Chapters authored
Democracy as a Perpetual Revolution: New Political Theory beyond Five Paradoxes By Masaya Kobayashi
This chapter examines essential paradoxes of contemporary democratic theories to overcome the present impasse of politics, such as populism, pseudo-democracy, and neo-authoritarianism. As simple democratic theory is impossible to deal with the dilemma, there is various “qualified democracy,” including participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, discursive democracy, radical democracy, agonistic democracy, contestatory democracy, and associative democracy. However, these attempts and related political philosophies contain the following tensions: (1) Deliberative democracy vs. Radial democracy, (2) Associative democracy vs. French-type Republicanism, (3) Liberalism vs. Democracy, (4) Communitarianism vs. Democracy, (5) Republicanism vs. Democracy. In order to cope with these dilemmas, this chapter will propose a new political theory, developing a democratic theory by Masao Maruyama, the most influential post-war Japanese political theorist. His idea of a “perpetual revolution of democracy” is based on the dilemma between many/individual or parts/whole along the horizontal/vertical dimension within sovereign people. This chapter will re-formulate this idea as a multi-dimensional neo-dialectical democratic theory for perpetual revolution.
Part of the book: Democracy - Crises and Changes Across the Globe
Populism Typology across Europe, the United States, and Japan: Still the Century of Hybrid Fascism? By Masaya Kobayashi and Jiro Mizushima
This chapter offers a comparative analysis of contemporary populism across Europe, the United States, and Japan, highlighting the interaction between outsider mobilization and insider-driven authoritarian tendencies as the core dynamic of the global populist turn. Moreover, it examines whether the interaction of ideological echoes and insider-outsider hybridization warrants reconsidering fascism not as a historical recurrence but as a transformed, hybrid analytical category in contemporary democratic politics. In Europe, immigration and refugee pressures enabled the rapid expansion of right-wing outsider populist parties, normalizing welfare chauvinism and civilizational Christian identity politics. In the United States, outsider populism penetrated the Republican Party, where evangelical networks and Catholic post-liberalism reshaped the party from within, producing an insider-outsider hybrid that facilitated democratic erosion under the Trump administrations. Japan, long considered a deviant case, experienced a nationwide surge of outsider populism in 2024–2025, while Shinto-inflected cultural nationalism continued to sustain elite-driven insider populism. The result is a vertically fused hybrid configuration reminiscent of prewar “fascism from above” interacting with bottom-up extremism. Across the three regions, religion or quasi-religion operates as a symbolic and organizational reservoir for political mobilization, though taking distinct institutional forms. By synthesizing Mizushima’s outsider-politics theory, Maruyama’s classical typology of “fascism from above/below,” and emerging theories of hybrid authoritarianism, the chapter identifies shared mechanisms of democratic backsliding and offers a new typology of populist politics and hybrid authoritarian formations in advanced democracies.
Part of the book: The Populist Challenge
Japan’s 2025 Populist Turn from Outside: Multi-Dimensional Well-Being and Value Depletion in Integrative Political Psychology By Masaya Kobayashi, Hikari Ishido and Jiro Mizushima
Japan’s 2025 House of Councillors election provides a rare empirical window into how declines in subjective well-being (WB) and value-based resources align with contemporary populist realignment. Using national survey data linked to party support and seat-change patterns, this chapter shows that multi-dimensional WBs—spanning evaluative, affective, relational, and eudaimonic domains—together with value-related indicators (meaning, mattering, intrinsic versus material orientation, and sacralization) form a coherent psychological architecture behind Japan’s “populist turn from outside.” Lower WB and depleted meaning and mattering are consistently associated with stronger populist attitudes, outperforming ideology, socioeconomic grievance, and basic demographics. Three configurations are identified: (1) resentment-based populism, marked by elevated negative affect and collapsed meaning and mattering; (2) sacralized far-right populism, in which resentment is intensified by pseudo-religious purity and national-cultural sacralization; and (3) reform-oriented populism, where relatively high WB and future-oriented capability (hope, optimism, and agency) support efficacy-driven, market-focused dissatisfaction. These patterns indicate a generalizable mechanism linking WB and value erosion to democratic fragility in an advanced democracy. The chapter situates these findings within integrative positive political psychology, treating negative political phenomena as diagnostic signals of deficits in well-being and values—such as meaning and recognition—thereby clarifying targets for democratic resilience and flourishing-oriented renewal.
Part of the book: The Populist Challenge
Beyond Populism: A Moral-Existential Theory of Civic Sacredness for Flourishing Democracy By Masaya Kobayashi and Hirotaka Ishikawa
This chapter argues that the contemporary crisis of democracy is fundamentally existential rather than primarily ideological or economic. Drawing on Japanese national survey data, the study demonstrates that support for far-right populism is driven less by coherent ideology than by meaning depletion, resentment, and pseudo-religious forms of sacredness organized around purity and hierarchy. By contrast, supporters of centrist democratic parties display higher levels of meaning, hope, spirituality, and fairness-oriented morality, revealing a distinct form of civic sacredness grounded in dignity, recognition, and ethical transcendence. To conceptualize this democratic form of sacralization, the chapter introduces the concept of civic sacredness and distinguishes it from authoritarian sacredness. This distinction also revises Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory by showing that the sanctity foundation conflates two psychologically and normatively different orientations of sacredness. The Japanese evidence, therefore, reveals a previously under-theorized moral-existential cleavage within contemporary democracy. Building on these findings, the chapter develops a moral-existential theory of democracy in which civic sacredness functions as the ethical infrastructure of democratic life. It further proposes Ethical Communitarian Democracy (ECD) as the institutional articulation of a flourishing-oriented democratic order grounded in a democratic value ecology—meaning, mattering, recognition, and multi-dimensional well-being. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the future of democracy depends not only on institutional design but also on the cultivation of civic sacredness capable of sustaining a flourishing democracy (FD), understood here as an enduring form of Everlasting Multi-Dimensional Flourishing Democracy (EMDD).
Part of the book: The Populist Challenge
