Dutiful Democracy: How Nations Hold Democracies Together

South Korean citizens lined up to donate their personal gold to help the state pay off its foreign debt during the Asian Financial Crisis.

My book asks a simple question: why do citizens willingly comply with their democracies, even when it is costly? When such support runs low, citizens are quick to cheat or abandon democratic norms in times of uncertainty, cracking open the door for demagogues or to-be autocrats. Yet what motivates this kind of democratic duty in citizens? Can it be fostered? Amid concerns over democratic backsliding and how democracies die, this book asks how democracies survive.
 
My answer is that nationalism serves as the moral backbone for democracies. Excess nationalism can take violent, irrational forms, but at the root, it also fosters an intrinsic obligation to contribute to the nation. I show that when citizens see the democratic state to represent “my” nation, national obligation frames compliance in moral rather than payoff terms, motivating a duty to uphold democratic norms even when payoffs fail. In contrast, when “my” nation is seen as excluded from or discriminated by the state, I find that the same moral ties can push citizens to abandon or even resist such norms. To show this, I draw on a controlled comparison of democratic duty towards voting, paying taxes, and military service in South Korea versus Taiwan. The two otherwise similar democracies resulted in strong versus weak nation-state “linkages” due to differing nationalist strategies. Across statistical, experimental, and personal narrative evidence from the two East Asian democracies, as well as an external validation test comparing East versus West Germans in post-reunification Germany and cross-national analyses of democratic duty across nearly 30 democracies, I show that the democratic benefits of nationalism are real and vary predictably with nation-state linkage.
 
The book turns on its head the assumption that nationalism hurts democratic stability. I show that the obligations to community that nationalism instills is an important part of what keeps democracies together through hard times. Democracies vary a great deal in the proportion of the citizenry that sees compliance through this national, moral lens, and this has real, quantifiable consequences for democratic stability in the long run. At the same time, I show that strong democratic norms have less to do with the culture or character of a people, and more to do with the national identity politics of a given state. Thus, the book offers a cautiously optimistic conclusion that democratic duty, and relatedly resilient democracies, can possibly be grown.

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