This article compares partisanship across East Asian nations, with four indicators reflecting different dimensions of the concept. Across these indicators, partisanship in East Asian nations was found to be relatively weak compared with most Western democracies, reflecting the less institutionalized nature of their party systems. This could be caused by insufficient time to develop partisanship through mechanisms such as electoral experience and parental socialization. Further breakdowns of income, gender, age groups, and educational levels of partisans showed that more advanced democracies share a relatively uniform pattern across demographics, while young democracies in East Asia showed a more skewed distribution of partisan identifiers, unevenly distributed across income and gender groups. This pattern suggests partisanship is likely to start its development from certain segments of the population and then spread into other segments of the society as a party system becomes more institutionalized.
