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Abstract
As democracy backsliding has come to the fore in recent years, authoritarian nostalgia has also stood out as an emerging topic in democratization studies. Since nostalgia is inherently an emotion, this study differs from the existing literature that treated authoritarian nostalgia merely as a political attitude. Instead, we reinterpret authoritarian nostalgia by regarding the fundamentals of nostalgia in psychology, emphasizing three qualities of authoritarian nostalgia, which are “idealized,” “time-unrestrictive,” and “constructive.” In addition, we select two sets of national telephone surveys in 2015 and 2023 to conduct empirical analysis. First, we find that the Taiwanese public shows greater authoritarian nostalgia in social stability and economic performance than in the aspect of political and human rights. Second, the results reveal that age, political efficacy, and party identification exert an influence on authoritarian nostalgia; older people and those with low political efficacy display a tendency towards such nostalgia.
Moreover, Pan-Blue supporters are more likely to feel authoritarian nostalgia under a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government, while Pan-Green supporters, by contrast, believe that the present ruling government usually outperforms its past and authoritarian counterpart, accentuating the importance of party politics in Taiwanese authoritarian nostalgia. Finally, we propose an innovative survey questionnaire to tap the concept of authoritarian nostalgia, hoping to pave the way for further research in this field.
Abstract
In the case of some transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, it is prevalent to have the sentiment of nostalgia for the stable and orderly times of the past regime, particularly in the context of nascent democracies. This pilot study sheds some light on the issue by examining the public evaluations of government performance between the Chiang Ching-kuo administration and the present government in Taiwan. I take advantage of the ”2003 Taiwan's Election and Democratization Study” (TEDS 2003) survey date, using the technique of factor analysis to classify government-performance evaluations into two factors, ”liberty and democracy” and ”stabilization and income equality,” and then employing regression models to test the relationship between sociopolitical variables and the two factors. The findings confirm the research hypothesis of authoritarian nostalgia that the public perceptions of the Chiang Ching-kuo administration and the present government differ in terms of the political perspective and the socioeconomic standpoint. On one hand, the general public has perceived the achievement of ”liberty and democracy” since the democratic transition, and on the other has looked back with nostalgia to the impressions of ”stabilization and income equality” during the authoritarian period. The findings also reveal that the variables of educational attainment, political knowledge, Taiwanese consciousness, Taiwan independence preference, and the pan-green identification exert positive effects on ”liberty and democracy,” while the variables of mainlander ethnicity, Chinese consciousness, China reunification preference, and the pan-blue identification account for significant variance in ”stabilization and income equality.” This study concludes that authoritarian nostalgia is still potential for future research in this field of democratization.
