Hierarchy, Legitimacy, and Differentiated Voice: Cross-National Evidence from Asia
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Abstract
This study examines three questions within the Authority-Enabled Voice (AEV) framework in cross-cultural leadership and voice research. First, does individual-level authority endorsement differentiate institutional participation from protest participation across Asian societies? Second, does a normative pathway through order values transmit this relationship? Third, does a parallel legitimacy pathway through institutional trust? Using nationally representative data from 13 Asian societies (N = 22,210) in the World Values Survey Wave 7, the analysis employs pooled and multilevel regression models with cluster-robust inference, alongside 10,000-draw bootstrapped mediation tests. Across specifications, authority endorsement is not a reliable individual-level predictor of either institutional or protest participation. Neither the normative pathway nor the legitimacy pathway yields a statistically significant indirect effect: authority endorsement does not meaningfully predict order values and shows only a weak association with institutional trust, and the bootstrapped indirect effects through both mediators are negligible. The remaining empirical signal is concentrated in the evaluative component, where institutional trust exhibits a modest negative association with protest participation, particularly in multilevel specifications that account for between-country heterogeneity. Three contributions follow. First, the study establishes a boundary condition for the AEV framework by showing that hierarchical value endorsement does not operate as a direct behavioral driver, thereby placing boundary conditions on culturalist assumptions in cross-cultural leadership research. Second, it analytically distinguishes hierarchy as a generalized cultural orientation from legitimacy as an evaluative judgment about institutions, demonstrating that these constructs should not be conflated in cross-cultural voice theory. Third, it refines the AEV framework by repositioning it as a legitimacy-anchored account in which evaluative perceptions of institutional fairness, rather than normative value endorsement, more directly shape the channel through which voice is expressed. Together, these contributions shift cross-cultural leadership and voice research from direct cultural-value prediction toward a more context-sensitive, legitimacy-based explanation of participation.
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