While voluminous studies have attributed the continuing decline of institutional trust to political corruption, the link between corruption and institutional trust in Asia has yet to be explored systematically. Testing the effect of corruption on institutional trust is theoretically important and empirically challenging, since many suggest that contextual factors in Asia, such as political culture and electoral politics, might neutralize the negative impact of corruption. Utilizing data from the East Asia Barometer, we find a strong trust-eroding effect of political corruption in Asian democracies. We also find no evidence that contextual factors lessen the corruption-trust link in Asia. The trust-eroding effect holds uniformly across all countries examined in this study and remains robust even after taking into account the endogenous relationship between corruption and trust.
This paper examines on a global scale how important it is for young democracies to deliver economic welfare to win the hearts of their citizens. A decoupling of popular support for democratic form of government from economic performance is believed to be conducive to the consolidation of young democracies. We found an encouraging global pattern that clearly shows evaluations of economic condition are relatively unimportant in explaining level of popular support for democracy. However, high-income East Asian countries register a glaring exception to this global generalization, suggesting that their distinctive trajectory of regime transition has imposed on democratic regimes an additional burden of sustaining a record of miraculous economic growth of the past.
for their helpful comments and suggestions for revisions. 1. For our analysis, a political regime is defined as an ensemble of patterns that determines the methods of access to the principal public offices; the characteristics of the actors admitted to or excluded from such access; the strategies that actors may use to gain access; and the rules that are followed in the making of publicly binding decisions.
Bangkok to Manila, Taipei, Seoul, and Ulaanbaatar, East Asia's "third-wave" democracies are in distress. The most dramatic sign of trouble has been the September 2006 military coup in Thailand, where the opposition had earlier boycotted a parliamentary election. (Thailand was also the scene of the region's last full-scale democratic breakdown, a 1991 coup.) In Taiwan and the Philippines, the losers of the most recent presidential elections have challenged the results. In South Korea, the incumbent president has found himself crippled by flagging popular support and deserted by his own party's National Assembly deputies. Mongolia is mired in party stalemate. Even the region's oldest democracy, Japan, has been beset by endless corruption scandals and consistent failures to come to grips with the challenges of deflation, stagnation, and the need for structural economic reform. Under these stressful circumstances, can democracy still endure and flourish in East Asia?Although many forces can affect a democracy's survival chances, no democratic regime can stand long without legitimacy in the eyes of its own people. Scholars have long known that beliefs and perceptions regarding legitimacy have much to do with whether a regime-particularly one founded upon popular consent-will endure or break down. 1 What elites think matters, but for democracy to become stable and effective, the bulk of the citizenry must develop a deep and resilient commitment to it. A necessary condition for the consolidation of democracy is met when an overwhelming proportion of citizens believe
This paper presents a spatial analysis of political competition in Taiwan in an effort to explore the role of conflict displacement in the process of democratic transition. In recent elections, a new cleavage on socioeconomic justice has emerged as a salient political issue in Taiwan, crosscutting the traditional cleavage on national identity. The authors first trace the historical trajectory of regime transition in order to provide a structural explanation of such a displacement of conflicts. Using data from the 1992 General Survey on Social Changes designed primarily by the authors for the Institute of Ethnology of Academia Sinica, they then present the results of a spatial analysis. The empirical findings confirm that socioeconomic justice together with national identity are the defining dimensions of the latent ideological space in which political competition takes place. The authors argue that, because of the availability of the new issue, political elites in Taiwan are undertaking a partisan realignment in both electoral and legislative politics, a process the authors consider conducive to both the transition to democracy and the consolidation of the new regime.
The authors’ empirical analysis shows both commonalities and variations in the sources of regime support in Southeast Asian countries. Most regimes in the region draw political legitimacy from perceptions that their governance is effective and marked by integrity. These findings lend support to the argument that regime legitimacy—when it is won and when it is lost—is rooted in the output side of the political system. Yet delivering economic prosperity alone will not suffice. In order for political regimes in Southeast Asia to win over their people, they must control corruption, respect the rule of law, treat all citizens fairly and equally, expand public services, and be responsive to what the people need. The region’s young democracies are not exempt from these requirements.
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