What Is Liberal about East Asia’s Liberal Democracies?

• In Event: Political Processes in South Korea

Abstract

The left-right has become a near-ubiquitous term to describe political parties and the ideological positions they represent. We show, however, that the liberal versus conservative schema based on the size of government and preferences for redistribution is a uniquely Western one that is not useful—and often inaccurate—for understanding left-right politics in East Asian democracies. Who are the liberals in these democracies, and what values do they hold? Applying the Lipset and Rokkan (1967) model of social origins of party formation to South Korea and Taiwan, we show that democratization occurred under very different social pressures from Western Europe. In both, the right-wing authoritarian response to the primary security threat facing the nascent nation—from North Korea and China, respectively—shaped the contours of the opposition. Consequently, emergent parties “froze” around cleavages based not on distributive politics, but national identity. Using qualitative analyses of campaign pledges and policy cases, analyses of election surveys, and a choice-based survey experiment, we show that the left-right schema rests on very different sociopolitical foundations in East Asia. Our analyses suggest that, given the distinct democratization contexts of Third Wave democracies, it would often be misleading to refer to the progressive or leftist elements in non-Western democracies as “liberals.” The findings caution against the blind use of the left-right schema in cross-national research and policy debates.

Authors

• Joan E. Cho, Wesleyan University

• Aram Hur, The Fletcher School, Tufts University