Regime types and winner-loser Gaps in support for democracy in East Asia

ABSTRACT

What is the effect of regime type on democratic support among political winners and losers? Existing studies on the winner-loser gap in political attitudes mostly discuss satisfaction with democracy and political trust without testing the conditional effect of political regimes. We argue that because winners and losers have different understandings of the word “democracy,” support for democracy as an ideal political system is not a valid measurement of democratic support in autocracies. In this article, we examine support for liberal democratic values in different regime types. We find a clear winner-loser gap in competitive authoritarian regimes since supporters of the ruling parties are less enthusiastic about democratic principles that would constrain executive power than those who support the opposition. In democracies, this gap is much smaller as all voters may become political underdogs after free and fair elections; both winners and losers prefer civil liberties and limited executive power, therefore they uphold democratic values at similar levels. We test our argument using four waves of the Asian Barometer Survey.

KEYWORDS:

• Winners and losers
• liberal democratic values
• democracy
• competitive authoritarianism
• East Asian politics

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the suggestions from Amy H. Liu, Tse-min Lin, Tsung Chi, and Kyosuke Kikuta. We also thank anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Anderson et al., Losers’ Consent.

2 Diamond, Developing Democracy.

3 Anderson and LoTempio, “Winning, Losing and Political Trust.”

4 Moehler, “Critical Citizens.”

5 Banducci and Karp, “How Elections Change”; Anderson et al., Losers’ Consent; Curini et al., “Satisfaction with Democracy.”

6 Anderson and Tverdova, “Winners, Losers, and Attitudes”; Anderson and LoTempio, “Winning, Losing and Political Trust”; Banducci and Karp, “How Elections Change”; Moehler, “Critical Citizens.”

7 Moehler, “Critical Citizens.”

8 See for example, Inglehart, “How Solid”; Park and Shin, “Popular Support for Democracy in South Korea.”

9 See the discussion in Bratton, “Anchoring the "D-Word" in Africa.”

10 Schedler and Sarsfield, “Democrats with Adjectives”; Chu and Huang, “The Meanings of Democracy.”

11 Carothers, “The End”; Gandhi, Political Institutions.

12 Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.

13 Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.

14 Nadeau and Blais, “Accepting the Election Outcome”; Moehler and Lindberg, “Narrowing the Legitimacy Gap”; Moehler, “Critical Citizens”.

15 The countries we study in this article are: Cambodia, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand.

16 Kang, “Democratic Performance.”

17 Chang et al., “Authoritarian Nostalgia.”

18 Lipset, “Social Requisites.”

19 Diamond, Developing Democracy; Claassen, “Public Support.”

20 Easton, A Systems Analysis.

21 Anderson and Guillory, “Political Institutions”; Anderson et al., Losers’ Consent; Craig et al., “Winners, Losers, and Election Context”; Moehler, “Critical Citizens”; Huebert and Liu, “Ethnic Identity”; cf., Jou, “Political Support.”

22 Nadeau and Blais, “Accepting the Election Outcome”; Moehler and Lindberg, “Narrowing the Legitimacy Gap.”

23 Sani and Sartori, “Polarization.”

24 Moehler, “Critical Citizens.”

25 Dahlberg and Linde, “The Dynamics.”

26 Anderson et al., Losers’ Consent; Chang et al., “Authoritarian Nostalgia.”

27 Hansen et al., “Losers Lose More.”

28 Moehler and Lindberg, “Narrowing the Legitimacy Gap.”

29 Ibid.; Curini et al., “Satisfaction with Democracy.”

30 Anderson and Guillory, “Political Institutions”; Bernauer and Vatter, “The Westminster Model.” In addition to institutional settings, other factors in shaping the attitude gap can include ideologically biased media (Lelkes, “Affective Polarization”), quality of governance and economic performance (Martini and Quaranta, “Political Support”), bureaucratic quality (Anderson and Tverdova, “Corruption”), and policy positions between the ruling and opposition parties (Curini et al., “Satisfaction with Democracy”; Curini and Jou, “The Conditional Impact”).

31 Anderson et al., Losers’ Consent; Jou, “Political Support.”

32 Linde and Ekman, “Satisfaction with Democracy.”

33 Dalton et al., “Understanding Democracy”; Maseland and van Hoorn, “Why Muslims Like Democracy.”

34 Schedler and Sarsfield, “Democrats with Adjectives”; Kirsch and Welzel, “Democracy Misunderstood.”

35 Kirsch and Welzel, “Democracy Misunderstood”; Shin, “Democratization.”

36 Seligson, “The Political Culture”; Kirsch and Welzel, “Democracy Misunderstood”; Ulbricht, “Perceptions.”

37 While the abstract definition has an inflating property, given similar understanding of the meaning of democracy, it is still useful for examining how socioeconomic and political factors can affect people's support for democracy at the individual level. De Jonge, “Should Researchers.”

38 Dahl, “Polyarchy.”

39 Schedler and Sarsfield, “Democrats with Adjectives.”

40 Thomassen, “Democratic Values,” 418.

41 Similarly, scholars posit that self-expression values are positively associated with support for democratic transitions. Self-expression values essentially concern individual freedom and choice (Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization).

42 Welzel and Alvarez, “Enlightening People.”

43 Marquez, Charismatic Authority and Democratic.

44 Kirsch and Welzel, “Democracy Misunderstood.”

45 For instance, see Fuchs et al., “Support for the Democratic System”; Anderson et al., Losers’ Consent.

46 Carothers, “The End”; Gandhi, Political Institutions; Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.

47 Anderson and Tverdova, “Winners, Losers, and Attitudes”; Curini et al., “Satisfaction with Democracy”; Blais and Gélineau, “Winning, Losing and Satisfaction with Democracy.”

48 Chu and Huang, “The Meanings of Democracy.”

49 Rivera-Batiz, “Democracy, Governance, and Economic Growth.”

50 Ng, “Hong Kong.”

51 Ng, “Young People Into Opposition Parties.”

52 Lührmann et al., “Regimes of the World”; Coppedge et al., V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date]; Pemstein et al., “The V-Dem Measurement Model.”

53 Banducci and Karp, “How Elections Change”; Anderson et al., Losers’ Consent; Curini et al., “Satisfaction with Democracy.”

54 Moehler and Lindberg, “Narrowing the Legitimacy Gap”; Curini et al., “Satisfaction with Democracy.”

55 Norén-Nilsson, "Good Gifts, Bad Gifts, and Rights," 796.

56 O'Neill, “Cambodia in 2016.”

57 Dahlum and Kuntsen “Democracy by Demand”.

58 Dahlum and Kuntsen in “Democracy by Demand” argue that people in democratic systems are better acquainted with and more used to the rules and norms of the institutions. Whether this argument can be extended to suggest that political winners and losers will have the same levels of commitment to democratic principles is debatable. In East and Southeast Asia, as discussed in the empirical analysis section, our empirical evidence supports this argument: respondents generally have higher liberal democratic values in democracies than respondents in authoritarian countries.

59 Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2018.

60 Some countries appear in more waves than others.

61 For the countries included in this article, see footnote no.15.

62 The coefficient of internal consistency for the seven indicators is 0.7138 (Cronbach’s alpha).

63 See Callahan, “Social Capital”; Aspinall et al., “Vote Buying in Indonesia”; Canare et al., “An Empirical Analysis.”

64 Goren, “Party Identification.”

65 Teorell et al., “Measuring Polyarchy”; Coppedge et al., V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date]; Pemstein et al., “The V-Dem Measurement Model.”

66 Taiwan data is taken from the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics of Taiwan. We accessed the information on GDP per capita on November 13, 2018.

67 Lipset, “Social Requisites.”

68 Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization; Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization.

69 Finkel et al., “Democratic Values.”

70 Luke, Multilevel Modeling.

71 We assume that winner-loser gaps are related to each other within the same country (e.g., Taiwan 2001, 2006, 2010, and 2014 survey). Therefore, we cluster the data at the country level to adjust the standard error of estimated coefficients to address the issue of heteroskedasticity (because residuals are not independently and identically distributed).

72 Kang, “Democratic Performance.”

73 Chang et al., “Authoritarian Nostalgia.”

74 Inglehart, “How Solid.” Also see Chu and Huang, “The Meanings of Democracy.”

75 Chang et al., “Authoritarian Nostalgia”; Shin and Wells, “The Only Game.”

76 Bartels “Ethnic antagonism”; Kingzette et al. “How Affective Polarization.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chun-Ying Wu

Chun-Ying Wu is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals, Barcelona, Spain. His research focuses on ethnic politics, political behaviours, and political regimes.

Chin-en Wu

Chin-en Wu is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. His research focuses on political economy, democratization, and political regimes.