The Laboratory for Comparative Social Research announces the next regular seminar, which will be held as a zoom session on October, 22 at 16-30 p.m. (GMT+3). Hyungjun Suh (Assistant Professor of Sociology, HSE) will deliver a report “Emancipative Values and Support for Democracy in East Asia: 2005-2019”.
A link to zoom session is available upon request (lcsr.event@hse.ru)

The heated academic debate about the decline in support for democracy is still going on. However, previous studies disproportionately focus on the United States and Western European countries. Methodologically speaking, previous studies tend to use the country and the individual as the analytic units. To fill these research gaps, this paper tests the emancipative value thesis proposed by Welzel using nine East Asian countries (China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand). This paper constructs a pseudo panel dataset using the group by age and gender as the analytic unit from the World Values Survey 5th to 7th Waves. Fixed-effect analysis results suggest that, out of four dimensions of the emancipative values (tolerance, autonomy, people’s voice, and gender equality in democracy), autonomy and gender equality are most significant. Surprisingly, autonomy is negatively associated with support for democracy: but the negative association mostly comes from non-democratic countries. Meanwhile, more equal gender norms are positively associated with support for democracy. Findings imply that the role of emancipative values enhancing support for democracy may depend on the sociopolitical contexts, not universal. Also, the link between gender norms and support for democracy provides one explanation of the decline in support for democracy among younger men in East Asian democratic countries.