How narratives shape support for authoritarian regimes

     

Different national stories can strengthen or weaken popular support for authoritarian regimes, a new book suggests.

Classic democratic theory sees civic duty—an individual’s willingness to vote, pay taxes, serve in the military, and so on—as a defining feature of a healthy democratic culture, but scholars have not established what circumstances produce this attitude, notes Andrew J. Nathan. Analyzing the South Korean experience, Aram Hur’s Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia, suggests that Koreans contribute willingly to the state not because they are more Confucian or more moral than other people but because the twentieth-century struggles against Japanese colonialism, the North Korean invasion, and the postwar military dictatorship forged a belief that Koreans are a distinct race with their own state, which they had to fight for to create and protect, the former National Endowment for Democracy (NED) board member writes for Foreign Affairs:

Civic duty is weaker in an ethnically divided society such as Taiwan, Hur’s comparison case, because citizens of the majority Taiwanese ethnicity still associate the state with the rule of the minority Chinese mainlanders. She argues that civic duty is shaped by the “national stories” that people tell, which strengthen or weaken links among people, their sense of nationality, and the state. 

In a new post for the International Forum’s Power 3.0 blog – Defending Democratization: How the OSCE’s ODIHR Can Counteract Russian Authoritarian Influence – Rick Fawn describes Russia’s sabotage of an annual meeting of the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. 

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