Yun-han Chu

Corruption and Trust: Exceptionalism in Asian Democracies?

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.

Public Opinion and Democratic Legitimacy

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.

The political economy of Taiwan's mainland policy

The emerging patterns of the cross‐strait interaction present a perplexing duality, revealing both the trends toward closer economic convergence and greater political divergence. Taiwans mainland policy is both the manifestation and the catalyst of the two contradictory processes. It is the locus of confrontation of the various economic, social, and political forces that propels the two concurrent processes. It has been propelled by the epic changes in the global political economy, the market‐oriented reform in China, and Taiwans economic restructuring process. It has also been prompted by the perceived challenges and opportunities brought about by the transition to the post‐Cold War era, the unraveling of structural conflicts between a status‐quo power (i.e., the US) and a rising power (i.e., the PRC) and by the politics of political succession within the CCP. In more immediate terms, it has been driven by the power struggle over political succession within the KMT, the bureaucratic process, the intere...

Who Votes? Implications for New Democracies

To appreciate the quality of new democracies around the world, it is desirable to understand the social dimensions of mass participation. While studies have been done on this subject for established democracies of the North, it is necessary to check results against observations from the developing world. Using unique data from Globalbarometer surveys, we find support for some aspects of conventional wisdom, but evidence that challenges other aspects. For example, we confirm the universality of abstention of youth from participation in elections. But we cannot replicate the truism that persons of higher socioeconomic status tend to vote more frequently. And we add the intriguing new finding that rural folk participate consistently more regularly than their urban counterparts. These social effects are tested against a rival institutional approach and found to be robust. The essay concludes by exploring the implications of the low quality of a mobilized rather than autonomous rural vote for the consolidation of democracy.

Building Democracy in Taiwan

This article examines the process of democratization from the December 1992 Legislative Yuan election, a watershed event in the course of Taiwans regime transition, to the March 1996 presidential election, which put a conclusive end to the process of democratic transition. The political significance of the 1992 election as a historic conjuncture is multi-faceted. First, it was a necessary first step for a full transition to democracy, that is, a founding election.

Southeast Asia: Sources of Regime Support

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.

Asia's Challenged Democracies

East Asian democracies are in distress. From Bangkok to Manila to Taipei to Seoul to Ulaanbaatar, democratically elected governments in the last few years have suffered inconclusive or disputed ele...

Re-engineering the Developmental State in an Age of Globalization: Taiwan in Defiance of Neoliberalism

Taiwan is one of the few East Asian economies that have emerged from the regional financial crisis relatively unscathed. Taiwan’s capacity to absorb the external economic shocks is built upon two outstanding characteristics. First, Taiwan was partially insulated from the external financial shock because both its dependence on foreign portfolio investment and its exposure to short-term foreign borrowings have been minimal. Unlike South Korea, where short-term foreign financing exposed highly leveraged firms to both exchange rate and interest rate shocks, the island’s economic growth were financed almost exclusively by domestic savings while most of its large companies ran a modest debt—equity ratio. Second, Taiwan was better equipped to with-stand the regional economic downturn and the downward spiral of competitive currency depreciation because the island has been able to maintain its competitiveness in the export market through a constant upgrading and renewal of its industrial portfolio throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) economies that continued to compete both among themselves and with the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) low-waged exporters in labour-intensive manufacturing, Taiwan has carved out different market niches for itself and widened its technological lead over the second-tier newly industrialized countries (NICs).1

How East Asians View the Rise of China

Its newly acquired status as the worlds second largest economy has entitled China to a more prominent role in global affairs, and increasingly, its behavior has drawn scrutiny from the world in ways that the country is ill-prepared for. The attention to Chinas rise, however, focuses not only on its economy but also on other aspects, including its military, diplomatic moves, domestic politics and its ‘soft power’, namely, its own image or self-projection and the worlds perception or attitudes toward China. And yet, there has been no systematic investigation to evaluate how the world views a rising China. In this article, the authors applied the latest dataset from the Asian Barometer Survey to investigate whether East Asians recognize and welcome the rise of China. The findings suggest that geographical and cultural proximity have a great impact on peoples perception of China. Countries which are territorially adjacent or culturally close to China tend to regard China as the most influential country in Asia. With the exception of Japan and Mongolia, most Asian countries hold positive views about the impact of China on the region. However, such benign evaluations are weaker in countries which have potential security conflicts with China, such as Taiwan and South Korea, when only the bilateral impact is considered. The overall picture shows that the rise of China has been largely recognized and welcomed by East Asians, despite some apprehension about Chinas strategic intentions to its neighboring countries.

Introduction: Parties, Party Choice, and Partisanship in East Asia

Political 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 articles 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 articles, 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 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,