East Asian Perspectives on Political Legitimacy

Joseph Chan is Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at The University of Hong Kong. His scholarship spans analytic political philosophy, Confucian political thought, the history of Western political thought, and contemporary Chinese and Hong Kong politics. He is the author of Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times (2014) and has been published in numerous leading journals such as Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, History of Political Thought, the Journal of Democracy, Philosophy East and West, and China Quarterly. Doh Chull Shin is a Jack W. Peltason Scholar in Residence at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine, and Professor Emeritus, Korea Foundation Chair, and Middlebush Chair at the University of Columbia, Missouri. His research interests include democratisation and political socialisation throughout East Asia. His has published, co-authored and co-edited many books in this field including Confucianism and Democratization in East Asia (2012), The Quality of Life in Confucian Asia (2009) and How East Asians View Democracy (2008). Melissa S. Williams is Professor of Political Science, and was the founding Director of the Centre of Ethics, at the University of Toronto. Her research is predominantly in contemporary democratic theory, core concepts in political philosophy through the lens of group-structured inequality, social and political marginalization, and cultural and religious diversity. She is the author of Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation (1998), has co-edited numerous volumes as editor of NOMOS: Yearbook of the American Society of Political and Legal Philosophy, and has published many articles in journals such as the Canadian Journal of Political Science and Political Theory.

1. Political legitimacy in East Asia: bridging normative and empirical analysis Melissa S. Williams, Joseph Chan and Doh Chull Shin; 2. Reasons to obey: 'multiple modernities' and constructions of political legitimacy Melissa S. Williams; 3. Do East Asian states enjoy a legitimacy premium? Bruce Gilley; 4. Political legitimacy in China: a Confucian approach Daniel A. Bell; 5. Political legitimacy in Hong Kong: a hybrid notion Wai-man Lam; 6. The evolution of political legitimacy in Singapore: electoral institutions, governmental performance, moral authority, and meritocracy Kenneth Paul Tan and Benjamin Wong; 7. Polarized politics, government legitimacy and democratic legitimacy in Taiwan Min-Hua Huang; 8. The legitimacy of democratic rule in Korea: from the perspective of the mass citizenry Doh Chull Shin and Youngho Cho; 9. Political legitimacy, satisfaction, and Japanese democracy Benjamin Nyblade; 10. Legitimacy as a hybrid phenomenon Leigh Jenco.