Political Culture and its Impact to the Contemporary Regimes

Is a political culture approach fruitful in understanding democratization in East Asia? Certainly in cases of East Asian democratization there are complex interactions between institutional, economic, and cultural dynamics. Sometimes political culture can be seen as an expression of differences in historical, political, and economic development. Sometimes political culture must be seen as an independent variable. Often political cultural analysis points in the same direction as institutional or economic analyses and can be seen as one aspect of a phenomenon with many dimensions. Political culture should never be reified. Political culture is dynamic. It evolves over time in response to changes in people's lives. In this paper I would like to lay great stress on the importance of Confucianism in understanding the political cultures of East Asia. But what Confucianism is, how it is understood, and what it means for human behavior is radically different today than two thousand years ago, or even 50 years ago, just as the effect of Christianity on western political culture has changed over historical time.