[EAI Online Seminar] Democracy Cooperation Series 13.

YouTube 링크 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=funbpME71m0

The East Asia Institute (President Yul Sohn), as a secretariat of the Asia Democracy Research Network (ADRN), invited you to the thirteenth online seminar of the [Democracy Cooperation] series, titled "Political Polarization in Asia and Its Impact on Democracy." Political polarization is a process of simplifying politics by presenting either-or-choices to the public. It usually damages democracy by dividing the electorate into two mutually mistrustful camps. While political polarization operates at both elite and mass levels, political elites including government and party leaders use polarization as a strategy to concentrate their power. With this in mind, this seminar invited speakers from four Asian countries to speak about their country’s political polarization and how it has been eroding democracy.

• ㆍTime/Date: 25 March 2022 (Friday) 17:00 – 18:30 (KST)
• ㆍPanelists:

Jennifer McCoy (Professor, Georgia State University)

Sook Jong Lee (Professor, Sungkyunkwan University; Senior Fellow, East Asia Institute)

Jung Kim (Professor, University of North Korean Studies)

Francisco A. Magno (Senior Fellow, Institute of Governance at De La Salle University)

Niranjan Sahoo (Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation)

Janjira Sombatpoonsiri (Assistant Professor, Chulalongkorn University)

영상 스크립트

good morning good afternoon and even good evening wherever wherever you are this says suggeong me a representative for asia democracy resource network and also senior fellow at east asia institute and i'm going to moderate this webinar titled political polarization in asia and its impact on democracy political polarization is a process of simplifying politics into two camps us versus them and usually scholars have found the negative impact consequences of political polarizations so among asian countries of course there

are more polarized countries however this time we invited four country experts from india and south korea and philippines and thailand before we discuss the features and agencies of political polarization and its negative impact on the country's state of democracy i'm glad we invited the keynote speaker professor jennifer mccoy jennifer mccoy is an expert in this field let me introduce jennifer she is a professor at georgia state university and non-resident scholar at the carnegie endowment for international

peace her specialty is democratization polarization mediation and conflict prevention election process many areas and as a regionally she's an expert in latin america in the past professor mccoy served as a director of the khan kata center's american program and then uh from 2019 she became a senior core fellow at the institute of advanced studies at central european university in budapest hungary she is joining us from budapest so it must be early in the morning and professor mccoy has answered or edited

six books and dozens of articles and her latest volume is polarizing politics a global threat to democracy and she acquired it with the murad sommers uh in 1919 so as a very well-known leading scholar in this field i think will be all benefited by hearing uh you know what she has found in her uh studies uh comparing many countries which are politically polarized so without further ado i will ask professor mccoy to present her findings thank you so much professor lee i'm really delighted to be here with with

all of you um so i wanted to just present kind of a brief overview of the theory that we developed that the panelists will be talking about some of the specifics in in the countries that they're doing so let me just start with this um this does uh come from work that i have been doing with murat sumer and a group of international scholars so the term that we developed pernicious polarization which professor lee already gave this definition but we i really want to emphasize that this this is a severe form of political

polarization and so we view it as a process that simplifies politics so there's a range of you know polarization as a process begins to simplify politics so the normally cross-cutting differences that we see in societies as people have different identities and different interests and that they may cross over and form different groups in common instead of that they become consolidated based on a single us versus them dimension or dividing line so there's a political dimension and a social dimension the political dimension

is that people are sorting into like-minded groups often the center drops out of public opinion and the the political representation of public opinion and the public begins to view and politicians begin to view politics as a zero-sum game so if you are winning that must mean i'm losing rather than a positive sum game where we can all win normal adversaries that we are facing in elections in competitions become instead enemies that must be eliminated it also then gets extended into the society and into social relationships

this is when citizens do internalize this partisan divide in their daily life and so they may start dividing sorting themselves out spatially where they live the neighborhoods they choose the areas of town they go to for restaurants for parks for entertainment and socially the groups that they associate with this would of course include as well um media that they would look at and they begin to view the other the other side as posing an existential threat to their way of life now in this process we see a

psychological effect of increasing the level of stereotyping and prejudice and that is partly because as people start to lose that direct communication interaction with people of different views um then they they can exaggerate their perceptions of the characteristics of the other group and they often view them as a very homogeneous group when they're not and they begin to develop prejudice and they they see more negative traits in the other group and they exaggerate the positive traits in their own group

now i want to make a point that our concept differs from the way that the term political polarization has been studied particularly in political science and in american political science which has influenced a lot of scholarship um which had you looked simply at the ideological difference or distance between parties or between voters and we're not looking at this difference or distance we're looking at the creation of a binary divide that is broader than just ideology it has an identity basis we view it as very political so

political entrepreneurs can choose a polarizing strategy to serve their political ends now i want to note that these ends their aims or goals may be to actually transform a democracy or economic structures it could be transformative it could have very benign or positive goals revolutionary goals or could be simply more um self-serving to gain power or to retain power for themselves and their political party but it's also relational and we have to recognize that the opposition to a polarizing incumbent or

polarizing political actor the opposition to them the other side will react in some way if the opposition reciprocates the polarizing strategy which usually involves demonization discrediting of the other side that will lock a polity into a downward spiral of obstructionism and ungovernability that's difficult to overcome so we start our starting assumptions are that basically some level of polarization is natural and healthy in a democracy because we want to differentiate among the choices for voters parties have to show the

differences among them and it can be constructive if we need a disruption of the status quo for example if it's autocratizing or already an autocracy we want to disrupt that status quo if there is great social injustice great inequality great discrimination against a particular population group we want to disrupt that status quo so polarizing can be constructive the problem is we have to be careful about how we use it as a strategy because it risks turning destructive and self-sustaining if it deepens into this binary division

of society so i would argue that to be constructive it needs to focus on values and ideas rather than attacking the identities in a demonizing way creating identifying others as an enemy so therefore in our work we have identified these multiple roles the strategy i was talking about it can be used as a strategy of gaining political power gaining supporters by emphasizing an us versus them binary and the us are the friends the them is the enemy but it's also this process in the process it is weakening the

cross-cutting ties and creating these two immovable blocks and then it's a condition or a state when it gets to the point the extreme point where where it's it is this definite binary division then it can reach an equilibrium of what we call pernicious polarization because it has pernicious consequences for democracy now i want to also note that there's an endogenous nature to it the very process of polarization changes the political actors themselves it creates pernicious incentives to reciprocate and continue deepening it

and it emboldens the extremes within each group as they begin to label anybody who wants to be a bridge builder as traders or sellouts this endogenousness nature also affects the institutions that could be accountability but as they begin to be politicized or perceived as politicized then they can no longer play that role of an accountability mechanism so we see a chain reaction of how it's a harm to democracy so it starts with an actor with agency polarizing strategies by an actor creating this us versus them

and the tribal logic the psychological aspects of mutual distressed dislike and bias result as this happens then people begin to view the other side as an existential threat to their way of life or to the nation if the other side gains or retains power and this may lead both leaders and citizens to support the violation of democratic norms because it's more important to stay in power or keep the other people out of power than to protect democratic principles now the relationship we can see empirically this is varieties of

democracy index measure of political polarization which is one measure but it relates very much to ours it asks the question of experts to rate countries around the world to what extent is a society divided politically such that they have hostile interactions with each other and we can see that the red line is political polarization worldwide population weighted because some of the largest countries are the most polarized particularly today like india the united states brazil and then the blue line is the liberal

democracy index and we see that as these are far apart that there's a relationship as polarization declines we see a relationship with democracy improving and as polarization increases we see a relationship with it with uh democracy decreasing and we have tested this statistically as well with lagged uh variables and we do see that it looks like a lag time polarization and then one two and five years after looking at democratic uh ranking uh ratings uh there is a relationship so a few findings from our comparative case

studies which is um this comes from this article here um are first that we emphasize agency over structure we see this as very elite driven now there are mass underpinnings of course but the structure is not predetermined we don't find any specific social cleavages as either necessary or sufficient for example ethnic cleavages religious cleavages inequality class we don't see any single one of those as a predetermined causal factor however grievances are necessary the society there must be grievances for

a political entrepreneur to exploit or to draw on and so it's most polarizations most commonly activated when the political entrepreneurs use this manikin us versus them moralizing the us are the positive the good the them is the evil when they use this kind of discourse to exacerbate existing social cleavages or grievances or they can even manufacture the divisions they can bring an agenda item you know to the public's attention like donald trump did with immigration in the united states when he started his

campaign so here this is a little bit small but this is a chart showing um some examples of what the dimensions of polarization may be and what i want to point out is that the discursive dimensions that is what the leaders are focusing on in their discourse may be one thing but the underlying cleavage or a formative rift which i will discuss in a second uh may be another so they don't always match so here's some examples populism is often seen as a primary cause of democratic erosion but we view populism

as simply one example of a polarizing discourse it focuses on elite versus people us versus them there's always an enemy from a populist leader but it's basically an empty signifier that enemy could be any number one of things the underlying cleavage is not defined by populism but many countries we've seen this discourse being very prominent another cleava another discursive dimension of polarization or underlying cleavage is a religious secular or a church and state kind of dimension that divides people

and so we see this for example in turkey and bangladesh this becomes very much a salient discursive dimension but it's actually an underlying cleavage in additional countries like the us and poland we often see a cosmopolitan nationalist division so this is prominent in europe being pro or anti-eu or like in the united states pro or anti-globalist so how much is nationalism emphasized versus cosmopolitan independence interdependence cultural values may be one traditional versus modern conservative versus

liberal communitarian versus universalist um geography the values and interest of place and status so urban versus rural center versus periphery and then the traditional economic ideology or class can very much be a polarizing dimension but we increasingly see and i think we'll see in the cases today the east asian the asian cases we're looking at today that political ideology the concept of democracy and the source of legitimacy of government and authority can be very polarizing so we see a number of

countries where this is the cleavage and then finally is the formative rift that we talk about as being the most pernicious it can be the most entrenched form of polarization when it focuses on citizenship rights and national identity the formative rift we say are the unresolved historic debates at the nation's founding around these questions of citizenship rights and national identity all right a second finding is that the opposition matters so it's relational and we see kind of basic patterns oppositions will

often reciprocate this denigrating kind of language and this winner take all polarizing tactics which then locks the system into this downward spiral now they may try to repolarize that is change the axis of polarization change that line that dividing line to focus on one that is an inclusionary transformative effort to address this injustice um that that may be occurring that would lead to this constructive uh disruptive polarization i mentioned earlier and then we also see efforts of another that an opposition may enter into

depolarizing through promoting democratizing reforms through mobilizing their electorate to participate in elections and presenting these kind of pluralistic political representation options so that might mean electoral reform to provide more choice for voters better representation a third is uh finding is that we found risk factors that seem to lead to enduring pernicious polarization i've already mentioned the formative rifts here and the reason they are so enduring and pernicious is that it's a

it leads to a conflict over who can legitimately represent the polity so polarization becomes threatening and causes a backlash a polarizing counter reaction because it is talking about who can be a member of the community the political community and who can represent them and this can lead to democratic erosion also found another risk factor about mobilization capacity and we found that when a country has a relative balance of power between particularly political parties that have or political camps

that have equal uh electoral mobilizing capacity then we may see this um you know kind of balanced alternating in government uh kind of a ping pong or pendulum effect until eventually one side usually asserts hegemony such as in bangladesh and um and then we see democratic erosion but we can also see an imbalance in the mobilizing capacity now i should say there's uh so so when only one party may have this mass mobilization um capacity electorally but another group may control the institutions such as the

bureaucracy the military or the courts the delay allow them to use constitutional or unconstitutional institutions these institutions military courts bureaucracy to constrain an executive we've seen this in thailand many times going back and forth one side had this great electoral mobilizing capacity with the toxin movement and then we see a kind of royalist side using various constitutional times but then unconstitutional and finally you know military coup and finally looking you know do institutions determine

or predict polarization we find that they are facilitating conditions but they don't definitively predict nor resolve polarization but two facilitating ones in particular are the majoritarian electoral systems systems that give a a large disproportionate representation to the majority party as opposed to the pure proportional representation systems can lead to winner-take-all perceptions and polarization i want to point out though that pr systems can also have majoritarian aspects when they have compensation back

winner compensation mechanisms bonus systems high thresholds and the second one is whether institutionalized party systems help to prevent polarization and we find that in fact the institutionalization of a party system does not predict the rise of polarizing leaders or the outcome for democracy we see great variety in this so here are two of the special issues the collection of work that we did with a number of collaborators where you can find some of this research and i will stop here and move to the next phase thank you very

much