How East Asians Understand Democracy: From Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Democracy is political model with global appeal, but little is known about how contemporary publics understand it. Are East Asians capable of defining democracy in their own words? Are they also capable of prioritizing its properties? Do they tend to understand it procedurally or substantively? This paper addresses these questions by analyzing responses to the open-ended and closed-ended questions that the second round of the East Asia Barometer surveys asked in nine countries in 2006 and 2007. Results of this analysis confirm that most people in East Asia are cognitively capable of defining democracy. Contrary to what is known in the literature, however, the majority of East Asians do not equate democracy exclusively with political freedom. This finding leads to the conclusion that the prevalence of substantive or communitarian conceptions of democracy is one important characteristic of the cultural democratization unfolding in East Asia.