Democratization in Confucian East Asia: Citizen Politics in China ...

Elites make decisions by assessing how the public will react to various political agendas. How the public will receive a certain political agenda depends on the values of the public. Above all, their attitudes and values determine public political preferences. The connection between social structural factors and elite behaviors is, in the end, the people. This is to say, it is true that economic development and modernization promote democracy, but they promote democracy by producing a public that demands democratic institutions. Value change comes along with expanding markets and social mobilization. Economic development, industrialization, marketization, and expansion of social interaction by individuals all work to promote prodemocratic attitudes of the public. Such attitudes then translate into pressures on the political elite to introduce democratic reform and liberalization. In this sense, a third school of comparative democratization study, the study of prodemocratic values, offers the link between a structural perspective and the elite-pacting perspective.

A Conceptual Framework

In light of these considerations, I propose a conceptual framework to understand democratic transition and consolidation. Our study of democratization suffers from a profusion of academic works on the subject. A conceptual framework will provide a coherent perspective, and I propose a conceptual framework that links the three major schools of democratic studies: the modernization school, the elite-pacting school, and the democratic values school. Of these three schools, I argue the examination of citizen values provides the most direct evidence of democratic transition. The people will come to demand democracy, and in so doing, they will win democracy.