https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2299-6174
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ABSTRACT
How does support for strong leadership affect institutional trust in post-authoritarian democracies? Studies suggest that fostering trust in public institutions is contingent upon citizens’ favourable evaluation of the government’s institutional performance, whereas individual’s cultural orientations and political values are seldom given much interest. However, the resurgence of leaders with ‘populist’ tendencies presents an empirical puzzle, which may reveal intriguing political patterns in the context of comparative democratization (and autocratization). This study theorizes that citizens’ need for economic deliverance and social stability develops agreeable attitudes towards prevailing public institutions even though political incumbents project authoritarian tendencies. Using public opinion data from the seventh wave of World Values Survey (WVS7), this study finds that citizens in Indonesia and the Philippines—two of the region’s post-authoritarian democracies i.e. fragile democracies with spells of authoritarian rule manifest high support for a political system with a strong leader unconstrained with electoral and congressional intervention. Consequently, this favourable attitude makes them more likely to express higher institutional confidence. Overall, the findings shed light on the paradoxes of contemporary politics confronted not only with authoritarian resilience, political illiberalism and personalist rule but also of the enduring nondemocratic psychological disposition among citizens in settings with troubled democratic transitions.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Dr. Sanghoon Kim-Leffingwell for his insights on the earlier draft of the manuscript. The author is also grateful for the helpful feedback from the editors and reviewers of the Asian Journal of Political Science. All errors however are the author's sole responsibility.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Although in some accounts higher trust in institutions is to be expected among authoritarian countries like China (Chen, Citation2017; Yang & Tang, Citation2010), this present study focuses on democracies with authoritarian spells.
2 Though there are other Southeast Asian country that merits comparison e.g. Thailand, this present study decided to focus only between Indonesia and Philippines primarily because of the presence of ‘populist’ leaders who are still in power i.e. Widodo and Duterte.
3 This is a loose and minimalist definition that may also include other countries like Taiwan and South Korea. For this present study however, I focus on the above-mentioned countries primarily for the presence of their well-known populist leaders in their contemporary political landscape. And though there are contentions surrounding the definition of a populist (see Mudde & Kaltwasser, Citation2018), I follow existing works asserting that Duterte and Widodo as populists (Teehankee, Citation2016;; Aspinall & Mietzner, Citation2019).
4 EDSA is short for Epifanio de los Santos Avenue—a major thoroughfare in Metro Manila and the staging ground of the protests that transpired the first people power—known as the EDSA 1.
5 Although it may be perceived as nondemocratic in a normative sense (Mansbridge & Macedo, Citation2019; Urbinati, Citation2019), here I follow the empirical literature on democracy and populism which focuses on the demand-side, that is, populist attitudes from below (Spruyt et al., Citation2016; Hawkins et al., Citation2020; Akkerman et al., Citation2014)
6 I use the terms ‘political trust’, ‘institutional trust’, ‘trust in public institutions’ and ‘confidence in political institutions’ synonymously consistent with the empirical researches on the topic (Mauk, Citation2020; Baniamin et al., Citation2020).
7 Originally, 1 meant high trust and 4 no trust at all. However, in the analysis this was reverse coded so that high scores signify a high degree of confidence.
8 The six measures of political trust generated a single factor with an eigenvalue of 3.06 that accounts for 51% of the total variance. In addition, the Cronbach alpha is .80 indicating high reliability.
9 For this present study, I nevertheless argue that respondents think of the current political leadership in their respective countries as a reference base when they are probed about such specific items.
10 Originally, 1 meant very good and 4 very bad. However, in the analysis this was reverse coded so that high scores signify a high degree of agreement (support) for strong leaders.
11 To see the full specification in the multivariate regression model, see Table A.3 in the Supplemental information.
12 It must be reiterated further that items especially on political trust do not contain any question about the president or the presidency. In other words, one cannot immediately assume that trust in existing institutions is due to their high trust towards the president when in fact it was not asked to begin with.
13 I thank one of the Reviewers for pointing this out.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ronald A. Pernia
Ronald A. Pernia is a Ph.D. candidate in the Institute of Political Science at National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU) in Kaohsiung, Taiwan and a predoctoral fellow in the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica (IPSAS) in Taipei, Taiwan. He is also an assistant professor in the Political Science Program of the College of Social Sciences, University of the Philippines Cebu.