. Values also shape partisan preferences in Japan: authoritarian values are strongly linked to LDP support. In addition, libertarian values indirectly influence partisanship by promoting distrust and cynicism vis-à-vis the ruling party and conservative political establishment. In part, such cultural issues defined the postwar partisan cleavage and left-right social alignments.23 It is noteworthy how significantly LDP supporters differ from the nonpartisans on all items but trust in social institutions: LDP supporters are more authoritarian, more economically conservative, more rightist, more psychologically involved in politics, and less prone to protest than their nonpartisan counterparts. It does not surprise us to see that the LDP is more to the right on economic issues, emphasizing increasing incentives for individual effort, seeing individuals as responsible for themselves, seeing competition as good, and favoring an increase in private ownership. Simply put, economic issues are an important basis of partisan preferences in Japan. Finally, Table 6.3 reports that nonpartisans over DPJ are more liberal on economic issues, more trustful in governmental institutions, and less psychologically involved in politics. Taiwan KMT or NP has been the ruling party of Taiwan for most of the twentieth century. But by 1998, the KMT faced severe challenges to its stable ruling majority, a steady decreasing percentage of the popular vote, and widening support for the DPP’s pro-independence platform. Faced with the possibility of losing its major status, the KMT strategically modified its course by expanding its electoral base by moving the party away from its mainland roots. Taiwan’s party system in the late 1990s clearly became a predominately two-party system. The KMT represented the traditional base of power since the mainland exodus, and the DPP has its root in the liberal opposition to the KMT one-party rule. The DPP is associated with the pan-green coalition and Taiwan independence. Thus, for reform-minded voters, the DPP is their choice.24 As Table 6.4 reports, neither A-L values nor economic issues distinguish Taiwanese across the main political divide. Left-right position is the most consistently important in distinguishing KMT supporters from DPP and nonpartisans, with the former being more to the right of the political spectrum. As Russell J. Dalton and Aiji Tanaka suggest in

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(SE)

Estimate

(SE)

Estimate

(SE)

ns ns ns –1.707*** –.439*** ns ns

ns ns ns (.412) (.086) ns ns

ns ns ns ns –.199** ns –.842**

ns ns ns ns (.085) ns (.386)

ns ns .739** –1.401*** –.239*** ns ns

ns ns (.307) (.308) (.060) ns ns

1.513

1.189 .167 (590)

.324

Notes: NP (National Party), DPP (Democratic Progressive Party), OR (other response), SE (standard error). Analyses are based on multinational logistic regression estimates. For the coding of predictors see note 22; * indicates P < .10, two-tailed; ** indicates P < .05; *** indicates P < .01; ns = not statistically significant.

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Table 6.4

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their chapter, the left/right divide in Taiwan is an indirect way to tap nationalist sentiments. Distrust in governmental institutions also separates the KMT from the DPP and the OR (“other response”), with the former being more trustful. KMT supporters also exhibit more trust in social institutions than their OR counterparts. All in all, the results indicate that while the DPP is often classified as liberal, these classifications do not necessarily correlate to views regarding such issues as economic policy or the role of government in society. This again may be evidence that the nationalism issue transcends other potential bases of cleavage in defining Taiwanese electoral alignments. The Philippines The party system of the Philippines has been fragmented and weakly institutionalized. Philippine political parties are essentially nonideological vehicles for personal and factional political ambition. Thus, previous chapters in this book found only weak left-right differences in party position, and weak class patterns in voting.25 Although they lack coherent political programs, parties generally champion conservative social positions and avoid taking any position that might divide the electorate. Consequently, each party tries to be a catchall party appealing to a broad range of social groups. Since neither party has a way to enforce party discipline, politicians switched capriciously back and forth at both higher and lower levels of government. The parties are essentially pyramids of patron-client relationships stretching from the remotest villages to Manila. The upshot is that while elections might be fought by politicians wearing party labels, party appears to have little effect on citizens’ votes, or on the organization of government.26 Twenty-two separate parties are listed in the WVS survey, with three major parties capturing only 10 to 15 percent, and the “do not vote for a party” category getting 21 percent. Our analyses focus on three parties and nonvoters. The LDP is the party of Corazon Aquino. The LAMMP is the party of Joseph Estrada. The LNU (Lakas–National Union of Christian Democrats–United Muslim Democrats of the Philippines) is the party of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Table 6.5 finds few significant differences between major party supporters and nonpartisans. The LNU and those who do not vote for a party, compared with their LAMMP counterparts, and the LNU over the LDP are more willing to participate in protest activities. The only other significant finding is that nonpartisans show more distrust in the governmental institutions, but less than the LDP. Thus, the results reaf-

DV/LAMMP

LDP/LNU

DV/LNU

LDP/DV

Estimate (SE)

Estimate (SE)

Estimate (SE)

Estimate (SE)

Estimate (SE)

Estimate (SE)

ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns 1.210*** (.343)

ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns .831** (.323)

ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns ns –.645** (.322)

ns ns ns ns ns ns ns –.196

ns ns ns ns ns ns ns

–.116

–1.053 .054 (636)

–.080

ns ns ns .458* ns ns ns –.937

ns ns ns (.251) ns ns ns

ns ns ns ns ns ns –.561** (.258) ns ns ns ns ns ns .857

Notes: LDP (Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino or Struggle of Democratic Filipinos), LAMMP (Labang ng Makabayang Masang Pilipino or Struggle of the Patriotic Filipino Masses), LNU (Lakas-NUCD or Lakas–National Union of Christian Democrats–United Muslim Democrats of the Philippines), DV (do not vote for a party), SE (standard error). Analyses are based on multinational logistic regression estimates. For the coding of predictors see note 22. * indicates P < .10, two-tailed; ** indicates P < .05; *** indicates P < .01; ns = not statistically significant.

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Table 6.5

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firm the evidence in the chapters by Dalton and Tanaka and McAllister that party choices are ill-defined in the Philippines, which limits the structuring of vote choice by either social group cues, values, or economic policy attitudes. Indonesia After four decades of autocratic regimes (Sukarno, 1950–1967; Suharto, 1968–1998), Indonesian voters went to the polls in the country’s first democratic elections in 1999. As the newest democratic nation of our four East Asian nations, Indonesia has faced the political uncertainty inherent in balancing acts typically found in the mosaic of ethnic, religious, and ideological groups and islands. Accordingly, political parties appear deeply divided along ideological, religious, and regional lines that sometimes threaten to pull Indonesia apart. The Indonesian Democratic Party–P (“Struggle” PDI or PDI-P), formed in 1996 as a split from the Indonesian Democracy Party (PDI), is supported by a majority of the common people. Golkar is another large party; it was the governing party under former president Suharto before 1999. The PPP is the third largest party in the legislature and largest Islamic party. Before the 1999 elections, these two parties did not provide real choice to the voters. They were not “opposition parties” per se to Golkar; they could not offer alternative visions of the state or government. The two parties had been forcibly co-opted to be complementary to Golkar in mobilizing popular support for Suharto’s Pancasila (Guided Democracy), not to influence policy.27 We compare support for these three Indonesian parties in Table 6.6. All seven items have relatively weak effects on partisanship. Distrust of government institutions significantly distinguishes PDI and PPP supporters from Golkar supporters, with the latter being more trustful. Trust in social institutions also separates the PDI from the Golkar, with the latter being less trustful. PPP supporters profess higher level of interest in politics or frequency of discussing politics with friends than do both Golkar and PDI supporters. And as we expected, since the policy and programmatic structure of the party system is ill-formed, neither the A-L values nor economic policy attitudes significantly influence party support. We put these analyses in comparative context by performing the same analyses for Australia (results not shown). Five out of the same seven predictors are statistically significant in separating the Labor from the Liberal party, and the overall explanatory power of these variables is stronger than in the East Asian party systems. In comparison to

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(SE)

Estimate

(SE)

ns ns –.652** .806** ns ns ns

ns ns (.316) (.329) ns ns ns

ns ns ns .913** ns .418*

ns ns ns (.434) ns (.801)

–.784

–4.366 .074 (380)

Estimate ns ns ns ns ns –.155* .744*

(SE) ns ns ns ns ns (.080) (.429)

3.582

Notes: PDI (Indonesian Democratic Party), Golkar (Sekretariat Bersama Golongan Karya or Joint Secretariat of Functional Groups), PPP (United Development Party), SE (standard error). Analyses are based on multinational logistics regression estimates. For the coding of predictors see note 22; * indicates P < .10, two-tailed; ** indicates P < .05; *** indicates P < .01; ns = not statistically significant.

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Table 6.6

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Liberals, Labor supporters are more supportive of a liberal position on economic policy, more trustful in governmental institutions, more likely to be leftists, less psychologically involved in politics, yet more willing to engage in protest activities. Surprisingly, libertarian values do not seem to be shaping partisan preference in the 1995 Australia results, once other controls are taken into account.28 This may be because the A-L dimension does not distinguish between Labor and Liberals, but is a cleavage that differentiates between minor parties with the Australian Democrats and Greens closer to libertarian voters, and parties like One Nation tapping voters with strong authoritarian values.29

Conclusion This study has attempted to answer this question: have libertarian values emerged in East Asia; and if so, are these values significantly affecting party preference in a set of four East Asian democracies? We have demonstrated that A-L values have clearly emerged in Japan and Taiwan by the late 1990s, and other research suggests a similar pattern for South Korea. Even in the Philippines there are signs of an emergent A-L dimension by the late 1990s, but not in Indonesia, which is the least developed of these Asian nations. The emergence of the A-L value cleavage in the thinking of mass publics is clearly associated with level of socioeconomic development, but the level at which these cleavages emerge is clearly well below what is expected from Inglehart’s theory of postmaterialist values. We believe that the dramatic socioeconomic transformation of East Asia has contributed to the emergence of the A-L dimension, as well as cultural tensions between traditional authority orientations in East Asia and the values encouraged by modernization. The relationship between values and party preference also varies across these East Asian countries. Three country-specific conclusions stand out. First, only in Japan does the A-L value cleavage model for partisanship work strongly: A-L values, economic policy attitudes, and left-right positions all have a direct effect on party preferences. These effects are roughly comparable to Australia (except for A-L values), which is our comparison case of a stable, issue-based Western party system. This speaks well of the Japanese party system’s role in providing a vehicle for voter value and policy choices. Second, in Taiwan’s party system, neither A-L values nor economic policy attitudes matter. However, left-right identities are strongly related

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to party preferences for the KMT and the DPP. This suggests that other high-salience issues, like national identity (pro-independence vs. pro-unification) and reform versus stability, are more salient for Taiwanese voters.30 Undoubtedly, the national identity issue is a highly important issue that runs relatively independent of A-L values or economic attitudes. Finally, in the Philippines and Indonesia, both the A-L dimension and economic attitudes exert only weak effects. We suggest two possible explanations. First, the inchoate nature of these party systems might retard the development of systematic policy voting. Alternatively, there might be contrasting elements of local cultures that may have counterbalancing effects, such as income inequality, or economic growth rates might account for this difference, particularly in the Philippines where growth has been more erratic. In summary, although our data are limited to only four East Asian democracies, they suggest a pattern of concomitant development between the social modernization of society and the bases of party choice. The contributions to this book have broadly found that party preferences become more clearly defined by social cleavages, values, and issues as a function of social modernization and democratic development. The party systems of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea thus offer clearer party choices to their citizens, and this is reflected in clearer voter alignments. The emerging democracies of Indonesia and the Philippines apparently offer less distinct choices, which is reflected in the lack of clarity in voter choices. Thus, one deeper measure of democratization may be the clarity and certainty of electoral choice.

Notes 1. D. J. Jang, “East Asian Perspectives on Liberal Democracy: A Critical Evaluation.” In C. Ahn and B. Fort, eds., Democracy in Asia, Europe and the World. Toward a Universal Definition (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2006), pp. 37–56; Russell Dalton and Nhu-Ngoc Ong, “Authority Orientations and Support for Democracy in East Asia.” In Russell Dalton and Doh Chull Shin, eds., Citizens, Democracy and Markets Around the Pacific Rim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 50–72. 2. Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Christian Welzel and Ronald Inglehart, “The Human Development Model of Democracy: East Asia in Perspective.” In Dalton and Shin, eds., Citizens, Democracy and Markets, pp. 21–49; Zheng-Xu Wang and

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Ern-Ser Tan, “Self-Expression, ‘Asian Values,’ and Democracy.” In Dalton and Shin, eds., Citizens, Democracy and Markets, pp. 50–72. 3. For a detailed discussion on the A-L value cleavage, refer to Scott C. Flanagan and Aie-Rie Lee, “Value Change and Democratic Reform in Japan and Korea,” Comparative Political Studies 33, no. 5 (2000): 626–659; Scott C. Flanagan and Aie-Rie Lee, “The New Politics, Culture Wars, and the Authoritarian-Libertarian Value Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies,” Comparative Political Studies 36, no. 3 (2003): 235–270; Scott C. Flanagan and Aie-Rie Lee, “The Causes and Socio-Political Implications of Value Change in the Advanced Industrial Democracies.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 1990. 4. See Scott C. Flanagan and Aie-Rie Lee, “Modernization and the Emergence of the Authoritarian Libertarian Value Cleavage.” Paper presented at the annual meeting at the Southern Political Science Association, Tampa, Florida, 1991. In later work, Inglehart has adopted the broader idea of “self-expressive values” in his comparison of developed and developing nations, and this is conceptually close to our earlier framework of A-L values. See Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy. 5. Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan are included in the 1995–1997 WVS; Singapore and South Korea are in the 1999–2001 survey, but we could not include them because that survey lacked the party preference question. 6. Scott C. Flanagan, “Value Cleavages, Contextual Influences, and the Vote.” In Scott Flanagan et al., The Japanese Voter (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 84–142; Aie-Rie Lee and Yong U. Glasure, “Party Identifiers in South Korea,” Asian Survey 35, no. 4 (1995): 367–376. 7. Helmut Norpoth, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, and Jean-Dominique Lafay, eds., Economics and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); Ray Duch, “A Developmental Model of Heterogeneous Economic Voting in New Democracies,” American Political Science Review 95 (2001): 895–910. 8. See Flanagan and Lee, “Value Change and Democratic Reform in Japan and Korea”; Flanagan and Lee, “The New Politics, Culture Wars, and the Authoritarian-Libertarian Value Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies”; Flanagan and Lee, “The Causes and Socio-Political Implications of Value Change in the Advanced Industrial Democracies.” 9. We chose items that are available for every nation included in this study. 10. We recoded all twelve items presented in Table 6.1 so that for the six authoritarian items, the high end of the scale is the authoritarian response, and for the six libertarian items, the high end of the scale is the libertarian response. The independence and imagination item combines two questions. Also Inglehart’s materialist and postmaterialist (M-PM) items were used by coding each response option in the sets of four choices as 2 (if it was the respondent’s first priority), 1 (if it was the respondent’s second priority), and 0 (if the respondent did not select the item). The three questions on more say in government, job, and community were combined into a single item. 11. We also developed a measure for this dimension from several questions about the extent to which the respondents felt that various kinds of indi-

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vidual actions could be justified. That is, to what extent individuals should be restrained from exercising their own preferences at the expense of society or others. The “self-interest over common good” scale is coded so that the always justified response is the highest. That is, to what extent are respondents willing to condone actions in which there is no victim other than the state or society in general? Libertarians are more likely to condone cheating on taxes, avoiding a fare on public transport, and accepting a bribe. 12. We used unrotated principal components analyses to generate the factor results, using pairwise deletion of missing cases. Table 6.1 presents the average number of cases. 13. See the chapters by Russell J. Dalton and Aiji Tanaka in this volume; John Fuh-Sheng Hsieh and David Newman, eds., How Asia Votes (New York: Chatham House Publishers, 2002); Scott Mainwaring and Edurne Zoco, “Political Sequences and the Stabilization of Interparty Competition,” Party Politics 13 (March 2007): 155–178. 14. The sample sizes used in this analysis are: Japan, 316 (LDP), 312 (DJP), and 294 (no party to support) Taiwan, 320 (NP), 107 (DPP), and 267 (other response) Philippines, 142 (LDP), 182 (LAMMP), 143 (Lakas-NUCD-UMDP), and 254 (did not vote) Indonesia, 211 (PDI), 214 (GOLKAR), and 94 (PPP) Australia, 622 (Labor) and 640 (Liberal) New Zealand, 393 (Labour) and 306 (National) 15. Flanagan and Lee, “Value Change and Democratic Reform”; Flanagan and Lee, “The New Politics, Culture Wars, and the Authoritarian-Libertarian Value Change”; Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 16. These four items were factor analyzed and all load heavily on a first unrotated factor and hence were combined into single scale. Also see Doh Chull Shin and Russell Dalton, “Exploring Weber’s Theory of Capitalism in Confucian East Asia.” In Dalton and Shin, Citizens, Democracy and Markets. 17. The A-L scale is constructed using simple additive procedures by standardizing, equally weighing, and combining the twelve items reported in Table 6.1, running on a ten-point scale from authoritarian to libertarian. 18. We created the eleven New Politics issue scales including five morality issues (abortion, euthanasia and suicide, prostitution, homosexuality, alternative family values), three human rights issues (women’s rights, minority rights, nontraditional women’s role), two quality of life issues (environmental, autonomous job), and one social change issue item. The correlations between our A-L values and the combined issues scale reached remarkably high levels for Japan and Taiwan (.44 and .37) and even higher for Australia and New Zealand (.52 and .50). 19. As established in other works, education is one of the strongest predictors of A-L values. See Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society; Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy.

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The correlations between the A-L scale and education are .12, .28, –.02, .14, .29, and .23 for Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand, respectively. 20. The five-item protest potential scale includes signing a petition, joining in boycotts, attending lawful demonstrations, joining unofficial strikes, and occupying buildings or factories. 21. We further tested the model, this time replacing our A-L with Inglehart’s four-item M-PM scale. Similar patterns emerge for all but Japan. In the Japanese case, the M-PM values are no longer significant in separating LDP supporters from DJP supporters. Moreover, the significance levels also changed for a distinction on values between the LDP and the no-party supporters at the .10 level and on economic policy attitudes at .05 level. 22. Authoritarian/libertarian values: 1—authoritarian, 10—libertarian. Economic issues: 1—economic conservative, 10—economic liberal. Trust in social and government institutions: 1—trust, 10—distrust. Left/right scale: 1—right, 10—left. Involvement: 1—least involved, 10— very involved. Protest potential: 1—no protest, 3—much protest. 23. Flanagan et al., The Japanese Voter. 24. John Fuh-Sheng Hsieh, “Continuity and Change in Taiwan’s Electoral Politics.” In Hsieh and Newman, How Asia Votes, pp. 32–49. 25. See Dalton and Tanaka chapter, and Ian McAllister in this volume. 26. Steve Rood, “Elections as Complicated and Important Events in the Philippines.” In Hsieh and Newman, How Asia Votes, p. 154. 27. Donald E. Weatherbee, “Indonesia: Electoral Politics in a Newly Emerging Democracy.” In Hsieh and Newman, How Asia Votes, p. 262. 28. Only three predictors (Old Politics issues, trust in governmental institutions, leftist ideology) are statistically significant for New Zealand: Labor Party supporters, compared with National Party supporters, are more Old Politics issue oriented, more trusting in governmental institutions, and more to the left. 29. Mark Western and Bruce Tranter, “Postmaterialist and Economic Voting in Australia, 1990–98,” Australian Journal of Political Science 36, no. 3 (2001): 439–458. 30. See Yun-Han Chu, Crafting Democracy in Taiwan (Taipei: Institute for National Policy Research, 1992); similarly, Dalton and Tanaka in this issue find that national pride is the strongest correlate of left-right position in Taiwan.

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7 Partisanship and Citizen Politics Yun-han Chu and Min-hua Huang

A

mong the many functions that parties perform in democracies, by connecting citizens to the process of democratic governance, political parties give citizens a sense of involvement and empowerment. The early Michigan election studies demonstrated how partisanship was a core element in political identities and behaviors.1 Later on, researchers developed a functional theory of party identification, conceptualizing partisanship as a heuristic for organizing political information, evaluations, and behaviors.2 Partisanship provides a strong cue-giving function for voting, more than any other social group cues, because elections essentially involve partisan choices. Partisan ties also motivate citizens to take part in the political process. As Russell Dalton explained it, “Just like sports loyalties, attachment to a political party draws an individual into the electoral process to support his or her side.”3 Thus, partisanship is routinely identified as a strong predictor of a wide range of political predispositions and participatory actions ranging from political efficacy to psychological involvement in politics, voting, and campaign activities. Is this view about the impact of partisanship on political participation transferable to East Asian democracies? This is a very germane research question for both practical and theoretical reasons. First, if partisan attachment exhibits a similar orienting and mobilizing function in East Asian democracies as in established democracies, it provides a strong sign that the region’s emerging competitive party systems are helping connect citizens to the democratic process. This, in turn, will contribute to the consolidation of new democracies. Second, this question addresses the core assumption of the institutionalist perspective, which privileges the socializing effects of institutions in shaping citizens’ behavior, preference, or even identity over time.4 In East Asia 119

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both the rules of democratic contestation and institutional forms of political parties were transplanted from the West. If partisanship can perform the similar function of orienting and mobilizing citizens in East Asia, this provides strong support for the institutionalist assertion that similar institutions tend to bring about similar behavioral and attitudinal consequences. With the recent release of two cross-national surveys, we can now systematically investigate the role of partisan attachment to motivate East Asian citizens to be involved in both electoral and nonelectoral contexts. Our analysis proceeds in three steps: we examine some of the skepticism about both the temporal validity and cross-regional transferability of this partisanship theory, formulate our key hypotheses and research strategy, and report the empirical findings.

Parties and Partisanship in East Asia We can immediately identify two plausible counterarguments for why the general theory of partisanship’s mobilizing effects may lose its validity when it travels to East Asian democracies. First, there is a general (global) trend of decreasing relevance of parties as a vehicle of political mobilization and channel of interest aggregation. Second, there is the inchoate nature of party systems in many East Asian democracies. Both point to the possible attenuating effect of some prevailing structural conditions. In most Third Wave East Asian democracies, a competitive party system was created at a time when political parties were losing relevance in established democracies as vehicles of representation and instruments of mobilization. This trend is well documented in the recent literature on the “decline” of parties: parties are increasingly failing in their capacity to engage the ordinary citizen; citizens are less likely to show up at polling stations. And with a weaker sense of partisan consistency, citizens are increasingly reluctant to engage in more demanding forms of participation or commit themselves to parties, whether in terms of identification or membership.5 In addition, profound social changes are reshaping the role of political parties and nature of partisanship. The historical rigidities and inequalities of European societies that gave rise to the distinctive leftright cleavage have been substantially leveled by economic prosperity and expanding access to education. Ideological conflict over the role of the state has increasingly given way to concern with “postmaterialist”

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quality of life issues.6 Ideological differences between parties in established democracies have narrowed and become more fluid “as party systems float in search of a new grand line of cleavage.”7 In addition, parties have lost their preeminent role in the representation and aggregation of interests. As the political skills of the public increase and information costs decrease, more citizens now possess the political resources and skills that better prepare them to deal with the complexities of politics and reach their own political decisions without reliance on affective, habitual party cues or other surrogates.8 At the same time, interest associations and social movements have become much more vigorous competitors to parties for the opportunity to represent and mobilize citizens outside the electoral arena.9 In East Asia, political parties hold a markedly privileged position within the democratic institutional framework. They remain dominant in structuring the electoral process, governing, and integrating (at least symbolically) citizens into the democratic process. At the same time, many of these societies have leapfrogged into socioeconomic modernization in a compressed time. As a result, both the material and cultural environments in which most of these parties operate come much closer to the social conditions of the advanced industrialized societies today than those of earlier historical eras. This means East Asian democracies may follow the trend of party decline even at their quite junior stage of democratic life cycle. There is a second and even more powerful counterargument why the theory of the mobilizing function of partisanship deserves some scrutiny when it is applied to East Asian democracies. Both the parties and the party systems in most East Asian democracies are still far away from being institutionalized.10 As discussed in the introduction to this collection, most East Asian parties have not yet acquired consistent patterns of internal organization, mass mobilization, and leadership succession. Most of the major political parties in East Asia are of recent creation, and only a few of them enjoy an extended life span. They lack the kind of organizational complexity to protect their autonomy from their founding personalities. As Ian McAllister’s chapter has demonstrated, most parties lack organic ties with major socioeconomic groups. Most notably, party systems in East Asia typically do not exhibit institutionalized programmatic electoral competition. The familiar left-right cleavage has been absent in most East Asian contexts (see Chapter 3 by Dalton and Aiji Tanaka). Generally speaking, during the last decade institutionalized party systems have been emerging in Japan and Taiwan and to some extent in South Korea and Mongolia as well. However, in

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all four cases the dust of party realignment and dealignment has not completely settled yet. In a nutshell, the inchoate nature of political parties and party system in East Asia should reduce the mobilizing function of partisanship (as well as other consequences). Under such conditions, the level of partisan attachment is not widespread, it is susceptible to the short-term fluctuation of the electoral fortune of a given party, and it is causally independent of (or prior to) other relevant political predispositions that are conducive to political participation.

Examining the Explanatory Power of Partisanship Partisanship is not the only factor contributing to citizens’ psychological involvement and political participation. Nor does partisan attachment exert its impact in isolation. The existing literatures on political participation identify a series of important attitudinal, sociological, and institutional factors that are conducive (or inhibiting) to citizens’ engagement in the political process. At the microlevel, the familiar socioeconomic status (SES) model of political participation posits that people with higher income, education, and social status tend to have a higher sense of political involvement and are more likely to participate.11 Certain political predispositions such as political efficacy and sense of citizen duties are also strong predictors of political participation.12 In the context of emerging democracies, scholars have found that belief in democratic legitimacy and enthusiasm about the performance of the new regime also motivate people to participate.13 Assessing the causal relationships between these civic attitudes and positive orientations toward democracy and political participation helps us understand the nature of these participatory acts. A positive relationship usually suggests that participation grows from below by free-thinking citizens rather than being institutionally mobilized from above.14 Next, variables operating at meso-level—that is, at the level of the social milieu where individuals are situated, such as party affiliation, membership in civic organizations, and social networks—have been stressed by research on social capital.15 In this view, whether citizens are active and engaged participants—or whether they are alienated and cynical nonparticipants—depends on the available level of social capital.

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In addition, some scholars have emphasized macronational variables, such as design of electoral system and the overall constitutional framework, as predictors of participation.16 For instance, proportional representation systems typically stimulate election turnout. Our primary task is to assess the relative importance of partisanship in explaining level of citizens’ political engagement within a multivariate framework that takes into account most of these alternative causal arguments. In particular, we examine if the relative impact of partisan attachment in explaining civic engagement differs systematically between East Asian emerging democracies and the Western established democracies. Lastly, citizens’ engagement in politics carries a number of behavioral aspects. These different forms of participation occur in different institutional contexts; require the employment of varying degrees of knowledge, skills, and resources; and are oftentimes precipitated by different motivations and objectives.17 For instance, satisfaction with the performance of a democratic regime might be positively associated with a higher level of conventional electoral participation but negatively associated with participation in protests and demonstration. Casting a vote in an election is the most common mode of political participation in representative democracies. But voting turnout can often overstate the extent to which citizens truly participate in public decisionmaking. Citizens can be mobilized to vote through psychological or materialist inducement even when they have no clear choice among competing candidates. So voting alone cannot provide a full indication of people’s participation in democratic self-governance. We also need to consider participation in campaigning, contacting, and protesting, in order to assess how actively citizens engage in public decisionmaking.18 It is also important to differentiate election-related activities from citizen-initiated participation in nonelectoral context. Other things being equal, partisan attachment tends to exert greater impact on the former than the latter because electoral contest essentially involves partisan competition.

Research Design In the analyses that follow, our two dependent variables are electoral participation and nonelectoral participation. Electoral participation refers to short-term activities that respondents do during elections, such as persuading others to vote for a particular party or candidate, engag-

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ing campaign activities, or casting a ballot. Nonelectoral participation refers to political activities that people do in ordinary time, such as contacting politicians, taking part in a protest or demonstration, or working with others who share the same concern.19 We use two datasets available to test the explanatory power of partisanship: the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES module 2) and the first-wave East Asia Barometer (EAB).20 Since there are some noticeable differences in the wording and format of certain questionnaire items that are supposed to measure the same variable between the two cross-national surveys, we only include items from the two surveys that are comparable on the basis of functional equivalence. In many ways, the two datasets complement each other. The CSES module 2 is more extensive in its geographic scope, covering thirty-one countries, but it is more limited in its inclusion of variables. The EAB round 1 covered only East Asian countries but includes a full array of relevant explanatory variables. Therefore, we employ the CSES dataset to examine if there are systematic differences between East Asian democracies and established democracies in the patterns of causal relationship. We have to settle for a more limited statistical model when using the CSES. However, we can employ the EAB dataset to test our key hypothesis in a more fully specified model and more closely examine the peculiarities among the seven East Asian countries. We include four groups of explanatory variables whenever possible. The first group is related to psychological variables such as Party Attachment, Internal Efficacy, and Social Capital.21 The second group taps attitudes toward democracy, specifically Belief in Democratic Legitimacy and Satisfaction with Democracy. The next group is about evaluation of governance, including Government Performance or Perceived Level of Corruption. The last group is socioeconomic background variables such as Religiosity, Income, Education, Gender, and Age. Details about the operationalization of all the dependent and explanatory variables are in the Appendix. The basic tool for analyzing the two datasets is ordinal logistic regression since the dependent variable is measured by a four-point Likert scale. With the number of country samples around thirty in the CSES dataset, we apply hierarchical generalized linear modeling (HGLM) to determine whether the factors accounting for political participation are systematically different among established democracies, East Asian emerging democracies, and other Third Wave democracies. Also, the measures of internal efficacy and social capital in the EAB allow us to implement structural equation modeling in these seven nations to tease

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out whether certain psychological variables might function as intermediary variables between partisanship and political participation. We apply structural equation modeling to EAB data to capture both the direct and indirect causal effects of partisanship. More specifically, we want to test whether the effect of partisanship on political participation is also mediated through internal political efficacy. Endogenous variables in the above structural equation model (SEM) are therefore (Non)Electoral Participation and Internal Efficacy.22 The explanatory variable to account for (non)electoral participation is the same as specified in the ordinal logistic regression, and for the internal efficacy variable our basic model assumes only four explanatory variables, such as Party Attachment, Education, Gender, and Age, while allowing modification when the basic model has poor fit, and thus other explanatory variables may be added. Corresponding to the four groups of explanatory variables, we examine the following hypothesized causal relationships: • Hypothesis 1 (partisanship): The stronger the party attachment, the higher the level of political participation in both electoral and nonelectoral context. • Hypothesis 2a (democratic legitimacy): The stronger the belief in democratic legitimacy, the higher the level of political participation in both electoral and nonelectoral context. • Hypothesis 2b (satisfaction with democracy): The higher the satisfaction with democracy, the higher the level of electoral participation, but the higher the satisfaction, the lower the level of nonelectoral participation. • Hypothesis 3 (government evaluations): The more favorable the evaluation of governance, the higher the level of electoral participation, but the more favorable the evaluation, the lower the level of nonelectoral participation. • Hypothesis 4 (social structure model): People who are richer, more religious, and better educated are more likely to participate in both electoral and nonelectoral context.

Empirical Findings To begin, it is useful to examine where participation levels in East Asian democracies stand in the larger international context. Figure 7.1 locates a country’s average level of partisanship on the horizontal axis

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Party Politics in East Asia Party Attachment and Level of Electoral Participation

Electoral participation

Figure 7.1

11:04 AM

Party attachment Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, module 2. Notes: Germany and Portugal have two samples respectively. The two samples of Germany were implemented at the same time by different methods. GMY_1 was a telephone survey and GMY_2 was a mail-back survey. The two samples of Portugal were conducted at different times, and we label them as POR_2002 and POR_2005. Abbreviations: AUL—Australia; BEL—Belgium; BRA—Brazil; BUL—Bulgaria; CAN— Canada; CZE—Czech Republic; DEN—Denmark; FIN—Finland; FRN—France; GMY—Germany; HKG—Hong Kong; HUN—Hungary; ICE—Iceland; IRE—Ireland; ISR—Israel; JPN—Japan; MEX—Mexico; NEW—New Zealand; NOR—Norway; NTH—Netherlands; PHI—Philippines; POL—Poland; POR—Portugal; ROK—South Korea; SPN—Spain; SWD—Sweden; SWZ—Switzerland; TAW—Taiwan; UKG—United Kingdom; USA—United States.

and its average level of electoral participation on the vertical axis (both variables are measured on four-point scales). There are four notable patterns. First, except for Japan, the average level of partisanship among East Asian countries is comparatively lower than most established democracies. This largely confirms our suspicion that partisanship should be less crystallized due to a lower level of institutionalization of their party system.23 Second, among the five East Asian countries in the CSES, the strength of partisanship goes largely in tandem with the level of institutionalization of the party system. Japan ar-

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guably has the most institutionalized party system, and the Philippines lags behind most other Asian democracies. Third, the average level of electoral participation of East Asian countries is comparatively lower than that of the established democracies, with the exception of the Philippines.24 Fourth, East Asian countries do not conform to the larger macrolevel pattern that suggests a weak linear relationship between level of partisanship and level of electoral participation.25 Instead, the level of electoral participation varies little among Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, with the Philippines being the clear outlier. In Figure 7.2 the level of nonelectoral participation is located on the vertical axis (also on a four-point scale), and partisanship, on the horizontal axis.26 The variation in nonelectoral participation among CSES countries is not that great. Within this narrow band of variation, East Asian countries (again with the exception of the Philippines) tend to have lower levels of nonelectoral participation than established democracies or other emerging democracies. Also, there is no visible linear pattern between the two variables either across all CSES country cases or among five East Asian countries. Microlevel Analyses: CSES The two scatter plots tell us little about the causal dynamics at the individual level, so we proceed to a country-by-country analysis of the CSES data. Tables 7.1 and 7.2 present the results from an ordinal multivariate regression analysis predicting electoral and nonelectoral participation.27 The table presents the unstandardized regression coefficients. Congruent to what we expected in hypothesis 1, party attachment shows a positive relationship with both electoral and nonelectoral participation in all five East Asian countries. For instance, a one-category increase in the strength of partisanship in Japan increases the average level of electoral activity by the log-odds ratio of 0.64, which means that the expected probability of participating in at least one electoral activity increases from 60.1 percent to 91.1 percent as the respondent’s level of partisanship varies from lowest to highest.28 The explanatory power of other variables varies greatly, most of them largely in agreement with our hypotheses. But individual cases have their own patterns of causal relationship and some of the findings run counter to our expectations. For instance, in most countries satisfaction with democracy exerts no impact on both electoral participation and nonelectoral participation. However, in Hong Kong satisfaction

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Figure 7.2

Party Attachment and Level of Nonelectoral Participation

1.0

Nonelectoral participation

0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

Party attachment Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, module 2. Abbreviations: AUL—Australia; BEL—Belgium; BRA—Brazil; BUL—Bulgaria; CAN—Canada; CZE—Czech Republic; DEN—Denmark; FIN—Finland; FRN—France; GMY—Germany; HKG—Hong Kong; HUN—Hungary; ICE—Iceland; IRE—Ireland; ISR—Israel; JPN—Japan; MEX—Mexico; NEW—New Zealand; NOR—Norway; NTH— Netherlands; PHI—Philippines; POL—Poland; POR—Portugal; ROK—South Korea; SPN—Spain; SWD—Sweden; SWZ—Switzerland; TAW—Taiwan; UKG—United Kingdom; USA—United States.

with democracy influences both electoral and nonelectoral participation, but in a negative way. This finding may reflect the specific context of Hong Kong’s truncated democracy, in which a large number of citizens vote to show their support for prodemocracy parties exactly because they are not happy with Beijing’s suppression of popular demand for a full democracy. Many prodemocracy Hong Kong citizens also participated in the annual demonstration on July 1 registering their demand for popular election for the chief executive and their objection to the enactment of a national security law.29 In a similar vein, many South Koreans participated in demonstrations surrounding the contro-

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Partisanship and Citizen Politics Table 7.1

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The Factors Related to Electoral Participation Hong Kong

South Korea

0.22*** (0.04) —

0.44*** (0.11) 0.18 (0.23) –0.30* (0.15) –0.19 (0.17) 0.03 (0.10) 0.06 (0.08) —

0.42*** (0.06) –0.12 (0.20) –0.02 (0.10) 0.27** (0.09) 0.03 (0.14) —

0.21*** (0.05) 0.003 (0.12) 0.02*** (0.004) 0.77 (0.71) 5.18*** (0.73) 6.73*** (0.74) 0.18 1,596

0.13 (0.07) 0.17 (0.21) –0.001 (0.00) –1.18 (0.80) 1.90* (0.81) 4.43*** (0.88) 0.10 408

0.16** (0.05) –0.20 (0.12) 0.03*** (0.01) 0.95 (0.64) 4.04*** (0.66) 6.26*** (0.68) 0.12 1,221

Japan Party attachment Belief in democracy Satisfaction with democracy Government performance Corruption Religiosity Income Education Gender Age Threshold (0) Threshold (1) Threshold (2) Pseudo R-square N

0.64*** (0.06) 0.33 (0.25) — — –0.34***

—

Philippines 0.47*** (0.07) 0.12 (0.15) 0.02 (0.09) 0.30** (0.10) 0.03 (0.09) 0.07 (0.07) 0.002 (0.05) 0.02 (0.05) –0.37** (0.13) 0.004 (0.004) –0.97 (0.57) 1.95*** (0.57) 3.11*** (0.58) 0.09 998

Taiwan 0.49*** (0.05) 0.18 (0.17) 0.001 (0.08) — — (0.08) 0.22*** (0.06) — 0.18*** (0.04) 0.04 (0.10) 0.03*** (0.004) 1.70*** (0.51) 4.99*** (0.52) 6.82*** (0.54) 0.14 1,581

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, module 2. Note: Variables not included are represented by a dash. Entries are unstandardized coefficients from an ordinal multivariate regression model. Figures in parentheses are standard errors. Significance level: * indicates p ≤ 0.05; ** indicates p ≤ 0.01; *** indicates p ≤ 0.001.

versies over the impeachment of the president. This explains the negative relationship between satisfaction with democracy and nonelectoral participation. Evaluations of government performance in South Korea and the Philippines show a positive relationship to both electoral and nonelectoral participation. These findings partially run counter to our hypothesis 3 as far as the nonelectoral participation is concerned. Again, this result is not difficult to understand in the specific context. Since political parties in both countries were orbiting around their political stars when these surveys were conducted, voters were more easily mobilized in

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130 Table 7.2

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Party Politics in East Asia The Factors Related to Nonelectoral Participation Hong Kong

South Korea

–0.03 (0.17) 0.18** (0.07) —

0.31** (0.12) 0.49 (0.29) –0.51* (0.18) –0.50* (0.20) 0.15 (0.16) –0.05 (0.09) —

0.65** (0.11) –0.54 (0.35) –0.44* (0.18) 0.65*** (0.17) 0.46* (0.19) — (0.07) —

0.05 (0.08) –0.65** (0.21) 0.00 (0.01) 2.43 (1.17) 3.65** (1.18) 5.15*** (1.22) 0.09 1,596

0.31*** (0.08) 0.08 (0.25) 0.00 (0.001) 1.25 (0.93) 3.09*** (0.95) 4.56*** (1.00) 0.16 408

0.24* (0.10) –0.74*** (0.23) –0.02 (0.01) 3.85** (1.23) 4.90*** (1.24) 6.34*** (1.27) 0.14 1,221

Japan Party attachment Belief in democracy Satisfaction with democracy Government performance Corruption Religiosity Income Education Gender Age Threshold (0) Threshold (1) Threshold (2) Pseudo R-square N

0.72*** (0.12) –0.52 (0.38) — —

Philippines 0.52*** (0.07) –0.16 (0.16) –0.18 (0.10) 0.27* (0.11) –0.14 (0.08) 0.12 –0.013 (0.05) 0.10* (0.05) –0.56*** (0.14) –0.002 (0.01) 0.17 (0.61) 1.84** (0.61) 4.00*** (0.66) 0.11 998

Taiwan 0.36*** (0.06) –0.25 (0.23) –0.13 (0.12) — — 0.21** (0.08) — 0.28*** (0.07) –0.55*** (0.15) 0.01* (0.01) 2.87*** (0.72) 4.26*** (0.73) 6.21*** (0.78) 0.08 1,581

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, module 2. Note: Variables not included are represented by a dash. Entries are unstandardized coefficients from an ordinal multivariate regression model. Figures in parentheses are standard errors. Significance level: * indicates p ≤ 0.05; ** indicates p ≤ 0.01; *** indicates p ≤ 0.001.

support of their leaders especially when they were doing a great job (although this no longer applies to the Korean case). The other noteworthy finding is that religiosity plays a very significant factor in Japan and Taiwan. A plausible explanation is that grassroots religious organizations in Japan and Taiwan are quite extensive and popular and they are often linked with local factions. Therefore, they are an important channel of political mobilization.30 With regard to the demographic variables, people who are more educated, male, and older tend to have a higher electoral or nonelectoral participation. This generally conforms to the standard SES model of political participation. The most significant finding is that the goodness-of-fit (in terms of pseudo R-square) of the five models predicting

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level of electoral participation goes up with the degree of the country’s party system institutionalization, if we accept that Japan is the most institutionalized and Hong Kong and the Philippines are the least. Since the average level of electoral participation in the Philippines is the highest among the five, we suspect that many of these participatory activities were mobilized by political groups in the highly divisive nature of the 2004 election, rather than initiated spontaneously by the citizens. This neat pattern breaks down when it comes to nonelectoral participation. In Table 7.2, the models for Japan and Taiwan suffer the poorest goodness-of-fit, suggesting that in these two countries nonelectoral participation involves mainly citizen-initiative contact about personal issues.31 Our HGLM models show that most findings across the three blocs of countries are corroborated with the results of the ordinal logistic regression, except for the contextual effect that citizens in established democracies are more active in nonelectoral participation (something shown in Figure 7.2).32 Furthermore, our HGLM models show that there is virtually no difference between established democracies and emerging democracies in East Asia.33 The magnitude of effect of partisanship on both electoral and nonelectoral participation also shows no difference among the three blocs of countries. This means partisanship as a motivating force behind political participation matters everywhere, and it matters as much in East Asian emerging democracies as elsewhere. Last, it appears that some of the explanatory variables exert different kinds of impact on electoral versus nonelectoral participation. Specifically, belief in democracy and a perception of less corruption increase electoral participation but not nonelectoral participation. Satisfaction with democracy and evaluation of government performance function the other way around. This suggests that electoral participation is motivated by ideological factors such as belief in democratic legitimacy and the perception of clean government, while nonelectoral participation is driven more by short-term factors such as dissatisfaction with the government and discontent with the way democracy works. Microlevel Analyses: East Asia Barometer While the CSES data help us identify similarities among established democracies, East Asian emerging democracies, and other Third Wave democracies, it remains to be seen if the explanatory power of partisanship still holds up when more East Asian countries are added to our

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analysis. A fuller set of control variables is included and a more complex structural relationship is taken into account using the EAB data. Tables 7.3 and 7.4 report the findings of our SEM analysis.34 The top half of the two tables presents the statistical association of explanatory variables to the major dependent variables, Electoral Participation and Nonelectoral Participation. The lower half exhibits the relationships of various independent (exogenous) variables that can possibly explain the intermediary variable, internal efficacy. The regression coefficients in the two tables, that is, the two equations, were estimated simultaneously. A striking finding is that partisanship remains a very powerful factor in explaining both electoral and nonelectoral participation across East Asia in the models displayed in the top half of both tables. It falls outside the significance level only in two countries and only for nonelectoral participation. Social capital in terms of group membership is another equally important predictor of participation. Social capital is a significant predictor for higher level of electoral participation across all seven countries and an important explanatory source for nonelectoral participation in five out of seven East Asian cases. Internal efficacy emerges as the third most consistent predictor of political participation albeit not to the same extent as partisanship or group membership. The analysis also provides support for our hypothesis about the indirect causal effect of partisanship passing through internal efficacy. For the four cases where internal efficacy exerts significant impact on electoral participation, partisanship is a strong predictor of internal political efficacy in three countries, namely Japan, Thailand, and Mongolia. In the case of electoral participation, it is also a significant predictor in the same three countries. With regard to other explanatory variables, belief in democracy, satisfaction with democracy, and perceived corruption do not show much explanatory power for participation. Government performance, income, education, and gender do have explanatory power in some cases, but no clear regional pattern can be drawn. Religiosity, as with the CSES data, is conducive to electoral participation in Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand, where grassroots religious organizations are often linked with local factions. Finally, much as in the established democracies, older people have a higher level of electoral participation but this does not apply to nonelectoral participation. There are some interesting country-specific structural relationships that deviate from this regionwide generalization. In South Korea and Taiwan, strength of partisan attachment fails to explain nonelectoral participation either directly or indirectly through the intermediary of inter-

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Table 7.3

A Structural Equation Analysis of Electoral Participation

0.21 (0.04)*** 0.07 (0.03)** 0.15 (0.04)***

0.30 (0.06)*** 0.08 (0.08) 0.35 (0.10)***

South Korea

0.31 (0.04)*** 0.06 (0.03)* 0.33 (0.08)***

Philippines

0.24 (0.03)*** –0.01 (0.02) 0.15 (0.04)***

Taiwan

0.39 (0.04)*** 0.06 (0.04) 0.11 (0.04)**

Thailand

Mongolia

0.31 (0.04)*** 0.13 (0.03)*** 0.18 (0.03)***

0.23 (0.04)*** 0.11 (0.03)*** 0.13 (0.03)***

–0.02 (0.12) –0.14 (0.11) –0.05 (0.10)

0.18 (0.07)* 0.05 (0.07) 0.002 (0.07)

–0.19 (0.12) 0.06 (0.07) –0.03 (0.04)

0.12 (0.08) –0.06 (0.07) –0.03 (0.06)

0.10 (0.08) –0.12 (0.08) 0.04 (0.05)

0.13 (0.11) 0.12 (0.07) 0.05 (0.05)

–0.01 (0.05)

–0.14 (0.09)

–0.15 (0.06)**

0.05 (0.04)

–0.02 (0.05)

–0.003 (0.05)

–0.10 (0.04)*

–0.01 (0.06) 0.06 (0.03)* — 0.05 (0.04) –0.06 (0.08) 0.02 (0.003)***

— 0.04 (0.05) 0.06 (0.04) — 0.03 (0.04) — — 0.02 (0.03) 0.06 (0.03)* 0.05 (0.03)* 0.04 (0.05) –0.002 (0.04) –0.14 (0.04)*** 0.14 (0.03)*** –0.05 (0.03) 0.10 (0.05) 0.10 (0.03)** 0.08 (0.03)** –0.01 (0.03) –0.01 (0.03) 0.25 (0.12)* 0.08 (0.07) –0.03 (0.07) 0.05 (0.08) –0.08 (0.06) 0.02 (0.01)*** 0.03 (0.003)*** 0.02 (0.002)*** 0.01 (0.003)** –0.001 (0.002)

0.22 (0.05)*** 0.07 (0.04) 0.03 (0.04) 0.18 (0.04)*** 0.11 (0.03)*** 0.07 (0.03) –0.43 (0.09)*** –0.15 (0.06)* –0.22 (0.07)** 0.003 (0.003) –0.003 (0.002) –0.003 (0.003) –0.14 (0.07)* — —

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0.23 (0.09)** 0.08 (0.10) –0.11 (0.06)

11:04 AM

Predictors of electoral participation Party attachment Internal efficacy Social capital— membership Social capital—trust Belief in democracy Satisfaction with democracy Government performance Corruption Religiosity Income Education Gender Age Predictors of internal efficacy Party attachment Education Gender Age Satisfaction with democracy

Hong Kong

3/24/08

Japan

0.01 (0.04) –0.01 (0.02) 0.003 (0.02) –0.05 (0.04) –0.06 (0.07) —

0.06 (0.04) 0.05 (0.03) 0.13 (0.03)*** 0.15 (0.05)** –0.08 (0.03)** 0.11 (0.03)*** 0.05 (0.02)* 0.17 (0.05)*** –0.38 (0.08)*** –0.33 (0.06)*** –0.09 (0.05) –0.24 (0.09)** –0.01 (0.003)** –0.004 (0.003) –0.002 (0.002) — — — — –0.13 (0.06)*

133

continues

Cont. South Korea

—

—

0.12 (0.05)*

—

—

—

— — — —

— — — —

— — — —

Philippines — 0.17 (0.05)*** — — — —

Taiwan — 0.13 (0.04)***

Thailand — —

0.09 (0.03)*** 0.18 (0.06)** — —

— — 0.11 (0.03)*** 0.20 (0.07)**

Mongolia — 0.08 (0.04)* — — — —

1.00 1.08 0.00

1.00 (0.98) 1.00 (0.93) 0.01 (0.02)

1.00 (0.93) 1.00 (0.78) 0.00 (0.04)

1.00 (0.86) 1.09 (0.59) 0.00 (0.06)

0.99 (0.86) 0.96 (0.56) 0.01 (0.05)

1.00 (0.93) 1.01 (0.81) 0.00 (0.03)

0.63 (0.76)

0.44

0.51 (0.68)

0.51 (0.88)

0.16 (1.20)

0.55 (1.15)

0.49 (0.80)

502

1,193

1,157

1,028

1,450

1,001

908

Source: East Asia Barometer. Program: Mplus 2.13. Note: Variables not included are represented by a dash. Entries are unstandardized coefficients from a structural equation model (SEM). Figures in parentheses are standard errors, except those in the heading of “Fit statistics,” which mean the fit statistics before modification. Significance level: * indicates p ≤ 0.05; ** indicates p ≤ 0.01; *** indicates p ≤ 0.001.

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0.98 (0.96) 0.93 (0.88) 0.03 (0.03)

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Government performance Social capital— membership Income Belief in democracy Religiosity Social capital—trust Fit statistics Comparative Fit Index Tucker-Lewis Index Root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) Weighted root mean square residual (WRMR) N

Hong Kong

3/24/08

Japan

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Table 7.3

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Table 7.4

A Structural Equation Analysis of Nonelectoral Participation Hong Kong

South Korea

Philippines

Taiwan

Thailand

Mongolia

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Predictors of nonelectoral participation Party attachment 0.19 (0.06)*** 0.35 (0.07)*** –0.02 (0.04) 0.25 (0.04)*** 0.05 (0.05) 0.31 (0.04)*** 0.13 (0.06)* Internal efficacy 0.12 (0.03)*** 0.12 (0.09) 0.17 (0.03)*** 0.03 (0.03) 0.12 (0.05)** 0.10 (0.03)*** 0.03 (0.03) Social capital— 0.30 (0.05)*** 0.19 (0.12) 0.13 (0.09) 0.20 (0.05)*** 0.33 (0.05)*** 0.12 (0.04)** 0.14 (0.04)*** membership Social capital—trust 0.07 (0.12) 0.01 (0.13) 0.11 (0.07) 0.18 (0.14) 0.10 (0.09) 0.13 (0.09) 0.03 (0.14) Belief in democracy –0.18 (0.14) –0.14 (0.13) 0.01 (0.07) –0.01 (0.09) –0.21 (0.09)* –0.14 (0.09) 0.09 (0.09) Satisfaction with –0.11 (0.09) –0.17 (0.10) –0.01 (0.07) –0.002 (0.05) –0.14 (0.07)* 0.04 (0.05) 0.05 (0.07) democracy Government –0.04 (0.07) 0.01 (0.11) 0.02 (0.06) –0.09 (0.05) 0.05 (0.07) –0.09 (0.05) 0.06 (0.06) performance Corruption 0.07 (0.09) — –0.01 (0.06) –0.04 (0.05) — 0.05 (0.05) –0.001 (0.06) Religiosity 0.02 (0.03) — — 0.04 (0.04) 0.06 (0.04) 0.06 (0.03)* 0.04 (0.03) Income — 0.05 (0.06) 0.06 (0.04) –0.09 (0.05)* 0.03 (0.04) 0.05 (0.03) 0.12 (0.03)*** Education 0.09 (0.05) 0.07 (0.06) 0.07 (0.04) 0.05 (0.03) 0.02 (0.05) 0.08 (0.03)** –0.13 (0.05)* Gender –0.23 (0.12) –0.22 (0.12) 0.04 (0.07) –0.18 (0.09)* –0.17 (0.09) –0.25 (0.06)*** –0.08 (0.10) Age 0.01 (0.01)* –0.01 (0.01) –0.001 (0.003) 0.002 (0.003) –0.003 (0.004) –0.002 (0.002) — Predictors of internal efficacy Party attachment 0.22 (0.05)*** 0.07 (0.04) 0.03 (0.04) 0.06 (0.04) 0.05 (0.03) 0.14 (0.03)*** 0.15 (0.05)** Education 0.18 (0.04)*** 0.11 (0.03)*** 0.07 (0.03) –0.08 (0.03)** 0.11 (0.03)*** 0.05 (0.02)* 0.17 (0.05)*** Gender –0.42 (0.09)*** –0.15 (0.06)* –0.22 (0.07)** –0.37 (0.08)*** –0.33 (0.06)*** –0.10 (0.05) –0.24 (0.09)** Age 0.003 (0.003) –0.003 (0.002) –0.003 (0.003) –0.01 (0.003)** –0.004 (0.003) –0.002 (0.002) — Satisfaction with –0.14 (0.07)* — — — — — –0.13 (0.06)* democracy continues

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Japan

Cont. South Korea

—

—

0.12 (0.05)*

—

—

—

— — — —

— — — —

— — — —

Philippines — 0.17 (0.05)*** — — — —

Taiwan — 0.13 (0.04)***

Thailand — —

0.09 (0.03)*** 0.18 (0.06)** — —

— — 0.11 (0.03)*** 0.20 (0.07)**

Mongolia — 0.08 (0.04)* — — — —

1.00 1.11 0.00

0.99 (0.90) 0.98 (0.72) 0.01 (0.02)

1.00 (0.89) 1.00 (0.67) 0.00 (0.04)

1.00 (0.76) 1.15 (0.32) 0.00 (0.06)

0.99 (0.85) 0.96 (0.53) 0.01 (0.05)

1.00 (0.88) 1.02 (0.69) 0.00 (0.03)

0.63 (0.76)

0.44

0.51 (0.68)

0.51 (0.88)

0.16 (1.20)

0.55 (1.15)

0.49 (0.80)

502

1,193

1,157

1,028

1,450

1,001

908

Source: East Asia Barometer. Program: Mplus 2.13. Note: Variables not included are represented by a dash. Entries are unstandardized coefficients from a structural equation model (SEM). Figures in parentheses are standard errors, except those in the heading of “Fit statistics,” which mean the fit statistics before modification. Significance level: * indicates p ≤ 0.05; ** indicates p ≤ 0.01; *** indicates p ≤ 0.001.

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0.97 (0.94) 0.90 (0.84) 0.03 (0.03)

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Government performance Social capital— membership Income Belief in democracy Religiosity Social capital—trust Fit statistics Comparative Fit Index Tucker-Lewis Index Root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) Weighted root mean square residual (WRMR) N

Hong Kong

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Japan

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Table 7.4

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nal efficacy. In contrast to the SEM estimation for South Korea and Taiwan in Table 7.3, we found very few meaningful predictors for level of nonelectoral participation in these two countries on Table 7.4. This implies that in these two countries, the more popular form of nonelectoral participation is citizen-initiated contact driven by private concern and oftentimes in an ad hoc manner. In Mongolia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, internal political efficacy loses its explanatory power when it comes to nonelectoral participation (Table 7.4). This again suggests that unlike electoral participation that is structured by very similar institutional settings across countries, nonelectoral participation can take place under very different political contexts, requires very different kinds of skills and resources, and is driven by a variety of motivation. A few East Asian countries deviate from our basic model explaining internal political efficacy (presented in the lower half of Tables 7.3 and 7.4). In Japan, Mongolia, and South Korea, in addition to partisanship, education, gender, and age, dissatisfaction with the way democracy works is significantly associated with higher levels of internal efficacy, and indirectly affects the level of electoral as well as nonelectoral participation.35 This suggests that in these two countries, political participation carries some element of political protest. Social capital in the form of group membership is significantly associated with internal efficacy in the Philippines, Mongolia, and Taiwan. This implies that civic groups function as agents of political socialization parallel to political parties, in addition to its direct mobilizing power in fostering political participation. Interestingly, the intermediary effect of internal political efficacy seems related to favorable evaluation of government in South Korea and can be regarded as an endorsement of the incumbent government, but it is more of a middle-class phenomenon in Taiwan since people who are richer, are more educated, have a more extensive social network, and hold a stronger belief in democracy tend to join nonelectoral political activities with strong internal political efficacy.

Conclusion We started this chapter with four sets of general proposition: First we expected that the level of partisanship in East Asian emerging democracies will be comparatively lower than established democracies. Among the East Asian countries, partisanship should be slightly higher in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea as more institutionalized party systems. Second, we expected that the impact of partisanship on political participation would be significant in East Asia, but not as strong as in

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established democracies because of the underdeveloped nature of most East Asian party systems. Third, we expected partisanship to exert a direct causal impact on participation, and a significant indirect effect as it raises citizens’ sense of political efficacy. Fourth, partisanship’s direct impact on voting and campaign activities would be more salient than nonelectoral participation, which in East Asian context oftentimes involves particularistic concerns without clear partisan connotation. Most of our predictions are corroborated with our statistical analyses, with one notable exception. Our data consistently show that in East Asia partisanship exerts just as much influence on citizens’ engagement in politics as what has been the case in established democracies. On this score, there is no empirical ground for “East Asian Exceptionalism.” Our research also starts with the premise that higher levels of citizens’ engagement in the political process contribute to the consolidation of democracy in the long run. Politicians can be more effectively held accountable, constitutionally guaranteed rights can be more thoroughly enforced, and groups’ and communities’ demands can be better represented within the policy process when ordinary citizens participate more actively in the politics of their country. As more people are drawn into the process of democratic governance, the political regime enjoys a more solid foundation of legitimacy.36 In this sense, political parties in East Asia, despite their many shortcomings and inchoate nature, remain indispensable in the consolidation of democracies. Even in countries where partisan attachment is not as widespread, it is still the single most important factor contributing to a higher sense of efficacy and higher level of electoral and nonelectoral participation. This reinforces Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg’s observation that “it remains difficult to think of national governments functioning without parties playing a significant role in connecting the various elements of the political process.”37 Another noteworthy finding is the importance of social capital, especially in the form of group membership, in facilitating citizens’ engagement in the political process and raising a sense of political efficacy. In many ways, the magnitude and consistency of its impact are comparable to those of party attachment across East Asia. This suggests that East Asian democracies are also catching on to a global trend in which interest associations and social movements are becoming vigorous competitors to parties for the opportunity to mobilize citizens in the democratic process. However, it remains to be seen if this trend will enhance or inhibit the institutionalization of political parties in East Asia. Lastly, our empirical results lend a strong support to the institutionalist claim that people develop certain orientations toward the po-

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Appendix: The Construction of the Variables Operationalization

Range

CSES

EAB

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Variable Name

0(Lowest)– 3(Highest)

B3001_1 B3001_2 B3004_1

Q27 Q29 Q30

Nonelectoral Participation

The number of positive answers to the questions “Whether the respondents had done the following things over the past five years: (1) contact politicians or officials, (2) protest or demonstration, (3) work with other to share concern.” Missing values are coded as zero.

0(Lowest)– 3(Highest)

B3042_1 B3042_2 B3042_3

{Q73,Q75,Q76} {Q77,Q78} Q79

Party Attachment

“Do you feel very close to this [party/party block], somewhat close, or not very close?” Recoded in a reversed order. Missing value means the respondents did not identify any party or party block they feel close to and therefore is coded as zero.

0(Lowest)– 3(Highest)

B3036

Q62

Internal Efficacy

Summing answers on the questions “I think I have the ability to participate in politics” and “Sometimes politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what is going on” (coded in the reversed order).

2(Lowest)– 8(Highest)

—

Q126 Q127

Social Capital– Membership

The number of formal groups with which a respondent is affiliated.

0(Lowest)– 3(Highest)

—

Q20

Social Capital– Trust

“Would you say that ‘Most people can be trusted’ or ‘you can’t be too careful in dealing with them?’”

1(Trusted), 2(Careful)

—

Q24

Belief in Democracy

“How strongly do you agree or disagree with the following statement: ‘Democracy may have problems but it’s better than any other form of government.’” Recoding in a reversed order and the answer is dichotomized.

1(Disagree), 2(Agree)

B3015

Q117

Satisfaction with Democracy

“On the whole, are you very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with the way democracy works in your country?” Recoding in a reversed order.

1(Lowest)– 4(Highest)

B3012

Q98

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The number of positive answers to the questions “Whether the respondents voted in the latest and previous elections,” “Whether the respondents persuade others to vote for a candidate,” and “Whether the respondents participate campaign activities.” Missing values are coded as zero.

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continues

Operationalization

Range

CSES

EAB

1(Lowest)– 4(Highest)

B3011

Q104

Corruption

“How widespread do you think corruption such as bribe taking is amongst politicians in your country?” Recoding in a reversed order.

1(Lowest)– 4(Highest)

B3044

Q115

Religiosity

Frequency of Religious Attendance, coding as follows: “1” (never), “2” (once a year), “3” (less than once a month), “4” (more than or equal to once a month), “5” (more than or equal to once a week).

1(Lowest)– 5(Highest)

B2023

SE7

Income

“As for your own family, how do you rate your economic situation today?” Coding as “very good” (first quintile), “good” (second quintile), “so so” (third quintile), “bad” (fourth quintile), and “very bad” (last quintile).

1(Lowest)– 5(Highest)

B2020

Q4

Education

Level of Education, coding as “1” (no formal education or incomplete primary), “2” (complete primary), “3” (incomplete secondary), “4” (complete secondary), “5” (postsecondary/some university-level), “6” (university degree completed or above).

1(Lowest)– 6(Highest)

B2003

SE5

Gender

Respondents’ gender.

1(men) 2(women)

B2002

SE2

Age

Respondents’ age.

16–101

B2001

SE3a

Established Democracy

Stable democracy over 20 years is coded as “1”, otherwise coded as “0”.

Dummy

—

—

Asian Democracy

Except Japan, a democratic country in Asia is coded as “1”, otherwise coded as “0”.

Dummy

—

—

Dummy

—

—

Other Third Wave The democracies in the CSES module 2 that do not belong to “Established Democracy” Democracy or to “Asian Democracy.”

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“Now thinking about the performance in [capital]/president in general, how good or bad a job do you think the government/president in [capital] has done over the past several years?” Recoding in a reversed order.

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Government Performance

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Variable Name

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Appendix: Cont.

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litical world as a consequence of the organizing principles of formal and informal institutions. Despite their varying degree of institutionalization, we are witnessing the powerful socializing effects of the region’s emerging competitive party systems on East Asian citizens’ behavior, preference, or even identity.

Notes 1. Angus Campbell et al., The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960); Angus Campbell et al., Elections and the Political Order (New York: Wiley, 1967). 2. Ole Borre and Daniel Katz, “Party Identification and Its Motivational Base in a Multiparty System,” Scandinavian Political Studies 8 (1973): 69–111; Warren Miller, “The Cross-National Use of Party Identification as a Stimulus to Political Inquiry.” In Ian Budge, Ivor Crewe, and Dennis Farlie, eds., Party Identification and Beyond (New York: Wiley, 1976); Warren Miller and J. Merrill Shanks, The New American Voter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 3. Russell J. Dalton, “Partisan Mobilization, Cognitive Mobilization and the Changing American Electorate,” Electoral Studies (forthcoming). 4. Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” Political Studies 44, no. 5 (1996): 936–957. 5. Martin Wattenberg, The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952–96 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Peter Mair and Ingrid van Biezen, “Party Membership in Twenty European Democracies, 1980– 2000,” Party Politics 7, no. 1 (2001): 5–21. 6. Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Americanization of the European Left.” In Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther, eds., Political Parties and Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 7. Ibid., p. 54. 8. Dalton, “Partisan Mobilization, Cognitive Mobilization.” 9. Philippe Schmitter, “Parties Are Not What They Once Were.” In Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther, eds., Political Parties and Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 10. It is worth noting that the two aspects of institutionalization are empirically related but conceptually distinctive. See Vicky Randall and Lars Svåsand, “Party Institutionalization in New Democracies,” Party Politics 8, no. 1 (2002): 5–29. 11. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); Henry Brady, Sidney Verba, and Kay Schlozman, “Beyond SES: A Resource Model of Political Participation,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 2 (1995): 271–294; Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited,” American Sociological Review 59 (1994): 1–22;

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Stephen Rosenstone and John Hansen, Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America (New York: Macmillan, 1993); Sidney Verba, Norman Nie, and J. Kim, Participation and Political Equality: A Seven-Nation Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 12. Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture; Verba, Nie, and Kim, Participation and Political Equality. 13. Jacques Thomassen and Jan W. van Deth, “Political Involvement and Democratic Attitudes.” In Samuel Barnes and Janos Simon, eds., The PostCommunist Citizens (Budapest: Erasmus Foundation, 1998); Michael Bratton, Robert Mattes, and E. Gyimah-Boadi, Learning About Reform: People, Democracy, and Markets in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 14. Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi, Learning About Reform, p. 296. 15. Robert Putnam, R. Leonardi, and R. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Mitchell Seligson, “Civic Association and Democratic Participation in Central America: A Test of the Putnam Thesis,” Comparative Political Studies 32 (1999): 342–362. 16. Robert W. Jackman and R. A. Miller, “Voter Turnout in the Industrial Democracies During the 1980s,” Comparative Political Studies 127 (1995): 467–492; Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully, “Introduction: Party Systems in Latin America.” In Mainwaring and Scully, eds., Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 1–34. 17. Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). 18. Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America; Verba, Nie, and Kim, Participation and Political Equality. 19. See the Appendix; the two dependent variables are four-point scales that sum the answers of three yes/no items. Zero means the respondent did not participate in any political activity, and three means participation in all three. Missing value is treated as a negative answer by assumption. 20. The CSES is available at www.cses.org, and we use the April 10, 2006, release. The East Asia Barometer is available at http://eacsurvey.law.ntu.edu.tw/. 21. We adopt the definition of internal efficacy proposed by Richard Niemi, Stephen Craig, and Franco Mattei, “Measuring Internal Political Efficacy in the 1988 National Election Study,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 1407–1413. “Internal efficacy refers to beliefs about one’s own competence to understand, and to participate effectively in, politics” (p. 1407). The items we use are also two of the original seven items in their article, with minor modification of phrases. 22. The basic specification of the SEM model is the same as an ordinal logistic regression model. The only difference is that we treat Internal Efficacy as an intervening variable to be explained by other independent variables.

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23. Our analysis also shows relatively weak partisanship in East Asian countries as opposed to Western democracies. The analysis by Emile C. J. Sheng in Chapter 4 attributes this to the fact that East Asian democracies have had a relatively short time span of electoral and partisan politics. There has not yet been enough time to institutionalize partisanship through mechanisms such as cumulative electoral experiences and parental socialization. See also Russell J. Dalton and Steve Weldon, “Partisanship and Party System Institutionalization,” Party Politics 13 (2007): 179–196. 24. Electoral participation encompasses having voted in the last election, trying to persuade others how to vote, and participating in campaign activities. See Appendix for additional detail. 25. Also see Jeffrey Karp and Susan Banducci, “Party Mobilization and Political Participation in New and Old Democracies,” Party Politics 13 (2007): 275–277. 26. Nonelectoral participation includes three items: (1) contacting politicians or officials, (2) protest or demonstration, and (3) work with others to share concern. 27. Tables 7.1 and 7.2 are the results of ordinal regressions for electoral and nonelectoral participation. Each ordinal regression views the model as three separate binary logistic regressions by dichotomizing the (0,1,2,3) ordinal scale into a (0,1) binary scale. For example, threshold (0) combines categories into (0/1,2,3), threshold category (1) into (0,1/2,3), and threshold category (2) into (0,1,2/3). Therefore, the threshold (0) represents “the constant of the binary logistic regression” if we recode the four-point scale into 0 and 1 (1, 2, and 3) and run the binary logistic regression. Threshold (1) means “the constant” if we recode the ordinal dependent variable by category 1 into a binary variable and run the regression. Similar interpretation can apply to threshold (2). 28. The expected probability is calculated with a baseline profile for those who are youngest and have the lowest level of religiosity, perception of corruption, and education. 29. For a more extensive analysis of citizen activism in Hong Kong see Lam Wai-man, Understanding the Political Culture of Hong Kong: The Paradox of Activism and Depoliticization (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004). 30. In Taiwan and Japan, political mobilization at the grassroots level is usually associated with local networks affiliated with traditional religious organizations, especially in the rural areas. See Ken’ichi Ikeda and Sean E. Richey, “Japanese Network Capital: The Impact of Social Networks on Japanese Political Participation,” Journal of Political Behavior 27 (2005): 239–260; Tsai Ming-hui and Chang Mau-kueig, “Formation and Transformation of Local P’ai-hsi: A Case Study of Ho-k’ou Town,” Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology Academia Sinica 77 (1994): 125–156; Chen Hsiang-shui, “Political Activities in Pinnan Village: A Case Study of a Southern Taiwanese Village,” Chinese Studies 17 (1999): 127–155. 31. A reasonable speculation for the poor fit of Taiwan and Japan is that there must be some country-specific factors beyond the scope of our model. We believe these factors are related to citizen-initiative contact about personal is-

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sues since the two countries for a long time had the same electoral system (single, nontransferable vote) and a very similar party system (one party dominated). Under this system, nonelectoral participation is usually initiated for local or personal purposes and most politicians try to exploit the chances of marketing themselves and demonstrate their political impact to win popular support. This is a key factor of intraparty competition under the one party–dominated system with SNTV rule with multiple party candidates in a district. See Yusaku Horiuchi, Institutions, Incentives and Electoral Participation in Japan: CrossLevel and Cross-National Perspectives (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005). 32. Model specification at the individual level of HGLM is exactly the same as ordinal logistic regression. But at country level, two dummy variables are added to the HGLM model, one signifying established democracies and the other Asian emerging democracies (Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Philippines), to verify if the random component shows significant unexplained variance. For the sake of space, we do not report the detailed results of our HGLM models. Only a summary of the findings is reported here. Interested readers are welcome to send us a request for a copy of detailed results. Only twenty-five countries are included in the HGLM model. We excluded Japan, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and New Zealand because of very high missing values in some variables. 33. This finding is based on lack of statistical significance for the contextual variables, specifically two dummy variables, Established Democracy and Asian Democracy, adding to the country-level part of multilevel specification. 34. We also ran ordinal logistic regressions for EAB data. Since the results are consistent with the SEM analysis, we only report the latter. 35. We add more explanatory variables to the country-specific model one at a time depending on which variable has the largest modification index. We stop adding new variables when the fit statistics pass the acceptable level. We apply the same specification for each country sample, and overfitting may be a potential problem. However, since the aim of our SEM modeling is to explore peculiarity of each country instead of finding a universal structure of causal relationships, we decide to let the data speak for themselves. The acceptable level of the fit statistics is as follows: CFI is greater than or equal to 0.95, TLI is greater than or equal to 0.9, RMSEA is less than 0.06, WRMR is less than 0.9. See Linda K. Muthén and Bengt O. Muthén, Mplus User’s Guide: Statistical Analysis with Latent Variables (Los Angeles: Muthén and Muthén, 2001), p. 362. 36. Valerie J. Bunce, “The Return of the Left and the Future of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe.” In B. Yesilada, ed., Political Parties: Essays in Honor of Samuel Elderseld (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 151–176. 37. Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds., Parties Without Partisans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 275.

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8 Partisanship and Democratization Doh Chull Shin and Rollin F. Tusalem

P

olitical parties perform a variety of functions for “achieving, maintaining, and improving the quality of democracy.”1 How effectively parties can perform such democratic functions, however, depends largely on whether they form an institutionalized party system that has taken root deeply in society.2 One indicator of such a viable party system concerns the extent to which voters identify with a party or have a party preference.3 Without widespread citizen attachment to political parties, the electoral process becomes highly volatile and the legislative process becomes highly unpredictable in its formulation of major policies. Such partisan attachment, known as partisanship, is, therefore, essential to the institutional process of democratization.4 The democratization effects of mass partisanship go well beyond the institutional dimension of democratization.5 As a political predisposition often called “a prime mover,” partisan attachment powerfully shapes many other political attitudes and beliefs.6 As discussed in earlier chapters, it motivates ordinary citizens to engage in electoral and other political activities. Furthermore, as a long-term affective orientation, it motivates them to perceive and react positively to the political world in which they live.7 By promoting favorable attitudes toward the democratic system in which citizens live, partisanship can contribute to the process of legitimizing democratic rule in the minds of the masses.8 To date, however, few studies have sought to explore the consequences shifting partisanship has on the cultural dimension of legitimizing democratic rule by directly examining partisanship’s link to support for democracy.9 Research on this link has dealt mostly with old democracies in Europe and North America. As a result, little is known about how orientations to political parties shape commitment to democracy among the citizens of nascent democracies in other regions. 145

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In Eastern Europe, support for new democratic regimes is 13 percentage points higher among those identified with a party than those without a party identification, and opposition to undemocratic alternatives is 9 percentage points higher among the former than the latter.10 In Africa, partisan affiliations also significantly shape popular reactions to democracy.11 Among those identified with the winning party, for example, 74 percent expressed satisfaction with democracy. The corresponding figure for those identified with losing parties was only 47 percent. Clearly, identification with a winning political party motivates Africans to support democracy and evaluate its performance positively to a greater extent. In Asia, however, no empirical study has yet investigated how partisanship and its status affect popular reactions to democracy. Is partisan attachment facilitating the democratization process in East Asia? Does partisanship motivate East Asians to accept democratic politics, while encouraging them to reject its authoritarian alternatives? Does it also motivate them to perceive the performance of the existing democratic political system in a positive light? Do those attached to the ruling and opposition parties perceive it differently? If so, why do partisans and nonpartisans react differently to the democratization process? This chapter explores these questions by analyzing the first wave of the East Asia Barometer (EAB hereafter) surveys conducted in Japan, Korea, Mongolia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand.12 Unlike the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and World Values surveys used in other chapters, the EAB surveys tapped democratic support from multidimensional and multilevel perspectives. Japan, the only established democracy in East Asia, is included in our analysis to explore whether partisanship plays a different role during the course of democratization. This chapter is organized into several sections. In the section following immediately, we review recent scholarship on the role of partisanship in democratization and propose a number of theories and hypotheses linking partisanship with prodemocratic and antiauthoritarian orientations. In the second section, we explicate the meanings of partisanship and democratic support, the two key concepts underlying these hypotheses. We also introduce indicators of these concepts. We then move to the largest part of the chapter, which analyzes the relationships between partisan attachments and reactions to institutional and cultural democratization among East Asians. In the final section, we summarize key findings and discuss their implications for the democratization of mass citizenries in East Asia.

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Theoretical Considerations The above review of the literature reveals that a sense of identification with a political party is a “super attitude,” that is, one that influences other political attitudes and beliefs. It also reveals that psychological attachment to a political party promotes citizen support for the democratic political system in which the party exists. Why does partisan attachment give rise to support for democratic political order among the citizens who live in a democracy? The existing literature on partisanship does not offer any single unified or general theory explaining, either deductively or inductively, why popular support for political parties translates to popular support for democracy. Instead, the literature offers a number of specific theoretical propositions linking an affective orientation to a political party with various components of democratic support. One proposition emphasizes the socialization role that partisanship plays in political life.13 Specifically, it posits that attachment to political parties exposes citizens to the issue positions and policy programs their favored parties advocate and stimulates them to become psychologically and behaviorally involved in the political process. Over time, repeated involvement in the political process integrates partisans into the party-based democratic system, and consequently leads them to develop favorable attitudes toward the system itself. Familiarity with the democratic process breeds contentment or satisfaction with it. Political involvement also encourages citizens to endorse the idea that the democratic political system needs parties to function correctly. Thus, this theory of political learning and socialization holds that partisans will be more supportive of democracy than nonpartisans when comparing democracy with its alternatives. A second theoretical proposition is derived from the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance.14 According to this theory, individuals seek to maintain consistency among their attitudes and beliefs by avoiding those that contradict them. Those favorably attached to political parties, therefore, seek to avoid cognitive dissonance by orienting themselves favorably toward the democratic political system populated with political parties. As much as they embrace their own political parties, therefore, they favor the political system in which those parties exist. To maintain consistently positive attitudes toward democratic politics, we expect partisans, as compared to nonpartisans, to be more favorably oriented toward the ideals and practices of democracy. A third theoretical proposition treats partisanship as a predisposition that can mediate the impact of electoral winning and losing on support

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for the political system in which people live.15 Taking the perspective of rational choice or prospective regime performance, this proposition emphasizes the expected benefit from the outcome of an electoral contest. Of the political parties taking part in the contest, only the winning party is likely to implement its favorite policies and thus benefit its supporters. Therefore, those identified with the winning party are expected to be more satisfied with and supportive of the political system than those who are identified with the losing parties. Thus, this theory differs from the socialization and cognitive dissonance theories, which claim all partisans, winning and losing, will be more supportive than nonpartisans.16

Conceptualization and Measurement From the three theories, we derived a number of hypotheses linking partisanship with positive reactions to institutional and cultural democratization. To test these hypotheses, we need to define and measure the key concepts of partisanship and democratization. This section explicates each of these two key concepts, and outlines a strategy for measuring them with responses to the EAB surveys conducted in six East Asian countries during the 2001–2003 period. Partisanship What constitutes partisanship? Since the publication of The American Voter in 1960, a large body of literature has accumulated to address that question.17 The authors of these studies often equate partisanship with an affective or emotional attachment to a particular political party. Emulating their research on political consequences of partisanship, our study focuses on affective identification with a particular party. It should be noted, however, that this conception of partisanship appears narrow when compared with another conception in which partisanship represents a frame of mind toward political parties in general.18 To measure affective partisan orientations among East Asians, we selected one of the two questions the EAB surveys asked to tap partisan attachments. The EAB asked respondents to name the one political party to which they felt closest on the list of all the parties in their country. Those who did not name any political party were recognized as nonpartisans. Those who named the governing party and those who named an opposition party were recognized, respectively, as winning and losing party identifiers.19

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Democratization The existing literature on third-wave democracies generally agrees that democratization takes place in individual citizens and their political regime.20 To examine the democratic changes at the regime level,21 we selected a pair of questions from the EAB surveys. The first question asked respondents to rate the extent to which their current regime was operating as a democracy or dictatorship on a 10-point scale. The second question asked them to rate on a 10-point scale the extent to which they were satisfied or dissatisfied with the way the existing regime was performing as a democracy. By considering these two assessments together, we estimated the extent to which respondents recognized the current political system as a well-functioning democracy. To examine the democratic changes taking place at the level of institutions, we selected from the EAB surveys a set of four questions dealing with four key institutions of representative democracy: the national government, political parties, parliament, and local government. To determine how responsibly and accountably these institutions have performed in the eyes of citizens, the surveys asked respondents how much trust they had in each institution. We converted their responses into an index of institutional trust. Values of this index range from a low of 0 to a high of 4. A third level is the democratization of cultural beliefs and values. It is a multilayered or multilevel phenomenon because citizens simultaneously comprehend democracy not only as an abstract idea but also as a political system-in-practice.22 It is also a multidimensional phenomenon because it involves the acceptance of democracy as well as the rejection of its alternatives. Embracing democracy as an abstract idea is not the same as embracing democracy as a working regime. Democracy as an abstract idea represents certain political principles, values, and ideals while democracy-in-practice represents the actual workings of the democratic institutions that govern citizens’ daily lives.23 Ordinary citizens who have lived most of their lives under authoritarian rule may have an idealized vision of what democracy can be, and yet not be fully supportive of the democracy they see at work in their country. Consequently, popular support for democracy must be differentiated into two broad categories: normative and practical. To measure normative democratic support, we selected an item that asked respondents to express their desire to live in a democracy or dictatorship on a 10-point scale. Those who scored 6 or higher on this

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scale were considered supporters of democracy-in-principle. Thus, calculating their percentage provides a measure of normative democratic support. To measure support for democracy-in-practice, we selected a set of three items from the EAB surveys. The first item asked respondents to appraise the suitability of democracy for their country. The second item asked them whether they agreed with the view that democracy is always preferable to any other kind of government. The third item asked them whether they believed democracy would be capable of solving the problems of their society. Those who endorsed democracy as a suitable, preferable, and efficacious system of governance were considered supporters of democracy-in-practice. Thus, calculating their percentage provides a measure of practical democratic support. In addition, citizens with little experience and limited sophistication about democratic politics may be uncertain whether democracy or dictatorship offers satisfying solutions to the problems facing their societies. Under such uncertainty, citizens often embrace both democratic and authoritarian political propensities concurrently.24 Consequently, the acceptance of democracy does not necessarily cause the rejection of authoritarianism or vice versa. We selected three questions to tap orientations toward or against the practices of authoritarian rule: whether respondents favored the return of the military in the country; whether they would approve of getting rid of parliament and elections and having a strong leader decide everything; and whether they would approve of one-party rule. Calculating the percentage of respondents who reject all three of these forms of undemocratic rule reveals the extent of the citizens’ dissociation from the virtues of authoritarian rule.

Findings from the EAB Surveys: The Contours of Partisanship We begin the analyses by categorizing East Asian citizens into nonpartisans, losing partisans, and winning partisans. Evidently, as shown in Table 8.1, the proportions of nonpartisans and partisans vary a great deal across the six countries in East Asia. In Thailand, for instance, partisans constitute a minority (41 percent) of the electorate. In Mongolia, on the other hand, partisans constitute an overwhelming majority (90 percent). In the other four countries, partisans outnumber nonpartisans (53 percent in Japan, 57 percent in Taiwan, 54 percent in the Philippines, and 73 percent in Korea).

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Among partisans, winning partisans outnumber losing partisans in three of the six countries: Japan, Korea, and Thailand. In the other three countries, Mongolia, the Philippines, and Taiwan, losing partisans outnumber winning partisans. More notable is that winning partisans do not constitute a majority in any of the six East Asian countries surveyed. Even in consolidated democracies like Japan (32 percent) and Korea (38 percent), there is only a mere plurality of respondents that identify with the ruling party. This finding indicates that the attachments of most East Asians to political parties are highly uneven from one country to another. Within each of the six countries surveyed, moreover, partisan attachments are not concentrated in one or two parties; instead, they are highly dispersed among several parties, including the winning party. Like those in other third-wave democracies, party systems in East Asia are neither institutionalized nor based on class distinctions. Working- or labor-class activism, which supposedly solidifies partisanship identification in the West,25 is lacking in East Asia. As a result, most parties are formed on the basis of elite interests and personal ties, and fail to represent the voices and policy demands of the various sectors of society.26 Accordingly, mass attachments to these parties remain tentative and fleeting from one election to another. This may be the reason why none of the ruling parties in East Asia holds support from a majority of its electorate.

Facilitating Institutional Democratization Democratization always involves the democratic transformation of authoritarian political institutions and procedures. How does attachment to Table 8.1

Japan Korea Mongolia Philippines Taiwan Thailand

Variants of Partisanship Identification Among East Asians Nonpartisans (%)

Losing Partisans (%)

Winning Partisans (%)

Total (%)

N

46.5 26.7 9.8 46.0 43.2 58.6

21.6 34.9 46.4 31.8 33.8 19.1

31.9 38.4 43.8 22.1 23.0 22.3

100 100 100 100 100 100

1,360 1,500 1,144 1,199 1,350 1,546

Source: East Asia Barometer Surveys, 2001–2003.

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political parties affect the process of such institutional democratization in East Asia? To address this question, we first compare the extent to which nonpartisans, losing partisans, and winning partisans perceive their current political system as a democracy that performs to their satisfaction. Regime Performance For each of the six East Asian countries, Table 8.2 reports the proportions of partisans and nonpartisans who rated their current regime as a well-functioning democracy. Of these countries, Thailand stands out as the only country where large majorities of both partisans and nonpartisans endorsed the current regime. Why is it that Thais, unlike those of other nationalities, were uniformly and unusually high in their endorsement of their nascent democratic rule? It appears that Thaksin Shinawatra’s winning the largest popular mandate ever in the January 2001 National Assembly elections, and subsequently forming the first majority democratic government in their country, encouraged respondents to the EAB survey conducted later in that year to become overly enthusiastic about democracy as a political ideal as well as political practice without dissociating themselves from authoritarianism.27 Even among their nonpartisans, more than four-fifths (84 percent) were supportive of their government as a well-functioning democracy. This figure is from 36 to 46 percentage points higher than what was observed in five other countries. Table 8.2 also shows that, in every country, partisans, either losing or winning, are more satisfied with their democratic experience than their nonpartisan counterparts. In all six East Asian countries, nonpartisans are the least positive about the way their political system performs as a democracy. With five of the six East Asian democracies, majorities of partisans endorse the current level of institutional democratization, while majorities of nonpartisans refuse to endorse it. Thailand is the only country where a majority of ordinary citizens support their democracy regardless of their partisanship. This finding that partisans, whether winning or losing, endorse the current democratic regime confirms the socialization hypothesis that partisanship familiarizes ordinary citizens with the democratic political process, and this experience breeds a greater sense of satisfaction with the performance of their political system as a democracy. It also confirms the cognitive dissonance hypothesis that the citizens who are favorably oriented toward political parties are likely to embrace the political system in which the parties operate. Table 8.2 also reports that, in every country, winning partisans are more likely than losing partisans to appraise their political system in a

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Partisanship and Democratization Table 8.2

Japan Korea Mongolia Philippines Taiwan Thailand

153

Perceptions of a Well-Functioning Democracy by Types of Partisanship Nonpartisans (%)

Losing Partisans (%)

Winning Partisans (%)

Eta

42.6 44.4 48.1 37.9 41.4 83.9

44.7 48.5 53.9 40.4 44.2 84.5

56.8 65.7 58.7 47.9 56.3 90.0

.13* .19* .06 .08* .12* .07*

Source: East Asia Barometer Surveys, 2001–2003. Note: * indicates statistically significant at the 0.05 level.

positive light. Regardless of the authoritarian political system in which they once lived or the level of socioeconomic modernization their country has achieved, East Asians who identify with their ruling party are the most positively oriented to the democratic performance of the existing political systems. Once again, Thailand is the only country where an overwhelming majority (90 percent) of winning partisans support the current regime as a well-functioning democracy. In other East Asian democracies, including Japan, the oldest democracy in the region, a relatively small majority or large minority of winning partisans endorse it: Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (57 percent); Korea’s Uri Party (66 percent); Mongolia’s People’s Revolutionary Party (59 percent); the Philippines’ governing coalition of Gloria Arroyo Party, Lakas Ng Tao, Liberal Party, and People Power Coalition (48 percent);28 and Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (56 percent). This finding that winning partisans are more favorably oriented to the existing democratic regime than losing partisans is statistically significant in all East Asian countries with the exception of Mongolia. It is, therefore, in general agreement with the rational choice or prospective regime performance proposition that supporters of the winning party are more satisfied with and supportive of the existing political system than those of losing parties, as the former expect greater benefits from the political system than the latter.29 Institutional Trust We also compared the levels of trust East Asians place in four major democratic institutions—the national government, the parliament, politi-

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cal parties, and the local government—across the three categories of nonpartisans, losing partisans, and winning partisans. For each partisanship category, we calculated the mean number of the institutions respondents reported they were trusting and placed them on a 5-point scale ranging from a low of 0 to a high of 4. Figure 8.1 presents these means. In Figure 8.1, we see that partisans are not always more trusting of democratic institutions than are nonpartisans. In four of the six East Asian countries—Japan, Mongolia, the Philippines, and Taiwan—the former tend to trust these institutions more, but not always significantly more, than do the latter. In Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan, for instance, the differences between their mean index values range from 0.01 in Mongolia to 0.14 in Japan on the 5-point scale ranging from 0 to 4. This finding clearly shows that mere attachment to a political party does not promote institutional trust either consistently or powerfully. It also suggests that neither the socialization nor cognitive dissonance theory of partisanship holds true at the subsystem level of particular institutions.

Partisanship and Levels of Institutional Trust

Mean index value

Figure 8.1

Source: East Asia Barometer Surveys, 2001–2003. Note: Figures above bars are eta coefficients.

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Concerning winning and losing partisans, Figure 8.1 shows that the former always report significantly higher mean levels of institutional trust than do the latter. Winning partisans register the highest level of trust for democratic institutions in every East Asian country, from Japan, the oldest established democracy in the region, to the third-wave democracies of Korea, Mongolia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Taiwan. This finding accords with the rational choice model of partisanship, which holds that winning partisans will have greater support for institutions of representative democracy than will losing partisans or nonpartisans. Moreover, the impact of winning partisanship on institutional trust appears to be more pronounced than its impact on the appraisal of the existing political system as a well-functioning democracy. The eta coefficients reported in Table 8.2 and Figure 8.1 indicate that winning partisanship is more strongly associated with institutional trust than perceptions of a well-functioning democracy in four of the six East Asian countries—Japan, Mongolia, Taiwan, and Thailand.

Fostering Cultural Democratization To comprehend the role partisanship plays in the entire process of democratization, we need to examine whether partisanship also matters in cultural democratization, that is, orienting East Asians toward democracy and away from authoritarianism. We differentiate those orientations into two categories, normative and practical support for democracy. Normative Support for Democracy For each East Asian country, Figure 8.2 reports the percentages of nonpartisans, losing partisans, and winning partisans who expressed a democratic desire by choosing 6 or higher on a 10-point scale in which a score of 1 means complete dictatorship and 10 means complete democracy. Most notable, all East Asian countries embrace democracy as an ideal political system. Regardless of their partisanship, large majorities ranging from 84 percent to 99 percent support democracy-inprinciple. In Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and Thailand, more than 9 out of 10 people expressed the desire to live in a democracy rather than in a dictatorship. Only in the Philippines (11 percent) and Taiwan (12 percent) did more than 1 out of 10 people express the desire to live in a nondemocratic regime.

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Party Politics in East Asia Types of Partisanship and Levels of Normative Democratic Support

Source: East Asia Barometer Surveys, 2001–2003. Note: Numbers above bars are eta coefficients.

Another notable feature of Figure 8.2 is that partisanship is not very instrumental in shaping the citizens’ desire to live in a democracy. Specifically, partisanship does not always mean higher levels of support for democracy-in-principle. For instance, in the two countries of Japan and Thailand, nonpartisans are more supportive of democracy as an ideal political system than partisans. Only in one of the four other countries, Taiwan, do partisans report significantly higher levels of normative democratic support than do nonpartisans. In none of the six East Asian countries, moreover, do winning partisans report a significantly higher level of such democratic support than do losing partisans. These findings, when considered together, make it clear that partisanship, either losing or winning, does not distinctively shape normative support for democracy. Practical Support for Democracy What effect does partisanship have on support for democracy-in-practice among East Asians? We used the index described above to reveal

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the strength of practical support for democracy. Citizens who respond positively to all three items in the index are fully supportive of democracy as it is practiced within their polity. Table 8.3 reports percentages expressing such full practical support for democracy among those in three categories of partisanship. Between nonpartisans and partisans, the latter tend to support democratic practices more than the former, although they do not always do so. In Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand, levels of practical democratic support are higher among partisans than nonpartisans, but in Korea and Mongolia, nonpartisans report higher levels of such support than do partisans (37 percent vs. 32 percent and 40 percent vs. 37 percent, respectively). In addition, between winning and losing partisans, the former tend to report greater support for democratic practices than do the latter, although not always. In five of the six countries, winning partisans are more supportive of democratic practices than losing partisans, but in Mongolia, the percentage of losing partisans who support democracy-in-practice is significantly greater than the percentage of winning partisans who do (58 percent vs. 37 percent). Considering these findings together reveals that in East Asia today, partisans are more likely to support democratic practices than nonpartisans, and that winning partisans are more likely to do so than losing partisans. Opposition to Authoritarian Rule People in Third Wave democracies lived many years under authoritarian regimes; consequently, some may remain attached to its virtues even as they embrace democracy as the best political system. To ex-

Table 8.3

Japan Korea Mongolia Philippines Taiwan Thailand

Types of Partisanship and Levels of Practical Support for Democracy Nonpartisans (%)

Losing Partisans (%)

Winning Partisans (%)

Eta

64.5 36.9 40.0 36.8 26.5 77.4

65.4 31.5 57.8 38.8 29.1 71.4

69.1 44.7 37.1 41.0 36.5 78.5

.04 .12* .20* .03 .09* .06

Source: East Asia Barometer Surveys, 2001–2003. Note: * indicates statistically significant at the 0.05 level.

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amine fully the role of partisanship in cultural democratization, we also considered popular detachment from authoritarianism. Respondents who rejected all three authoritarian regimes discussed above are considered true authoritarian opponents. Table 8.4 compares percentages of authoritarian opponents across three categories of partisanship. Of the six countries reported in the table, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are the three countries where majorities of both partisans and nonpartisans are detached from the virtues of authoritarian rule. In Mongolia, only partisans—winning and losing—are detached from them. In the Philippines and Thailand, on the other hand, majorities of nonpartisans as well as partisans remain attached to authoritarianism. This finding suggests that the rejection of authoritarian rule among the mass publics of East Asia has to do with the types of political regime they experienced in the past and with the extent to which they are socioeconomically modernized. The more oppressive their past regime was, the more quickly they dissociate themselves from it. The more modernized they are, the more quickly they reject it. Table 8.4 shows that partisans are not detached any more from authoritarianism than nonpartisans. This runs counter to the socialization, cognitive dissonance, and rational choice hypotheses, which link partisanship to democratization. In fact, nonpartisans are more detached from authoritarianism than partisans of either a losing or winning party in five of the six countries. In Korea, for instance, more than three-quarters (77 percent) of nonpartisans are fully detached from the virtues of authoritarian rule, whereas only two-thirds (68 percent) of winning partisans are. Taiwan is the only country where opponents of authoritarianism are more numerous among partisans than nonpartisans.

Table 8.4

Japan Korea Mongolia Philippines Taiwan Thailand

Types of Partisanship and Levels of Opposition to Authoritarian Politics Nonpartisans (%)

Losing Partisans (%)

Winning Partisans (%)

Eta

57.3 77.3 45.5 43.7 53.0 46.1

64.2 70.6 52.2 34.4 69.4 49.3

57.1 67.7 33.3 41.2 59.7 45.1

.06 .08* .18* .08* .15* .03

Source: East Asia Barometer Surveys, 2001–2003. Note: * indicates statistically significant at the 0.05 level.

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Concerning partisans only, winning partisans are not any less authoritarian than losing partisans. Only in the Philippines are the former significantly less authoritarian than the latter. In the other five countries, it is losing partisans, not winning partisans, who reject authoritarianism in a greater proportion. In Mongolia, for instance, 52 percent of losing partisans reject all three alternatives to democracy, while only 33 percent of winning partisans do the same. In Taiwan, 69 percent of the former are opponents of authoritarian rule, while only 60 percent of the latter are. Our findings in Table 8.4, when considered all together, offer little evidence to support the hypotheses claiming that partisanship contributes to cultural democratization by dissociating the masses from the virtues of authoritarian rule.

Determining Independent Influence The final step of our analysis isolates partisanship from other variables known to influence democratization and determines whether partisanship independently contributes to democratization.30 To address this question, we first selected five demographic characteristics—gender, age, educational attainment, class standing (subjective), and community type—as control variables.31 We then employed Multiple Classification Analysis to estimate the beta statistics for partisanship and five other control variables.32 Table 8.5 reports the beta coefficients for the relationships of the partisanship variable with two institutional and three cultural domains of democratization. Being analogous to standardized regression coefficients, the beta statistics reported in the table indicate the relative power of each predictor. According to these coefficients in the table, there is a great deal of variation from one country to another in the way partisanship shapes citizen reactions to democratization. In Korea and Mongolia, for instance, it matters significantly in all five domains, including normative support for democracy. In the Philippines, on the other hand, it matters only in two domains. From one domain to another domain of democratization, partisanship also plays a significantly different role. In the domain of democratic regime performance, it matters significantly in all six countries. In the domains of normative and practical democratic support, it matters similarly only in three of the six countries. Why does partisanship motivate citizens to react to democracy differently across its domains and across countries within the same region? This is an important question that needs further research.

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160 Table 8.5

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Party Politics in East Asia Multiple Classification Analysis of the Effects of Partisanship on Mass Reactions to Democratization

Democratization Domains Regime performance Institutional trust Normative support Practical support Opposition to authoritarianism

Japan

Korea

Mongolia

Philippines Taiwan Thailand

.12*

.18*

.07*

.08*

.13*

.07*

.16*

.10*

.24*

.06

.13*

.11*

.02

.07*

.13*

.04

.08*

.04

.08*

.11*

.20*

.04

.10*

.04

.04

.07*

.17*

.09*

.06

.09*

Source: East Asia Barometer Surveys, 2001–2003. Notes: Entries are beta coefficients for the relationships between partisanship and five domains of democratic change after holding five other factors constant. * indicates statistically significant at the 0.05 level.

Nonetheless, Table 8.5 shows that partisanship matters significantly for all six East Asian countries in at least one institutional domain (the regime as a whole and/or particular institutions) and at least one cultural domain (democracy-in-principle, democracy-in-action, and/or antiauthoritarianism) of their democratization even after holding other factors constant. In three of the six countries—Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan—it shapes most or all of their democratization domains significantly. In four countries—Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan—partisanship influences the process more powerfully than do any of the five other demographic variables, including educational attainment. In short, partisan ties do shape the cultural and institutional dynamics of democratization in East Asia. Comparisons of the beta coefficients across countries suggest a contrasting pattern of the role partisanship plays over the course of democratization. In the two domains of institutional democratization, the magnitude of these coefficients is higher for Japan, an established democracy, than most of the five new East Asian democracies. In all three domains of cultural democratization, however, their magnitude is lower for the former than the latter. Over the course of democratization, it appears that partisanship becomes stronger in motivating ordinary people to embrace democratic institutions, but it weakens in orienting them toward democracy and away from authoritarianism. These findings,

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when considered together, do not accord with what is known from the studies conducted in other regions. According to these studies, partisanship is uniformly more influential in orienting the masses toward democratic institutions and values in emerging democracies than established democracies.33 In striking contrast, it contributes more only to cultural democratization in the former than the latter.

Conclusion This chapter has explored whether mass partisanship contributes to the process of democratization in East Asia. Our analyses of the EAB surveys indicate that attachments to political parties among East Asian publics do support the process of democratization in the region. As the socialization and cognitive dissonance theories hold, partisan attachments tend to contribute to institutional democratization by motivating East Asians to recognize a newly installed political system as a democracy and appreciate its virtues. Those attachments also tend to contribute to institutional democratization by encouraging citizens to tolerate the shortcomings of key democratic institutions and thereby ensure the continuity of those institutions. As the rational choice theory of partisanship holds, identification with the governmental party facilitates this process of institutional democratization by endorsing limited democratic rule and supporting its expansion to the greatest extent.34 By and large, partisanship also contributes to the process of cultural democratization. It motivates East Asian citizens to endorse the practices of democratic politics and embrace it as the preferred system of government. In orienting them away from the virtues of authoritarian rule, however, identification with either a winning or losing party matters much less. Yet, in every East Asian country, partisanship contributes independently to positive citizen reactions to at least one of the three surveyed domains of cultural democratization. Only in the domains of cultural democratization, partisanship contributes consistently less in Japan, an established democracy, than the other five new democracies. On the basis of these findings, we conclude that mass partisanship fosters the legitimization of nascent democratic rule, and promotes its expansion and consolidation in East Asia. For further research, we need to ask why partisanship plays a divergent role across the different domains and dimensions of democratization. We need to also ask why it plays a divergent role across countries in varying levels of democratic change.

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Notes 1. “Democracy Without Parties? Political Parties and Regime Collapse in Fujimori’s Peru,” paper presented at the Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Washington, DC, September 6–8, 2001, p. 5. 2. Scott Mainwaring, Rethinking Party Systems in Third Wave of Democratization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Geoffrey Pridham and Paul G. Lewis, eds., Stabilising Fragile Democracies: Comparing the New Party Systems in Southern and Eastern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1966). 3. Russell J. Dalton and Steven Weldon, “Partisanship and Party System Institutionalization,” Party Politics 13, no. 2 (March 2007); Vicky Randall and Lars Svåsand, “Party Institutionalization in New Democracies,” Party Politics 8, no. 1 (January 2002): 5–29. 4. Ian McAllister and Stephen White, “Democracy, Political Parties and Party Formation in Postcommunist Russia,” Party Politics 1 (1995): 49–72. 5. Timothy J. Colton, “Babes in Partyland: The Riddle of Partisanship in Post-Soviet Russia” (unpublished manuscript); Richard Gunther, Jose Ramon Montero, and Juan Linz, eds., Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 6. Russell J. Dalton, Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2005), p. 174. See also Michael Bratton, Robert Mattes, and E. Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 39. 7. Christopher Anderson and Christine A. Guillory, “Political Institutions and Satisfaction with Democracy,” American Political Science Review 91, no. 1 (1997): 66–81; Larry Bartels, “Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions,” Political Behavior 24, no. 2 (2002): 117–150. 8. Christian Anderson, “Parties, Party Systems, and Satisfaction with Democratic Performance in the New Europe,” Political Studies 46, no. 4 (1998): 572. 9. Christopher Anderson et al., Loser’s Consent: Elections and Democracy Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jack Dennis and Diana Owen, “Popular Satisfaction with the Party System and Representative Democracy in the United States,” International Political Science Review 22, no. 4 (2001): 399–415; Soren Holmberg, “Are Political Parties Necessary?” Electoral Studies 22, no. 2 (2003): 287–299. 10. Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Christian Haerpfer, Democracy and Its Alternatives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 157. 11. Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform, pp. 259–261. 12. The study reported in this paper is based on the first wave of the EAB surveys conducted in 2002 and 2003. These multinational public opinion data consist of responses collected through face-to-face interviews with randomly selected voters in Japan (N = 1,360), South Korea (N = 1,500), Mongolia (N = 1,144), the Philippines (N = 1,199), Taiwan (N = 1,350), and Thailand (N =

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1,546) (though surveys were conducted in China and Hong Kong, these are not included in this study). Further information about questionnaire design, sampling methodology, and fieldwork is available at www.eastasiabarometer.org. 13. Holmberg, “Are Political Parties Necessary?” 14. Anderson et al., Loser’s Consent, p. 76; Aida Paskeviciute and Christopher J. Anderson, “Political Parties, Partisanship, and Attitudes Toward Government in Democracies,” presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 2004. 15. Anderson et al., Loser’s Consent, p. 75; Christopher Anderson and Yuliya Tverdova, “Winners, Losers, and Attitudes About Government in Contemporary Democracies,” International Political Science Review 22, no. 4 (2001): 323. 16. Christopher Anderson and Yuliya V. Tverdova, “Corruption, Political Allegiances, and Attitudes Toward Government in Contemporary Democracies,” American Journal of Political Science 47, no. 1 (2003): 91–109. 17. Angus Campbell et al., The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960); Morris Fiorina, “Parties and Partisanship: A Forty Year Retrospective,” Political Behavior 24, no. 2 (2002): 93–115. 18. Russell Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choice: The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 33; see also Steven Greene, “The Social-Psychological Measurement of Partisanship,” Political Behavior 24, no. 3 (2002): 171–197. 19. Ruling parties are Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party; Korea’s Uri Party; Mongolia’s People’s Revolutionary Party; the Philippines’ governing coalition of Gloria Arroyo Party, Lakas Ng Tao, Liberal Party, and People Power Coalition (48 percent); Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (56 percent); and Thailand’s Thai Rak Thai Party (90 percent). 20. Valerie Bunce, “Rethinking Recent Democratization: Lessons from the Postcommunist Experience,” World Politics 55, no. 2 (2003): 167–192; Laurence Whitehead, Democratization: Theory and Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 21. Russell Dalton, “Political Support for Advanced Industrial Democracies.” In Pippa Norris, ed., Critical Citizens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 57–77. 22. Hans-Dieter Klingemann, “Mapping Political Support in the 1990s: A Global Analysis,” in Norris, ed., Critical Citizens, pp. 31–56; Doh Chull Shin, “Democratization: Perspectives from Global Citizenries.” In Russell Dalton and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 259–282. 23. William Mishler and Richard Rose, “Political Support for Incomplete Democracies,” International Political Science Review 22, no. 4 (2001): 303–320. 24. Rose, Mishler, and Haerpfer, Democracy and Its Alternatives; Doh Chull Shin, Mass Politics and Culture in Democratizing Korea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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25. Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross National Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1967). See also Ian McAllister’s chapter in this book. 26. Wolfgang Sachsenroder and Ulrike Frings, eds., Political Party Systems and Democratic Developments in East and Southeast Asia (London: Ashgate, 1998). 27. Aurel Croissant, “Parliamentary Elections in Thailand, March 2000 and January 2001,” Electoral Studies 22, no. 1 (March 2003): 153–160. 28. Of the six East Asian democracies, the Philippines is the only country where a majority of winning partisans refused to endorse the current regime. This is probably because the congress impeached President Estrada and the Supreme Courts swore in Gloria Arroyo as acting president on January 20, 2001. For further details, see Steven Rogers, “Philippine Politics and the Rule of Law,” Journal of Democracy 15, no. 4 (October 2004): 111–125. 29. Christopher Anderson and Silvia Mendes, “Learning to Lose: Election Outcomes, Democratic Experience and Political Protest Potential,” British Journal of Political Science 36, no. 4 (2005): 91–111; Anderson and Tverdova, “Winners, Losers, and Attitudes”; Paskeviciute and Anderson, “Political Parties, Partisanship, and Attitudes.” 30. Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform; Rose, Mishler, and Haerpfer, Democracy and Its Alternatives; Shin, Mass Politics and Culture in Democratizing Korea. 31. Age, school, and class standing were measured in terms of five categories. Community type was measured in terms of two categories, rural and urban. 32. Frank Andrew, James Morgan, and James Gouquist, Multiple Classification Analysis (Ann Arbor: Survey Research Center, the University of Michigan, 1973). 33. Anderson, “Parties, Party Systems, and Satisfaction”; Anderson et al., Losers’ Consent (2005); Holmberg, “Are Political Parties Necessary?” 34. Anderson et al., Losers’ Consent, p. 527.

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9 Citizens, Political Parties, and Democratic Development Doh Chull Shin, Russell J. Dalton, and Yun-han Chu

E

ast Asia is a region of unprecedented economic growth and social modernization. Over the past three decades, its economy has expanded at a much faster rate than has ever been recorded for any global region. The expanding economies have freed thousands of people from poverty and illiteracy and exposed them to the libertarian values of freedom, autonomy, and pluralism. These trends contributed to democratization within the region. Twenty-five years ago, only a single nation in East Asia was a consolidated democracy. The Third Wave of democratization spread to the Philippines, Korea, and Taiwan in the 1980s. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the democratization of Mongolia, and Thailand soon followed (albeit with a recent reversal). By the start of the millennium, another new democracy had emerged in Indonesia.1 Admittedly, the democratization process is incomplete. By some standards, East Asia has not been as successful as some other regions in transforming authoritarian regimes into democracies and consolidating fledgling democratic regimes.2 In addition, with the dawning of the new millennium, the Third Wave East Asian democracies have struggled with the challenges of democratization. Thailand is the clearest case of regression, with a military coup overthrowing the democratic government in 2006. Of the six democracies in the region in 2007, the Freedom House rates only three—Japan, Korea, and Taiwan—as liberal democracies.3 The World Bank’s report “Governance Matters 2007” rates even these three liberal democracies as far from being wellfunctioning democracies.4 165

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This book focuses on the progress that has been made and examines whether these new democracies of East Asia are institutionalizing and consolidating their democratic systems. We explore East Asia’s democratic development by analyzing partisan politics as central to the democratic process. We follow E. E. Schattschneider’s dictum that democracy without parties is unthinkable, and thus we focus on the development of party systems and party politics as a key measure of democratic development.5 Recent research on the established democracies in the West stresses the importance of party politics to democratic governance.6 However, many scholars of East Asian politics have criticized the party systems in East Asia for not developing an institutionalized structure that allows them to perform these democratic roles.7 Thus, we examine partisan politics in East Asian democracies as a prime tool of democratic linkage. The answers to these questions are important for judging the progress that has been made, as well as the potential for further democratization in the region. The contributors first describe the structure of party competition in East Asian democracies. Then they examine the linkage between parties and their voters—what factors shape the electoral choices of East Asian publics. Finally, the authors describe the consequences of partisanship in terms of motivating citizens to participate and develop support for the democratic process. As a critical force shaping the institutionalization of a party system, these connections should determine the contours and dynamics of party competition and thereby the development of democracy in these nations. In addressing these questions, the authors adopt a variety of concepts and theoretical models from the study of party politics in consolidated Western democracies. With these conceptual and theoretical tools, they analyze data drawn from three different cross-national public opinion surveys: the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), the East Asia Barometer (EAB), and the World Values Survey. The data from these cross-national as well as cross-regional perspectives reveal a number of significant findings about the process of citizen-party linkage in East Asia and show also how this process differs from what has transpired in other regions. This concluding chapter highlights the key findings and discusses their conceptual and theoretical implications. Then, we consider how democratization in the region has affected the development of these party systems. Finally, we consider the implications of our findings for further democratization in East Asia.

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An Overview of Our Findings The previous chapters offer a comprehensive account of how party systems and voter alignments are developing in East Asia. Three of these chapters examine the institutionalization of party systems from the perspectives of the structure of electoral systems, ideological polarization, and citizen support for political parties. Two chapters analyze the social and cultural bases of partisanship as two key components of institutionalization. The remaining two chapters explore the attitudinal and behavioral consequences of partisanship on citizens’ reactions and involvement in the process of democratization. Characteristics of Party Systems In Chapter 2, Benjamin Reilly examines how recent changes in electoral systems have affected the structure of party systems in East Asian democracies. Confronted by weak parties and a fluid party system, a number of countries—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines—adopted new electoral systems in what Reilly calls a conscious effort to “undermine the institutional foundations of patronage politics and personalistic politics” and thereby increase the programmatic aspects of party competition. Like the mixed systems in Europe, many of these new systems combine the elements of plurality and proportionality. Unlike the European experience, however, these Asian party systems became highly majoritarian with small numbers of proportional seats. This should facilitate the evolution toward a two-party system and clearer party choices. In the wake of these electoral reforms, the effective number of legislative parties has declined significantly in four of the six democracies—Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan. In addition, the effective number of Thai parties declined by 50 percent from 1986 until 2001—a pattern now changed by the military coup. In Indonesia, there was a rapid consolidation of the party system after the transition. The absolute number of Indonesian parties declined by almost half over one parliamentary term (1999–2004), although the effective number of parties increased slightly. These declines in the effective or absolute numbers of political parties have reduced the fragmentation of party systems and produced “embryonic two-party systems” in many of these nations. The emergence of aggregative two-party systems, which resulted from the mixed electoral systems, attests to the increasing insti-

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tutionalization of the party systems, and Reilly expects this to contribute to “stable and predictable majority rule.” In Chapter 3, Russell J. Dalton and Aiji Tanaka compare the ideological characteristics of party systems in East Asia and Oceania. They focus on the extent to which the parties in each system are ideologically polarized along a left-right dimension and thus offer clear programmatic choices to their electorates. Meaningful choice is considered a prerequisite to democratic representation and accountability.8 They find that the Japanese party system is about as polarized as the parties in Australia, New Zealand, and other established democracies—suggesting that party polarization is a significant feature of consolidated democracies. However, the other East Asian party systems—the Philippines, Taiwan, and (to a degree) Korea—are generally less ideologically polarized than Australia and New Zealand, and even less polarized than the new democracies of Eastern Europe. Most problematic is the pattern in the Philippines, where the parties’ ideological positions seem almost independent of the left-right position of the Philippine electorate. This is the most glaring case of elections not providing a vehicle for programmatic choice in left-right ideological terms. The limited ideological choice in these East Asia party systems constrains the ability of voters to use elections to make clear decisions on governing programs. The limited partisan diversity may be another indicator of the patronage, personalistic, and other nonideological bases of partisan choice that Reilly noted. However, in contrast to changes in the effective number of parties, there is little evidence of systematic change in ideological choice over time. Korea is the only country where party differences significantly increased between waves of the CSES surveys, but this is likely due to the anomalous nature of the 2000 election. Thus, East Asia party systems still lag behind other party systems in offering ideological choices to their voters. There is, however, a positive consequence to the limited polarization of East Asian party systems. Dalton and Tanaka calculate the ideological distance between the average citizen and the ideological position of the ruling party. Because parties tend to converge to the center, they are generally closer to the average citizen. Thus, the average “representation gap” between citizens and government was smaller in the East Asian party systems than in Australia and New Zealand. In Chapter 4, Emile C. J. Sheng studies citizen attachments to political parties as another indicator of party system institutionalization. Such party ties are important in guiding individual behavior and in providing a stabilizing force for the party system as a whole.9 Unlike most

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researchers of this subject, Sheng conceptualizes partisanship in terms of both its attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. His analysis of the CSES surveys reveals that on all or most of these indicators, the East Asian nations (Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand) rank in the bottom third of the thirty-three countries included in the CSES, even falling below the new democracies of Eastern Europe. For instance, the proportion of the public expressing a party attachment ranges from 12.8 percent in the Philippines to 37.5 percent in Japan, while the median for all CSES nations is 47 percent. East Asian publics are simply not developing psychological attachments to their preferred political party as should occur as party systems stabilize and institutionalize. The underdevelopment of connections between the parties and the electorate is another notable feature of party systems in East Asia. These three chapters individually examine the separate aspects— fragmentation, polarization, representation, and partisanship—of the East Asian party systems. Collectively, however, they offer a complementary account of how these party systems are developing. These analyses indicate a low level of institutionalization among East Asian democracies, even in comparison to new democracies in other regions. The recent adoption of mixed electoral systems has significantly reduced the parties’ fragmentation, but this has not yet reduced the personalistic and nonideological nature of partisan affiliation. In addition, citizens are not developing enduring party attachments that would stabilize and structure electoral choice. While there are positive signs in the trend of party development across these East Asian nations, this is still a very incomplete process and probably lags behind developments in the new democracies of Eastern Europe. Sources of Electoral Support Political parties, either old or new, should provide a vehicle for social interests to articulate their interests and gain representation in the political process. With repeated electoral experience, parties typically develop a persistent base of support from certain sectors of the electorate. For the voters, this provides a consistent and dependable voice for their views; for the parties, this provides a reliable and stable base of electoral support. Therefore, the strength of social- and value-based party support can be considered another indicator of party system development and of the strength and stability of the party systems. The stronger these relationships, the stronger the parties’ linkage to their voters.

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In Chapter 5, Ian McAllister, drawing from the Lipset-Rokkan paradigm,10 selects four social cleavages or divisions—owner-worker, church-state, center-periphery, and urban-rural—and examines their connections to voting support for the major parties in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan. He compares these four nations to voting patterns in the established democracies of Australia and New Zealand. He finds that in all four of the East Asian countries, cleavage-based voting choice is not strongly evident. Only two of these cleavages—the center-periphery and owner-worker—have significant effects for one or two of the parties in any of the four countries. In his multivariate analyses, the urban-rural cleavage has no significant effect in Japan and Taiwan—despite frequent claims of an urban-rural divide in the electoral research literature. The religious cleavage, measured by affiliation and the frequency of church attendance, also has very limited effect across parties and nations. Even trade union membership, which has long been a powerful influence on voting in the West, does not significantly affect party voting in most instances—markedly different from the pattern McAllister describes for Australia and New Zealand. Only in Taiwan does union membership orient voters away from the Kuomintang and toward the Democratic Progressive Party. The most notable finding is how much weaker social cleavage– based voting is in East Asia than in the established democracies of Australia and New Zealand (despite evidence that social cleavages have narrowed in these latter two nations over the past several decades). Only in Japan and the Philippines do the set of four social cleavages explain more than 10 percent of the variance in party support. In Korea and Taiwan, the personal characteristics of gender, age, and education explain voting choice more effectively than do the four social cleavages. In Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, moreover, age significantly shapes party voting. This age relationship may be an indicator that the social modernization process is reshaping values across generations, and this is altering the patterns of party preferences. However, since individuals are constantly aging, the long-term persistence of these generational patterns is something that bears monitoring over time. Evidence of such generation change also comes from Aie-Rie Lee’s examination in Chapter 6 of the shifting patterns of value priorities among East Asian publics. Lee studies value preferences in Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan—again in comparison to Australia and New Zealand as established democracies. She first develops and tests a model of the authoritarian-libertarian value change with the latest two waves of the World Values Survey. Then she esti-

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mates the relative power of these values to predict party preferences and compares this to the explanatory power of economic policy attitudes. According to her analysis, the emergence of libertarian values in East Asia was closely associated with the socioeconomic modernization of the region. By the late 1990s, substantial support for libertarian values had developed in Japan and Taiwan, the two most modernized of the four countries she studied. Libertarian values are only weakly developed in the Philippines and even less so in Indonesia, the least modernized country in the set. Just as the extent of the value cleavage varies across the East Asian countries, so does its impact on party preference. In Japan, where libertarian values are more developed, these values as well as economic policy attitudes significantly affect party preference. In Taiwan, the impact of libertarian values and economic attitudes on partisanship appears limited, which is another indicator of the policy narrowness of voting in Taiwan. In the Philippines and Indonesia, where the libertarianauthoritarian cleavage is ill formed, it has little or no significant direct impact on party preference. Nor do economic policy attitudes have much of an impact in these two nations. Thus, if Japan is the example in which social modernization has transformed citizen values and these values are then linked to party choices at election time, the other three examples of East Asian party systems seem to lag behind. Opposing social values and economic attitudes among East Asians do not yet provide a firm base for party support in these latter party systems. In summary, these two chapters indicate that party support in East Asian democracies lacks solid social as well as value foundations. Compared to established democracies—using either Japan or the Australia/New Zealand examples—the party systems in the consolidating Asian democracies seem to have weak links to distinct voter clienteles. Citizens do vote, but voting patterns do not display the sociological or policy bases that convert elections into choices on government programs. Lacking such foundations, voting choice is less predictable, and party systems can remain fragile and unstable. Consequences of Party Support More so than any other institution, political parties can perform a variety of necessary functions for the evolution of limited electoral democracy into fully consolidated liberal democracy. In order for parties to perform these democratic functions, they should motivate ordinary citizens to become their loyal supporters. Then the parties need to en-

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courage the public to become active and competent democratic citizens by embracing democracy as the most preferred political system. Thus, two contributions to this book examine the effects of partisanship on participation and democratic attitudes. In Chapter 7, Yun-han Chu and Min-hua Huang use the CSES and EAB surveys to study patterns of citizen engagement. They first find that a broad measure of electoral participation, including voting and participation in the campaign, is relatively low among the publics in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan compared to other established and consolidating democracies—and this appears correlated with the low level of party attachments among East Asian publics. Nonelectoral participation is also below the cross-national average in the CSES surveys.11 Chu and Huang then demonstrate that the strength of partisanship directly affects electoral and nonelectoral participation independent of other variables. They also estimate the indirect partisanship effect on electoral and nonelectoral participation through political efficacy, as they compare established democracies, East Asian democracies, and other Third Wave democracies. Their analyses confirm that people become more politically engaged when they are more strongly identified with a political party. In all six East Asian democracies, citizen attachments to political parties significantly stimulate electoral participation. In four of these countries (the exceptions being Korea and Taiwan), partisan attachments also stimulate nonelectoral participation. When its direct and indirect effects are compared with other potential predictors of participation, partisanship stands out as the most powerful force contributing to political participation in democratic East Asia. Thus, the weakness of partisanship across East Asian publics that Sheng observes in Chapter 4 leads to lower participation in the democratic process. In Chapter 8, Doh Chull Shin and Rollin F. Tusalem use the East Asia Barometer to examine whether partisanship promotes the psychological process of legitimizing democratic rule. Do East Asians become more supportive of democracy as an ideal system and as a political enterprise when they are attached to a political party? Shin and Tusalem first differentiate partisanship into three separate categories: (1) nonpartisans; (2) partisan supporters of the losing (nongovernment) parties; and (3) winning partisans (supporters of the governing parties). Because many citizens of new democracies hold both democratic and authoritarian political propensities concurrently, they differentiate support for democracy into prodemocratic and antiauthoritarian attitudes. Across six East Asian countries, partisans—either winning or losing—are more supportive of the current regime as a well-functioning

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democracy than are their nonpartisan counterparts. In every country, those who identify with their ruling party are the most supportive of the regime. In every country, moreover, those winning partisans also express the highest level of trust for four key democratic institutions: the national government, parliament, political parties, and local government. In every country except Thailand, nonpartisans are the least trusting of these institutions. In short, partisanship is significantly related to the endorsement of the existing regime and its institutions. In contrast, partisanship matters little in embracing democracy as an ideal or in opposing authoritarian rule. Regardless of the nature of their nonpartisan or partisan orientations, East Asians are very much alike in expressing the desire to live in a democracy. In endorsing democracy in practice, however, partisanship matters significantly in most of the six countries. In four countries—Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand—levels of practical democratic support are significantly higher among partisans than nonpartisans. In every country except Mongolia, the support levels are higher among winning partisans than losing partisans. Similarly, the majority of both partisans and nonpartisans in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are opposed to authoritarian rule. In most countries, authoritarian opponents are surprisingly less numerous among partisans than among nonpartisans. However, in four countries—Japan, Mongolia, Taiwan, and Thailand—losing partisans are the most fully detached from authoritarian rule. What matters in orienting East Asians away from authoritarianism appears to be attachment to a party competing against the ruling party, not just attachment to any political party. Chapters 7 and 8 demonstrate that partisanship contributes to the democratization of both political institutions and individual citizens in East Asia. By encouraging citizens to take part in the political process, partisanship makes a political system and its institutions more responsive to their interests. Partisanship also contributes to the legitimization of democratic rule by motivating citizens to appreciate the virtues of a fledgling democratic system and its institutions and to embrace democracy as “the only game in town.” In short, the development of partisanship is important in transforming limited democracies into wellfunctioning full democracies in East Asia.

Conceptual and Theoretical Implications This collection of research also contributes to the conceptualization of party development by testing, within the context of East Asia, a num-

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ber of key concepts of partisan politics. Examining these concepts in a new political context should provide theoretical and empirical evidence of their value. Of these concepts, partisanship is the oldest and most pivotal concept that served, in all but one chapter, as the dependent or independent variable. In the Western literature, there is general agreement that partisanship refers to a subjective attachment or tie to a political party and that it is a powerful force shaping other political attitudes and behaviors.12 In East Asia, as elsewhere, partisanship, as a concept referring to a state of mind, is found to be highly capable of identifying the connections of citizens to parties and determining the natures of such connections at both the level of individual citizens and the level of their society. This collection also provides credible evidence corroborating partisanship’s theoretical importance as a determinant of democratic attitudes and political participation. In addition, the chapters show how the concept can be more useful in the study of party development and democratization when both its strength and types are considered together. Theoretically, all the contributors, with the exception of Reilly (Chapter 2), tested several theories of partisanship, which focus on either its sources or its consequences. The findings presented in this book provide weak support for those theories dealing with the sources of partisanship and strong support for those dealing with its consequences. To explain the formation of partisanship, Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan formulated a theory in which social cleavages exert the most powerful influence on partisanship’s composition and stability. More recently, Scott Flanagan and Aie-Rie Lee proposed an alternative theory that links party support to the emergence of conflicting authoritarian and libertarian values. Contrary to what these two theories predict, neither socioeconomic divisions nor value differences are found to drive East Asians toward or away from political parties, either powerfully or consistently. More surprisingly, the magnitude of the influences of these divisions on party support is found to be much weaker than those of age, gender, and educational attainment. To explain why partisans become actively involved in the political process, the literature has often cited political institutions as being capable of reshaping the behavioral patterns of their members by introducing new sets of incentives and norms.13 As expected from this theory of neoinstitutionalism, East Asians participate more actively in the political process when they identify with a political party. Partisanship also contributes to their political activism as much as it contributes to the political activism of citizens in established democracies. As ex-

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pected from the socialization and learning theory linking partisanship with greater democratic support,14 East Asians endorse democracy more unconditionally when they become partisans. Finally, as expected from rational choice theory,15 East Asians, like their peers in other democracies, support the existing democratic system more strongly when they identify with the governing party rather than with an opposition party. Left-right orientation is another conceptual tool newly employed to compare an ideological root of partisanship across democracies in the region. The left-right framework has been used in East Asia for a substantial period of time.16 Yet it was often used as a political tool to attack political opponents by authoritarian rulers. In East Asia’s scholarly communities, therefore, the conservative-progressive framework has been more often used than the left-right framework. To date, no systematic effort has been made to test the merits of these two conceptual frameworks for mapping the ideological connection of citizens to parties. The comparative study by Dalton and Tanaka (Chapter 3) reveals that majorities of the East Asian electorates are capable of recognizing and applying the left-right framework to themselves and political parties. Their study also confirms that this framework can detect the shortterm dynamics of ideological configurations among the parties in East Asia as it has done in the West. To validate it fully, however, we need to examine further the substantive meaning East Asians attach to the notions of the left and the right and how consistently those placed in the same left or right camp rate the ideological tendency of each party.17 In summary, partisanship constitutes as an important factor of party development in East Asia as it does in other regions. Similarly, the Downsian spatial model also seems useful in understanding party competition in East Asia. The theories advanced in the West are capable of explaining partisanship’s consequences for institutional and cultural democratization in East Asia. However, those theories are not able to explain its genesis. Evidentially, in East Asia and the West, partisanship emerges from different sources but contributes similarly to the democratization process. Party development in East Asia cannot be understood fully by relying on or drawing insights exclusively from the US and European models of partisanship.

The Partisan Context In examining the development of East Asian party systems, we have focused on the citizens and their relationship to the parties: how citizens

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perceive the parties, how they make voting decisions, and whether they participate. However, we also need to consider how parties function as political organizations, and how party behavior shapes citizen behavior. The weakness of the citizen-party linkage that is apparent in many of this book’s chapters may arise because of the nature of the party systems in which voters function. For instance, if parties focus on personalistic appeals over programmatic choice, it should not be surprising that social cleavages and issue positions are poor predictors of party choice. Even more clearly, many of the chapters in this collection have stressed the importance of partisan attachments in guiding political choice, encouraging participation, and nurturing support for the democratic political system. However, such partisan attachments require that parties offer consistent and persisting choices to the voters—something that appears lacking in many instances. Political parties can perform a variety of democratic functions, including mobilizing and integrating citizens into the political process, aggregating and representing their preferences in policymaking, and holding elites to abide by the rule of law.18 When the parties perform these functions effectively, political systems can grow into well-functioning civic democracies—ones in which people work to influence government and government responds positively to their demands. The inability of East Asian democracies to build institutionalized party systems is often cited as a major barrier to the development of democracy in the region.19 Thus, here we briefly discuss some of the characteristics of parties and party systems in East Asia to complement the citizen-focused analyses in the previous chapters. One key factor is the stability of a party system. The current literature, and our evidence, suggests that political parties in the consolidating democracies of East Asia are much less institutionalized than those in established Western democracies or even in the new democracies of Eastern Europe. One measure of institutionalization is simply the constancy of parties over time. With few exceptions, such as the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan and the Kuomintang in Taiwan, the political parties in democratic East Asia are of recent creation. Figure 9.1 shows that nearly one-third of the political parties represented in the legislatures of the seven East Asian nations examined in this book were founded in 2000 or later (for the legislature sitting in 2007, see party list in Appendix).20 Being relatively new, these parties lack a stable basis of mass support and experience a high level of electoral volatility as voters often shift their partisan preferences from one election to the next.21

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Figure 9.1 Political Parties in East Asia by the Period of 16 Their Founding 14

12

Raw Number

10

8

6

4

2

0 1900-1959

1960-1969

1970-1979

1980-1989

1990-1999

2000-2007

Year

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, for parties included in this project; data for other nations compiled by the authors.

Like the parties organized by the three Kims in Korea—Kim Young Sam’s New Korea Party, Kim Dae-jung’s New Millennium Party, and Kim Jong-pil’s United Liberal Democrats—many political parties in East Asia were formed to serve their leader’s interests through personal connections and cronyism.22 Other parties emerged from populist candidacies to “orbit” around those personalities. Joseph Estrada’s LAMMP in the Philippines in 1999 and Thaksin Shinawatra’s former Thai Rak Thai are two prominent examples. In short, East Asian political parties have often failed to make the transition from parties based on a single individual to parties as independent organizations. And when individuals change, the parties change. We can see the overall stability of the partisan landscape in each nation by calculating the average longevity of parties. Six of the nations in our study participated in the Third Wave of democratization: Indonesia, the Philippines, Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. For each of these nations we calculated the age of the party system as the average number of years each party has existed since the democratic transition.23 Figure 9.2 plots the years since the democratic transition on the horizontal axis, and the average age of the parties on

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the vertical axis. If the party landscape had been entirely stable since the democratic transition, it should lie along the 45-degree line. For comparison, we also include four new democracies from Eastern Europe. Although we are dealing with a small number of nations, party turnover is generally higher in East Asia than in Third Wave Eastern European democracies.24 Korea displays a very high level of party turnover, with the party system only about a quarter of the age of the democratic system (4.3 years versus 16). Mongolia, the Philippines, and Thailand also display relatively high turnover in the party system. The Philippine statistic probably underestimates party change, because it is based on legislative elections and there has been even more volatility in presidential elections. Although the specific reasons for party turnover are unique to each nation, the outcome is similar (for instance, in Mongolia there was a major restructuring of the party system in 2000, and Thaksin Shinawatra’s creation of Thai Rak Thai transformed the Thai party system).25 The greatest stability appears in Taiwan, and the Indonesian party system was also fairly stable between its first election in 1999 and the 2004 election. However, even in the short history of the Indonesian party system, Tan argues that the 2004 elections represented a step toward deinstitutionalization of the party system due to

Figure 9.2 Years Since the Democratic Transition and Age of the Party System

Average Party System Age (Years)

20

Hungary 15 Romania

Taiwan

Bulgaria Philippines

10 Mongolia Thailand

Indonesia

5

Poland

Korea

0 0

5

10 Years of Continuous Democracy

Source: Compiled by the authors.

15

20

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the primacy of personalities in the direct elections of the president and the regional heads.26 In comparison, Hungarians, Romanians, and Bulgarians in the most recent elections are still largely choosing between parties that were formed during the democratic transition. Even in Poland, which has been a more volatile party system, the democratic system was fifteen years old in 2005, and the party system had an average age of 9.8 years. Another way of estimating the stability of the party system is the volatility of votes between elections. If voters are switching parties between elections, this inhibits the development of partisanship and group ties that may help institutionalize party attachments. To measure volatility we use the Pedersen index, which compares the shifts in aggregate party vote shares between adjacent elections.27 This statistic undoubtedly underestimates volatility because it is based on aggregate party shares (net change) rather than on individual vote shifts between parties that might be partially compensating (gross change). But this still provides a useful estimate of party volatility that can be compared across time and nations. Table 9.1 shows the Pedersen index for the six East Asian democracies and a comparison set of Eastern European democracies. Excluding Japan as a now-established democracy, the average volatility in East Asia is relatively high (a 30.3 percent aggregate swing in legislative vote shares between adjacent elections). This is about two and a

Table 9.1 Index of Party Volatility Nation Japan South Korea Indonesia Philippines Taiwan Thailand Bulgaria Hungary Poland Romania

Year of Transition

Years for Volatility

1952 1987 1998 1986 1992 1992 1990 1990 1990 1990

1952–2000 1988–2000 1999–2004 1992–1998 1992–2001 1992–2005 1990–2001 1990–2002 1991–2001 1990–2000

Party Volatility Score 16.2 24.6 30.3 41.9 20.4 34.7 36.8 25.1 46.6 53.0

Sources: Scott Mainwaring and Edurne Zoco, “Political Sequences and the Stabilization of Interparty Competition: Electoral Volatility in Old and New Democracies”; data for Indonesia compiled by the authors.

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half times larger than what Scott Mainwaring and Edurne Zoco found for established democracies, and even Japan is 16.2 percent.28 In this case, aggregate volatility is even higher in the four Eastern European cases (40.3 percent). But still, these Eastern European publics are switching between the same set of parties, an environment where party ties can gradually develop. In contrast, many East Asian electorates see a significantly different party lineup across elections, and so developing partisanship is not likely. Furthermore, these comparisons are based on legislative elections, and there is additional volatility in the presidential elections of several East Asian nations. Thus, voters, except in Japan and Taiwan, confront a shifting party landscape. The party they supported at the last election is often missing at the next election. Parties created for presidential elections do not compete in the next legislative election. In such circumstances, it is difficult for voters to develop attachments to a preferred party and the positive consequences that flow from the spread of partisanship. In addition, it is difficult for social groups and political interests to develop firm party ties that may define the core of party voters and identity. In the words of Scott Mainwaring and Mariano Torcal, they form “inchoate party systems.”29 Regardless of the sources of their underinstitutionalization, “transient and personalized parties” have one thing in common: a hesitancy to develop policy alternatives and to implement new programs for better governance. By adopting as their policy goals whatever becomes a popular “wedge” issue at the time of each election, these parties can remain, by and large, ideologically empty and organizationally thin. Holding elections without an institutionalized party system leads to the continuation of feckless pluralism, not the genuine expression of political pluralism.30 Even with an alternation in power between political parties, a fluid party system allows party leaders to avoid developing coherent policy proposals and implementing them because the parties are not institutionalized. If things do not work, then elites will create a new party for the next election to avoid responsibility. In such settings, party leaders often engage in patronage, cronyism, and nepotism without external monitoring from their own parties or external political institutions.31 In these circumstances, a change in government need not entail great accountability and performance. Instead, different political elites can preserve the status quo of protecting the continuation of an underinstitutionalized and inchoate party system. Dan Slater’s observation for the contemporary Indonesian party system can be applied to other nations

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in the region: “Parties share power far more than they fight over it,” with the parties acting like a cartel to maintain their collective status.32 The pattern of stunted party development is perhaps most noticeable in Korea and the Philippines. In Korea, the presidential system has encouraged the personalization of party politics, with a high turnover in parties between elections.33 Even after a quarter century of democratic elections, the Korean party landscape is still fluid and volatile. Therefore, party attachments are among the weakest for East Asian democracies and social cleavage–based voting is also weak, except when linked to regional patronage. Even more problematic is the Philippine party system, which seems to institutionalize nonpartisan competition.34 The cumbersome (and probably unique) voting system requires that voters write in the names of individual candidates in legislative elections, rather than marking ballots identifying the candidates and their parties. Presidential elections are almost solely candidate-centered contests. Campaigns emphasize patronage and personal ties rather than party ideologies and a program of governance. Corruption in campaigning and the counting of votes appears to be a recurring pattern, in part facilitated by the system of handwritten ballots. And when new presidential elections indicate a change in political tides, large numbers of previously elected legislators also change their allegiances. Thus, it is not surprising that the Philippine public has a difficult time identifying the ideological positions of the major parties or translating their social position or political attitudes into voting choice. Only 12.8 percent of the Philippine public claims to be attached to a political party. The Philippines approaches a system of elections without meaningful parties, which raises fundamental questions about the democratic meaning of the elections. Underdeveloped and noninstitutionalized party systems can deprive voters of the opportunity to have their views represented in the political process and to choose between meaningful policy alternatives.35 Such systems also make political realignments a function of personality cults or regional proclivities. In short, the currently retarded institutionalization of political parties can limit the development and consolidation of East Asian democracies.

The Future of Party Politics and Democratic Development Despite decades of unprecedented socioeconomic development, the Third Wave democracies in East Asia have apparently not come as far

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as other new democracies in institutionalizing their democratic party systems. The party systems in most of the new East Asian democracies are underinstitutionalized for many reasons. This is a multilevel problem. On the one hand, the nature of elite politics—the development of personalistic “parties” and the lack of party identities and organization—produces a political context where meaningful party competition is diminished. Parties should articulate and aggregate interests, and this is difficult to achieve when parties are candidate-centered and often short-lived. Such an environment also limits the accountability and representativeness of parties. On the other hand, the attitudes and behaviors of the public also weaken these party systems. Voting choice seems only weakly structured by social needs and political values. Partisanship, a key variable in party system development, is limited across East Asian publics. The volatility of parties goes hand in hand with the volatility in voter choice. The underinstitutionalized party systems make it difficult for the existing regimes to expand and deepen their limited democratic rule. The malfunctioning of the regimes, in turn, detracts from the further institutionalization of the party systems. In East Asian countries, this destructive relationship between party politics and democratic development has recurred in cycles. Even today, it constitutes a very serious political dilemma facing many East Asian countries, including Japan.36 Is this cycle likely to continue in the coming years? The comparative analyses presented in this collection suggest that many East Asian countries are experiencing two significant changes, each of which could transform the instability into a constructive cycle. These changes are taking place within the party systems and among individual citizens. On the macrolevel, the adoption of mixed electoral systems has restructured several party systems into “embryonic” two-party systems by reducing the number of parties represented in the legislative process. The shrinking number of effective legislative parties, in turn, makes the party systems more stable and more institutionalized.37 With the increased institutionalization of the party systems, East Asian parties are likely to better carry out their democratic functions. In turn, improved performance would expand the base of mass support for political parties, a key component of the institutionalized party systems. It will probably take much more time, however, for East Asian political parties to develop themselves into institutionalized, meaningful agents of democratic representation and accountability.

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On the microlevel, individual citizens of East Asian democracies are gaining greater experience in democratic politics as they participate in more national and local elections. Expanding democratic experience encourages them to appreciate the virtues of democracy and the importance of the various roles political parties play in the democratic political process. In the wake of such democratic political learning, more citizens are likely to become stronger supporters of democracy and political parties. Greater support for democracy and stronger attachment to political parties are, in turn, likely to contribute to the further institutionalization of party systems and to the transformation of defective electoral democracies into better-functioning liberal democracies. In conclusion, democratically propitious changes are currently occurring within political parties and among individual citizens in many East Asian countries. These changes are making it possible for their democratic regimes and party systems to interact with each other constructively rather than destructively. Consequently, East Asia may hopefully continue its democratization process.

Notes 1. East Timor, Papua New Guinea, and some Micronesian states also made some democratic progress during this period, but because these are not generally considered East Asian nations, we do not include them in our study. 2. Tun-jen Cheng, “Political Institutions and the Malaise of East Asian New Democracies,” Journal of East Asian Studies 3 (2003): 1–41; Aurel Croissant, “From Transition to Defective Democracy: Mapping Asia Democratization,” Democratization 11, no. 5 (2004):156–178. 3. Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2006 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 4. World Bank, “Governance Matters 2007: Worldwide Governance Indicators, 1996–2006.” Available at http://info.worldbank.org/governance /wgi2007/sc_country.asp. 5. E. E. Schattschneider, Party Government (New York: Rinehart, 1942), p. 1. 6. Russell J. Dalton and Ian McAllister, “Political Parties and Political Development,” a special issue of Party Politics 13 (March 2007); Richard Rose and Neil Munro, Elections and Parties in New European Democracies (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003); Richard Gunther, José Ramón-Montero, and Juan J. Linz, eds., Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther, eds., Political Parties and Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, eds., Building Demo-

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cratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). 7. Wolfgang Sachsenroder and Ulrike Frings, eds., Political Party Systems and Democratic Developments in East and Southeast Asia (London: Ashgate, 1998); Vicky Randall and Lars Svåsand, “Party Institutionalization in New Democracies,” Party Politics 8, no. 1 (2002): 5–29. See also Cheng, “Political Institutions and the Malaise of East Asian New Democracies”; and Croissant, “From Transition to Defective Democracy.” 8. G. Bingham Powell, Elections as Instruments of Democracy: Majoritarian and Proportional Visions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 9. Russell J. Dalton and Steven Weldon, “Partisanship and Party System Institutionalization,” Party Politics 13 (March 2007): 179–196. 10. Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan, “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction.” In Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross National Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1967). 11. Surprisingly, the Philippines scores relatively high on both electoral and nonelectoral participation. See Chu and Huang’s discussion in this book (Chapter 7). 12. Dalton and Weldon, “Partisanship and Party System Institutionalization.” 13. Elizabeth S. Clemens and James M. Cook, “Politics and Institutionalism: Explaining Durability and Change,” Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 441–466; Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” Political Studies 44, no. 5 (1996): 936–957; Steven Levitsky, “Institutionalization: The Concept, the Case, and the Case for Unpacking the Concept,” Party Politics 4, no. 1 (1998): 77–92. 14. Herbert McClosky and John Zaller, The American Ethos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); William Mishler and Richard Rose, “Learning and Re-Learning Regime Support: The Dynamics of Post-Communist Regimes,” European Journal of Political Research 41 (2002): 5–35; Robert Rohrschneider, Learning Democracy: Democratic and Economic Values in Unified Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 15. Christopher Anderson, André Blais, Shaun Bowler, Todd Donovan, and Ola Listhaug, Loser’s Consent: Elections and Democratic Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 16. Doh Chull Shin and Byong-Kuen Jhee, “How Does Democratic Regime Change Affect Mass Political Ideology?” International Political Science Review 26, no. 4 (2005): 381–396; Garry Rodan, “The Internationalization of Ideological Conflict: Asia’s New Significance,” Pacific Review 9, no. 3 (1996): 349–362. 17. For example, see Russell Dalton, “Social Modernization and the End of Ideology Debate: Patterns of Ideological Polarization,” Japanese Journal of Political Science 7, no. 1 (2006): 1–22. 18. John Aldrich, Why Parties? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); José Ramón-Montero and Richard Gunther, “Introduction: Reviewing

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and Reassessing Parties.” In Gunther, Ramón-Montero, and Linz, Political Parties; Susan Stokes, “Political Parties and Democracy,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999): 243–267. 19. Sachsenroder and Ulrike, eds., Political Party Systems and Democratic Developments in East and Southeast Asia; Vicky Randall and Lars Svåsand, “Party Institutionalization in New Democracies,” Party Politics 8, no. 1 (2002): 5–29. See also Cheng, “Political Institutions and the Malaise of East Asian New Democracies”; and Croissant, “From Transition to Defective Democracy.” 20. It is difficult to precisely determine when a party change occurs, because often parties change names but keep the essential personnel intact. We treated a change in name as a de facto new party in the listing in the Appendix, because changes in name or the factionalization of existing parties is a sign of party volatility. 21. See, especially, Dieter Nohlen, Florian Grotz, and Christof Hartmann, eds., Elections in Asia and the Pacific: A Data Handbook, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 22. Hubg Baeg Im, “Faltering Democratic Consolidation in South Korea: Democracy at the End of ‘Three Kims’ Era,” Democratization 11, no. 5 (2004): 179–198. 23. We calculate the age of the party system as the number of years since the transition that each party has existed. We sum these years, weighted by the vote share of each party in the last election. ∑ = (years existing since transition x vote share in last election)pi, where pi is each party receiving at least 1 percent of the vote in the last election. We used the most recent election for the lower house of parliament for which data are available: Indonesia (2004), Mongolia (2004), South Korea (2004), and Taiwan (2005). The Philippines case was more complex, because national party vote totals are not reported. Therefore, we used the percentage of party votes reported in the 2004 CSES survey. 24. Since Japan is a consolidated democracy, with a much longer party history, we do not include it in Figure 9.2. However, the Japanese party system has been fairly stable since the realignment of the 1955 election. In 2007, it had been fifty-eight years since Japan’s democratic transition, and the party system age was 35.2 years. 25. Paul Hutchcroft, Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Andreas Ufen, “Political Party and Party System Institutionalization in South East Asia” Working Paper Series, German Institute of Global and Area Studies, 2007. 26. Paige Johnson Tan, “Indonesia Seven Years After Soeharto: Party System Institutionalization in a New Democracy,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 28 (April 2006): 88–114. 27. Mogens Pedersen, “Changing Patterns of Electoral Volatility in European Party Systems: Explorations in Explanation.” In Hans Daalder and Peter Mair, eds., Western European Party Systems: Continuity and Change (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1983); Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair, Identity,

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Competition and Electoral Availability: The Stabilisation of European Electorates, 1885–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 28. As another reference point, they note that vote shifts in US congressional elections average 3.3 percent. Scott Mainwaring and Edurne Zoco, “Political Sequences and the Stabilization of Interparty Competition,” Party Politics 13 (2007): 155–178. 29. Scott Mainwaring and Mariano Torcal, “Party System Institutionalization and Party System Theory After the Third Wave of Democratization.” In Richard S. Katz and William J. Crotty, eds., Handbook of Party Politics (London: Sage, 2006). 30. Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13, no.1 (2002): 5–21. 31. Hans Stockton, The Impact of Democratization on the Utilization of Clientelistic Styles of Ruling Parties in East Asia (Ceredigion, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003). 32. Dan Slater, “Indonesia’s Accountability Trap: Party Cartels and Presidential Power After Democratic Transition,” manuscript, July 29, 2004, p. 3. 33. Doh Chull Shin, Mass Politics and Culture in Democratizing Korea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Ursula Van Beek and HansDieter Klingemann, Democracy Under Construction: Patterns from Four Continents (Leverkusen-Opladen, Germany: Budrich Publishers, 2005). 34. Steven Rood, “Elections Are Complicated and Important Events in the Philippines.” In John Fuh-Sheng Hsieh and David Newman, eds., How Asia Votes (New York: Chatham House, 2002); Rodelio Manacsa and Alexander C. Tan, “Manufacturing Parties: Re-examining the Transient Nature of Philippine Political Parties,” Party Politics 11, no. 6 (2005): 748–765. 35. Mainwaring and Torcal, “Party System Institutionalization and Party System Theory”; Sachsenroder and Frings, Political Party Systems and Democratic Developments in East and Southeast Asia; see also Nohlen, Grotz, and Hartmann, Elections in Asia and the Pacific. 36. Hans Stockton, “Political Parties, Party Systems, and Democracy in East Asia: Lessons from Latin America,” Comparative Political Studies 34, no. 1 (2001): 94–119. 37. Uk Heo and Hans Stockton, “The Impact of Democratic Transition on Elections and Parties in South Korea,” Party Politics 11, no. 6 (2005): 674– 688; Stockton, The Impact of Democratization.

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Appendix Parties Represented in the 2007 Legislature by the Year of Their Founding

The 1900–1945 Period Nationalista Party (NP), Philippines, 1907 Kuomintang (KMT) (Chungkuo Kuomintang), Taiwan, 1919 Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI) (Indonesian National Party), Indonesia, 1921 Mongol Ardyn Khuvisgalt Nam (Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party), Mongolia, 1921 Japanese Communist Party (JCP), Japan, 1922 Phak Prachathipat (Democratic Party), Thailand, 1945

The 1946–1979 Period Liberal Party (LP), Philippines, 1946 Jimin-to (Liberal Democratic Party, LDP), Japan, 1955 Golkar, Indonesia, 1964 Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (PPP) (United Development Party), Indonesia, 1972 Kilusan Bagong Lipunan (KBL) (New Society Movement), Philippines, 1978

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The 1980–1989 Period Partido ng Demokratikong Pilipino–Lakas ng Bayan (PDP-Laban) (Philippines Democratic Party–National Struggle), Philippines, 1984 Minchu Chinpu Tang (Democratic Progressive Party), Taiwan, 1986 Puwersa ng Masang Pilipino (PMP) (Force of the Filipino Masses), Philippines, 1987 Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino (LDP) (Struggle of Democratic Filipinos), Philippines, 1988

The 1990–1999 Period Lakas–Christian Muslim Democrats (Lakas-CMD), Philippines, 1991 Nationalist People’s Coalition (NPC), Philippines, 1991 Hsin Tang (New Party), Taiwan, 1993 Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan (Indonesian Democratic Party–Struggle), Indonesia, 1993 Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (PKB) (National Awakening Party), Indonesia, 1995 Shamin-to (Social Democratic Party, SDP), Japan, 1996 Kabalikat ng Malayang Pilipino (KAMPI), Philippines, 1997 Aksyon Demokratiko (AD) (Democratic Action), Philippines, 1997 Hannara-dang (Grand National Party), Korea, 1997 Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan, DPJ), Japan, 1998 Komeito (New Komeito Party), Japan, 1998 Thai Rak Thai, Thailand, 1998 Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (Prosperous Justice Party), Indonesia, 1998 Partai Keadilan dan Persatuan din Indonesia (Justice and Unity Party), Indonesia, 1998

The 2000–2007 Period Minju Nodong-dang (Democratic Labour Party), Korea, 2000 Ardchilsan Nam (Democratic Party), Mongolia, 2000 Bugd Nairamdakh Nam (Republican Party), Mongolia, 2001 Sotsial Demokrat Nam (Social Democratic Party), Mongolia, 2001 Ingenii Zong Nam (Civic Will Party), Mongolia, 2001 Phak Chart Thai (Thai Nation Party), Thailand, 2001

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Phak Mahachon (Great People’s Party), Thailand, 2001 Taiwan Tuanjie Lianmeng (Taiwan Solidarity Union), Taiwan, 2001 Partai Demokrat (Democratic Party), Indonesia, 2001 Partai Amanat Nasional (National Mandate Party), Indonesia, 2001 Uri Party, Korea, 2003 Centrist Reformists Democratic Party, Korea, 2005 Team Unity, Philippines, 2007 Genuine Opposition (GO), Philippines, 2007

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The Contributors

Yun-han Chu is Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science of Academia Sinica and professor of political science at National Taiwan University. He is currently president of Chiang Chingkuo Foundation. He has been the coordinator of Asian Barometer Survey since 2004. Chu is an associate editor of Journal of East Asian Studies and serves on the editorial board of many other journals. Among his recent publications are China Under Jiang Zemin (2000) and The New Chinese Leadership (2004). Russell J. Dalton is professor of political science and former director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California–Irvine. He has been a Fulbright Professor at the University of Mannheim and a POSCO Fellow. His recent publications include The Good Citizen (2007), Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices (2004), and Citizen Politics (2006); he is coeditor of Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior (2007). Min-hua Huang is assistant professor of political science at National Taiwan University. He has published in Issue and Studies (in Chinese), Taiwanese Political Science Review, Chinese Political Science Review (in Chinese), Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Journal of Electoral Studies (in Chinese), Journal of Social Science and Philosophy (in Chinese), International Journal of Public Opinion Research, and Soochow Journal of Political Science (in Chinese). Aie-Rie Lee is professor of political science at Texas Tech University. She has been a Korean Research Foundation Fellow. Her work has appeared in such journals as Comparative Political Studies, Social Science Quarterly, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Journal of Northeast Asian Studies, Asian Survey, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Asian Affairs. 199

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Ian McAllister is professor of political science at the Australian National University. He has been director of the Australian Election Study since 1987 and chair of the fifty-nation Comparative Study of Electoral Systems since 2003. He is the coauthor of The Australian Electoral System (2006) and coeditor of The Cambridge Handbook of the Social Sciences in Australia (2003). He was a POSCO Fellow at the East-West Center in 2006. Benjamin Reilly is director of the Centre for Democratic Institutions at the Australian National University. He has advised many governments and international organizations on issues of democratization and conflict management, and published widely on these subjects. Reilly has held visiting fellowships at Oxford, Canterbury, and Harvard universities. His latest book is Democracy and Diversity (2006). Emile C. J. Sheng is professor of political science at Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. His research interests and recent publications are in areas of voting behavior, party politics, public opinion, and political communication. He is now on temporary leave of absence to serve as chairperson at the Research, Development, and Evaluation Commission of Taipei City Government. Doh Chull Shin is professor of political science at the University of Missouri at Columbia and holds Korea Foundation and Middlebush chairs. Since 1988 he has directed the Korean Democracy Barometer program and is one of the founding members of the East Asia Barometer program. His recent publications include Economic Crisis and Dual Transition in Korea (2004) and Citizens, Democracy and Markets Around the Pacific Rim (2006). Aiji Tanaka is a professor of political science and dean of Academic Studies at Waseda University. He has been a co–principal investigator of the Japanese election studies, and his research focuses on electoral behavior in Japan and comparatively. His recent publications include “Change in the Spatial Dimensions of Party Conflict: The Case of Japan in the 1990s,” Political Behavior (2001) (with Herbert F. Weisberg); and he coauthored Seijigaku (Political Science: Theory and Scope) (2003). Rollin F. Tusalem is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Missouri at Columbia. His interests include the comparative study of civil society and governance, democratization, and the politics of East Asia.

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Index

Africa, vii, 146 Arroyo, Gloria, 37, 77, 85, 109, 153 Australia, 5; authoritarian-libertarian values in, 100, 102–104, 170–171; electoral cleavages in, 69–70, 73, 75–79, 87, 89–90, 170–171; leftright dimension in, 32–35, 38–39; partisanship in, 51, 54–57, 60, 62–63; party preferences in, 100–101; party system in, 41–43 Authoritarian-libertarian values, 6, 95–77, 113–114, 171, 174–175; measurement of, 98–100; party preference and, 101–105. See also under specific countries Authoritarianism, 9, 89; attitudes toward, 95–95, 146, 157–159. See also Authoritarian-libertarian values; Military rule Barisan Nasional (Malaysia), 16 Buddhism, 18, 72–73. See also Religion Cambodia, 9, 11, 15, 21 Chen Shui-bian, 9, 13, 37 China, 58, 62 Civil society, 71, 89 Clientelism, 2, 12, 17, 18, 109

Coalition of Truth and Experience for Tomorrow (K-4), 77, 83, 85 Coalition of United Filipinos, 77, 83 Cognitive Dissonance, 147–148, 154, 161 Confucianism, 71, 98 Corruption, viii, 12, 17–18, 124, 177, 180 Democracy: citizen satisfaction with, 125, 127, 131, 146; citizen support of, 7, 145–147, 155–157, 159, 161, 173; legitimacy of, 27, 124–125, 131, 138, 172–173; Third Wave of, vii, 28, 42, 119, 124, 131, 149, 165, 177, 182; transitions to, 9, 69, 90, 95, 167. See also Democratic consolidation; Democratization Democratic consolidation: participation and, 138; partisanship and, 63–64, 119, 173; party system institutionalization and, viii, 6, 22, 114, 138–172. See also Democracy Democratic Party of Japan (DJP), 81, 101–103 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) 30, 35–37, 85, 101–102, 107–109, 114, 153, 170 Democratization, vii, viii, 6, 9, 28,

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202 42–43, 96, 114, 146, 50, 161, 165–166. See also under specific countries; Democratic consolidation DLP. See Labor Party (Korea) DJP. See Democratic Party of Japan Downs, Anthony: Downsian spatial model 29, 36–37, 39–43, 175 DPP. See Democratic Progressive Party East Timor, 9–12, 14–15, 21 Eastern Europe, 54, 71, 146, 169, 176, 180 Efficacy, political, 1, 122, 124–125, 129, 132, 137–138 Electoral cleavages: class, 2, 6, 38, 70, 73–74, 89, 151, 169; ideological, 27, 42; partisanship and, 174, 176; party systems, 70–71; regional, 19, 70, 72; religious, 6, 70, 72, 74, 169; social base, 27–28, 57; urbanrural, 70–74, 89, 169; voting and, 70–72, 170. See also Authoritarian-libertarian values; Left-right dimension; Partisanship Electoral reform. See Electoral system Electoral system: convergence, 10–13; majoritarian, 12–16, 22–23, 43, 57, 167; mixed-member, 11–15, 18, 75, 169; party list, 13–14, 17; plurality, 11–16, 22, 59, 166; proportional representation (PR), 12–16, 39, 43, 57, 79, 75, 123; presidential vs. parliamentary, 11, 22; reforms, 6, 12–16, 43, 59, 166; single member district, 13–15, 59; single non-transferable vote (SNTV), 11–13, 51, 59; single transferable vote, 59; thresholds, 14, 16, 20 Established vs. emerging democracies: left-right dimension, 38–39; electoral cleavages, 69, 73, 77,

Index 170–171; party systems, 3, 113–114, 151; partisanship, 3, 6–7, 51, 54–63, 174–176 Estrada, Joseph, 37, 109, 177 Flanagan, Scott, 95 GNP. See Grand National Party Golkar, 101, 111–112 Grand National Party (GNP) (Korea), 36, 83–84 Greens (Australia), 39 Greens (New Zealand), 39 Hong Kong, 51, 56-58, 62 Ideological position. See Left-right dimension Indonesia: authoritarian-libertarian values, 100, 102–104; democratization in, vii, 69; electoral system, 10–11, 14, 20; party preferences, 100–101; party system, 21, 114, 178–179, 181; presidentialism, 11; social values and party preference, 111–113 Indonesia Democratic Party (PDI), 101, 111–112 Inglehart, Ronald, 29, 96, 101, 102, 104 Japan: authoritarian-libertarian values, 100–104, 113; electoral cleavages, 72, 79, 81, 87, 89, 170–171; electoral system, 10–13; established democracy, 9–10, 69, 151, 165; left-right dimension, 32–34, 137; parliamentary, 11; participation, political, 126–127, 137, 172; partisanship, 51, 55–57, 62–64, 146, 151, 153, 160, 172; party preferences, 100–101; party system, 3, 21, 41–43, 113–114, 126, 131, 167–169, 176, 180; political trust, 154–155; social values and party linkages, 97;

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Index support for democracy, 155–159, 173 Japanese Communist Party (JPC), 30, 35–36 JPC. See Japanese Communist Party K-4. See Coalition of Truth and Experience for Tomorrow Kim Dae-jung, 9, 36, 39, 43, 177 Kim Jong-pil, 177 Kim Young Sam, 177 KMT. See Kuomintang Korea: authoritarian-libertarian values, 113; democratization in, vii, 4, 9, 69, 159–160, 165; electoral cleavages, 72–73, 81–83, 87, 89, 170–171; electoral system, 10–13; left-right dimension, 32–34; participation in, 126–127, 129–130, 137, 172; partisanship in, 54–57, 137, 146, 151, 153, 159–160, 172–173; party system, 3, 21–22, 36, 41–43, 51, 127, 137, 167–169, 177–179, 181; political trust, 154–155; presidentialism, 11; regionalism, 17, 19; support for democracy, 155–159, 173 Korea’s Uri Party, 153 Kuomintang (KMT), vii, 1, 3, 30, 35, 37, 51, 85, 97, 101, 107–109, 114, 176 Labor Party (Australia), 38, 77, 101, 111–112 Labor Party (DLP) (Korea), 83 Labor Party (New Zealand), 75, 79, 101 Lakas–Christian Muslim Democrats, 37–38, 83, 85, 101, 109, 153 LAMMP, 37–38, 101, 109–110, 177 LDP. See Liberal Democratic Party Left-right dimension, 28, 101; cleavages and, 2, 30–43, 120–121, 168, 175; meaning, 28–29; measurement, 30–32; party placement, 33–39, 175, 181; self-

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placement, 30–33, 102, 175; validity, 32. See also Electoral cleavages; Sartori, Giovanni Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 3, 30, 36, 51, 81, 97, 101–102, 105–107, 153, 176 Liberal Party (Philippines), 85 Liberal-National Party (Australia), 38, 77, 101, 111–112 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 28, 69–72, 75, 77, 87–90, 169, 174 Majoritarian system. See Electoral System Malaysia, 10–11, 15, 19, 21 Marcos, Ferdinand, vii, 9, 37 MDP. See Millennium Democratic Party Military rule, coup, vii, 10, 69–71, 89, 165. See also Authoritarianism Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) (Korea), 36 Mixed-member system. See Electoral System Mongolia: democratization in, vii, 159–160; electoral system, 14–15; participation, 137; partisanship, 146, 151, 153, 159–160, 173; party system, 21–22, 177–179; political trust, 154–155; semipresidential, 11; support for democracy, 155–159, 173 Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) 15 Motherland Democracy Coalition, 22 MPRP. See Mongolian People’s Revolutionary National Party (New Zealand), 75, 79, 101 Nationalist Party (Taiwan), 101–102 Nationalists People’s Coalition (NPC) (Philippines), 37–38, 83, 85 New Frontier Party (NFP), 36 New Komei Party (NKP) (Japan), 36, 81, 176

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204 New Millennium Party (Korea), 177 New Zealand, 5; authoritarianlibertarian values, 100, 102–105, 170–171; electoral cleavages, 69–70, 73, 75, 79–80, 87, 89–90, 170–171; left-right dimension, 32–35, 38–39; partisanship, 51, 54–57, 60, 62–63; party preferences, 100–101; party system, 41–43; social values and party preference, 105–107, 111, 113 New Zealand First Party, 39, 75, 79 North Korea, 37 NPC. See Nationalist People’s Coalition One Nation, 39 Our Party (UD) (Korea), 36, 39, 51, 75, 83 Pan-Blue Coalition, 85 Pancasila (Guided Democracy), 111 Participation: civic, 122, 124, 137–138; democratic attitudes and, 122, 124, 132, 137–138, 174; efficacy and, 1, 122, 124–125, 129, 132, 137–138; partisanship and electoral participation, 1, 125–127, 129, 131–134, 137–138, 174–175; partisanship and non-electoral participation, 1, 128, 130–132, 137–138, 174–175; socioeconomic status and, 122, 124, 130; social capital, 122, 124, 129, 132, 137–138. See also Protest; Voting Partisanship: across nations, 54–59; cognitive dissonance and, 147–148, 154, 161; democratic consequences, viii, 1, 67, 49, 52, 119, 126, 150–161, 166, 174; democratic consolidation, 145–146, 155–161; democratic support and, 7, 145–147, 155–157, 159, 161, 173; demographics and, 52, 60; indicators of, 49, 50,

Index 52–58, 148, 174; political participation and, 119, 121–122, 125–137; rational choice theory and, 148, 153, 161, 175; social learning and, 51, 175; socialization and, 51 147–148, 154, 161, 175; stability of, 2, 52, 119, 177–179; trust and, 153–154; winning and losing partisans, 148–151. See also Participation; Party Preference Party attachment. See Partisanship Party preference, 1–2, 4–6, 27, 33, 38, 40–41, 96–97; consequences of, 150–161, determinants of, 75–87, 104–105; measurement, 100–101, 148–149; social values and, 96–97, 102–103, 113–114. See also under specific countries; Partisanship Party system: competition, 1, 2, 6, 9, 12, 6, 27–29, 35, 38–39, 42, 43, 70, 119, 166, 179; effective number of parties, 19, 21, 167–168, 182; fragmentation, 16, 18, 21, 166–167 169; institutionalization, viii, 2, 4, 6, 7, 17, 43, 51, 63, 69, 121, 145, 151, 166–169, 176, 181–183; multiparty, vii–viii, 9–10; one party, vii, 19, 71; organizational structure, 9, 27–28, 42; polarization, 6, 27, 28, 32, 35, 38–43, 168–169; representation, viii, 28, 40, 151, 168–169; stability, 3, 39, 51, 169, 176, 178, 182; two-party, 21–23, 167, 182; volatility, 2, 3, 27, 60, 64, 145, 179–182. See also Downs, Anthony Patronage, 12, 57, 89, 166, 180–181 People First Party, 51, 85 People’s Action Party (Singapore), 16 People’s Power Movement, vii, 3 People’s Republic of China. See China People’s Revolutionary Party (Mongolia), 153 PDI. See Indonesia Democratic Party Personalism: and politics, 12, 18, 89;

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Index and partisanship, 27, 168; and political parties, 58, 71,151, 177, 180–181 Philippines: authoritarian-libertarian values, 100, 102–104, 170–171; democratization in, vii, 9, 37, 159–160, 165; electoral system, 13–14, 20, 72–73, 83–85, 87, 89; left-right dimension, 32–34, 37–38; participation, 126–127, 137; partisanship, 51, 54–58, 60, 62, 146, 151, 153, 159–160, 173; party preferences, 100–101; party system, 3, 21, 37, 41–43, 114, 127, 167–169, 177–179, 181; political trust, 154–155; social values and party preference, 109–111; support for democracy, 155–159, 173 Plurality system. See Electoral system Political behavior, 6–7, 32, 49, 64, 95, 119, 167. See also Participation Political party: alignment, 2–4, 122, 167; centrist 22, 40; coalitions, 18, 22; decline of, 3, 119–120, 121; democratic functions, 119, 145, 171–172, 176, 182; ideology, 2, 27–28, 58, 119, 168–169, 180; interest articulation and, 1, 3, 121, 182; linkage to citizens, 1, 3, 6, 69, 71, 119, 166, 169, 174, 176; organization, 3, 27, 121, 176, 180; programmatic, 18, 23, 27, 38, 42, 121, 168, 176; representation and, 1, 6, 40–43, 121, 168, 182; small parties, 14–16. See also Electoral cleavages; Left-right dimension; Partisanship Postmaterialism, 96, 101, 120 Powell, Bingham G., 39 Presidential vs. parliamentary system. See Electoral system PROMDI, 37 Proportional representation (PR). See Electoral system Protest, viii, 27, 79, 103–104, 123, 137

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Rational choice theory, 148, 153, 161, 175 Religion, 18, 72–73, 124, 130, 132, 137. See also Electoral cleavages Roh Moo-hyun, vii, 36–37, 51, 62, 75 Rokkan, Stein, 69–72, 75, 77, 87–90, 169, 174 Sartori, Giovanni, 27, 28, 39 Scattschneider, E. E., 166 Singapore, 10–11, 19, 21 Single member district. See Electoral system Single non-transferable vote. See Electoral system Single transferable vote. See Electoral system Social capital, 122, 124, 129, 132, 137–138 Social modernization, 2, 5–6, 95, 114, 121, 158, 165, 170–171 Social movements, vii, 3, 121, 138. See also Protest Social structure. See Electoral cleavages Social values, 95; and Confucianism, 71, 98; postmaterialist, 96, 104. See also Authoritarian-libertarian values Socialization, political, 51 147–148, 154, 161, 175 South Korea. See Korea Struggle of Democratic Filipinos (LDP), 101 Suharto, 9, 111 Sukarnoputri, Megawati, vii Support for Democracy, 145, 149–150. See Partisanship Taiwan: authoritarian-libertarian values, 100, 102–104, 113, 170–171; democratization in, vii, 4, 9, 69, 165; electoral cleavages, 20, 73, 85–87, 170; electoral system, 11–13; leftright dimension, 32–34;

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206 participation, 126–127, 137, 172; partisanship, 54–57, 60, 62–63, 137, 146, 151, 153, 160, 172–173; party preferences, 100–101, 113–114; party system, 3, 21, 41, 43, 53, 127, 137, 167–169, 176, 177–179, 180; political trust, 154–155; semipresidential 11; social values and party preference, 97, 107–109; support for democracy, 155–159, 173 Taiwan Solidarity, 51 Thai Rak Thai, 60, 177–178 Thailand: democratization in, vii, 18, 69, 160,165; electoral system, 12–13, 59; parliamentary, 11; partisanship, 51, 54–57, 59–60, 62, 146, 151–153, 160, 172–173; party system, 21, 177–179; political trust, 154–155, 173; support for democracy, 155–159, 173

Index Thaksin, Shinawatra, viii, 10, 36, 75, 81, 60–62, 177–178 Third Wave. See Democracy Trust, political, 102–104 UD. See Our Party ULD. See United Liberal Democrats Unions, 73, 77–78, 102, 170 United Development Party (PPP), 101, 111–112 United Liberal Democrats (ULD) (Korea), 36–37, 39, 177 Voting: age and, 75, 90, 96, 124–125, 170; choice and, 1–2, 4–6, 27, 33, 38, 40–43, 49, 71, 172; vote buying, 18. See also Participation; Party preference Wahid, Abdurah-man, vii Western Europe 1, 3, 70–71

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About the Book

A

ssessing the trajectory of democratization in East Asia, this book offers a systematic and tightly integrated analysis of party-system development in countries across the region. The authors utilize unprecedented cross-national survey data to examine the institutional structure of party systems, the range of choices these systems represent, and the factors influencing voting preferences. They also investigate the consequences of partisanship for citizen support of the democratic process. While revealing that party development in the region is still incomplete, the book highlights areas of progress as it explores the potential for enhanced representation.

Russell J. Dalton is professor of political science at the University of California–Irvine. In 1995–2004, he served as founding director of the university’s Center for the Study of Democracy. Doh Chull Shin is professor of political science and holds the Korea Foundation Chair at the University of Missouri at Columbia. He is one of the founding members of the East Asian Barometer Program. Yun-han Chu is distinguished research fellow at the Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, and director of the East Asian Barometer Program.

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