Explaining mass support for democracy in Hong Kong

This article aims to identify the main causal factors that underlie the overall levels of mass support for democracy in Hong Kong in the light of two approaches of comparative politics. Using a common questionnaire in 2003, 2005, and 2008, analyses of their results reveal a more or less stable level of support by Hongkongers for democracy. Viewed from the perspective of a mass values approach, post-materialism and respect for authority are found to be consistently statistically significant factors in explaining the support across the three years. The future prospects for Hong Kong will thus in part rest on the future trends of post-materialism and respect for authority. Viewed from the perspective of a perceived performance approach, both perceived economic and political performance are found to have consistently exerted a causal effect on mass support for democracy. Thus, any attempt to suppress the popular demand for democracy by offering only economic sweeteners will not, it is argued, be enough. Also, the democrats’ ability to shape the public's perception of the performance of democracy is pivotal to raising mass support. However, it is shown here that the lack of relatively strong support among younger and more educated people in Hong Kong casts a pall over the prospects for Hong Kong's democratic development. Finally, the theoretical implications of the theory of post-materialism and the Asian values debate are discussed.     

Between Liberal Autocracy and Democracy: Democratic Legitimacy in Hong Kong

The partial democracy in Hong Kong is an experiment with limited suffrage in a liberal, self-governing society. This article examines the impact of system dissatisfaction and fundamental cultural values on democratic legitimacy, using logistic regression analyses of data drawn from an electoral survey in 2000. It is found that widespread public dissatisfaction with the economic downturn has not been generalized to the abstract, structural level of regime legitimacy. Equally widespread discontent with the political situation matters; but it has strengthened public support for democracy, rather than weakened it. Finally, democratic legitimacy is grounded in liberal, post-material and individualist-competitive values. In recognition of the plausible durability of these fundamental cultural norms and in view of the relative lack of support for non-democratic alternatives and strong support for partial electoral reform, we conclude that Hong Kong is very likely to remain on track toward a fuller democracy by incremental steps.     

Mauritania: Political Parties,Neo-patrimonialism and Democracy

This article takes issue with those analyses of ‘developmental democracy’ which treat popular participation as a clamorous inconvenience to be managed in the interests of economic efficiency. Instead it asks what follows from prioritizing participation both as a defining feature of democracy, and as an integral part of what is meant by development.

The analysis is developed in two parts. The first contrasts the narratives of popular and of liberal democracy, showing how they come to different conclusions about participation and its role in development. But it also argues there are potential complementarities. These were obscured when socialist ‘people's democracies’ were (misleadingly) seen as popular alternatives to liberal democracy. Since the end of the cold war, however, the focus has been on democratizing liberal democracy, to ensure it is responsive to the needs of citizens, as active participants in development and not just targets of state policy, rather than on whole system alternatives.

The second part reviews the experience of popular democratic experiments in Tanzania and Nicaragua, which sought to extend participation beyond the confines of representative democracy, and to link it to participatory development. It might be read as a requiem for their apparent failure. But their vicissitudes also raise broader questions: about the contradictions between popular participation and ‘people's democracy'as a system of rule; concerning the structures and procedures (elections, political parties, civil society bodies, mass organizations and so on) through which participation is organised; and about the problems of harmonizing participatory development with the management of complex national economies.     

Textbook citizens: Education for democracy and political culture in el Salvador

Political education can play a crucial role in the process of democratization precisely because it is moulding the norms and expectations of the ‘ordinary’ citizen. After identifying three politico‐cultural obstacles to democratization, ‐ exclusion, violence and institutional manipulation ‐ the article explains how education for democracy programmes might undermine these obstacles. An assessment of several projects follows, including a new school curriculum and non‐governmental organization programmes among young people and poor communities. Given the enthusiasm shown towards such initiatives, it is paradoxical that levels of formal political participation via the parties are very low. The article explores the credibility gap of the parties, especially notable during elections, and which is leading the parties to respond by adopting more participatory practices at the base. El Salvador is in an advantageous position precisely because of its greatest problem: the lack of a liberal democratic history which is now allowing ordinary citizens to ‘create’ their democracy from scratch and to imagine for themselves a new identity as citizens.     

Making Hong Kong Chinese: State Nationalism and its Blowbacks in a Recalcitrant City

Abstract

Drawing from the literatures on strategic identity shift and on signaling, this article examines the strategies used by Beijing to impose its monist brand of state nationalism on Hong Kong. Given the nominally high degree of autonomy granted to Hong Kong, Beijing has been unable to impose its nationalism directly from above. Instead, it has made use of cooptation strategies so as to cultivate increasingly vocal and influential loyalist circles among local elites, who have promoted state nationalism from within. This logic, this article argues, has led many among Hong Kong’s political elite to compete in expressing an increasingly overt Chinese nationalistic posture as a way to signal loyalty to Beijing. These strategies have however backfired, raising doubts as to the actual extent of Hong Kong’s autonomy and triggering an existential crisis that led to the emergence of a reactive form of popular Hong Kong sub-state nationalism. In this context, state and popular sub-state nationalisms have fed on each other and grown increasingly irreconcilable, echoing the intensifying radicalization and polarization between the authoritarian establishment and the democratic opposition.     

In-between liberal authoritarianism and electoral authoritarianism: Hong Kong’s democratization under Chinese sovereignty, 1997–2016

On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the handover, Hong Kong’s transition towards a full democracy remains unsettled. Drawing upon the contemporary theories of hybrid regimes, this article argues that manipulations adopted by electoral authoritarian governments have become increasingly common in Hong Kong today. As Hong Kong’s elections, opposition activities, and media have been increasingly put under electoral authoritarian-style manipulations, the city-state is now situated in the “political grey zone” in-between liberal authoritarianism and electoral authoritarianism and its transition into a full democracy remains nowhere in sight. The case study of Hong Kong will help enrich the existing comparative literature on hybrid regimes by developing a new “in-between category” and offering an interesting case of democratization of sub-national polity.     

Demography and democracy: the impact of youth cohort size on democratic stability in the world

The traditional explanations for the survival of democratic systems mostly include economic and cultural variables. Only rarely has attention been given to the age structure of a society. This article introduces a hypothesis involving the ‘youth bulge’ concept popular in conflict studies. It is hypothesized that democratic countries with proportionally large male youth cohorts are more likely to become dictatorships than societies with a smaller share of young men. A causal link between demography and democracy is assumed to exist because young men are the protagonists of virtually all violent political action as well as political extremism with a potential to threaten democracy. Strong evidence supporting the hypothesis is found using data for 110 countries in the period from 1972–2009.     

The German community in 19<Superscript>th</Superscript> century Hong Kong

This article examines the development of the German community in Hong Kong between the 1840s and the outbreak of the First World War. It pays particular attention to the question of how the Germans, as a minority group in the crown colony, attempted to strike a good balance between integration and segregation, cultural assimilation and dissimilation, national identity and marginalization. Through investigating their social life, missionary activities and economic activities in Hong Kong, it shows that they, on the one hand, cooperated closely with the British who were in charge of key political and economic affairs, and on the other hand worked with the local Chinese on different social stratums. Although the unification of Germany in 1870 strengthened the sense of nationhood among German people in Hong Kong, they strove to strengthen the German cultural and economic network that already existed in and around the colony, without sacrificing their business and social interests which were interwoven with those of the British and the local Chinese. It is this strategy that enabled them to survive in Hong Kong until 1914.     

Hong Kong and Macao in transition (II): Exploring the new political order

The first part of the article focused on democratization and the main issues at stake between China, Britain, Portugal, Hong Kong and Macao as the responsibility for the two colonies reverts to the mainland. It was argued that their separate history and their respective metropolitan traditions will weigh heavily on the prospects for any phased transition to democracy. Of more immediate importance, however, is the current balance of forces within the region which affects them both, particularly their relationships with a China undergoing vast social and economic changes with profound implications for their own future political development. In this second part of the article there is more concern with current and future problems affecting the practice of democracy in Hong Kong and Macao, particularly the ways in which the new Basic Laws might operate in practice after 1997.     

Hong Kong and Macao in transition (I): Debating democracy

Hong Kong returns to Chinese sovereignty on 1 July 1997 and Portugal terminates its administration of Macao, handing over to China, on 20 December 1999.’ The unprecedented circumstances when two European colonies are decolonized, not into independence but the embrace of the last effective communist state in the world, have raised considerable anxieties about the future of democracy there and the rights and freedoms of their inhabitants. Unlike other colonies, the acquisition and administration of Hong Kong or Macao was accomplished without any significant coercion of the local population. In recent years both have enjoyed a high degree of personal liberties, while also achieving high levels of economic development. However, neither has experienced any measure of democracy defined in terms of representation of the people in government or the accountability of the state apparatus. Consequently an examination and explanation of the extent of democracy that will be established there after their reversion to China should help illuminate the debate about the relevance of democracy to rights and freedoms and to economic development.     

Political-economic determinants of electoral participation in India

ABSTRACT

Elections bestow popular legitimacy to the democracies and, accordingly, electoral participation is an important indicator of the quality of democracy and civic engagement. Understanding what factors drive citizens’ decision to vote is central to the theory and practice of democracy and has implications for voter mobilization efforts of political parties and government agencies. We study the individual level determinants of electoral turnout in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections exploiting a nationally representative India Human Development Survey-2005 (IHDS-2005). We find convincing yet mixed evidence in support of political-institutional factors, and some variables of the psychological, mobilization, socialization, and resource models in explaining voter turnout. Public confidence in state government, newspapers, and judiciary, television watching, participation in civic body meetings, local conflict, caste conflict in neighborhood, local political connections, and caste association membership significantly increase the predicted probability of turnout. Factors like time family lived in the place, age, holding of below-poverty-line (BPL) cards, and receipt of public benefits increase voter turnout; whereas, business association membership, being female, metro-city resident, business being the main income source, urban residence, and the age quadratic reduce voter turnout. Separate analyses of the rural and urban, male and female contexts largely obtain the same line of results.     

Assessing democracy from below: A framework and indonesian pilot study

The emerging crisis of both elitist and popular strategies of democratization calls for assessments of the problems and options in such a way that different arguments may be put to the test while facilitating debate on improved agendas. This article first discusses the development of a framework for such assessments in the context of the most populous of the ‘third wave democracies’, Indonesia. The best audit of institutional performance, that of Beetham, is developed further by adding the scope of the institutions and the will and capacity of the local actors to improve and use them. This is followed by a presentation of the salient results from a thus designed survey comprising 330 questions to about 800 experienced democracy workers in all 32 provinces. Indonesia's actually existing democracy is surprisingly liberal and accepted as ‘the only game in town’. It suffers, however, from defunct instruments to really facilitate political equality and popular control of public affairs. This is due to monopolization of most rights and institutions by the establishment and the political marginalization of the democratic agents of change. The problems, however, are not all ‘structurally inevitable’. The article concludes by specifying the potential for improvements.     

Public confidence in the judiciary: the interaction between political awareness and level of democracy

Apart from the studies that focus on public attitudes toward higher courts in advanced democracies, we know little about the factors that can explain public confidence in the judiciary in a comparative setting. In this regard, the goal of this study is to explain whether, and to what extent, the country's level of democracy moderates the impact of political awareness on public confidence in the judiciary. This study uses hierarchical linear models to analyse the interaction between individual and country level factors by using the World Values Survey (2005–2009) data for 49 countries and various other data sources. Our empirical results show that in advanced democracies political awareness variables like education and political participation have a positive impact on public confidence in the judiciary, whereas in countries with weak levels of democracy higher political awareness leads to increased cynicism about the judiciary. These results suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to explain confidence in the judiciary is not possible when we are dealing with a wide range of societies that vary in terms of many characteristics, both institutional and cultural.     

Understanding support for democracy in new and old democracies in the Americas: the role of democratic experience

This article develops and evaluates a set of expectations regarding the mechanisms via which democratic experience could shape support for democracy. In line with previous studies, one straightforward possibility considered is that experience with democracy fosters greater affective support for democracy, making citizens of old democracies more supportive of this regime independently of government performance and other characteristics. Another possibility considered is that democratic experience mediates the importance of performance assessments in citizens’ judgments about democracy, decreasing the importance of economic performance assessments, while increasing that of political performance assessments. Statistical analyses of public opinion data from 23 countries in the Americas indicate that the effect of democratic experience on support for democracy is not statistically significant. Rather, democratic experience conditions the effects of performance assessments on support for democracy. The evidence also supports the assertion that experience with democracy, and not economic development, is what conditions the effects of performance assessments on support for democracy.     

阿根廷的可治理性危机分析

整个20世纪,特别是1983年民主转型以来,阿根廷多在政治不稳和经济乏力之间摇摆。经济和社会发展的迟滞降低了民众对政府的认同度,从而削弱了统治的合法性,以致阿根廷多次出现可治理性危机。危机的总根源可以归咎于"制度脆弱性",具体表现在政治文化和历史传承形成的路径依赖、权力制衡机制的失灵,以及政党职能异化导致利益表达渠道受阻而激起的大众抗议。2001年危机无疑是阿根廷问题的总爆发,使阿根廷的政治精英意识到必须注重平衡不同利益群体和不同部门的差别化利益,努力通过扩大公民社会参与政治决策来谋求发展共识的新道路。"阿根廷对话"正是探索这种新道路的一次尝试。     

Democracy promotion and China: blocker or bystander?

The increasingly prosperous, mighty, and assertive China is arguably the most powerful country blocking democracy today. In addition to withholding democratic rights of one-fifth of the world's population, authoritarian China represents an alternative development model that has gained significant traction. China thus constitutes a challenge to democracy promoters. But does Beijing also countervail democracy promotion by the European Union and the United States? After a summary of the party-state's response to democracy promotion at home, we test the hypothesis that geostrategic interests or a perceived risk of regime survival will lead the People's Republic to countervail democracy promotion outside its own borders. We do so by focusing on the most likely cases in China's near-abroad: Myanmar and Hong Kong. Our analysis of Myanmar suggests that Beijing remains focused on securing economic and security interests irrespective of regime type when regime survival at home is not at risk. The case of Hong Kong, on the other hand, allows us to identify the tactics used by Beijing when there is a significant risk of democratic spillover. This case also demonstrates that the People's Republic of China is able to stifle United States and European Union democracy support when it wishes to do so.     

Party prohibition cases: different approaches by the Turkish constitutional court and the European Court of Human Rights

The article deals with the different approaches followed by the Turkish Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in party prohibition cases. The Turkish Constitution and even more so the Law on Political Parties contain a long list of party bans, the violation of which leads to the closure of the party by the Constitutional Court. The Turkish Constitutional Court, both under the 1961 and the 1982 Constitutions, interpreted these provisions in an exceedingly illiberal manner, and has so far closed down a total of 24 political parties. Turkish rules and practices concerning the prohibition of political parties are among the most important ‘democracy deficits’ of the Turkish political system. In the article, the Turkish Court's illiberal approach to party prohibition cases, especially those involving the protection of the national and territorial integrity of the state and of the principle of secularism, is compared with the much more liberal criteria developed by the ECtHR and the Venice Commission.     

Managing the mixed economy in Central and Eastern Europe: Democratic politics and the role of the public sector

The central argument of this article is that the introduction of democracy and the transition to a market economy in Central and Eastern European countries is producing contradictory and even perverse effects on these societies. These effects are enlarging the micro‐macro paradox of politics and inducing political instability. Instead of focusing on the economic problems or institutionalizing democracy only, it is argued, one should elaborate more fully the relationship between democratic decision‐making, societal needs and wants in civil society and the public organization of policy‐making. In this article an attempt is made to conceptualize these relations by using the principal/agent approach. In addition various models of welfare capitalism and public sector management are discussed and their implications for East European countries. The main conclusion is that the model of the ‘mixed economy’ is not only appropriate, but also that it contributes to a better understanding of the present problems of democratization in this part of the world. In particular the role of the democratic principal and the position of public agents appear to be crucial.     

Democratic consolidation and convergence in Southern Europe: The Italian case

In the analysis of democratic consolidation(s) in Southern Europe the emphasis has been on three main factors: the relevance of institutional rules, the scope and activities of parties (and party elites), and the establishment of certain relationships between institutions, parties and interests, connected to the size of the public sector of the economy. From the varied combinations of these factors different consolidations result: an elite‐based consolidation (Spain), a party‐based one (Italy), a state‐based one (Greece), and also a mixed party‐state model (Portugal). Our analysis also suggests the emergence of different types of democratic regime, mainly characterized by (i) either a ‘chancellor’ democracy or a parliamentary arrangement; (ii) either a pivotal or a secondary role for parties; and (iii) either a large or small public economic sector.

Recently the economic crisis, the resulting problems, and discontent arising from other causes, have brought about change in these democracies. The main transformations include the weakening of parties vis‐à‐vis other actors, the shrinking of both the public economic sector and the welfare institutions and, as a result, the prospect of greater autonomy for civil society. Thus, partially new regimes emerge, while the analysis also suggests the possibility of building a new typology of democratic regimes. Alongside the process of democratic consolidation in Southern Europe, there has also been an accompanying trend towards convergence: in the direction of majoritarianism, confirmed by the most recent national elections.