They are smart. Smart people learn from the mistakes of others. What sane person would look at the US and would say: “I want that”, unless they were misled on what the US is?
the west in one picture
This paper uses democracy extensively, but doesn’t seem to ever define what is meant by it (at least not in the first few pages). I guess they mean liberal/bourgeois democracy specifically?
The paper is in english, and by omission it would seem to confirm anglosphere prejudices that China is in no way democratic. Two of the authors are in Hong Kong and the third is in the UK.
The “post-material” keyword gave me pause, but it just means it in a Maslow’s hierarchy sense.
The conflation of the broad ideal of democracy with the specific model of Western liberal democracy is one of the most successful feats of political branding in history.
TL;DR, the questions asked were:
- ‘National leaders should be selected by the people through free and competitive elections.’
- ‘Individual rights and freedoms should NOT be infringed upon but be protected by the government.’
- ‘Ordinary citizens should be allowed and be able to perform their civic duties such as vote and participate in public affairs at local and national levels.’
For each question, the respondents were asked how much they agree on a scale from 1 to 10, then the answers were added up (with combined total from 3 to 30) and then they were rescaled from 0 to 1 (with 3 → 0, 30 → 1).
For pre-1990 generations, the rescaled total was 0.83, for post-1990 generations it was 0.8. So, the way I look at it, support for those three values is relatively high overall, and has declined rather insignificantly.
TBH, I think the headline is pretty bad.
I don’t think there’s much “shunning” going on here. But also, I don’t think the questions are necessarily about a “liberal” democracy. They had nothing to do with private property on the means of production, or otherwise capitalism, but rather about the style of democracy employed (“democratic dictatorship or proletariat” vs “representative democracy”). Given that the younger generations enjoyed the rapid growth and vast improvements in living conditions, it’s no surprise to me that they also support the existing system more (even if slightly) than the older generations.
Really what it comes down to people caring more about material outcomes than proceduralism.
Yeah, this is pretty much my conclusion as well
The questions are also purposely formulated in such a way as to basically amount to just asking: “do you want good, nice things?”.
They are far too general and don’t even define what “individual rights and freedoms” even mean. Rights and freedoms to do what, exactly? What makes these rights “individual” as opposed to, what, collective rights, presumably? And who is to say that the respondents don’t already assume that they have those things?
Let’s say for instance for the first question they instead asked something like: “Would you prefer to have the US political system instead of your current one?”. Does anyone really believe that the result would reflect the same high approval score? I say no way. Everyone can see how dysfunctional the US is.
How about instead of the second question you reformulate it to ask: “Do you want to give rich people the freedom to buy politicians and the right to exert disproportionate influence on elections?” That’s an “individual freedom”, right? Or how about “Should everyone be free to carry a gun?”
Or for the third question, you can instead ask: “Should leaders be selected based solely on popularity and media coverage instead of proven skill in leadership and governance?” or maybe: “Should someone with no qualifications have as much say on policy in a specific field as a trained and educated expert?”
This is the problem with all polling of this sort. It all depends on how you formulate the questions. You can make something sound good by using words with generally positive associations, or you can take advantage of the fact that people don’t understand the hidden implications of what is being asked.
I agree with you about the latter two, but the first question is a pretty direct comparison between a representative democracy and whole-process people’s democracy. I’d love to see the answers for that first question specifically, they can’t be too low given the combined average score is like 25, so the minimum possible average for that question is 5.
