Now, political culture can also effect what institutions are established,
and that the culture can be influenced by changes in those institutions, all right?
So, here the argument would be that if you can go out and change the institutions.
So, you go from, let's say, a social or an authoritarian regime and
then, you take the society and transfer it into a more democratic regime,
that people will respond differently despite being Chinese.
So that again, the point of being Chinese is not the key factor,
the key factor is what are the institutions like, right?
And Zhu Yunhan, who was a very well known Taiwan political scientist,
I once was talking to him about changes in the views
towards democracy in Taiwan, and he said that one of the strongest factors
making Taiwanese feel more democratic was to participate in elections.
That the more people go out and vote and
feel that their voting has an impact on who gets elected,
they feel more Democratic in their own way and they adopt
Democratic values much more strongly.
Now, Wang Zhenyao, who was also a very close friend of mine,
he was the person who led the movement in China to develop village elections.
And once over dinner just outside of Peking University, he, his wife, and
I were having dinner and
I asked them a question about whether the peasants could be fooled.
That these village elections were really not very serious, not very successful,
because the peasants could be tricked by the local officials and
told who to vote for.
And his argument was, by the time of the third round of elections,
these elections were happening every four years.
So within ten years, the leaders could not fool the peasants anymore and
the peasants just understood much better the game of democracy and
therefore demanded that the election be more democratic.
So again, you change the norms, you change the rules, you change the structure, and
people will behave in a more democratic way and have more democratic values.
Now, this is one of my favorite slides, which clearly demonstrates that when you
change the political structure In a regime,
in a government, that people's attitudes towards politics.
Their attitudes, their normative attitudes.
Their views of politics will change as the regime changes.
So what we have here are ten statements given, read out, will be through a survey.
Ten statements read out to people in Taiwan.
The survey was done in 1985, in 1990 and then again in 1991.
And these are statements disagreeing,
these are the percentage of people who disagree with these norms.
So for example the norm is the first norm, is elders should manage politics.
The idea being, that only the old people,
the senior people should be the ones In charge of politics and the junior people,
younger people in their lives shouldn't be involved in politics.
Now in 1985, 49% of people disagreed with that statement.
Which meant that 51% agreed with that statement.