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The Role of Democratization in Shaping National Attachment: Democratic Pride in Taiwan
Abstract
As Taiwanese national identity has gradually consolidated in the last two decades, more than 80 percent of Taiwanese now believe that they are in some way “Taiwanese,” yet the unreconstructed nature of political cleavage remains a salient factor in domestic political disputes. While previous studies suggest that national identity is the key to understanding this young democracy, we argue that an important but thus far unexplored determinant of contemporary national political cleavage is the lack of national pride.
National pride is associated with how people feel about their country. Unlike national identity by which individuals view themselves as possessing a general and assumed “national” membership, national pride is associated with patriotism and nationalism, and thus it should not be surprising that national pride may have a more substantial influence on a broad range of political behavior. However, while theoretical statements and assumptions often suggest that patriotism and nationalism would typically bring individuals to a higher level of enthusiasm to support their country, what makes people proud of their nation has not been completely understood.
Using the latest individual data derived from the World Values Survey, this study aims to investigate the determinants of an individual’s national pride in Taiwan. Employing the generalized ordered logit model, we find that national pride is strongly associated with the overall personal well-being, the satisfaction of democratic government, and the level of national identity, whereas the effects of some other socio-demographic variables vary across different groups. Overall, the findings of this study provide novel insights into and the implications for Taiwan’s democratic development.
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National pride predicts a wide range of politico-economic outcomes, yet what makes individuals proud of their nation is not completely understood. We propose and test a theory that an important but thus far unexplored determinant of contemporary national pride is the longevity of national identity. To measure the longevity of national identity, we construct an index based on responses from an original expert survey designed to trace the emergence of national identity across the polities of Europe and the former Soviet Union. We find that our National Identity Longevity Index is statistically significantly positively associated with the extent of national pride. The implied effect is robust and noteworthy in magnitude. Our results suggest that contemporary national pride inter alia reflects deep, historically rooted societal conventions which take time to emerge.
Among the conditions that allow political authorities to demand people’s allegiance, existential insecurity is crucial. Under existential insecurity, authorities can appeal to threat perceptions and nurture a protective mentality that is easily turned against out-groups, legitimizing discrimination and even prompting genocide in the most extreme case (Gat 2013). Protective mentalities tend to breed national, ethnic, religious, and other divisive identities that make the in-group exclusive. Under existential pressures, divisive identities can absorb people so entirely that they are willing to sacrifice almost everything for their own group’s sake, including their freedoms and even their lives. The stronger an exclusionary group identity grows, the more selfsacrifice the authorities can demand from the individuals. All these patterns are well known from “group-threat theory” (Coenders, Lubbers, and Scheepers 2008). Against this background, we argue that an obvious - yet understudied - indication of self-sacrificial dispositions in a society is the percentage of people who say that they are willing to risk their lives for their own country in the case of war (Díez-Nicolás 2009; Puranen 2008c, 2009a, 2009b). We also argue that these self-sacrificial dispositions are a core ingredient of an allegiant political culture. Vice versa, a decline in people's willingness to sacrifice their lives for their country indicates the erosion of allegiance. More than that, we suggest that diminishing willingness to sacrifice human lives in war is a consequence of the rising emancipatory spirit of an assertive political culture.
This paper examines the bases of opposition to immigrant minorities in Western Europe, focusing on The Netherlands. The specific aim of this study is to test the validity of predictions derived from two theories - realistic conflict, which emphasizes considerations of economic well-being, and social identity, which emphasizes considerations of identity based on group membership. The larger aim of this study is to investigate the interplay of predisposing factors and situational triggers in evoking political responses. The analysis is based on a series of three experiments embedded in a public opinion survey carried out in The Netherlands (n = 2007) in 1997-98. The experiments, combined with parallel individual-level measures, allow measurement of the comparative impact of both dispositionally based and situationally triggered threats to economic well-being and to national identity at work. The results show, first, that considerations of national identity dominate those of economic advantage in evoking exclusionary reactions to immigrant minorities and, second, that the effect of situational triggers is to mobilize support for exclusionary policies above and beyond the core constituency already predisposed to support them.
This article focuses on the determinants of national pride in relation to ethnic diversity. Using pooled cross-sectional data from the World/European Values Survey (N = 43,909), a multilevel analysis method is applied to examine the impact of discrimination, poverty, and self-perceived social status on the feelings of national pride of individuals who belong to ethnic and immigrant minorities in Europe. Results show that, while national pride is generally low among minorities, it peaks when individuals who are members of ethnic and immigrant minorities are poor and when they themselves adopt discriminatory attitudes. These findings imply that the context of discrimination and poverty, when combined with the status of the ethnic and immigrant group in the country, serve as important mediating factors for the way minorities choose to identify with the nation.
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This paper investigates the relationships among national identity, national pride, and happiness, using a nationally representative survey dataset from South Korea. Two dimensions of national identity—civic and ethnic—are considered, after factor-analyzing eight survey items. The results demonstrate that national pride is positively associated with happiness, but empirical evidence is scarce regarding the relationship between national identity and happiness. Also, we have not found alleged moderating effects of national identity on the relationship between national pride and happiness. Lack of statistically significant effects of national identity is not consistent with the pre-existing findings from cross-national surveys. Given that national identity is deeply rooted in a historically unique context of each nation, this study calls for a more nuanced conceptualization of national identity and culture-specific measures to fully grasp its association with happiness.
It is argued that emotions are lawful phenomena and thus can be described in terms of a set of laws of emotion. These laws result from the operation of emotion mechanisms that are accessible to intentional control to only a limited extent. The law of situational meaning, the law of concern, the law of reality, the laws of change, habituation and comparative feeling, and the law of hedonic asymmetry are proposed to describe emotion elicitation; the law of conservation of emotional momentum formulates emotion persistence; the law of closure expresses the modularity of emotion; and the laws of care for consequence, of lightest load, and of greatest gain pertain to emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Neither principled believers in independence nor principled believers in unification are numerous enough to give any elected Taiwanese leader a clear man-date for imposing a solution on the question of national identity anytime soon. The existence of a large number of non-committed rationalists would, in the short run, mitigate the polarized conflict and could, over the long run, shift the political equilibrium in either direction, depending on changing external conditions. © 2004 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Divided government exists where different political parties control the executive and legislative branches in a political system. This has become a common feature of Taiwan's national and local political landscape. In the literature, scholars tend to disagree with each other concerning whether divided government leads to dysfunctional politics. This study artempts to shed some light on the issue by exploring the effects of divided government at the city/county level on the public's perceptions of their mayor/magistrate's performance in Taiwan. We take advantage of a 2002 survey of the public's evaluations of government performance and examine whether different forms of divided government affect residents' responses. Our findings indicate that residents in cities or counties under divided government express more negative views, although their party identification seems to be an important intervening variable in shaping their opinion.
This study looks at how proud South Koreans are of their nation's achievements, how strongly South Koreans feel their country is superior to other countries, what factors are impor- tant to explain differences in national pride, and how impor- tant perceptions on social trust and current political and eco- nomic situations are in determining Koreans' level of national pride. The data for this study comes from the Korean General Social Survey (KGSS) of 2003. Age, education, family income, and evaluations of social trust and current political and eco- nomic situations are examined as major determinants of national pride. The study finds that South Koreans exhibit greater national pride in their achievement in sports, history, and science and technology than in politics and social welfare systems. Moreover, South Koreans who are younger, better educated, or have higher family income tend to be less proud of their country and are less likely to have strong sentiments of national superiority or allegiance to the nation.
Researchers disagree over the definition, measurement, and expected political consequences of American patriotism, a situation that is fueled by the absence of a strong theoretical research foundation. We develop and evaluate a new measure of national attachment that is grounded in social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979), drawing on data from three distinct sources: two studies of undergraduate students and the 1996 General Social Survey (GSS). Confirmatory factor analyses provide clear evidence that national identity is distinct from other measures of national attachment including symbolic, constructive, and uncritical patriotism, and nationalism. National identity has a number of other good measurement properties when compared to existing measures: it receives equal endorsement from conservatives and liberals (unlike most other measures which exhibit an ideological bias), develops with time spent in the United States among immigrants, and most importantly is the only measure of national attachment to predict political interest and voter turnout in both student and adult samples, consistent with the predictions of social identity theory. In that sense, the national identity measure outperforms all other measures of national attachment and provides unambiguous evidence that a strong American identity promotes civic involvement.
What brings credit and prestige to a nation in the eyes of its citizens? Taking a multi‐dimensional approach, we investigate national pride in the country's science, economy, arts and literature, and sport. Data from the International Social Survey Programme's 24 nation ‘National Identity’ module ( N = 30,894) show that people throughout the developed world feel national pride in all these things, contrary to most globalization hypotheses. Pride in the economy shows the most variation among nations, and pride in science also varies greatly, while pride in the arts and literature and in sport vary less. Regression analyses show that linkages of pride to national attachment also vary cross‐culturally: pride in science is more consequential in English‐speaking countries but pride in arts less consequential; pride in sports matters especially in smaller nations; and pride in economic achievements matters everywhere.
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It is widely believed that identity with Taiwanese or Chinese is the major cleavage in Taiwan. People who hold Taiwanese identity tend to vote for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and those who identify themselves as both Chinese and Taiwanese are likely to vote for the Kuomintang. As the proportion of Taiwanese identifiers increases, the geographical difference seems to persist. Whether national identity is associated with regional line and why they are correlated is a pressing question. This paper uses the 2012 presidential election survey data to explore the extent to which regional divide accounts for national identity. Using generalized linear mixed effect model (GLMM), this research finds minor regional divide in terms of ethnicity concentration and economic structure. However, ethnic background is influential on national identity while retrospective evaluation and democratic value are significant predictors. This mixed result suggests that people in Taiwan have united national identity should geographical difference remain or even decrease, and that we should remain watchful about the influence of democratic value and economic concern.
In 1991 Taiwan held its first fully democratic election. This first single volume of party politics in Taiwan analyzes the evolution of party competition in the country, looking at how Taiwan's parties have adjusted to their new multi-party election environment. It features key chapters on: the development of party politics in Taiwan. the impact of party change on social welfare, corruption and national identity. party politics in the DPP era. Including interviews with high-ranking Taiwanese politicians and material on the 2004 Presidential election, this important work brings the literature up-to-date. It provides a valuable resource for scholars of Chinese and Taiwanese politics and a welcome addition to the field of regime transition and democratization.
This article sets out to analyse the transformation of the two émigré regimes and the formation of Taiwanese identity - the two developments that principally defined the political experiences of the Taiwanese people in the 20th century - and their mutual influences. The two cycles of regime evolution are considered in terms of the initial historical conditions for their installment, the strategies that the incumbent elite employed to consolidate and partially institutionalize its rule, and the political processes as well as the changing structural conditions that led to their eventual transformation. The article explains why the two regimes employed a different mixture of political co-optation (versus suppression), social integration (versus segregation) and economic inclusion (versus exclusion) at various stages of their rule in terms of the constraining and enabling structural conditions, the nature and level of threats to their political security, and their state-building and nation-building agenda. In acting, they made mistakes and generated unintended consequences, in some instances changing their very identity below the level of consciousness.
Objective
Group identity is a central concept in many social science disciplines. We investigate why people identify with groups and show favoritism to in-group members. We anticipate group identifications are substantially influenced by genes and social environments, likely working through stable personality traits.
Methods
Using twin study data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS I), we investigate the heritability of in-group identification and favoritism, as well as the extent to which the genetic bases of these orientations are shared with genetic underpinnings of personality traits, primarily focusing on the “Big Five”: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability/neuroticism.
Results
Group identification is largely attributable to genetic factors. However, environments also affect group identification. The heritability of personality traits accounts for a modest portion of the genetic variation of group identification.
Conclusion
Our findings have implications for the study of collective action, identity politics, and the growing research program investigating social and political behavior genetics.
This paper attempts to provide a concrete response and analysis to the decline of Chinese identity in Taiwan. Our focus is on the problem of “Chinese identity” and how this identity is gradually fading, as is evident in long-term public opinion polls conducted by various academic institutions in Taiwan between 1992 and 2012. This paper provides two perspectives to analyze the phenomenon. One is that the occurrence of political events impacts identification, and creates a lasting effect on younger generations. These events seem to have a greater and more continuous impact on the younger and better educated generations. Second, the gradual passing with age of the first generation of waishengren (people of Mainland Chinese origin who came to Taiwan after World War II and their descendents) has contributed somewhat to the decline of Chinese identity, but not enough to be a critical factor. Therefore, this paper provides a preliminary explanation that political events play a key role in influencing the decline of “Chinese identity” in Taiwan.
The multidimensionality of patriotic and nationalistic attitudes and their relationship to nuclear policy opinions were investigated. One hundred and ninety-four college students, 24 high school students, and 21 building contractors were administered the 120-item Patriotism/Nationalism Questionnaire. One hundred and sixty-six of the college students were concurrently administered the 18-item Nuclear Policy Questionnaire. An iterated principal factor analysis was performed on the Patriotism/Nationalism Questionnaire and six factors were extracted for Varimax rotation. The results indicated that the factors were interpretable and distinct. Further analyses indicated the predictive validity of the subscales derived from the six factors for the Nuclear Policy Questionnaire, and exploratory analyses of variance examined the effects of selected demographic variables. The findings support the contention that patriotic/nationalistic attitudes entail multiple dimensions, and that they are differentially related to nuclear policy opinions. We conclude that researchers need to be more attentive to this multidimensionality, especially the distinction between patriotism and nationalism.
Building on research from organizational sociology and the contact hypothesis, we incorporated community characteristics to examine how coworker citizenship dissimilarity influences employees’ attitudes towards immigrants. We also proposed that the nature of this relationship would depend on national pride. Results from a national survey (N=559) indicated living with more immigrants in one's neighborhood corresponded in heightened citizenship dissimilarity at the workplace. It, in turn, corresponded in employees holding more favorable views of immigrants. This effect was the most pronounced for people with high levels of national pride because of the presumably increased opportunities to dispel their previously held negative stereotypes about out-group members.
This arose as part of an ongoing project on ‘Visions of Governance for the Twenty‐first Century’ initiated in 1996 at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, which aims to explore what people want from government, the public sector, and non‐profit organizations. A first volume from the ‘Visions’ project (Why People Don’t Trust Government) was published by Harvard University Press in 1997; this second volume analyses a series of interrelated questions. The first two are diagnostic: how far are there legitimate grounds for concern about public support for democracy worldwide; and are trends towards growing cynicism found in the US evident in many established and newer democracies? The second concern is analytical: what are the main political, economic, and cultural factors driving the dynamics of support for democratic government? The final questions are prescriptive: what are the consequences of this analysis and what are the implications for strengthening democratic governance? The book brings together a distinguished group of international scholars who develop a global analysis of these issues by looking at trends in established and newer democracies towards the end of the twentieth century. Chapters draw upon the third wave (1995–1997) World Values Survey as well as using an extensive range of comparative empirical evidence.
Challenging the conventional wisdom, the book concludes that accounts of a democratic ‘crisis’ are greatly exaggerated. By the mid‐1990s most citizens worldwide shared widespread aspirations to the ideals and principles of democratic government, although at the same time there remains a marked gap between evaluations of the ideal and the practice of democracy. The publics in many newer democracies in Central and Eastern Europe and in Latin America have proved deeply critical of the performance of their governing regimes, and during the 1980s many established democracies saw a decline in public confidence in the core institutions of representative democracy, including parliaments, the legal system, and political parties. The book considers the causes and consequences of the development of critical citizens in three main parts: cross‐national trends in confidence in governance; testing theories with case studies; and explanations of trends.
Taiwan is a divided society; divided along the lines of ethnicity and national identity. During much of the 1980s and earlier, ethnicity played an important role for the opposition movement to mobilize popular support in fighting for democracy, but as Taiwan becomes democratic, national identity turns out to be more salient than ethnicity in shaping political competition on the island. As shown by survey data, national identity is indeed the dominant cleavage underpinning Taiwan’s party system. And since there is a high degree of stability in the distribution of the popular attitude toward the national identity issue, we also witness a relatively stable alignment between the two major political groupings, the pan-Kuomintang (KMT) and pan-Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) camps, even though there have been splits within each camp. Although such a cleavage is highly contentious, and could bring about serious conflicts in the society, thus far, as a result of the convergence toward the middle point, namely, the status quo, and the threat of a formidable enemy across the Taiwan Strait, the situation has not got out of hand. Since the division between Taiwan and China may not be easily resolved, national identity will remain a major political issue in Taiwan for years to come.
The sociological, economic, political, and anthropological literatures are devoting increasing attention to globalization. This chapter discusses the various connotations of the term and puts it in historical perspective. Existing theoretical and empirical research on globalization is organized around five key issues or questions: Is it really happening? Does it produce convergence? Does it undermine the authority of nation-states? Is globality different from modernity? Is a global culture in the making? A plea is made for a comparative sociology of globalization that is sensitive to local variations and to how agency, interest, and resistance mediate in the relationship between globalization causes and outcomes.
The bulk of the earth must not only be spherical, but not large in comparison with the size of other stars.
—Aristotle (384–322 BC), as quoted by Dreyer ( 1953 , p. 118)
It has been said about the United States that it is now suffering ‘a crisis of regime’. Europe, we have been told, is in little better condition: ‘all over Europe the First World War broke up the structure of society which, before 1914, had provided the necessary basis of confidence between government and governed. There no longer exists, except in a few places such as Switzerland, that general acceptance of the conduct of national affairs that adds to the vigor of government and society alike.’ ¹ These are the kinds of practical political problems to which the concept of political support, as found in systems analysis, has been directed.
The authors analyze the nation-state as a worldwide institution constructed by worldwide cultural and associational processes, developing four main topics: (1) properties of nation-states that result from their exogenously driven construction, including isomorphism, decoupling, and expansive structuration; (2) processes by which rationalistic world culture affects national states; (3) characteristics of world society that enhance the impact of world culture on national states and societies, including conditions favoring the diffusion of world models, expansion of world-level associations, and rationalized scientific and professional authority; (4) dynamic features of world culture and society that generate expansion, conflict, and change, especially the statelessness of world society, legitimation of multiple levels of rationalized actors, and internal inconsistencies and contradictions.
Our model suggests that national political, economic and cultural dimensions have to be taken into account when explaining support for European Union (EU) membership among the Swiss electorate. Using data from the first Eurobarometer survey in Switzerland (1999), we empirically test our model using structural equation modelling. We find that institutional attachment and `image' of neighbouring countries are strongly linked to the perception of threat to national interests, which in turn is a strong predictor of support for joining the EU. We also show that national identity, attachment to neutrality, as well as perceived economic gain or loss from EU membership are directly linked to attitudes towards EU membership.
This paper empirically analyzes economic and noneconomic determinants of individual attitudes toward immigrants, within and across countries. The two survey data sets used, covering a wide range of developed and developing countries, make it possible to test for interactive effects between individual characteristics and country-level attributes. In particular, theory predicts that the correlation between pro-immigration attitudes and individual skill should be related to the skill composition of natives relative to immigrants in the destination country. Skilled individuals should favor immigration in countries where natives are more skilled than immigrants and oppose it otherwise. Results based on direct and indirect measures of the relative skill composition are consistent with these predictions. Noneconomic variables also are correlated with immigration attitudes, but they don't alter significantly the labor-market results. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The aim of the present study was to examine further the role that self-identity plays in the theory of planned behaviour and, more specifically, to: (1) examine the combined effects of self-identity and social identity constructs on intention and behaviour, and (2) examine the effects of self-identity as a function of past experience of performing the behaviour. The study was concerned with the prediction of intention to engage in household recycling and reported recycling behaviour. A sample of 143 community residents participated in the study. It was prospective in design: measures of the predictors and intention were obtained at the first wave of data collection, whereas behaviour was assessed two weeks later. Self-identity significantly predicted behavioural intention, a relationship that was not dependent on the extent to which the behaviour had been performed in the past. As expected, there was also evidence that the perceived norm of a behaviourally relevant reference group was related to behavioural intention, but only for participants who identified strongly with the group, whereas the relationship between perceived behavioural control (a personal factor) and intention was strongest for low identifiers.
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