Cultural change in the Asian Pacific
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2057891116680897 |
| Author | Christian Collet,Russell Dalton |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
Editorial
Cultural change in the
Asian Pacific: Introduction
to the special issue on
Changing Political
Cultures
Christian Collet
International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan
Russell Dalton
University of California, Irvine, USA
As surely as the planet is steadily warming, political change is in the air. This special issue of AJCP
features five essays by Germany, US, Japan, and Korea-based scholars devoted to the theme of
Changing Political Cultures. The last quarter century has been a period of dramatic political change
in many Asian nations, and scholarship has tried to understand the processes guiding these
changes. This special issue focuses on the role of citizens, and how changes in economic conditions
and political institutions are interrelated with citizens’ images of government and their support for
democracy.
We see political culture as a force that shapes the political process, as well as reflecting changes
in the process. Culture is not a robust explanation for what happens in a nation in the short-term,
but it can provide a broad political context that impacts on governments and political elites with a
longer time horizon. In some Asian nations, people seemed to favor greater political reforms than
those in political power would allow—sometimes leading to people power movements and even-
tual reform. In other Asian nations, politic al changes seemed to move even beyond citizens’
preferences. But in both of these cases, the interaction between government and the public—and
the congruence between culture and institutions—influences political outcomes.
Beyond the theoretical and political implications of the research presented here, these studies
are also a testament to how the infrastructure for the empirical study of public opinion in Asia has
changed. A generation ago, public opinion surveys in the region were still relatively rare, and
mostly limited to a single nation. Scholars theorized on what ‘‘the public’’ thought, but it was
impressionistic evidence. Today there is a wealth of cross-national data to test past theorizing. The
Asian Barometer Survey (ABS) began in 2001–2003 and its third wave in 2014–2016 includes 14
Asian nations. The AsiaBarometer began in 2003 and offers data from 31 countries. The World
Values Survey has now collected six waves of data for a variety of Asian nations, beginning with
Asian Journal of Comparative Politics
2017, Vol. 2(2) 109–111
ªThe Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/2057891116680897
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