POLITICAL CONFIDENCE AND PUBLIC CONTESTATION: A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS OF INSTITUTIONAL CONFIDENCE IN EAST ASIA
Tesi di Dottorato
Data di Pubblicazione:
2021
Citazione:
POLITICAL CONFIDENCE AND PUBLIC CONTESTATION: A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS OF INSTITUTIONAL CONFIDENCE IN EAST ASIA / G. Carteny ; supervisor: P. Segatti, C. Vezzoni ; phd director: M. Jessoula. Università degli Studi di Milano, 2021 Jun 07. 33. ciclo, Anno Accademico 2020. [10.13130/carteny-giuseppe_phd2021-06-07].
Abstract:
This dissertation consists in an empirical study of the relationship between democracy and political confidence in East Asia, a region of our globe that goes from Mongolia to Indonesia, as Northern and Southern limits, and from Myanmar to Japan, as Western and Eastern borders. The study of individuals’ confidence in public institutions, often linked with the more general discussion about political legitimacy, arguably represents one of the most analysed and debated topics of political science. Nonetheless, the almost entirety of our knowledge about this relationship derives from theoretical discussion and empirical investigations about the impact, or potential impact, of citizens’ confidence in institutions on democratic viability. Although during the last two decades a burgeoning number of studies about the the interplay between institutions and individuals’ political confidence has been produced, studies investigating this relationship from the opposite perspective, namely the extent to which democracy impacts on individual confidence in institutions, has been seldom investigated.
Institutional studies of political confidence have been increasingly focusing on the extent to which the economic or political performance of state institutions and authorities, or other features of the political system, such as the fairness, responsiveness, and honesty of political process, affect citizens’ confidence in institutions. In those few cases in which the essential features of a democratic system have been considered as potential antecedents of individual confidence in institutions these effects have been investigated in and across democratic regimes, especially in the European and North American contexts. As a consequence, what it is contended is that our knowledge of this relationship, and the largely positive view about said relationship, is to a large extent contingent on the contexts in which it has been studied. For this reason, this work steps out from the usual yard of normative debates and empirical studies about this topic, and focuses on East Asia, a region of our globe providing several opportunities (and challenges) to empirically investigate individual confidence in institutions and its interplay with political institutions.
East Asia nowadays represents one of the most heterogeneous regions of our world on a plethora of structural and systemic features. Among these, East Asia presents a remarkable variety of political systems, ranging from single-party autocratic regimes to pluralistic liberal-democracies, and including several types of ‘hybrid’ regimes, fitting in neither categories. Since the late 1990s and early 2000s data about individual attitudes and behavior across this variety of regimes have been collected, allowing scholars and researchers to reassess, and in some cases challenge, issues and assumptions about a long list of political phenomena, including political confidence. In- deed, while individual-level studies of political confidence in this region have shown that the dynamics generating different degrees of confidence across individuals overlap with those seen in other regions of our globe, descriptive studies of cross-national variations of political confidence in this region have shown that individual confidence in institutions, during the last two decades, has been invariably higher in non-democratic regimes as compared to democratic countries. Several hypotheses and arguments, although scarcely investigated, have been developed in order to explain these aggregate regularities. Some authors attempted to explain these variations following socio-deterministic theories about an increasing mismatch between individual basic orientations to politics and the reality of their political systems
Tipologia IRIS:
Tesi di dottorato
Keywords:
political confidence; public contestation; East Asia; political attitudes; democracy;
Elenco autori:
G. Carteny
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