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POLI 423

Professor Ben Nyblade

Louise Lu

28 March 2013

 

Regional Democracy Report 2013:

Reassessment of East Asia

 

1. Introduction

This report will revisit the Regional Democracy Report 2012’s[1] assessment of the political regimes in six East Asian countries from 1990 onwards, and will make alterations where necessary. No country within the region has exhibited significant political changes in the past year, and, of the six measures utilized, only one has been updated. Thus, the focal points of this report will remain consistent with those from last year. However, new justifications for the usage of Freedom House Political Rights and Polity IV, along with new statistical analyses of the interactions between the two will be explored.

The definition of democracy utilized in the construction of RDR 2012 proved effective, and will thus be utilized again. To reiterate, democracy is defined as being comprised of two equally weighted attributes: (A.) Competition and (B.) Participation. Within each of these attributes, I identify two necessary components: (A1.) Regulation of political contestation, (A2.) Competitiveness of political participation, (B1.) Universal suffrage and (B2.) Fairness of the voting process.

 

1. Summary of the region

The six indices examined in RDR 2012: i. Democracy and Dictatorship ii. Polity IV iii. F, iv. Polyarchy, v. Political Regime Change and vi. Vanhanen Index will be reexamined here. Data from each measure for China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan can be found in Table 1 below.

Table 1. Summary of democracy scores in East Asia

Measure	DD  (ACLP)	Polity IV	Freedom House			CR- Polyarchy		PRC	Vanhanen
			PR	CL	ED	Poly	Cont
Scale	0/1	-10 – +10	7-1		N/Y	10-0	1-9	A,D,S(T)	0 – 100
Temporal Scope	1990-2008	1990- 2010	1990- 2012			1985*, 2000		≈1990 – 1998	1990-2000
Country Scores
China	0	-7	7	7 à61	N	10,10	1,1	A	0
Japan	1	10	1à12	1à2	Y	0,0	9,9	N/A	28.68à… 24.382
Mongolia	13	2 à103	4à 23	4à23	NàY3	10, 1	1,8	Tà…D3	7.86…à 23.63
N. Korea	0	-9	7	7	N	10,10	1,1	A	0
S. Korea	1	6à84	2à 1	3 à 24	Y	4,3	5,6	D	33.23…à 28.994
Taiwan	0à 15	-1 à105	3 à 15	3à 25	NàY5	7,0	3,9	Tà…D5	5.17…à 29.385

 

^1-5Refer to Appendix B for score fluctuation details.

Freedom House is the only measure that has been updated since the publishing of RDR 2012, and the only country affected by the updating of the Freedom House measure is South Korea, which experiences a minor decrease on its political rights scale from a ‘1’ in 2011 to a ‘2’ in 2012. This minor exception aside, the implications of the data collected remain identical: North Korea, China and Japan do not undergo any notable changes; South Korea experiences very minor fluctuations; and Mongolia and Taiwan undergo significant regime shifts.

The measures’ unanimous agreement on the non-democratic status of North Korea and China remains unchanged. North Korea is still a single-party dictatorship in practice. Leadership is currently restricted to the Workers’ Party of Korea by law, and absolute control is concentrated in an authoritarian leader whose identity is determined via hereditary power structure, as witnessed by Kim Jong-un’s assumption of power immediately following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, on December 17, 2011.

China continues to share a number of North Korea’s non-democratic features; it is a nominal multi-party republic, but a de facto single-party authoritarian state. The country’s only political party, the Communist Party of China, has been in power since 1949, and currently maintains unitary control over the state, military and media. Although a peaceful transition of political power has occurred since the last report, with the new President, Xi JinPing, assuming power in November 2012, the identities of the new executive leaders, including members of the Politburo Standing Committee, were not democratically determined.

Japan retains its position at the opposite China and North Korea. To recapitulate, Japan is a constitutional monarchy that exhibits all the institutional characteristics of an established parliamentary democracy. The quality of Japanese democracy is corroborated by the consistency with which it earns the ‘most democratic’ score possible across gradated measures, even when they vary in focal points (i.e. Polity IV’s institutional focus vs., Freedom House’s focuses on civil liberties and political rights).

South Korea is the only country affected by the 2013 update of the Freedom House measure, with a promotion from ‘2’ to ‘1’ on the Political Rights index. This minor change is most likely due to the presidential election that took place on December 19, 2012, the sixth since South Korea’s democratization in 1987. The winning candidate, South Korea’s first female president Park Geun-hye, earned 51.6% of the popular vote, the highest share won by any South Korean presidential candidate thus far. Freedom House’s new score could be indicative of South Korea’s increasing maturity as a democratic nation.

Mongolia and Taiwan have stabilized in recent years, but they are both still relatively young democracies. As previously noted, the variations in the individual scores of these two countries make them the most effective models for analyzing the utility of certain measures. Thus, they will be discussed in relation to the measurement assessment performed in Section III.

1. Analysis of Measures

Expanding on the justification from the previous year, FHPR and Polity IV will be utilized because they best serve the qualitative purposes of this paper. The relatively limited number of countries looked at and the relative stability of the region prohibit dichotomous measures from giving as meaningful or as nuanced an assessment of the region as their gradated counterparts. Had the project been expanded to include the entire body of countries in Asia, or if the task at hand were related to explaining specific divergences between democracies and dictatorships within the continent, the dichotomous measures would be more effective tools for analysis.

As such, the uni-dimensionality of the information imparted by dichotomous measures is clearly discernable in the scores for East Asia. Using the most current scores available for the DD (2008), FH ED (2012) indices, South Korea, Mongolia, Taiwan and Japan all receive the same ‘Democracy/ Yes’ designation. These classifications do not allow any claims to be made as to the actual quality of these four democracies, and, thus, would be inept for making differentiations between these otherwise distinctive states. To reiterate, the restricted geographical and temporal scope of this project is conducive to a qualitative approach to analyzing the region, for which dichotomous measures are largely ineffectual.

The patterns observed in the comparison of gradated measures in RDR 2012 remain unaffected. Results suggest that the Polity IV data is more generous at the ‘institutionalized democracy’ end of the spectrum than the ‘institutionalized autocracy’ end. While both FHPRCL and Coppedge and Reinecke give North Korea scores at the ‘least democratic’ limits of their data, a consistent 7|7 and 10|1 respectively, Polity IV maintains a -7 for China and -9 for North Korea. Taking into account its inverse attribution of Japan with a consistent 10, the Polity IV index, if utilized on its own, would likely result in a skewed assessment of East Asia that appears more democratic than the region is in reality.

Thus, to contextualize the use of Polity IV scores in examining East Asia, the FHPR scores were also utilized so as to provide the most informational assessment of the region possible. Table 2 summarizes the correlations between the components and attributes identified in the definition of democracy utilized in this report, and those in the FHPR and Polity IV indices.

 

 

 

 

 

Table 2. Summary of the attributes and components of this report’s definition of democracy contra Polity IV and Freedom House PR.

RDR	Attributes	A. Competition		B. Participation
	Components	A1. Regulation of contestation	A2. Competitiveness of contestation	B1. Universal suffrage	B2. Fairness of the voting process
P IV	Attributes	Executive Recruitment Executive Recruitment Political Competition		N/A	Political Competition
	Components	3.1 XRREG Regulation of Chief Executive Recruitment	3.2 XRCOMP Competitiveness of Executive Recruitment: 3.6 PARCOMP The Competitiveness of Participation		3.5 PARREG Regulation of Participation
FH PR	Attributes	N/A	B. Political Pluralism and Participation	B. Political Pluralism And Participation	A. Electoral Process
	Components		2. Is there a significant opposition vote and a realistic possibility for the opposition to increase its support or gain power through elections?	3. Are the people’s political choices free from domination by the military, foreignpowers, totalitarian parties, religious hierarchies, economic oligarchies, or any other powerful group? 4. Do cultural, ethnic, religious, or other minority groups have full political rights and electoral opportunities?	1. Is the head of government or other chief national authority elected through free and fair elections? 2. Are the national legislative representatives elected through free and fair elections? 3. Are the electoral laws and framework fair?

 

Taken from the previous report, Figure 1 below shows an attempt to ascertain what correlations, if any, existed between the Polity and Freedom Houses scores.

 

 

Figure 1. Graph of Polity IV scores vs. FHPR scores in

 

 

There are a number of methodological improvements that can be made to the approach illustrated above. Firstly, the sample size of the data utilized can be expanded. For a fuller understanding of how the measures are related to each other beyond the limited context of this six-country region, the geographical and temporal scopes can be expanded to include all possible dyads of Polity/ Freedom House scores. Secondly, the measures can be disaggregated into the components and attributes of democracy defined in Table 2. While the previous approach compares the entirety of the Polity variables to the entirety of the FHPR, capturing the relationship that may exist between the measures as a whole, it would be more useful to compare the specific variables within each measure that we are interested in.

With these considerations in mind, new statistical analyses were performed using data from the 2011 ‘Quality of Government’ dataset. Specifically, multivariate regressions were performed on SPSS to examine whether or not a relationship existed between Polity and Freedom House’s respective conceptualizations of ‘Participation’ and ‘Competition.’ To do so, data from every available Polity/ Freedom House dyad between 2000-2006 (as per the Quality of Government dataset) was utilized, and only the variables specified in columns 4 and 6 of Table 2 were compared. Tables 3 and 4, below, display the results of these regressions.

Table 3. Regression results of comparing Polity and Freedom House’s respective ‘Participation’ components.

Coefficientsa
Model		Unstandardized Coefficients		Standardized Coefficients	t	Sig.
		B	Std. Error	Beta
1	(Constant)	2.995	.200		14.963	.000
	Electoral Process	-.160[2]	.068	-.584	-2.345	.020
	Political Pluralism and Participation	.151	.058	.651	2.612	.010
Dependent Variable: Regulation of Participation

 

Table 4. Regression results of comparing Polity and Freedom House’s respective ‘Competition’ components.

Coefficientsa
Model		Unstandardized Coefficients		Standardized Coefficients	t	Sig.
		B	Std. Error	Beta
1	(Constant)	8.073	.639		12.630	.000
	The Competitiveness of Participation	1.131	.398	3.764	2.840	.005
	Competitiveness of Executive Recruitment	-1.104[3]	.405	-3.610	-2.724	.007
a. Dependent Variable: Political Pluralism and Participation

These results indicate that statistically significant correlations do exist between the scores attributed by Polity and those attributed by Freedom House. On the participation dimension, Polity’s Regulation of Participation variable is related to both the FHPR’s Electoral Process and Political Pluralism and Participation variables with p values of .02 and .01 respectively. This indicates that there is less than a 2% chance of the first (and a less than 1% chance of the latter) relationship being observed if no true relationship existed. The competition dimension revealed even stronger correlations: Freedom House PR’S Political Pluralism and Participation variable was related to Polity’s Competitiveness of Participation and Competitiveness of Executive Recruitment variables with p values of .005 and .007, respectively.

Despite these changes in methodology, the conclusions reached from this analysis ultimately coincide with those from the previous year: “By linear regression, the correlation coefficient R was calculated as -0.8769, indicating that these two measures share a strong correlation.”[4]

 

1. Mongolia and Taiwan

The previous examinations of Mongolia and Taiwan do not require any substantial alterations; semantic and structural improvements aside, no substantive additions or deletions need to be introduced. The graphs displaying a time-series analysis of each country’s Polity IV and FHPR scores, along wit their non-gradated measures’ points of change are reproduced below.

 

 

Figure 2a. Graph of Polity IV scores, FHPR scores and non-gradated measures’ points of change vs. Time in Mongolia.

 

 

Figure 2b. Graph of Polity IV scores, FHPR scores, and non-gradated measures’ points of change vs. Time in Taiwan.

 

 

The inclusion of the PRC dataset was most valuable in its contribution of month/year data, and it designated Mongolia as ‘democratic’ at the completion of its first election in September 1990. DD also specified 1990, and FHED specified 1991.  The margin of difference between these dates is small enough to warrant an investigation of variations in methodology as an explanation, which ultimately revealed that the timing discrepancies were a result of variations in temporal scale and marking between indices. The 1990 Democratic Revolution of Mongolia is a clear benchmark for Mongolia’s transition to democracy, and the relative constancy of the Polity IV and FHPR data after the mid-90s reflects that.

Unlike Mongolia, Taiwan does not have a singular clear-cut event marking its democratization. Reflective of the disorder leading up to its first democratic presidential election, Polity and FHPR scores showed notable divergence. Also highlighted was the correspondence between Polity and PRC: the critical shift in Polity from -1 to 7 occurs between 1991 and 1992, coinciding with PRC’s denomination of Taiwan as ‘Semidemocratic’ in 1992. This was attributed to the December 1992 elections for the renewal of the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s most important parliamentary body. From 1992 onwards, Taiwan’s Polity IV score steadily increases but its FHPR score remains in a state of perpetual instability.

Taiwan remains the best case for utilizing Polity in conjunction with FHPR. Polity IV helped to determine when Taiwan exhibited the institutional components of democracy, while FHPR sought a more holistic approach, thereby reflecting the instability inherent to transitioning states through scores that that move in both positive and negative directions.

1. Conclusions

While, by and large, the same conclusions were reached, revisiting Regional Democracy Report 2012 has been a worthwhile task. Familiarity with the region allowed excess information to be trimmed and deleted, and familiarity with the measures allowed for improvements be made to their analyses. On the whole, the quality of democracy in East Asia remains virtually unchanged since last year’s report. Within the confines of the six countries examined, there is little room for the natural (domestically-rooted) growth or decline of democracy. The longstanding stability and incurred strength of the authoritarian regimes in North Korea and China, suggest that, with the exception of a major mass-mobilizing event or external/ international imposition, neither country will be undergoing a transition to democracy in the foreseeable future. The reverse is true for Japan.

In the cases of South Korea, Taiwan and Mongolia, each appears to have survived what is often considered the ‘critical stage of democratization’ following a regime transition. This denotes the time during which a newly formed democracy is most susceptible to reverting back to dictatorship, either when the first election occurs and power is subsumed and consolidated in the hands of a new authoritarian leader, or when the first elected body refuses to give up their power after the established term ends. Each of these three countries has experienced multiple, democratic elections since their respective transitions, and are, thus, likely to continue to develop as democracies.

 

 

 

 

Appendix A

 

POLI 333D

Professor Ben Nyblade

Louise Lu

March 1, 2012

 

Regional Democracy Report 2012:

East Asia

 

1. Introduction

 

In this report I will assess the quality of democracy in six East Asian countries throughout the past two decades. I will do so by summarizing and analyzing data from six major measures of democracy. Through this analysis, I will argue that utilizing a combination of the Polity IV and Freedom House Political Rights indices is the most effective way to fulfill my objective.

For the purposes of this paper, I define democracy as being comprised of two attributes: A. Competition and B. Participation. Within each of these attributes, I identify two components: A1. Regulation of political contestation, A2. Competitiveness of political participation, B1. Right to vote, and B2. Fairness of the voting process, all of which are necessary but not sufficient for democracy. The vertical organization of this conceptualization of democracy heeds Munck and Verkullen’s criticism of both maximalist and minimalist definitions.[5]

1. Summary

The data used in the preparation of this regional democracy report was aggregated from the following six indices: i. ACLP- Democracy and Dictatorship ii. Polity IV iii. Freedom House, iv. Coppedge and Reinecke- Polyarchy, Political Regime Change and vi. Vanhanen. The respective types, attributes, measurement levels, and aggregation rules of each of these six measures are summarized in Table 1 below.

Table 1. Summary of the six measures of democracy utilized.

Name		Type	Attributes1	Measurement Level	Aggregation Rule
ACLP- DD		Dichotomous	Contestation	Nominal	Multiplicative
			Offices(2 components)
Polity IV		Gradated	Executive Recruitment(3 components s)	Ordinal	Additive (of weighted scores)
			Executive Authority
			Political Competition(2 components)
FH	PR	Gradated	Electoral Process(3 components)	Ordinal	Additive (at variable level)
			Political Pluralism/Participation(4 components)
			Functioning ofGovernment(3 components)
	CL	Gradated	Freedom of Expression/ Belief(4 components)
			Associational Rights(3 components)
			Rule of Law(4 components)
			Personal Autonomy(4 components)
	ED	Dichotomous	Same as FH PR	Nominal	Additive (with cut-off point)
Polyarchy		Gradated	Contestation(4 components)	Ordinal	Guttman scale (hierarchical),
PRC		Trichotomous	Competitiveness	Ordinal(with residual category)	None
			Inclusiveness
			Civil and Political Liberties(3 components)
Vanhanen		Gradated	Competition	Interval	Multiplicative
			Participation

 

¹All unspecified = not abstracted into components

 

 

A summary of the data compiled from the six measures described in Table 1 above for each of the six countries to be examined in this report can be found in Table 2 below.

Table 2. Summary of democracy scores in East Asia

Measure	DD  (ACLP)	Polity IV	Freedom House			CR- Polyarchy		PRC	Vanhanen
			PR	CL	ED	Poly	Cont
Scale	0/1	-10 – +10	7-1		N/Y	10-0	1-9	A,D,S(T)	0 – 100
Temporal Scope	1990-2008	1990- 2010	1990- 2011			1985*, 2000		≈1990 – 1998	1990-2000
Country Scores
China	0	-7	7	7 à61	N	10,10	1,1	A	0
Japan	1	10	1à12	1à2	Y	0,0	9,9	N/A	28.68à… 24.382
Mongolia	13	2 à103	4à 23	4à23	NàY3	10, 1	1,8	Tà…D3	7.86…à 23.63
N. Korea	0	-9	7	7	N	10,10	1,1	A	0
S. Korea	1	6à84	2	3 à 24	Y	4,3	5,6	D	33.23…à 28.994
Taiwan	0à 15	-1 à105	3 à 15	3à 25	NàY5	7,0	3,9	Tà…D5	5.17…à 29.385

 

¹China FH CL 1990-97: 7, 1998- 2011: 6

²Japan FH PR 1990-92: 1, 1993: 2, 1995-2011: 1

FH CL: 1990: 1, 1991- 2011: 2

VH: 1990-92: 28.68, 1993-95: 31.94, 1996-99: 27.11, 2000: 24.38

³Mongolia DD: until 1990: 0

            P4: 1990-91: 2, 1992-95: 9, 1996-2010: 10

            FH PR: 1990: 4, 1991: 2, 1992: 3, 1993- 2011: 2

            FH CL: 1990: 4, 1991: 3, 1992: 2, 1993- 2002: 3, 2003- 2011: 2

            FH ED: 1990: N, 1991-2011: Y

PRC: 11/1988–9/1990: T, 9/1990–12/1998: D

            VH: 1990-91: 7.86, 1992-95: 19.63, 1996-99: 23.6, 2000: 19.32

⁴South Korea P4: 1990- 97: 6, 1998- 2010: 8

            FH CL: 1990-92: 3, 1993- 2011; 2

Vanhanen: 1990-91: 33.23, 1992- 1995: 30.29, 1996: 30.42, 1997-1999: 31.31, 2000: 28.99

⁵Taiwan DD: 1990-95: 0, 1996- 2008: 1

            P4: 1990-91: -1, 1992-95: 7, 1996: 8, 1999- 2003:9, 2004- 2010: 10

FH PR: 1990-92: 3, 1993: 4, 1994-95: 3, 1996-99: 2 2000-02: 1, 2003-05: 2, 2006: 1, 2007-09: 2, 2010: 1

FH CL: 1990-92: 3, 1993: 4, 1994-95: 3, 1996-99: 2, 2000-04: 2,2005-09: 1, 2010- 11: 2

            FH ED: 1990-95: N, 1996-2011: Y

PRC: 10/1988–12/1991: T, 12/1991–3/1996: S, 3/1996–12/1998: D

VH: 1990-91: 5.17, 1992-94: 6.18, 1995: 6.17, 1996-97: 22.78, 1998-99: 23.66, 2000: 29.86

 

In Table 2, the temporal scope within which data was aggregated is limited to 1990 onwards. The data from this time period specifies that North Korea, China and Japan do not undergo any notable changes; South Korea experiences very minor fluctuations; and Mongolia and Taiwan undergo significant political regime shifts.

A brief investigation of China and North Korea reveals unanimous agreement across all measures that both countries are non-democratic.[6] Contrary to its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea is an established dictatorship. North Korea’s constitution claims it to be a democratic multi-party system, but it is a de facto authoritarian single-party system. Leadership is restricted to the Workers’ Party of Korea by law, and absolute control is concentrated in a single leader whose identity is determined via a hereditary power structure. The framework of China’s government is similar; formally the People’s Republic of China, it is a multi-party republic nominally, but a single-party authoritarian state in practice. The Communist Party of China has held power since 1949, and continues to maintain unitary control over the state, military and media.

The measures unanimously place Japan at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Japan is a constitutional monarchy that exhibits all the systematic and structural characteristics of an established parliamentary democracy, i.e. a constitutional separation of powers and checks and balances. Although the Liberal Democratic Party held nearly continuous power for 54 years, the recent victory of the Democratic Party of Japan in 2009 demonstrated a peaceful alternation of power, and had no adverse effects on its scores.[7]

Formally the Republic of Korea, South Korea receives scores that generally reflect a mid-tier quality of democracy. There are a number of minor fluctuations in its scores both within and between measures, most likely due to its comparatively recent regime transition in 1987. Regardless of these oscillations, the collective data from 1990 onwards confirms South Korea’s status as a presidential republic. Currently, five parties are represented in its legislature, with the Grand National Party holding a majority of seats.

In the cases of Mongolia and Taiwan, there is visibly greater fluidity in the aggregated data.  These two countries underwent transitions to democracy at the beginning of, or throughout, the 1990s respectively. The variations in their particular scores make these two countries the most effective models for our analysis. Thus, they will receive a separate discussion in Part III.

 

1. Analysis

It is misleading to denote all of the measures used in the construction of this report as measures of ‘democracy.’ Among the indices examined, only ACLP- DD, FHED, PRC, and Vanhanen, claim to be measuring a conceptualization of ‘democracy.’ Of the other sources utilized, Polity IV measures ‘polity’ (institutional democracy vs. institutional autocracy), FH PRCL measures ‘freedom’ (political rights and civil liberties), and Coppedge and Reinecke measure ‘polyarchy.’ While these concepts are strongly related to ‘democracy,’ determining the most suitable measurement of the definition of ‘democracy’ at hand would require the dissembling of all of these measures into their respective attributes, as depicted in Table 1, and the reassembling of relevant measures to determine the most useful combination.

In carrying out this process, the prototypal trade-off between validity and reliability surfaces. For example, while the Vanhanen index is easily the most replicable and, thus, the most reliable, the variables it proposes for its two attributes have the lowest validity for the present definition of democracy. This critical caveat discontinues its further inclusion in the analysis. Conversely, while FH PRCL examines 25 comprehensive components in total, and thus is more valid, it is also one of the least reliable, due to the lack of transparency in methodology that makes it almost impossible to replicate.

Confronted with these dilemmas, I have selected a truncated version of Polity IV and FHPR as the combination of measures that best encapsulates ‘democracy’ for my purposes. This combination ensures attributes A. Competition and B. Participation will both be captured, and, thus, is highly valid.  I argue this on the basis of the correlations between the attributes and component breakdowns of ‘democracy’ as defined in this paper and those defined in the Polity IV and FHPR indices. These correlations are illustrated in Table 3.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table 3. Summary of the attributes and components of this report’s definition of democracy contra Polity IV and Freedom House PR.

RDR	Attributes	A. Competition		B. Participation
	Components	A1. Regulation of contestation	A2. Competitiveness of contestation	B1. Right to vote	B2. Fairness of the voting process
P4	Attributes	Executive Recruitment Executive Recruitment Political Competition		N/A
	Components	3.1 XRREG Regulation of Chief Executive Recruitment	3.2 XRCOMP Competitiveness of Executive Recruitment: 3.6 PARCOMP The Competitiveness of Participation		3.5 PARREG Regulation of Participation
FH PR	Attributes	N/A	B. Political Pluralism and Participation	B. Political Pluralism And Participation	A. Electoral Process
	Components		2. Is there a significant opposition vote and a realistic possibility for the opposition to increase its support or gain power through elections?	3. Are the people’s political choices free from domination by the military, foreignpowers, totalitarian parties, religious hierarchies, economic oligarchies, or any other powerful group? 4. Do cultural, ethnic, religious, or other minority groups have full political rights and electoral opportunities?	1. Is the head of government or other chief national authority elected through free and fair elections? 2. Are the national legislative representatives elected through free and fair elections? 3. Are the electoral laws and framework fair?

 

Table 3 identifies the four components from Polity IV and the six components from FHPR that correspond to at least one of the two attributes used in this report. The lack of a parallel component for A1 in FHPR and B1 in Polity IV indicates that the former better captures the attribute B, and the latter better captures the attribute A. This evokes the question of how strong the correlation is between these two measures. To address this, a graphical comparison of the scores summarized in Table 2 for Polity IV vs. FHPR was developed in Figure 1 below.

 

Figure 1. Graph of Polity IV scores vs. Freedom House PR scores.

 

 

By linear regression, the correlation coefficient R was calculated as -0.8769, indicating that these two measures share a strong correlation. However, as foreshadowed by Polity IV’s lack of component B1 and FHPR’s lack of component A1, this relationship is not empirically perfect (R ≠ -1 or 1). Such an observation emphasizes the importance of using these measures in combination with one another, as and neither offers a wholly valid assessment of democracy independently, but together they can offset each other’s gaps.

The utility behind combining Polity IV and FHPR is not detectable in North Korea, China and Japan, as all measures generally agree for these cases. A comparison of this data unveils a number of noteworthy patterns, both endogenous to individual measures and exogenous across different measures of the same type. For instance, all assessments are identical for in the non-gradated measures (with the exception of a lack of data for Japan in PRC). This conveys the one-dimensional character of the information inherent to non-gradated measures.

The relationships found when comparing gradated measures in these stable regimes suggest that the Polity IV data is more generous at the ‘institutionalized democracy’ end of the spectrum than the ‘institutionalized autocracy’ end. While both FHPRCL and Coppedge and Reinecke give North Korea scores at the ‘least democratic’ limits of their data, a consistent 7|7 and 10|1 respectively, Polity IV maintains a consistent score of -7 for China and -9 for North Korea. Taking into account its inverse attribution of Japan with a consistent 10, the Polity IV index portrays a skewed region of East Asia that more democratic than it is in reality. This pattern recapitulates the importance of using Polity IV in combination with FHPR.

The efficacy of this combination becomes more evident when they are used to examine less stable political regimes. In the cases of Mongolia and, to a greater extent, Taiwan, these two gradated measures convey much more information than would otherwise be possible with dichotomous measures and balance each other’s assessments. Figures 2a and 2b were constructed to illustrate this point below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 2a. Graph of Polity IV scores and Freedom House PR scores vs. time (years) in Mongolia and the non-gradated measures’ points of change.

 

 

Figure 2b. Graph of Polity IV scores and Freedom House PR scores vs. time (years) in Taiwan and the non-gradated measures’ points of change.

 

Around 1990, Mongolia underwent a regime transition from authoritarianism to democracy through a peaceful revolution that ousted the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, which had held power since 1921. Accordingly, Figure 2a illustrates Mongolia as being in a state of flux throughout the early 1990’s. It is evident that there is some disagreement regarding the timing of Mongolia’s transition, as the shift in FHPR occurs between 1990 and 1991, but it occurs between 1991 and 1992 in Polity IV. To contextualize these differences, data from non-gradated measures was added to our time series analysis. The PRC dataset was most valuable in its contribution of month/year data, and it designated Mongolia as ‘democratic’ at the completion of its first election in September 1990. ACLP- DD was the earliest in declaring Mongolia a democracy in 1990, and FHED was the latest in 1991.

There is a margin of differences between these dates is slim, and thus, I account for them as being a result of differences in temporal marking between sources. The 1990 Democratic Revolution of Mongolia is a clear-cut benchmark for its establishment of a democratic regime, and the relative constancy of the Polity IV and FHPR data after the mid-90s reflects that. Figure 2a also illustrates the same pattern of Polity IV being more generous at the ‘institutionalized democracy’ end of its scale; after 1996, Polity IV maintains a 10, while FHPR maintains a 2. This pattern is replicated in Figure 2b; after 2004, Polity IV gives Taiwan a constant 10, while FHPR fluctuates between 1 and 2. This variability is likely a reflection of Taiwan’s relatively more recent and tumultuous transition.

Unlike Mongolia, Taiwan has no single, agreed-upon event marking its democratization. In 1979, a rapidly suppressed pro-democracy protest know as the Kaohsiung Incident united the incumbent governments opposition, but it was not until 1986 that the formation of new political parties occurred. Soon after, in 1987, the repressive martial law was lifted, and in the following year, the restrictions on newspaper registration followed suit. This succession of events culminated in the country’s first democratic presidential election with universal suffrage in March 1996.

The scope of the timeline in Figure 2b limits our analysis to the final stages of Taiwan’s democratization. Reflective of the disorder leading up to its first democratic presidential election, the graph illustrates internal fluctuations in Polity IV and FHPR, as well as external discrepancies between measures.  There is a correspondence between Polity IV and PRC in Figure 2b; the crucial shift in Polity IV from -1 to 7 occurs between 1991 and 1992, coinciding with PRC’s denomination of Taiwan as ‘Semidemocratic’ in 1992. This is most likely explained by the December 1992 elections for the total renewal of the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s most important parliamentary body.[8] From 1992 onwards, Taiwan’s Polity IV scores steadily increase but its FHPR scores are in a state of perpetual instability.

The usefulness of a combination of Polity IV and FHPR is exemplified not only in their individual enhancements of the details of Taiwan’s democratization process, but also in their separate capitalizations on different attributes of democracy. Polity IV helps to determine when Taiwan exhibited the institutional components of political competition, while FHPR shows the inherent social instability in a transitioning state through scores that that move in both positive and negative directions.

 

1. Conclusion

With regards to the region of East Asia, I extract the following conclusions from the data examined: since 1990, (I) North Korea and China have consistently demonstrated the lowest, or no, quality of democracy; (II) Japan has consistently demonstrated the highest quality of democracy; (III) South Korea has demonstrated a mid-tier quality of democracy with minor fluctuations; and (IV) Mongolia and Taiwan have undergone regime transitions and now have high qualities of democracy.

With regards to the measures utilized, the following conclusions were reached: (I) all of the measures agreed with one another in the stable regimes; (II.a) a trimmed combination of Polity IV and FHPR provides the best possible assessment of Mongolia and Taiwan; and (II.b) the efficacy of Polity IV and FHPR is exemplified in unstable regimes.

Overall, the region of East Asia is a somewhat peculiar conglomerate of countries. Although two of its most powerful actors are strongly authoritarian regimes, there is generally no volatility either internally between them or externally with the democratic regimes. The power dynamics in East Asia seem to exist not in spite of the differences in regime type, but rather complementary to them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Appendix B

 

¹China

FH CL 1990-97: 7, 1998- 2012: 6

 

²Japan

FH PR 1990-92: 1, 1993: 2, 1995-2012: 1

FH CL: 1990: 1, 1991- 2013: 2

VH: 1990-92: 28.68, 1993-95: 31.94, 1996-99: 27.11, 2000: 24.38

³Mongolia

DD: until 1990: 0

            P4: 1990-91: 2, 1992-95: 9, 1996-2010: 10

            FH PR: 1990: 4, 1991: 2, 1992: 3, 1993- 2011: 2 2011-12: 1

            FH CL: 1990: 4, 1991: 3, 1992: 2, 1993- 2002: 3, 2003- 2012: 2

            FH ED: 1990: N, 1991-2012: Y

PRC: 11/1988–9/1990: T, 9/1990–12/1998: D

            VH: 1990-91: 7.86, 1992-95: 19.63, 1996-99: 23.6, 2000: 19.32

⁴South Korea

P4: 1990- 97: 6, 1998- 2010: 8

            FH PR: 1990- 2003: 2, 2004- 2012: 1

            FH CL: 1990-92: 3, 1993- 2012: 2

Vanhanen: 1990-91: 33.23, 1992- 1995: 30.29, 1996: 30.42, 1997-1999: 31.31, 2000: 28.99

⁵Taiwan

DD: 1990-95: 0, 1996- 2008: 1

            P4: 1990-91: -1, 1992-95: 7, 1996: 8, 1999- 2003:9, 2004- 2010: 10

FH PR: 1990-92: 3, 1993: 4, 1994-95: 3, 1996-99: 2,  2000-01: 1, 2002-05: 2, 2006: 1, 2007-09: 2, 2010- 13: 1

FH CL: 1990-92: 3, 1993: 4, 1994-95: 3, 1996- 2004: 2, 2005-09: 1, 2010- 11: 2

            FH ED: 1990-95: N, 1996-2011: Y

PRC: 10/1988–12/1991: T, 12/1991–3/1996: S, 3/1996–12/1998: D

VH: 1990-91: 5.17, 1992-94: 6.18, 1995: 6.17, 1996-97: 22.78, 1998-99: 23.66, 2000: 29.86