East Asian Perspectives On Political Legitimacy

A key exploration of political legitimacy in East Asian societies undertaken by normative political theorists and empirical political scientists.

A key exploration of political legitimacy in East Asian societies undertaken by normative political theorists and empirical political scientists.

This book documents the bases for a new view of legitimacy in general and in various parts of Asia, including China, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. The authors see legitimacy anywhere as always partial, rather than total, and somewhat measurable.

This book explores the challenges and obstacles faced by dissident leaders in Asia seeking to introduce reforms into regimes that are either imperfectly democratic or frankly hostile to democratic practices and institutions.

Despite the end of the Cold War, security continues to be a critical concern of Asian states. Allocations of state revenues to the security sector continue to be substantial and have, in fact, increased in several countries. As Asian nations construct a new security architecture for the Asia-Pacific region, Asian security has received increased attention by the scholarly community. But most of that scholarship has focused on specific issues or selected countries. This book aims to lay the groundwork for a comprehensive, in-depth understanding of Asian security by investigating conceptions of security in sixteen Asian countries. The book undertakes an ethnographic, country-by-country study of how Asian states conceive of their security. For each country, it identifies and explains the security concerns and behavior of central decision makers, asking who or what is to be protected, against what potential threats, and how security policies have changed over time. This inside-out or bottom-up approach facilitates both identification of similarities and differences in the security thinking and practice of Asian countries and exploration of their consequences. The crucial insights into the dynamics of international security in the region provided by this approach can form the basis for further inquiry, including debates about the future of the region.

This edited volume is intended to showcase the breadth and depth of the collaborative intellectual enterprise that the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) network has built up over the past two decades. To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the ABS, we invited ABS partners to contribute their intellectual findings to this edited volume. Except for the introduction, this volume consists of twenty-seven chapters divided into two sections. The first part of the book contains eleven chapters that are based on previously published studies and are updated based on the latest ABS data. The second part of the book focuses on issues specific to each country or autonomous territory and consists of sixteen chapters. Among the topics discussed are potential threats to third-wave democracies, evolving ideology in one-party states, cases of denied democracy, and peculiar challenges faced by long-term democracies. The contributors are the indispensable partners that have made the ABS possible over the past two decades. In addition to celebrating the long-term collective efforts of those who participated in the ABS project, this edited volume also sets out to address the ongoing debate over the future of democracy in Asia.

This fascinating collection of papers on China's ongoing efforts in reviving legitimacy has approached the issue of legitimacy from both normative and empirical perspectives, and from Western and Chinese perspectives, thus this edited volume offers lessons and insights for and from China, and contributes to the ongoing theoretical debates as well as empirical research on legitimacy in the Chinese context.

This book examines the new equity-enhancing politics in China in the context of Chinese traditional cognitive patterns of political legitimacy and its implication for Chinese political development in the near future. Based on an analysis of the new governing philosophy, the generation of political elite, and a new set of public policies, the book reaffirms the emergence of a new Chinese polity that infuses one-party rule with limited electoral and deliberative democracies. Unlike many scholars who perceive the contemporary Chinese history as a constant search for democracy, this book takes a very different approach. It asserts that the enduring question in political development in China today is no different from what was sought after throughout Chinese history, namely, the constant search for political legitimacy. Even though the quest for democracy is instrumental to that end, it may not ultimately lead to the embrace of a full-fledged liberal democracy. The new politics is not only a rationalization of the efficiency-based development, but also a major paradigm shift in China's developmental strategy.