Series on Contemporary China: Legitimacy (ePub)

This book documents the bases for a new view of legitimacy in general and in various parts of Asia, including China, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. The authors see legitimacy anywhere as always partial, rather than total, and somewhat measurable. Legitimacy is specifically political, rather than more vaguely socioeconomic. It can be a predicate of various sizes of collectivity, not just of a sovereign government, or of policies, or of leaders. It can be challenged by patriotism. Legitimacy derives not just from scientific norms or technocracy, even in modern times. It is a belief whose alternative (illegitimacy) people may often suppress in their minds until external situations change, bringing an unexpected cascade of altered legitimacy.The volume is edited by Lynn White, a professor in the Woodrow Wilson School and Politics Department at Princeton. It throws light not only on modern changes of the process of political legitimization, but also on the correlates of that process in specific East and Southeast Asian countries.This book can be adopted as a textbook, please email sales@wspc.com for student price enquiries.Sample Chapter(s)Introduction – Dimensions of Legitimacy (222 KB)Contents:Dimensions of Legitimacy (L White)Political Legitimacy in Malaysia: Regime Performance in the Asian Context (B Gilley)The Basis of Political Legitimacy in Late-Authoritarian Taiwan (D D Yang)Political Trust in China: Forms and Causes (Z Wang)Nationalism and the Problem of Political Legitimacy in China (J Seo)Political Legitimacy in Reform China: Between Economic Performance and Democratization (Y Zheng & L F Lye)Legitimating Rhetorics and Factual Economies in a South Korean Development Dispute (R Oppenheim)Policy Legitimacy as a Determinant of Policy Outputs: Japan's Case (T Sakamoto)Readership: University academics and students, government administrators, and interested general readers.Keywords:Legitimacy;Political Attitude Surveys;Nationalism;Political Trust;Political Stability;East Asia;Southeast AsiaReview:“Most of the articles are also well worth reading.”Pacific Affairs“A book that attempts to make sense of the changing nature and importance of legitimacy in East Asia is, therefore, timely and welcome, Legitimacy does precisely that … this book will be of interest to scholars working on East Asian politics in particular, and on the nature of legitimacy more generally.”The China Review“One of the strengths of this book is that contributors in the book study legitimacy in different countries that are authoritarian (China and Taiwan before democratization), semi-democratic (Malaysia) and democratic (South Korea and Japan). Thus the book presents studies and information on legitimacy issues in a truly comparative fashion … Another strength of the book is that authors took different yet appropriate methodological approaches including systematic quantitative and interpretative methods to study the issue of legitimacy.”Professor Yang ZhongUniversity of Tennessee“This is a courageous attempt on the part of several authors to put aside the hegemonic liberal democratic narrative and grapple with this very complicated concept.”The China JournalKey Features:The contributors are academics from various disciplines; they find extensive areas of agreement despite methodological diversityThe volume broaches a sensitive topic about which too few academics have recently writtenIt finds empirical grounds for a new conceptualization of political legitimacy that relies on both statistical and interpretive research