Here it is!

 

POLI 423

Professor Ben Nyblade

Louise Lu

28 February 2013

 

Regional Democracy Report 2013:

East Asia

 

1. Introduction

This report will assess the political regimes of six East Asian countries from 1990 onwards through data aggregated from six major measures of democracy. While the entire region will be overviewed, countries exhibiting regime transitions within the temporal scope examined, Mongolia and Taiwan, will receive specialized analyses. These cases demonstrate the efficacy of the Polity IV, Freedom House Political Rights, and Political Regime Change indices in providing a detailed evaluation of the region.

For the purposes of this report, democracy will be 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. Right to vote, and B2. Fairness of the voting process. These differing levels of abstraction follow Munck and Verkuilen’s vertical conceptualization structure.[1]

 

1. Summary of the region

Scores from each of the following six indices: i. Democracy and Dictatorship ii. Polity IV iii. F, iv. Polyarchy, v. Political Regime Change and vi. Vanhanen Index for each of the six East Asian countries studied: China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan were aggregated and condensed into 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 A for score fluctuation details.

The collective data from these measures specifies that, within the temporal scope examined, 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.

A brief investigation of China and North Korea reveals unanimous agreement across all six measures that both countries are non-democratic (to an extreme degree when referencing the gradated measures). Although North Korea’s constitution claims that the state is a multi-party democracy, it is a single-party dictatorship in practice. Leadership is 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 in Kim Jong-un’s assumption of power following Kim Jong-il’s death.

China shares 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 Communist Party of China has held power since 1949, and continues to maintain unitary control over the state, military and media. Although a peaceful transition of political power occurred in November 2012, the identities of the new executive leaders, namely the President, Xi JinPing, and the members of the Politburo Standing Committee were not democratically determined.

The measures unanimously place Japan in extreme opposition to China and North Korea. Japan is a constitutional monarchy that exhibits all the systematic and structural characteristics of an established parliamentary democracy, with a constitutional separation of powers and checks and balances in place. 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. The quality of Japanese democracy is corroborated by the consistency with which it earns the ‘most democratic’ score possible across gradated measures with varying focal points (i.e. Polity IV, Freedom House and Polyarchy).

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 comparative youth as a democratic nation, having undergone a regime transition a little less than a decade ago 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 scores across time and between measures, which is reflective of the transitions from authoritarianism to democracy that both countries underwent within the temporal scope examined. The variations in individual scores make these two countries the most effective models for analyzing the utility of certain measures. Thus, they will be discussed separately in section IV.

1. Analysis of Measures

Cases of intra- and inter-measurement variance across different regimes reveal a number of noteworthy patterns, both endogenous to individual measures and exogenous across different measures of the same type (dichotomous vs. gradated).

The one-dimensionality of the information imparted by dichotomous measures is easily 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 substantial claims to be made as to the actual quality of these four democracies, and, thus, would be inept at differentiating between otherwise these distinctive states. The limited geographical and temporal scope of this project encourages the inclusion of qualitative information for each state, which dichotomous measures are ineffectual at providing.

The relationships found when comparing gradated measures 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.

An examination of the data aggregation techniques for the different measures utilized warrants a brief discussion of the prototypal trade-off between validity and reliability. While the Vanhanen index is easily the most replicable and, thus, the most reliable, the variables utilized for competition and participation are not adequate measurements of either concept, and, thus, the measures is evaluated as having low validity. Conversely, while FH PRCL is valid in that it comprehensively examines 25 individual components in operationalizing its concepts of political rights and civil liberties, it is also one of the least reliable, due to a lack of transparency in methodology that makes FH almost impossible to replicate.

In spite of its lack of replicability, the FH Political Rights index has been selected along with the Polity IV index as the measures that will provide the most informational assessments of Mongolia and, to a greater extent Japan. 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. Right to vote	B2. Fairness of the voting process
P IV	Attributes	Executive Recruitment Executive Recruitment Political Competition		N/A	Executive Recruitment 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		3.1 XRREG Regulation of Chief Executive Recruitment: 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?

 

Four components from Polity IV and the six components from FHPR 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 evokes the question of how strong the correlation is between these two measures. To address this question, refer to Figure 1 for a graphical comparison of Polity IV vs. FHPR country scores.

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

 

 

By linear regression, the correlation coefficient, R, was determined to be -0.8679. This is indicative of a strong correlation, but far from empirically perfect (R= +/- 1). Thus, there is some merit to using these measures in conjunction with one another, as neither offers a wholly valid assessment of democracy as defined in this report, but, together, they mutually offset one another’s lapses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Analysis of Mongolia and Taiwan

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

 

 

Around 1990, Mongolia underwent a regime transition from authoritarianism to democracy through a peaceful revolution that ousted the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, the prevailing party in1921. Accordingly, Figure 2a illustrates Mongolia as being in a state of flux throughout the early 1990’s. Slight discrepancies arose in determining 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. 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 the state’s transition to democracy, and the relative constancy of the Polity IV and FHPR data after the mid-90s reflects that.

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

 

 

Unlike Mongolia, Taiwan does not have a singular clear-cut event marking its democratization. In 1979, a rapidly suppressed pro-democracy protest known as the Kaohsiung Incident united the then-incumbent government’s 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 election with universal suffrage in March 1996.

The limitations on temporal scope in this report limits analysis to the final stages of Taiwan’s democratization. Reflective of the disorder leading up to its first democratic presidential election, Figure 2b illustrates the internal fluctuations within Polity IV and FHPR, and the external inconsistencies between the two measures in the data for Taiwan. Figure 2b also highlights the correspondence between Polity IV and PRC: the critical 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 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.

The usefulness of a combination of Polity IV and FHPR is exemplified by the individual enhancements of this time-series analysis of Taiwan’s democratization process that each provides. Polity IV helps to determine when Taiwan exhibited the institutional components of political competition, while FHPR speaks more to the social instability inherent to transitioning states through scores that that move in both positive and negative directions.

 

1. Conclusions

Over the past two decades in East Asia, North Korea and China have consistently demonstrated the lowest, or no, quality of democracy; Japan has consistently demonstrated the highest quality of democracy; South Korea has demonstrated a mid-tier quality of democracy; and Mongolia and Taiwan have undergone regime transitions and now have high qualities of democracy. In providing this assessment, all of the measures agreed with one another among the stable regimes; and fluctuations between measures among the unstable regimes, Mongolia and Taiwan, suggested that Polity IV and FHPR be used in conjunction with one another.

The region of East Asia assessed in this report represents an unusual conglomerate of political regimes. Although two of its most powerful actors are strongly authoritarian, there is generally no volatility either between themselves, or with surrounding democracies. The power dynamics in East Asia seem to exist not in spite of these differences in regime type, but rather complementary to them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Appendix A

 

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

 

 

Like:

Think Progress

I really enjoy this political blog for the following reasons:

1. It’s written from a left-central (a little more left than central) point of view, which I personally identify well with – yes I realize this is a ‘preaching to the congregation’ kind of effect, but it does not take away from the fact that I find it a more enjoyable read than, say, the Tea Party Nation blog;

2. It categorizes and colour-codes  its posts;

3. Elaborating on reason 2, it’s generally very visually appealing: lots of pictures and videos breaking up portions of text;

4. The font is of a large-enough-to-be-read-easily, small-enough-to-be-professional size;

5. The actual content of the posts is relevant, up-to-date, and covers a wide range of topics;

6. The tone of voice is relatively moderate and unbiased, often presenting varying points of view (as opposed to extremely liberal/ conservative/ or focusing on a singular, particular stance);

7. The writing style is concise yet personable, and is very informative while retaining a level of conversationally; and

8. It is interactive, by allowing individuals to post on the sidelines of each post (via social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc).

The success of this blog speaks for itself; it has over 70,000 likes on Facebook, and 106,000 followers on Twitter. In an age where the ‘cool’ thing to do is to be apathetic about politics, this is a noteworthy audience. Putting aside the fact that I am probably representative of Think Progress’ ideal demographic, characteristics 3 – 8 can be more generally applicable to my idea of what a ‘good’ political blog is.

Hate:

Obnoxio The Clown

After my initial scan of the blog, the only reaction I had was: What is going on???? 

I am hoping that this blog is a joke. Everything from the ridiculous content and overly colloquial language to the lacklustre presentation with no visuals of any sort makes me, first, appalled, and, then, disgusted by this blog. Given that it is already hard for me to take any anarchist seriously, it doesn’t help that he consistently undermines himself in his posts *i.e. when he titles something:

WHY “RENEWABLE” SOURCES OF ENERGY DON’T WORK IN THE REAL WORLD

and then writes an update saying:

“Update: This may have potential. (OK, that was pretty shocking. I’m sorry I didn’t offer more resistance. Etc.)”

He exhibits a lot of the same characteristics of ‘bad writing’ that we talked about in class, and fails in all of my criteria for good blogging (#3- 8 above). I don’t think I could have found a better example of a bad blog; honest, it’s worth taking a look it if only for the entertainment value…

Disagreements amongst scholars have led to a proliferation of different conceptualizations of democracy, ranging from procedural minimalist definitions quoting singularly sufficient components, i.e. Schumpeter’s competitive elitism, to  multifaceted maximalist definitions, i.e. those used by Freedom House. While I see the merit in minimalist definitions of democracy in terms of differentiation, especially in the conduction of quantitative research, if I were given a chance to talk about what democracy is at a dinner party I would utilize a wholesome, albeit idyllic, maximalist approach.  It is common in mainstream thought to define democracy ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people.” This provides a straightforward framework for my basic ‘dinner party definition’ of democracy.

When I speak of democracy in this way, I think of a variety of necessary conditions that must be satisfied; government of the people speaks to the concept of representation; things like universal adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and one vote per person come to mind; this is also interrelated to government ‘by the people,’ which implies that we, as citizens, are a sovereign body, holding the ultimate decision-making powers. ‘By the people’ also makes me think about the concept of contestation; both in the presence of multiple parties, and in the right of ordinary citizens, under limited restrictions, to run for office.  To me, government ‘for the people’ revolves around the concept of accountability; elected governments must reflect the wants and needs of their electorate, and they must be willing to peacefully give up office if the people vote them out. That is to say, incumbents must be accountable to the public; i.e. when the MP in your district does a poor job, and does not vote according to his or her platform, you have the ability to remove them from his or her position at the next election.

“So, what is democracy anyway?” In sum, democracy is ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people,’ which evokes the correlative concepts of representation, contestation and accountability…a definition which for academic purposes could be problematic, but, for dinner party purposes, would more than suffice.

Attached in .docx format here: Initial Thoughts on East Asia 

Enjoy 🙂