ABSTRACT
This chapter examines systematically how citizens view the quality of political institutions and practices in Northeast Asian democracies that experienced different trajectories of regime evolution or transition. In Northeast Asia, Japan had been the sole democracy for a long time before Third Wave democracies emerged across the region in the late 1980s. In a comprehensive review of existing indicators monitoring the health of democratic governance, Norris distinguishes between two types of evaluations: public and elite. Arend Lijphart chooses various measures of the quality of democracy to compare the performance of consensus and majoritarian democracies: women's representation, political equality, electoral participation, satisfaction with democracy, government-voter proximity, accountability, and corruption. The chapter examines the relationship between the general quality of democracy and its dimensional qualities. In the eyes of many citizens in Northeast Asian democracies, the rule of law and checks and balances, core dimensions of liberal democracy, remained central to a high-quality democracy.
