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.

What holds democracies together through hard times? What pushes individuals to hold steadfast to democratic norms in the face of crisis or democratic backsliding, when payoffs fail? Prior work suggests that they do out of contractual trust, but say little about when that trust is broken. I show that nationalism—typically seen as a violent, destabilizing force in democracies—can serve as that “moral glue” for many ordinary citizens. Political theorists have long recognized the moral coerciveness of the nation, but why it holds some democracies together and tears others apart is not well understood. I argue that national obligation interacts with beliefs about the status of “my” nation in the eyes of the state to produce a tractable logic. When nation-state linkage is strong—when “my” nation is seen as represented by the state—national obligation frames compliance in moral, rather than payoff, terms, fostering a dutiful citizenry even through difficult times. When linkage is fractured—when “my” nation is seen as excluded from or threatened by the democratic state—the same moral ties can push individuals to abandon democratic norms.

I test the conditional theory across voting, paying taxes, and military service—the most basic expectations in every democracy. I start with a controlled comparison in South Korea versus Taiwan, where despite nearly identical pathways to democracy, differing nationalist strategies resulted in strong versus weak nation-state linkages. The setup predicts contrasting national effects on the willingness to comply with democratic norms. To show that the moral pull of the nation is real, I triangulate three ways: a statistical model that applies insights from political theory to identify ethical intent; a pair of experiments that prime national obligation as the reason to comply; and analyses of the personal narratives of volunteer soldiers. After pressure testing the theoretical logic in East Asia, I externally validate it in Germany, where compliance has been regionally divided since reunification. Finally, I conduct a large-N, cross-national test on the widest set of democracies for which data exist. My findings suggest that good citizenship and 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. In a time of rampant political cynicism and disillusion, the book offers a cautiously optimistic conclusion that dutiful citizens, and relatedly resilient democracies, are things that can possibly be grown.

---