Popular Understandings of Democracy and Regime Legitimacy in East Asia

This essay uses the latest Asian Barometer survey data to explain how popular understanding of democracy affects regime legitimacy in Asia. Our findings indicate that Asian citizens who possess a procedural understanding of democracy are less supportive of the current political regime. This finding appears in both the microand macro-analyses. Furthermore, we found modern social values and liberal orientation to be significant factors in reducing diffuse regime support. These results could be explained by the perspective of critical citizenship or social conformity. However, we also found supporting evidence for the conventional wisdom concering democratic citizenship at the microand macro-level. The overall conclusion suggests that the source of regime legitimacy stems from multifarious factors and that different theoretical claims could simultaneously have a certain level of explanatory power. Moreover, a further analysis suggests that social conformity could generate habitual psychological attachment to the incumbent political authority and thus increase regime legitimacy. Our investigation shows that this explanation has even greater empirical saliency than theories of democratic citizenship and critical citizenship.