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ABSTRACT
Recent decades witnessed economic and political developments in Asia, especially in the Southeast Asia region, that warrant a re-examination of popular support for democracy among socioeconomic classes in the region. Using the 2010--2012 round of the Asian Barometer Survey, we constructed seven indicators of support for democracy and three socioeconomic classes for Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. The tests of proportions indicate that for each country, a high percentage of each class generally expresses support for democracy. Where inter-class differences are significant, the Oaxaca decompositions reveal that in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand these are largely due to dissimilarities in class characteristics (like average education). In Indonesia and the Philippines, the differences in average class characteristics matter less than the heterogeneous effects of the characteristics. Thus, democratic consensus among socioeconomic classes can be promoted through policies that promote class parity in, say, educational attainment or employment status, but more directly in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand than in Indonesia and the Philippines.
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the Philippine Center for Economic Development for the research grant, the participants in the brown bag seminar held at the UP School of Economics on 30 September 2014 and in the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Philippine Economic Society held in Hotel Intercontinental Manila in Makati City on 14 November 2014, Dr. Christian von Luebke and an anonymous referee for their thoughtful comments and generous suggestions. This paper was completed while the author was a visiting fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the Albert-Lüdwigs University Freiburg, with funding support from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under REA grant agreement no. 609305. The author also appreciates the assistance and the data from the Asian Barometer Project Office (www.asianbarometer.org). The views expressed herein are the author's own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For recent studies linking the middle classes, economic development and democracy, see, for example, Gerring et al. (Citation2005), Chun, Hasan and Ulubasoglu (Citation2011) and Birdsall (Citation2015).
2. http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview. Accessed 15 December 2014.
3. POLITY IV is developed by the POLITY IV Project. http://www.systemspeace.org/polity/polity4htm. Accessed 30 July 2015.
4. Dow (Citation2009) used the same method to account for the differences in political views between genders.
5. The studies in Embong (Citation2001a) use the Erikson-Goldthorpe scheme in classifying people into social classes based on employment status and occupational classifications.
6. This threshold sets the lower income class apart from the middle income class, but does not delineate the middle income households from the upper income households. But the basic idea is that only when one reaches the threshold could the extra income become available for non-necessities. Put differently, the low-income households only have enough money for food and other basic necessities.
7. The website is www.asianbarometer.org.
8. The correlation estimates are for samples that reported their household income level; it excludes those with missing responses or replied as not knowing their income levels.
9. Our classification of the respondents into ‘white collar’ worker or otherwise is based on the scheme proposed by Erikson and Goldthorpe (Citation1992). Specifically, the ‘white collar’ workers include ‘professionals, large enterprise employers, managers (with 1–10 or more than 10 subordinates) and routine clerical and sales workers’. However this classification can be applied only to respondents who, at the time of the survey, were employed and declared their main occupation.
10. This assumes that the coefficients do not capture the omitted variable bias. Otherwise, the heterogeneous effects will be due to the omitted variable as well. Also, for the decomposition to work, the classes should have the same vector of characteristics.
11. The results reported are based on a set of 30 unweighted regression runs, one pair for each indicator of democratic support where differences in proportions exist between the middle class and either the lower or upper class. Sampling weights are not used to make the results comparable with those obtained in the tests of proportions (which do not allow weights). The detailed regression results are not reported here to save on space, but are available from the authors upon request.
12. Thanks to the anonymous referee for this insight.
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Joseph J. Capuno
Joseph J. Capuno is a professor at the University of the Philippines School of Economics, where he also got his PhD in 1997. His research focuses on local public economics, health financing and political economy of development. He has published articles on yardstick competition among local governments; health decentralization in the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam; local government innovations; party affiliations and political dynasties and local service delivery; and performance monitoring and local government responsiveness.