Replication Data for: Democratic Ceilings: The Long Shadow of Nationalist Polarization in East Asia

East Asian democracies, long seen as the success stories of the Third Wave, have curiously co-existed with illiberal partisan competition. We argue that such patterns are symptoms of long-standing democratic stagnation, rather than democratic regress. We trace the entrenchment of illiberal competition to nationalist polarization in the early phase of democratization—a common phenomenon in Third Wave democracies where nation-building and democratization pressures coincided. Party polarization can take many forms, but when it centers on mutually exclusive nationalist visions from the outset, it redefines the end of democratic competition as state capture and justifies whatever means necessary, even those that violate democratic norms, to achieve it. Through a comparative analysis of Taiwan and South Korea, we show that when democratization tends to institutionalize, rather than alleviate, pre-existing nationalist conflicts, it can seed endemic barriers to the habituation of democratic norms, imposing a ceiling on democratic progress.长期以来被视为第三波民主化浪潮成功典范的东亚民主政体，却反常地与非自由式政党竞争并存。本文认为，此类现象实为长期民主停滞的表征，而非民主倒退。本文将非自由式政党竞争的固化溯源至民主化早期阶段的民族主义极化——这是第三波民主化国家中常见的现象，彼时国家构建与民主化的压力彼此交织重合。政党极化存在多种表现形式，但倘若从一开始便以相互排斥的民族主义叙事为核心，便会将民主竞争的终点重新定义为国家俘获(State Capture)，并为达成此目标而不择手段，即便这些手段违背民主规范亦在所不惜。通过对中国台湾地区与韩国的比较分析，本文发现，若民主化进程非但未能缓解既存的民族主义冲突，反而将其制度化，则会孕育出阻碍民主规范内化的根深蒂固的障碍，进而为民主发展设置明确上限。