Confucian Democratic Leadership: A Reconstruction for Contemporary East Asia

Can Confucianism be reconciled with democracy if it is based on a leader-centered idea of political leadership where citizens exercise almost no influence in charting collective political directions? This question is central to the relevance of Confucianism to contemporary East Asian politics. This article overcomes this conundrum by presenting a new theory of Confucian democratic leadership. Contemporary leadership studies are analyzed to determine the fundamental conceptual elements of democratic leadership. At the same time, classical Confucian intellectual resources are used to develop a conception of democratic leadership that can be considered distinctively Confucian. The result is a robust conception of Confucian democratic leadership that is not only distinguished from traditional Confucian undemocratic views of political leadership but also from dominant Western theories of democratic leadership.