Understanding East Asian Political Systems: Origins, Characteristics, and Changes = Understanding East Asian Political Systems: Origins, Characteristics, and Changes

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

East Asian politics has mostly been approached from the perspective of either political economy or political culture, which leaves the study of East Asian political systems highly underdeveloped. This paper seeks a political explanation of the emergence, characteristics, changes and future prospects of East Asian political regimes. They reveal the common nature of unipolar power in each of three forms-the one-party regime, one-man rule, and the oligarchical unipolar system. The unipolar nature of the regime`s originated in the political elites` sense of crisis about the survival of the nation in foreign-penetrated and bifurcated East Asian societies. East Asian political regimes gradually change into looser forms of authoritarianism or into plural democracy, due to the evaporation of revolutionary zeal and/or the growth of civil society. Changes in the power balance between the state and society makes the future of democracy ever brighter in East Asia, for all their Confucian and paternalistic traditions which are increasingly mixed with Western cultural traits.