Table 1.3: What do people think it is? We asked an open-ended question. It's the only open-ended question in this survey: "What does democracy mean to you?" It's very expensive in survey research to ask an open-ended question, because your interviewer has to write it down and somebody else has to code it into categories. We struggled over the categories. I am not that happy with the categories we came up with. It's not that I have a better set of categories than my colleagues, but I feel like, in the end, this table doesn't tell you what we really found out.

What we really found out, I think—and one of the good things about the book is that each country chapter is written by the country team. So the China chapter is written by Tianjian Shi, who is a Chinese who participated in the fieldwork. So there is a richness in the capability to interpret what the data mean that you really can't get off the surface of the table.

But if you see that for the Chinese, 28.8 percent said that democracy is by and for the people—they didn't say that. They said all kinds of different things, and we coded it back into that category of "by and for the people." That's our language. But basically, a lot of Chinese feel that democracy is when the government takes care of you. It's the classic Confucian "father and mother" government, and the Chinese are by far the highest in the region of those who see democracy in that meaning. Taiwan is the next one down the line, with 17.1 percent.

The Koreans, for example, give more emphasis than anybody else to social equality and justice.

People were allowed to give up to three answers, by the way, so it comes to more than 100.

A lot of Koreans felt that democracy is when the working class—which has been struggling for many, many years and demonstrating and getting shot and thrown in jail—finally, the government cares about the working class and so forth.

So there are various ideas here.

But when you compare our two kinds of anchor countries of China and Japan, the Chinese are more positioned to accept when their government, which describes itself as a socialist regime that knows how to take care of the people, says it's a democracy. That kind of is congruent with Chinese people's concept of democracy, which the government has helped to shape, of course. It's not just there. It has been shaped by the regime. In Japan, you would say people are kind of divided and unsure about what they think democracy is, by comparison with others in the region. A lot of them think it's freedom and liberty. A lot of them think it's social equality and justice. A lot of them just think it's a good thing—18.1 percent, generally positive, something good. A lot of them don't know—35.5 percent.

We have been asked how come so many people in Japan answer a lot of questions "Don't know." Our Japanese team, experienced survey researchers in Japan, says they often find this in Japan. Japanese people are kind of shy about answering attitude questions. They are not used to taking a stand and saying, "I think this," and "I think that." If you ask them a behavioral question or what their education is, they will answer the facts, but they are shy about attitudes.

In China, we have a lot of "Don't know" answers. We have done some tests on that. Usually the "Don't know" answers are actually the people with a lower educational level, who probably really don't know.

So it's a difference in the inner meaning of a response category.

If you look at Table 1.13, "Commitment to Rule of Law," you think you have a democracy, but now we are not going to use the D word and we're going to ask you about some values that you hold or principles in which you believe—whether the leader should follow procedure, for example. In China, 47.3 percent, fewer than half, the majority is saying, "Well, he doesn't have to follow procedure. The leader is the leader. Let him produce results, whatever it takes." The Hong Kong people and the Taiwan people and the Korea people are much more legalistic: "The leader should follow procedure." In Japan, it's only a little bit above 50 percent.

For "Judges should decide cases independently," China is the lowest, at 30.9 percent, in the region. In the other countries, that attitude is more strongly established, particularly in Japan and Korea, both above 60 percent. These are countries where people hold to what we are classifying here as rule-of-law values that are more deeply established, and not so much in China.

There's an error here. "Reject experts decide everything" doesn't belong in that table. It should be deleted. "Legislature should check executive," and so forth.

What we find is that if you move off of the brand name of democracy and you ask some questions about the values that we or Freedom House or the Columbia University political science department or, I presume, the Carnegie Council would define for democracy, then we find it's shakier in the region and very, very different from country to country, and even different from value to value.

If you look at the table called "Democratic Values in East Asia," it gives another set of questions about basic values, political values, where again we have refrained from using the D word and we are asking about other things.

The first one we ask about is, "Do you agree or disagree: People with little or no education should have as much say in politics as highly educated people?" In square brackets we have put in the term "political equality," which means that we designed this question in order to ask people's attitude toward what we were abstractly conceptualizing as the value of political equality. We are coding an "Agree" answer as pro-democratic.

This was not always the view in Asia. If you had conducted a survey in the 19th or 18th century in Asia and tabbed up the answers on your abacus, I believe you would not have found such high percentages of people throughout the region believing in political equality. They would have believed in the opposite. In fact, in Thailand, only 15 percent of the people are willing to say so. Apparently they don't believe in it. Our Thai team can interpret that for you better than I can. But we know that Thailand is very deeply in a struggle right now between the elite and the peasants over their political role.

But this value is quite widely established throughout the region. Even in the Confucian societies, quote/unquote—Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and China—this value is highly established.

If you look down at the last row, if people have too many different ways of thinking, society will be chaotic, which is a test of sort of the Asian-values idea that there should be consensus, and whether people agree with political pluralism or not—to give the democratic answer, you should disagree with this. Lo and behold, this attitude is very weakly established throughout the region. Even in Japan, it's less than a majority. There is a strong belief in political harmony, as Hu Jintao likes to say it. Even in Taiwan, which is a strong democracy with a lot of political competition, people have distaste for the pluralism that's occurring there, apparently.

So we have gone through eight separate questions which are designed to measure four values. Some of the values are measured in two questions. We find quite a wide spread of attitudes. But if you have a bottom line on this table, it would be to say that democratic values as a whole are not that deeply rooted in these Asian political systems.

Now, we don't have the same questions asked in Europe or the United States, unfortunately. I hope that somebody will pick up that opportunity. But, presumably, we would get significantly higher levels of pro-democratic attitudes on these questions in those places.

I'm almost done. I want to hand back to Yun-han.

The next table to look at is "Difference in Perceived Performance of Current and Past Regimes." This is a boiling-down of a lot of questions that we asked. In each country we established a previous regime.

Now, as Yun-han said, the survey was designed primarily around the new democracies in the region—Thailand, Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. We threw in China, Japan, and Hong Kong as kind of extras, even though today I'm talking about them more.

In each country, we said, "You used to have the previous regime" —the military regime in Korea, the KMT regime in Taiwan— "and now you have this regime. Can you tell me how things have changed with respect to the performance of the government, how this government compares to the previous government?" Then we asked eight or nine questions, and we combined them into two sets.

Democratic performance: "Does the new government give you more than the past government of (a) freedom of speech; (b) freedom of association" —you can see in the notes— "equal treatment; popular influence; and independent judiciary?"

Then we asked, "How about corruption, law and order, economic development, economic equality?"

What we see under democratic performance is that people throughout the region basically see that there is an improvement, except in Hong Kong. We think that the respondents are pretty realistic, by and large.

In the policy performance—this is a little bit disturbing—a lot of people see that the new system is worse, that the old authoritarian system was doing better in fighting corruption, providing economic development and equity and stuff like that.

We have another table in the book—these performance measures have a significant impact on the public support for the regime. One of the conclusions of our book is that if these governments don't get their act together and start performing, they will not win the hearts of the people, which is kind of common sense, but it hasn't been the emphasis of democracy-promotion policies by either American government agencies, foundations, or European democracy-promotion efforts. They have emphasized so much elections and civil societies and parties and not enough the ability of these governments to deliver honest justice and anticorruption.

The last table I want to draw your attention to—more as a tease, really—is "Traditional Values in East Asia." Joanne mentioned the question of Asia's value challenge to the West, the Asian values debate. The Asian values debate came up in the 1990s, really, after the end of the Cold War, when the United States was, like, "the end of history" and, "Okay, the game is over, and everybody has to have Western values. There's nothing except democratic capitalism. So turn in your guns at the door. We're all going to do democratic capitalism."

At that time, some of the Asian governments, particularly Singapore and China, said, "Wait a minute. This is Asia. We have our own values." Then there was quite a bit of debate about this. The debate kind of petered out for a while.

But now that we have the financial crisis, Kishore Mahbubani is back in the Financial Times saying, "I told you so. The Asian model is better."

So we actually asked Asian publics about these Asian values. I don't have time to run through it, but, for example, when you ask people to agree or disagree, "For the sake of the family, the individual should put his personal interests second," there is very wide agreement throughout the region, even in places like Hong Kong. In fact, Hong Kong has the highest level of agreement. This is the epitome of capitalism, but they believe that.

But as you go down the line, it isn't always the case. For example, in the middle of the table, "Even if parents' demands are unreasonable, children should still do what they ask," which used to be an Asian value, is not very popular in the region anymore. I always tell my students that I used to think this was wrong, but now I think it's correct. But it's not popular in the region.

So values do change. If you go into multivariate analysis and try to find out who believes—if you add this up and say a person who agrees with all of this stuff is totally traditional, which is a construct of ours—they may watch TV or use a cell phone, but if they get a score of nine on this thing, we count them as traditional, down to a score of zero, they are very modern—it's a way of assessing that. Then you ask, "Who are the traditionalists?" It's the older people, the more rural people, the less educated people, in every society.

But then there are differences from country to country in the impact of those demographic variables on attitudes. So there is a big picture that modernization changes attitudes in a less traditional direction, as well as a cross-national picture that it doesn't do so the same way in every country, with the same impact.

As traditional values go down, democratic values do increase. That's a trend in the region. So we can say that democracy has a lot of trouble and is fragile at the level of public support, and yet we can also say that a long-term trend—but how long it will take, for probably quite a long time—is toward the rise of democratic values. But then on the third hand, if you will, we can say that even as democratic values increase, many of the regimes in the region are adept at positioning themselves as the ones who instantiate precisely those values, even if Freedom House says that they don't.

Now I go back to Yun-han.

YUN-HAN CHU: I would just like to call your attention to two more slides, if you haven't had enough by now.

First of all, if you turn to the fourth-last, titled "Satisfaction with the Way Democracy Works," this table essentially tells you what kind of change has taken place between our first-wave survey and our second-wave survey, with roughly five years in between. In most countries, the first wave was conducted in 2001 and the second in 2006.

I think the gist of this table entails two things, primarily. Number one, the level of satisfaction in many countries has not been very impressive. Close to half or sometimes less than half of the population are satisfied with the way democracy works in their given countries. Secondly, in quite a few countries we witness a growing discontent—in the case of Mongolia, in the case of the Philippines, Thailand, and Korea—which means that in four of the five young democracies you see a downward trend line, although two points in time don't really give you a line. Nevertheless, that's the data we have at this point. The most dramatic change is taking place in a country like the Philippines. It dropped from 52 percent to only 37 percent.

In other cases, like Taiwan and Japan, even though we witness some upward movement, the absolute level of satisfaction remains not very encouraging, hovering around 50 percent or below 50 percent.

Lastly, I want to call your attention to the second-to-the-last slide. That's a question dealing with the effectiveness of democracy in solving the problems that society is facing right now. Again, you witness some dramatic declines in people's confidence in democratic efficacy, in particular in Thailand. In 2001, immediately after Thaksin got elected, during the honeymoon, a very high percentage of people believed that democracy could solve the problems, but then five years later, it's almost a 24-point drop. Korea also suffered a very marked drop.

In a nutshell, democracy—I don't think it's in danger in most places of Asia. But on the other hand, it has still a long way to go before it can really win over the hearts of these people.

JOANNE MYERS: Thank you, Andy and Yun-han. If anyone could make statistics come alive, it was you, Andy.

I would like to open the floor to questions.

Questions and Answers