A Nuanced and Dynamic Reassessment of the Asian Values Thesis

Since the mid-1990s, the “Asian values thesis (AVT)” has constituted a notable feature of scholarly research on East Asian political culture, as well as a crucial component in the comparative studies of political culture. Despite the accumulation of increasingly rich data for empirical scrutiny over the past decades, little consensus has emerged regarding either the nature or implications of the AVT. This article proposes a more nuanced understanding of the AVT and reassesses the thesis. Theoretically, it differentiates between cultural traditions’ level and relationship effects on contemporary political dynamics. Empirically, it integrates six waves of the World Values Survey data for analysis and employs mixed-effect models to capture both cross-sectional and longitudinal dynamics. Robust and supporting empirical evidence has been documented for the AVT, although in the “most-likely” scenario.