EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No.27

저자  

Mary Alice Haddad is an Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. She received her BA from Amherst College, and her MA and PhD in political science from the University of Washington. She has received awards from numerous places including the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Mellon Foundation, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Humanities, Japan Foundation, and the East Asia Institute. Her publications include a book, Politics and Volunteering in Japan: A Global Perspective (Cambridge 2007), and articles in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Democratization, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and Journal of Asian Studies. She is completing a manuscript on Japanese democratization, and her current project is concerned with environmental politics in East Asia. Her research and teaching interests concern comparative politics, East Asia, state-society relations, civil society, democracy, and environmental politics.

 
본 working paper는 "EAI Fellows Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia"에 제출된 논문이며, 온라인 버전으로만 배포됩니다. EAI Fellows Program은 대만 장경국 재단, 미국 헨리루스 재단의 후원으로 진행됩니다.

Abstract

This working paper asks: How do citizens in single-party states get them to listen and be responsive? It lays out a research project that focuses on environmental politics in East Asia, which is an area where citizens across the region have successfully diversified policymaking processes to include more citizen voices. The paper lays out the Multi-Channel Model of Political Advocacy which posits that successful advocacy is a function of (a) activating multiple channels of communication, both formal and informal, with policy makers, and (b) how much threat the advocacy poses to the regime. Advocates that can utilize multiple channels to access policy makers will be able to cultivate elite allies who can make or change policies in their favor. When this process works there is a win-win for the advocates and the regime: the advocates gain their desired policy outcome and greater access to policy makers, and the state gains positive publicity, enhanced legitimacy, and greater access to activists. Implications of the model for studies of civil society, democratization, and enduring authoritarianism are discussed in the conclusion.

East Asia has jumped onto the environmental bandwagon. In January 2009 South Korea announced an economic stimulus package that pledged $38.1 billion dollars (equivalent to 4 percent of total GDP) on a “Green New Deal.” Immediately after his election in August 2009, Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama committed to slashing his country’s greenhouse emissions by 25 percent of its 1990 levels by 2020.

Taiwan has recently announced plans to upgrade its Environmental Protection Agency to ministry status by 2012 and has begun the process of instituting a carbon-offset scheme to reduce carbon emissions. China has nearly doubled the number of its national parks in the last decade, and this past year it became the largest producer of photovoltaic panels in the world and the second largest producer of wind energy. These events are particularly remarkable because this region has a long history of exploiting the environment, none of these countries has a large, national, environmental organization that lobbies the government on environmental policies, and their memberships of international environmental organizations remain very small. Indeed, in comparative studies of civil society, the region is generally seen as very weak in nearly all areas of civil society organization.

Why then have East Asian states developed such forward-looking, activist environmental policies? Why has the region, dominated by single-party states generally suspicious of political organizations, seen an explosion of grassroots environmental activity in the last decade? Contemporary theories of environmental politics have been based on the historical experience of the United States and Western Europe. In general, they argue that large-scale mass political movements are a prerequisite for the development of pro-environmental policies. The dominant political arena occurs in legislative politics where citizen activist organizations foster mass movements and lobby politicians using media campaigns to combat industrial interests and develop more progressive environmental policies. In the most successful cases, this advocacy occurs though Green Party influence on coalition politics.

This context is very far removed from the experience of any state in East Asia, and its assumptions suggest that no progressive environmental policies would be possible in most places outside of Western Europe. This paper is a preliminary effort to use the experience of East Asian states, which have been able to develop impressive environmental policies in a context very different from one where such initiatives would be expected, to develop a new model of political advocacy.

This paper argues that there are many ways to get citizens heard by the state, and finding avenues for advocacy that are less threatening to the regime and building elite political allies will be the most successful. This will usually be done by targeting the “less political” branches of government—the executive and judicial branches as opposed to legislative bodies—and by building and utilizing multiple informal channels of influence—“old boy” networks, family ties, local community-based connections, business networks, etc. The successful advocacy efforts will find or create supporters within elite politics, who will then help to teach other elite actors about the benefits of listening to citizens. The end result will be policies that reflect the interests of the citizens and a political process that is more open to citizen participation. This working paper offers an intellectual foray into this topic. It begins with a brief review of relevant literature. The second section lays out the Multi-Channel to Model of Political Advocacy. The third section sketches the research design and method that will be used in the study. A fourth section presents some preliminary supporting evidence, and the paper concludes with a few reflections on the implications of the model for our understanding of politics and East Asia.

Civic Participation in East Asia

A decade ago there was nearly universal agreement that East Asia had little to no civic participation. Comparative studies all indicated that citizens in East Asia did not join civic organizations, rarely volunteered, and were generally uninvolved politically. Research that relied on statistical surveys found that East Asian states trailed other advanced countries in values and activities associated with political activism. Their citizens have a set of values that are often characterized as “illiberal” and “undemocratic”: they remain skeptical of individual freedom, have a strong preference for social order, favor an interventionist rather than a limited government, show a reluctance to engage in public protest, etc. Supporting this perspective, academic work focused on the ways that the heavy hand of the state in regional countries acted to constrain and control civil society.

Recently, this perspective has begun to change. Beginning with the “third wave” democracies of Korea and Taiwan, East Asian scholars began to demonstrate that while civil societies in East Asia may not look exactly like their counterparts in Europe and North America, they were still playing increasingly important roles in their country’s politics. Robert Wellar’s Alternate Civilities (1999) documents civil society’s role in Taiwanese democratization and argues that its success and the expansion of civic, if not necessarily democratic, activity on the mainland suggests that vibrant civic cultures can form in ways that are coherent with non-Western societies. A bit more critically, Sunhyuk Kim’s Politics of Democratization in Korea (2000) and Charles Armstrong’s Korean Society (2002) both offer detailed accounts of the mixed and varied roles that a wide range of citizen groups have played in Korea’s disjointed and lengthy democratization processes...(Continued)