Impacts of Rural-Urban Cleavages and Cultural Orientations and Attitudes toward Elements of Democracy: ACross-National, Within-Nation Analysis.

This paper substitutes variables for countries in analyzing attitudes toward democracy in six Asian nations: Korea, China (Mainland), Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, and Thailand. The working hypothesis of the paper is that national differences in attitudes and opinions reflect underlying socioeconomic variations across nations, rather than inherent cultures within the nations. According to this hypothesis, urban-rural configurations of the populations should dominate opinion orientations, rather than idiosyncratic characteristics of these nations. The fundamental rural-urban cleavage will explain attitudes toward traditionalism-modernism which, correspondingly, will contribute to an explanation of attitudes toward democracy. The data for the study come from probability samples across the selected nations in a multi-nayion study using the same questionnaire in 2001. The analysis shows that rural-urban cleavages, seldom used in cross-national comparisons, are significant explanatory factors within nations. This study examines whether these within-nation associations are also significant for explaining attitudes and opinions in a cross-national analysis. The essential issue is: Is within-nation variance greater than variance among nations on the issues of interest? The inclusion of both developed and developing Asian nations permits examination of whether levels of development contribute to national profiles of public attitudes toward elements of democracy such as preference for democracy over authoritarian forms of government, satisfaction with democracy, desire for democracy, and other indicators of democratic support and consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]