IS DEMOCRACY THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN?

The East Asia Barometer provides multinational public opinion data, gathered in 2002 and 2003, collected through face-to-face interviews with randomly selected voters in Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand. Employing the data culled from it, Shin and Wells found that in three countries surveyed, a majority of respondents prefer democracy to its alternative, while in the other three, a lingering nostalgia for authoritarianism stands in the way of democratic consolidation. From it, they look at the patterns of democratic commitment that can be discerned in the countries surveyed, and draws some conclusions about the connection between political culture and democratic consolidation.