POLITICAL CONFIDENCE AND PUBLIC CONTESTATION: A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS OF INSTITUTIONAL CONFIDENCE IN EAST ASIA

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 determined by socioeconomic modernization, that is the so-called ‘critical citizens’ theory, or enduring cultural traditions, the so-called ‘Asian Values’ argument. Others have pointed their attention on differences in terms of (especially economic) performance of East Asian governments. Still others have called into question the reliability and validity of individual confidence measures in non-democratic settings. Few scholars have considered the idea that these differences may be related to structural characteristics of the political processes that differentiate democratic regimes from non-democratic ones. In this work, although accounting for alternative explanations both theoretically and empirically, this latter perspective is developed and investigated. Building on arguments and evidence concerning the effects of political competition outputs (namely, election results) on individual-level variations of confidence in institutions, and relying on the renowned theoretical and analytical comparative framework developed by Robert Dahl (1971) in its seminal study on political participation and opposition, this thesis aims to investigate how an essential characteristic of any political system, namely the extent to which a regime provides institutional guarantees for public contestation to a more or less broad share of its population, affects individuals’ confidence in institutions. In order to provide a rigorous, specific, but also comprehensive empirical assessment of this topic, this dissertation is structured as follows. Chapter 1 is dedicated to a theoretical and conceptual discussion about the notion of political confidence and the main explanations of its origins, starting from which the broad research question inspiring this dissertation is presented. About the former topic, building on relatively recent theoretical and conceptual developments, what it is contended is that the notion of confidence is conceptually distinct to the notion of trust, and the former should be preferred to the latter in order to conceptualize the relationship between individuals and public institutions (Ch. 1, Sect. 1.2.1). Furthermore, the relationship between this notion and the related concepts of regime legitimacy and political support is critically assessed in order to define the peculiar nature of the individual attitude under investigation (Ch. 1, Sect. 1.2.2). The chapter, then, continues with a reassessments of the second topic mentioned above, namely a review of theories and explanations of political confidence, based on the ubiquitous categorization of theories of political phenomena distinguishing between culturalist and institutionalist arguments (Ch. 1, Sect. 1.3). Building on these two sections the chapter ends with a discussion concerning the scope of these explanations, and briefly reviewing the debate about the relationship between democracy and political confidence (Ch. 1, Sect. 1.4). In particular, what is claimed is that, while providing opposite and to some extent irreconcilable perspectives about the determinants of political confidence, current theories and explanations of this phenomenon lack arguments assessing the systemic impact of democracy on individual confidence in institutions, for both theoretical reasons and the already mentioned focus of theoretical discussions and empirical investigation on democratic settings, driving to a contingent understanding of the relationship between democracy and political confidence. What it is contended, thus, is that for assessing this issue a different analytical strategy is needed. Chapter 2 is, thus, dedicated to developing the specific argument of this thesis (Ch. 2, Sect. 2.2), discussing the state of art of the empirical research dedicated to political confidence in East Asia, thus introducing the geopolitical context in which this work is situated (Ch. 2, Sect. 2.3), and finally presenting the research design adopted to investigate the main puzzle and related research questions of this research effort (Sect. 2.4). The first section (Sect. 2.2.1) clarifies which is the notion of democracy adopted in this study, that consists in Dahl’s (1971, 1989, 1998) notion of polyarchy and the theoretical and analytical framework that has been produced around this notion (e.g. Coppedge and Reinicke 1990; Coppedge et al. 2008; Teorell et al. 2019). The section then continues (Sect. 2.2.2) with an explanation of why varying levels of democracy are interpreted as variations of levels of public contestation, one of the two dimensions informing the notion of democracy used in this work. The following pages are then dedicated to a discussion about why and how variations of institutional features and dimensions identified by the notion of democracy used in this thesis can be related to varying levels of individuals’ confidence in institutions (Sect. 2.2.3). What it is contended is that variations of these attributes shape the structure of incentives and constraints affecting individuals assessments of institutions and authorities trustworthiness, and that higher degrees of public contestation are likely to produce both positive and negative incentives for individuals’ confidence in public institutions. The following section is then dedicated to the state of art of the study of political confidence in this region, that highlights the main findings and gaps about aggregate- level and individual-level studies of political confidence in this region. By doing so, in this section the East Asian context is presented and the opportunities and challenges given by the structural heterogeneity of this region are discussed, and the necessity of a study able to fill the the lack of contextual analyses of political confidence in this region is underlined. Then, Finally, the chapter ends presenting the specific research questions investigated in the following chapters and the research strategy employed to address these questions (Sect. 2.4.1), as well as the main individual-level and contextual-level data bases of this empirical study (Sect. 2.4.2). The following three chapters of the thesis (Chs. 3, 4, and 5) consist in the three sets of empirical analyses used to address the research questions and the main hypothesis grounding this work. Chapter 3 presents a dimensionality analysis of political confidence in East Asia. What it is claimed is that in order to properly analyse the relationship between democracy and political confidence, what is needed is a prior assessment of whether East Asians confidence in institutions represent a single and general assessment of public institutions, or rather a multidimensional attitude (an assessment seldom performed in previous research). Consequently, this chapter, building on the ongoing debate about political confidence dimensionality in Europe (Ch. 3, Sect. 3.2), and after presenting the main expectations derived by translating this debate in investigates this issue through the means of exploratory and (multi-group) confirmatory factor analyses (EFA and CFA), applied to (almost) all the studies composing the first four rounds of the ABS (Ch. 3, Sect. 3.3). The main finding of this chapter is that, despite the crucial diversities of the countries included in this study on a series of structural factors potentially affecting the way in which East Asians organize their attitudes toward public institutions, a common factor structure of political confidence in this region can be found, and that this configuration consists in a two-dimensional conception distinguishing between confidence in political institutions (e.g. national governments and national assemblies) and confidence in implementative institutions (e.g. civil services and police forces). Chapter 4 is then dedicated to an analysis of these two types of political confidence in the aggregate. In the first part of the chapter, a descriptive analysis of East Asians’ confidence in both political and implementative institutions is provided (Ch. 4, Sect. 4.2). In this part the cross-national variations of political confidence already highlighted by previous research are presented, although in a broader picture, spanning across approximately fifteen years of evidence provided by the ABS data. The stable differences between East Asian countries are then assessed through a bivariate and multivariate correlational analyses, performed in order to test alternative explanations of these cross-national patterns (Ch. 4, Sect. 4.4 and Sect. 4.5). What it is shown is that the selected indicator of political contestation levels consistently negatively correlates with the index dedicated to ABS respondents’ political confidence, representing the best predictor of cross-national variations of aggregate levels of these attitudes, outperforming all the alternative explanations. What the chapter shows, however, is that the impact of contestation on aggregate levels of political confidence is much stronger for confidence in political institutions as compared to confidence in implementative ones. Chapter 5 then represents the last empirical chapter of this dissertation, and presents a multilevel analysis of political confidence, spanning across the second, third, and fourth rounds of the ABS, and providing an assessment of both individual-level and contextual-level determinants of political confidence, and their interplay. After providing hypotheses concerning the relationship between relevant individual-level antecedents of political confidence as identified by previous research, and expectations concerning the direct and indirect effect of the contextual variable of interest (Ch. 5, Sect. 5.2), a series of hierarchical linear regression models (HLMs) are performed in order to account for both individual-level and contextual-level variation of political confidence (Ch. 5, Sect. 5.4). What these models provide is, first, a reassessment of previous findings about the direct effect of political contestation on confidence in political institutions and confidence in implementative institutions, partially confirming previous results, but also highlighting even more the different impact of political contestation on the two indices of political confidence, strong and statistically significant for average levels of confidence in political institutions, while much weaker and even not significant in affecting confidence in implementative ones. Second, the HLMs return a clear picture about the individual-level determinants of political confidence in this region, showing how institutional performance indicators represent the best individual-level predictors of confidence across all the contexts considered, and how their effects vary according to the type of political confidence taken into account. Third, these models show how the indirect effect of political contestation, considered as a moderating factor of the effect of some individual-level determinants, operates differently according to the type of political confidence considered, moderating the effect of individual-level variables when considering confidence in implementative institutions but not in the case of the other type investigated in this work. The chapter, hence, returns a rather puzzling scenario that is further discussed in the last section of this chapter (Ch. 5, Sect. 5.5). The dissertation, then, concludes with a reassessment of the main findings proposed in previous chapters, the limitations of the study, and the main implications for the empirical study of political confidence in East Asia and beyond.