Economic inequality, distributive unfairness, and regime support in East Asia

ABSTRACT

The relationship between economic inequality and political support is not well established in previous empirical studies in part because people commonly misperceive the level of economic inequality. Moreover, people perceiving high economic inequality may not oppose the incumbent government or political regime because they consider the inequality fair. To better capture the political outcomes of economic inequality, we investigate the effects of perceived distributive unfairness on regime support. Using data collected from the fourth wave of Asian Barometer Survey (2014–2016), we find that perceived unfairness decreases support for the current political regime. We further examine three mechanisms through which distributive unfairness dampens regime support: changes of political value orientation, redistribution demand, and social trust. We find that political value orientation plays a greater mediating role than redistribution demand and social trust, meaning that distributive unfairness depresses regime support largely through its erosive impact on citizens’ affective identification with authoritarian values that underpin regime support in East Asian societies. Moreover, we find that distributive unfairness is more detrimental to regime support in autocracies and lower-income groups. Our study corroborates the importance of distributive fairness for regime legitimacy and highlights the vulnerability of autocracies to distributive unfairness.

KEYWORDS:

• income distribution
• unfairness
• regime support
• authoritarian values
• East Asia

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable suggestions for the revision of this article. We thank Ling Chen, Iza Ding, Jean Hong, Qixuan Huang, Robert Kaufman, Yesola Kweon, Jie Lü, Lingling Qi, Min Tang, Shiping Tang, Wenfang Tang, Kelle Tsai, Zhengxu Wang, Wei-Ting Yen, Qingjie Zeng, Qi Zhang, and Yu Zheng for their useful comments. All errors remain our own.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Luhrmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization is Here.”

2 Croissant and Haynes, “Democratic Regression in Asia: Introduction.”

3 Anderson, “The End of Economic Voting”; Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, “Economic Determinants of Electoral Outcomes.”

4 Krieckhaus et al., “Economic Inequality and Democratic Support”; Park, “Assessing the Inequality-Democracy Linkage at the Individual Level.”

5 Gimpelson and Treisman, “Misperceiving Inequality”; Wu and Chang, “Income Inequality, Distributive Unfairness, and Support for Democracy.”

6 Chi and Kwon, “The Trust-Eroding Effect of Perceived Inequality”; Wu, “Income Inequality and Distributive Justice.”

7 Osberg and Smeeding, “Fair Inequality? Attitudes toward Pay Differentials.”

8 Loveless and Whitefield, “Being Unequal and Seeing Inequality”; Lee et al., “Political Consequences of Income Inequality.”

9 see, for example, Wu and Chang, “Income Inequality, Distributive Unfairness, and Support for Democracy” ; Lee et al., “Political Consequences of Income Inequality.”

10 Tyler et al., “The Influence of Perceived Injustice on the Endorsement of Political Leaders”; Tyler and Van Der Toorn, “Social Justice.”

11 Chi and Kwon, “The Trust-Eroding Effect of Perceived Inequality,” 320–321.

12 Woo-Cumings, The Development State.

13 Shin, Confucianism and Democratization in East Asia.

14 Alesina and Angeletos, “Fairness and Redistribution.”

15 Tyler et al., “The Influence of Perceived Injustice on the Endorsement of Political Leaders.”

16 Wu and Chang, “Income Inequality, Distributive Unfairness, and Support for Democracy.”

17 Lee et al., “Political Consequences of Income Inequality.”

18 Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life; Nathan, “The Puzzle of Authoritarian Legitimacy.”

19 Haggard and Kaufman, “Inequality and Regime Change: Democratic Transitions and the Stability of Democratic Rule”; Park, “Assessing the Inequality-Democracy Linkage at the Individual Level.”

20 Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy; Boix, Democracy and Redistribution.

21 E.g. Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy; Boix, Democracy and Redistribution.

22 Nathan, “Authoritarian Impermanence”; Nathan, “The Puzzle of Authoritarian Legitimacy.”

23 Davies, “Toward a Theory of Revolution.”

24 Gurr, “Why Men Rebel.”

25 Gurr, “Why Men Rebel.”

26 Tyler et al., “The Influence of Perceived Injustice on the Endorsement of Political Leaders.”

27 Tyler et al., “The Influence of Perceived Injustice on the Endorsement of Political Leaders”; Wu and Chang, “Income Inequality, Distributive Unfairness, and Support for Democracy”; Zmerli and Castillo, “Income Inequality, Distributive Fairness and Political Trust in Latin America.”

28 Tyler and Van Der Toorn, “Social Justice.”

29 Deutsch, “Equity, Equality, and Need.”

30 Barrett-Howard and Tyler, “Procedural Justice as a Criterion in Allocation Decisions.”

31 Houle, “Does Economic Inequality Breed Political Inequality?”

32 Anderson and Singer, “The Sensitive Left and the Impervious Right”; Bratton and Mattes, “Support for Democracy in Africa”; Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life.

33 Mauk, Citizen Support for Democratic and Autocratic Regimes.

34 Ballard-Rosa et al., “The Economic Origins of Authoritarian Values”; Solt, “The Social Origins of Authoritarianism.”

35 Jost and Hunyady, “he Psychology of System Justification and the Palliative Function of Ideology.”

36 Visser et al., “Support for Radical Left Ideologies in Europe.”

37 Li et al., “The Perception of Anti-Corruption Efficacy in China.”

38 Solt, “Economic Inequality and Democratic Political Engagement.”

39 Uslaner, Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law.

40 Tyler and Van Der Toorn, “Social Justice.”

41 Shin, Confucianism and Democratization in East Asia; Lu and Chu, Understandings of Democracy.

42 Shin, Confucianism and Democratization in East Asia; Williams, “Reasons to Obey.”

43 Gilley, “Do East Asian States Enjoy a Legitimacy Premium?”

44 Wu, “Big Government Sentiment and Support for Protectionism in East Asia.”

45 Chang et al., “Authoritarian Nostalgia in Asia.”

46 Meltzer and Richard, “A Rational Theory of the Size of Government.”

47 North and Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment.”

48 Boix, Democracy and Redistribution.

49 Alesina and Angeletos, “Fairness and Redistribution.”

50 Sachweh, “The Moral Economy of Inequality,” 437.

51 Jamal, Barriers to Democracy; Zmerli and Newton, “Social Trust and Attitudes Towards Democracy”; Jamal and Nooruddin, “The Democratic Utility of Trust.”

52 Jennings and Stoker, “Social Trust and Civic Engagement across Time and Generations”; Putnam, Bowling Alone.

53 Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture; Inglehart, Modernization and Post-modernization.

54 Huang and Schuler, “A Status Quo Theory of Generalized Trust.”

55 Ibid.

56 Hong Kong is not included in our sample because when respondents in Hong Kong are asked about regime support, it is not clear whether they would have the Hong Kong government/system in mind or the Chinese central government or system in mind. That said, we use the whole sample including Hong Kong to redo the analysis for robustness and all the findings remain (See Table 1 in Appendix B).

57 Following common practice, we define democracies as countries with a Polity score of at least six. For robustness, we adopt a categorical classification of regime types using the Freedom House data (“free”: Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, Taiwan; “partially free”: Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia; “not free”: China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar) to re-do the analysis. The results are reported in Tables 8–10 of Appendix B.

58 More information available at: www.asianbarometer.org/newenglish/introduction.

59 E.g. Nathan, “The Puzzle of Authoritarian Legitimacy.”

60 One may question if regime support is conceptually the same in democracies and autocracies; and if the self-reported regime support in autocracies is reliable. To address the first question, we conduct the factor analysis and the Mokken scale analysis in democracies and autocracies separately. The results do not significantly differ across regime types (Tables 3–5 in Appendix B). As for the second question, we acknowledge the potential inflation of regime support in autocracies, a limitation of using observational data to study political support in autocracies. However, the potential inflation of regime support does not work against our argument; in fact, it suggests that the effect of distributive unfairness shown in this study might be the lower bound of the true effect.

61 The results using the ordinal independent variable (see Table 2 in Appendix B) are consistent with those with the binary independent variable.

62 The coding rule for item 3 is that value 1 corresponds to “disagree” or “strongly disagree” and value 0 to “agree” or “strongly agree”.

63 Alesina and La Ferrara, “Preferences for Redistribution in the Land of Opportunities”; Haggard et al., “Income, Occupation, and Preferences for Redistribution in the Developing World”; Kuhn, “Inequality Perceptions, Distributional Norms, and Redistributive Preferences in East and West Germany.”

64 This variable is coded in a similar way as that of distributive unfairness perception.

65 Chu et al., “Public Opinion and Democratic Legitimacy”; Ou-Yang and Zhou, “Economic Evaluations and Political Support in Authoritarian Countries.”

66 Alesina and La Ferrara, “Preferences for Redistribution in the Land of Opportunities”; Houle and Miller, “Social Mobility and Democratic Attitudes.”

67 MacKinnon and Fairchild, “Current Directions in Mediation Analysis.”

68 Bollen, Structural Equations with Latent Variables.

69 Gunzler et al., “Introduction to Mediation Analysis with Structural Equation Modeling.”

70 Although our empirical strategy cannot rule out the possibility of reversed causality that one’s perception of unfairness derives from his/her political values and/or attitudes, our strategy is to use the cross-sectional variations of political values and attitudes between individuals with high unfairness perception and those with low unfairness perception to make a theoretical case that the high/low perceptions of distributive unfairness result in the different political values and support for the current regime. To be sure, our argument is not a substitute of the reversed possibility and vice versa.

71 King et al., “Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data.”

72 Lü, “Does Changing Economic Well-Being Shape Resentment about Inequality in China?”

73 Wong, “The Adaptive Developmental State in East Asia.”

74 Since we allow the parameters to be estimated separately for each group in the first step, we performed Wald tests to see whether a constraint on the coefficients (i.e. coefficients are constrained to be equal across groups) would be valid.

75 We use the t-test to compare the difference in the coefficient means from the two groups to 0. In other words, it tests whether the difference in the means of the coefficient is 0.

76 Zmerli and Castillo, “Income Inequality, Distributive Fairness and Political Trust in Latin America.”

77 Statistical tests indicate that the coefficient of redistribution demand should be constrained to be equal across groups, though it significantly differs across groups (see Tables 17–19 in Appendix B).

78 Note that the number of countries in the ABS data is relatively small: 13. Some researchers advise against using multi-level modeling for such limited case numbers. See Kline, Principles and Practice of Structural Equation Modeling. Hence, we employ the single-level structural equation modeling with country dummies in the main analysis and use the multi-level modeling with country-level parameters for robustness checks.

79 The identification in the causal mediation analysis relies upon a strong and untestable assumption (i.e. sequential ignorability). Researchers need to evaluate the robustness of CMA results to potential violation of the assumption. See Imai et al., “Unpacking the Black Box of Causality.” We therefore prefer SEM over CMA in this study.

80 Chu et al., “Public Opinion and Democratic Legitimacy”; Shin, Confucianism and Democratization in East Asia.

81 Only since the fourth wave of ABS (2014-2015), the questions about redistribution are asked in all sample countries.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xian Huang

Xian Huang is an associate professor in the Political Science Department at Rutgers University. Her research has focused on the politics of social inequality and welfare state in China. She is the author of the book: Social Protection under Authoritarianism: Health Politics and Policy in China (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Governance, Political Studies, Social Science Research, Studies in Comparative International Development, and The China Quarterly, among others.

Cai Zuo

Cai Zuo is an associate professor at School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. Her research focuses on comparative political institution, political methodology, bureaucratic politics, and Chinese politics. Her research has appeared in Political Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development, International Political Science Review, European Political Science, China Quarterly, and Journal of Contemporary China.