1 - Social capital and democratic support in Asia: Evidence from a cross-national analysis

Recently, considerable scholarly attention has been paid to examining whether and to what extent new democracies in Asia have been affected by democratic regression, a “substantial decline in the democratic quality of political institutions processes in a given democracy and the capacity of a democratic system to prevent or recover from such a downward trend” (Croissant and Haynes 2021, 2). Yet, efforts to explain this phenomenon remain inchoate because most of the related literature focuses on institutional and agential factors, notably the political rise of populist-authoritarian elites and ineffective political parties and other democratic institutions. Indeed, little is known about many aspects of Asian democratic regression, particularly the roles of citizens’ democratic commitment. 
This paper thus seeks to explore to what extent citizens’ preferences over democratic values affect their democratic commitment and their countries’ overall quality of democracy. We mainly focus on social capital, which has been regarded as a ‘moral resource’ of democratic values and is underpinned by political and personal trust, communalism, and networks of personal ties. To test these propositions, we undertake the task in two steps, finding the individual-level relationship between social capital and democratic commitment; and then turning to the presentation of the correlation between the overall levels of social capital and aggregate numerical indicators of political regimes. The findings from statistical tests are expected to not only enhance understanding of the influence of communitarian ideas and political culture on democratic quality but also offer a way of identifying and measuring democratic regression in Asia.

Co-Author 1
Woo Jeong Ko, Sungshin Women's University