Value cleavages, new politics, and political change in East Asia

Over the past several decades, several East Asian nations have experienced tremendous socio-economic changes rivaling the changes what Inglehart described for postwar Europe, so similar process of value cleavages may be at work in Asia. We first briefly explain the nature of value cleavage process and outline why it is occurring, thus empirically demonstrating its causal antecedents. We expect that the New Politics value cleavages (Authoritarian-Libertarian) clearly emerge in countries with higher level of development, but does not appear in those at a substantially lower level of development. We then empirically analyze the political consequences of these value cleavages in three important areas. We look at the relationship between the A-L value cleavages and growing levels of social and political alienation along a number of key attitudinal dimensions. We also investigate the relationship between value preferences and a "New Politics" agenda and political involvement. Finally, we explore if values determine one's willingness to engage in unconventional form of political participation, protest. The study is based on the 1999-2001 wave of the World Values Survey (WVS). The selected 5 East Asian nations exhibit drastically different levels of development levels: Japan, Singapore, Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia.