The Path Analysis Of The Influence Of Authoritarian Polity Types On The Democratic Transformation In East Asia

“Is democracy in decline?” It once became an important research topic in 2015.As the most important political phenomenon since the Second World War,the third wave of democratization has completely changed the map of world politics.But since the global financial crisis,democracy seems to be on the wane.Many mature democracies have underperformed economically and the quality of their democracy has declined;The subsequent development of the countries that took part in the Arab Spring dispelled hopes of a “fourth wave of democratization”;The six East Asian countries that achieved democracy during the third wave of democratization also showed signs of democratic retrogression.Looking back,it is not hard to see that some authoritarian regimes that bucked the global trend in the late 20 th century and maintained their grip on power are still around in the second decade of the 21 st century,and may even persist for many years to come.Therefore,it is very necessary to rethink the traditional concept that authoritarian regimes are fragile and further explore the influence of authoritarian regimes on democratic transformation in East Asia.From the perspective of the source and mechanism of the elasticity of authoritarian regime,it is found that it mainly comes from internal state factors and external international factors,and is reflected in the ability to face and solve the crisis.Based on the theory of institutional analysis and configuration thought,this paper divides the influential factors of democratic transformation in East Asia into three categories:political,economic and social.In view of the important political factor of the types of authoritarian regimes,this paper divides the East Asian authoritarian regimes into institutionalized authoritarian regimes and non-institutionalized authoritarian regimes by combining Huntington’s theory of categorizing the types of authoritarian regimes and Gordis’ s theory of vulnerability of different authoritarian regimes.Through the preliminary analysis and induction of the characteristics and fragility of these two types of authoritarian regimes,it can be found that the two types of authoritarian regimes have different elasticity and democratization potential in the face of political mobilization and popular protests.In order to verify the above theoretical hypothesis,the clear set technique in qualitative comparative analysis is used to carry out the research.According to the principle and logic of qualitative comparative analysis,we can distinguish the combination of different conditional factors and the form of interaction,which is beneficial to explore the multiple concurrent causality of authoritarian regime types influencing the political transformation in East Asia under the multi-factor conditions.The clear set technique is suitable for the dichotomy processing of small sample category and key variables in East Asia,which has certain logic and technical advantages and is in line with the assumption and purpose of this study.According to the research hypothesis and related theories,in addition to the main conditional variable authoritarian regime type,this paper takes democracy as the outcome variable,selects economic development,wealth gap,urbanization and popular protest as auxiliary conditional variables,and makes a qualitative comparative analysis of 11 East Asian regimes.Through the quantitative operation and software analysis of the above variables,the Boolean minimization formula composed of three configurations is obtained.Combined with the minimization formula for configuration analysis,three paths of democratic transformation in East Asia under different authoritarian regimes are explored:(1)the model of radical revolution under non-institutionalized authoritarian regimes(Philippines,Thailand,and Indonesia),accompanied by large-scale and persistent popular protests;(2)a model of improvement within an institutionalized authoritarian regime(Mongolia),based on high urbanization and equal income distribution;(3)An interaction between two authoritarian regimes(South Korea and Taiwan),where popular protest and socio-economic development coexist.Through case study,it is found that the reason why popular protests have such a strong effect on the democratic transformation in East Asia is precisely because of the inherent fragility of non-institutionalized authoritarian regimes.