Democracy In East Research Articles

Democracy Through Strength in Modern Asia: A Review Essay of Dan Slater and Joseph Wong's From Development to Democracy

Abstract Junyan Jiang's review essay of Dan Slater and Joseph Wong's From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia highlights the innovative and compelling aspects of the book but also raises some questions about the authors’ interpretations of the conditions, content, and consequences of elite-led democratization in East and Southeast Asia.

Presidentialism and Democracy in East and Southeast Asia, ed. Marco Bünte, Mark R. Thompson, Routledge 2023, pp. 173

Presidentialism and Democracy in East and Southeast Asia, ed. Marco Bünte, Mark R. Thompson, Routledge 2023, pp. 173

Separation of powers, opposition strength, and chief executives' strategy

AbstractOne of the main questions about presidential democracies is to what extent the legislature influences executive governance. However, less well‐known in this literature is the influence of opposition parties in policy‐making and government formation processes. We argue that, in multiparty presidential governments, more concentrated opposition forces in the legislature, as opposed to more fragmented, lead to higher government spending and greater chances of coalition formation. Facing more united opposition, presidents who are concerned about passing their agenda in the legislature are willing to pay the price to hold their ruling party or governing coalition together in tighter unity. We test this logic by analyzing data on government spending and cabinet formation in all multiparty presidential democracies in East and Southeast Asia and find strong support for it, controlling for several political and economic variables. Our analysis further shows that chief executives' electoral incentives strongly shape their budget spending and cabinet appointments.

Stable Support for Democracy in East and Southeast Asia? Examining Citizens’ Trust in Democratic Institutions

Recent democratic regressions and crises suggest democracy is at risk across East and Southeast Asia. One of the factors that can determine democratic stability are citizens’ attitudes. While previous research has concentrated on support for democracy-in-principle, this contribution argues that it is political trust, i.e. support for democracy-in-practice, which is crucial for democratic stability. For democracies to be stable, political trust should be high as well as rooted in long-term factors like liberal democratic value orientations or social trust to protect it from short-term fluctuations following economic crises or political scandals. This contribution therefore examines not only the current levels and development of political trust but also whether it is influenced more by long-term factors (liberal democratic value orientations, social trust) or short-term factors (economic performance evaluations, incumbent support). The empirical analysis shows political trust in five East and Southeast Asian democracies (Indonesia, Japan, Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan) to be mostly mediocre and primarily dependent on economic performance evaluations and incumbent support. Among the five democracies, citizens in Japan appear most resilient to democratic regressions; on the other hand, Taiwanese democracy seems least equipped to master future crises.

Iraq, 2003–2011: succeeding to fail

ABSTRACT This study examines the US experience during the Iraq war, from the planning phase that began in 2001 to the withdrawal of US forces in 2011. It reveals a dearth of planning and intelligence leading up to the invasion; reluctance by conventional coalition military forces to conduct reconstruction, political and security capacity-building; and, later, full spectrum counterinsurgency operations. These forces took on some missions traditionally reserved for special operations forces, and they increasingly assumed diplomatic roles as they interfaced with the Iraqi leadership and local kingpins. Although these efforts yielded some impressive organizational learning and limited operational successes, they were hampered by lack of adequate preparation, a poor understanding of the human terrain, shortsighted strategies, and ultimately a dearth of political will to stay the course. The outcome was far from the model Middle East democracy envisioned by the invasion’s architects, and the American experience in Iraq instead became a cautionary tale for military intervention.

Democratization and women’s representation in presidential cabinets: evidence from East and Southeast Asia

ABSTRACTThis article examines patterns of women’s cabinet representation across all presidential democracies in East and Southeast Asia since democratization. It demonstrates how the choice of female ministers differs across career backgrounds in presidential systems and further examines why young presidential systems in Asia are conducive to women’s access to ministerial power through professional career tracks. We argue that despite women’s successful performance in national legislative elections, women have been restricted to access the power resources necessary to target other political goals, such as cabinet positions, whereas democratic transition has provided broader avenues for women to emerge as professionals outside party politics. By analyzing original data on female ministers in East and Southeast Asia, the study finds that the share of women among professional ministers has increased over time, but women’s share among political ministers has not changed significantly. Additionally, the different qualifications of female politicians and professionals also make them eligible for appointment to different types of policy areas in terms of prestige and gender. Our analysis suggests that women’s cabinet representation has improved overall since democratic transition in Asia, but this improvement disguises contrasting outcomes in women’s cabinet status according to their career backgrounds.

Illiberalism, Populism and Democracy in East and West

The emergence and persistence of right-wing populist parties (RWPs) in almost all advanced democracies in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and across the Atlantic is a result of a new cleavage that revolves around the question of how open borders should be for goods, services, capital, migrants, refugees, human rights, and the transfer of political power to supranational institutions: Cosmopolitans opt for opening the nation states’ borders, while communitarians prefer more closed and con- trolled borders in a broader sense. An economic and cultural-discursive representation gap on the communitarian side allowed RWPs to enter the political stage along this cleavage. The composition of their electorate, their thematic focus and their discourse support our hypothesis. We demonstrate that whether RWPs pose a danger for democracy crucially depends on whether they are in government or opposition and whether the context is that of well-established or less consolidated democracies. We also discuss whether polarization is deemed harmful to democracy. RWPs can indeed have a positive impact on a re-intensified political participation. However, if the illiberalism of RWPs dominates policies, politics, and the political discourse in less consolidated democracies, such as in Hungary and Poland, liberal democracy is in danger.

Democracy in East -Central Europe: Consolidated, Semi -Consolidated, Hybrid, Illiberal or Other?

Democracy in East -Central Europe: Consolidated, Semi -Consolidated, Hybrid, Illiberal or Other?

Popular Value Perceptions and Institutional Preference for Democracy in “Confucian” East Asia

Scholars and observers of democracy have argued that the world has entered a period of democratic recession (Carothers 2006; Diamond 2008; Kurlantzick 2011; Plattner 2015; Puddington 2007, 2009). This pessimistic view is supported by Freedom House's annual report on political rights and civil liberties, Freedom in the World 2015, which concludes that the state of freedom has declined for the ninth consecutive year (Freedom House 2015). In many cases, this rollback has taken place even as democratic institutions remain, at least superficially, in place. As the National Endowment for Democracy (2006, 2) has noted, there has been an increase in semi-authoritarian hybrid regimes characterized by superficially democratic processes that disguise and help legitimate authoritarian rule. In these countries, there has been a pushback against democracy as autocratic governments clamp down on free media, civil society, and human rights groups (Carothers 2006). In East Asia-the eastern part of the Asian continent that can be defined in either geographical or ethnocultural terms-the democratic recession in semiauthoritarian hybrid regimes has coincided with the entrenchment of authoritarianism in China, which is now the region's largest economy. In the context of the global democratic recession and the rise of China, the prospects for democratization in East and Southeast Asia are now bleaker than at any time since the beginning of the third wave of democratization.Some observers have argued explicitly that the democratic recession is closely associated with China's rise and the position taken by China's leadership toward political institutions (Ambrosio 2012; Ikenberry 2008; Leonard 2008; Tao 2015). Tao (2015) argues that the China model, as an alternative modernization model, has enhanced the normative power of autocracy over democracy. Tao describes China's authoritarian model as an economic globalization model based upon liberal state-market relations and illiberal statesociety relations, with a market economy driven by globalization and a political system operated according to the rule of law. Concerning the mechanisms for international diffusion, Thomas Ambrosio (2010) contends appropriateness and effectiveness are the two key mechanisms for the diffusion of authoritarianism. In this regard, the existence of a successful China model already shows the appropriateness and effectiveness of authoritarianism for countries where a liberal political culture has not developed and both political elites and citizens tend toward normative values such as the accumulation of wealth over political freedom.Literature ReviewThe literature on the decline of democracy is reminiscent of the Asian values debate of the 1990s, following the economic emer- gence of the four Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan). In the wake of economic development and rising national pride, some politicians in East Asia, such as Lee Kwan Yew and Mohamad Mahathir, questioned the necessity and desirability of liberal democracy, and developed an alternative discourse based on Asian values.1 With the economic rise of China and the stability of its political system the debate surrounding Asian values reappeared. The global financial crisis of 2008 resulted in even more attention given to Asian values as an alternative to liberal democracy (Shin 2012). China's rise has thus reopened the debate between cultural determinism and modernization theory.Cultural determinism and modernization theory are premised on competing claims about the attitudes of ordinary people. Therefore, this study reexamines the Asian values debate by considering popular value perceptions and institutional preference for democracy among citizens in seven societies with Confucian traditions: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, mainland China, and Vietnam.2 The economic success of Confucian (or authoritarian) societies has discredited the idea that the wholesale adoption of democracy is requisite for economic development. …

Cultural War and Reinventing the Past in Poland and Hungary: The Politics of Historical Memory in East–Central Europe

This paper has been based on three assumptions that have been widely discussed in the international political science: (1) there has been a decline of democracy in East–Central Europe (ECE) with the emergence of “velvet dictatorships”, (2) the velvet dictatorships rely on the soft power of media and communication rather on the hard power of state violence that has provoked “cultural wars“ and (3) the basic turning point is the transition from the former modernization narrative to the traditional narrative with “reinventing the past” and “reconceptualising modernity” through the reference to the historically given collective national identity by launching the “politics of historical memory”. The velvet dictatorships have been using and abusing the national history as an ideological drug to consolidate their power. The (social and national) populism and Euroscepticism are the basic twin terms to describe the soft power of the new (semi)authoritarian regimes. They are convertible, the two sides of the same coin, since they express the same divergence from the EU mainstream from inside and outside. Soft power means that the political contest in the new regimes has been transferred from the hard to the soft fields of politics as the fight between the confronting narratives. The victory of the traditionalist–nativist narrative carries also the message that the people are only passive “subjects” and not active citizens, so the field of politics has been extremely narrowed in the “new brave world” in ECE.

Party system types and party system institutionalization

This article is an overview of the types and level of institutionalization of party systems in seven young democracies in East and Southeast Asia. By applying Alan Siaroff’s typology of party systems, the analysis demonstrates that the party systems in Asia do not converge on a single format. The party systems under consideration also differ in the level of institutionalization. Party systems in Thailand, the Philippines and especially South Korea are stuck in an inchoate state. Even though there is considerable variation among the cases, the party systems in Indonesia, Mongolia and Taiwan can be considered as well institutionalized relative to the rest of Asia and moderately institutionalized when compared to Latin America. Furthermore, weak institutionalization correlates with volatile structures of party competition and cooperation in Thailand, whereas in South Korea and the Philippines party systems seem to be paradoxically stabilizing in a situation of protracted under-institutionalization, as both cases combine more or less stable party system patterns with weak institutionalization.

Strategic Government Spending in South Korea and Taiwan: Lessons for Emergent Democracies

A debate persists over how economic performance fuels democratization. It is fanned partly by the divergent experiences of the East and Southeast Asian nations of Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan and the Philippines. This paper provides a theoretical model that shows that economic downturns lead to democratization and evaluates the conclusion systematically with data from South Korea and Taiwan. It departs by treating democratization as an outcome of strategic interaction between government and non-government actors. The model and statistical results corroborate that economic downturns motivate government and non-government actors to credibly pursue political reforms and democratization in East and Southeast Asia. This paper makes three contributions: First, it provides a model to show democratization as the outcome of strategic responses under weak economic conditions. Second, the model’s conclusions are tested with different operationalizations of democratization, ensuring that the findings are robust to alternative specifications. Third, the evidence from East and Southeast Asia expands strategic treatment and systematic analyses to critical cases to augment theoretical and empirical bases towards the debate.

The Middle East's Democracy Deficit in Comparative Perspective

AbstractThe Middle East's democracy deficit is a product of the patterns of political and economic development in the region. It is not because the region is predominantly Islamic or is somehow afflicted by purportedly undemocratic cultures. By itself, culture is not an impediment to transition to democracy as it is subject to influences from the larger polity, especially insofar as the economy and the initiatives of the state are concerned. Instead, transition to democracy is determined by the degree of society's autonomy from the state. This autonomy may result from the empowerment of society as a consequence of economic development, or the state elite's devolution of power to social actors and classes, or, more commonly, a combination of both. Assumptions about the inherently undemocratic nature of cultures such as Islamic and Confucian ones are fundamentally invalid. The key to understanding democratic transitions lies instead in the nature of state-society relations rather than the nature of society's norms and values in themselves.

Who owns the media?: global trends and local resistances

* Foreword - Peter Golding * Editors' Preface * PART I: Theory and Policies ** 1. The Political Economy of International Communications - Robert McChesney ** 2. Global Institutions and the Democratisation of the Media - Se n a Siochr ** 3. Intellectual Property Rights - Cees J Hamelink * PART II: Regional and Country Case Studies ** 4. Privatisation: The Cost of Media Democratisation in East and Central Europe? - Slavko Splichal ** 5. The Politics of the Media in the English Speaking Caribbean - Hopeton S Dunn ** 6. The Political Economy of Media in Southern Africa, 1990-2001 - William Hueva, Keyan Tomaselli and Ruth Teer-Tomaselli ** 7. Media Ownership and Control in Africa in the Age of Globalisation - Francis Nyamnjoh ** 8. Media and Neoliberalism in Latin America - Ana Fiol ** 9. Communications and the Crisis: From Neo-Liberalism to Authoritarian Development? - Dan Schiller ** 10. The State, the Market, and Media Control in China - Zhao Yuezhi ** 11. Media Ownership and Communication Rights in India - Pradip N. Thomas ** 12. The Political Economy of Media Ownership in Nigeria - Mohammed Musa and Jibril Mohammed ** 13 Ownership, Control and the Malaysian Media - Zaharom Nain and Wang Lay Kim * PART III: Democratic Communication Futures ** 14. The Whole World Is Watching: Online Surveillance of Social Movement Organisations - Sasha Constanza-Chock ** 15. Agendas for Research and Strategies for Intervention - Pradip N. Thomas

Democracy and Confucian Values

This essay considers a number of proposals for liberal political democracy in East Asian societies, and some of the critical responses such proposals have attracted from political philosophers and from East Asian intellectuals and leaders. These proposals may well be ill-suited to the distinctive traditional values of societies claiming a Confucian inheritance. Offered here instead is a pragmatist- and Confucian-inspired vision of participatory democracy in civic life that is possibly better able to address the problem of conserving and continuing these traditional values through times of economic and social change.

East Asian Democratization: Impact of Globalization, Culture, and Economy By Robert W. Compton, Jr. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000 224p. $68.00.

Studies of Asian politics tend to follow one of two divergent analytic strategies. Area specialists emphasize the importance of Asian culture in shaping the politics and economics of those nations, whereas comparative theorists apply broader models of political behavior to the Asian context. Robert Compton seeks to integrate these two traditions, which generally speak past one another, by proposing a promising (albeit somewhat limited) model of the dynamics of democratization in East and Southeast Asia. The model explicitly incorporates the distinctive cultures of these nations as the central causal factor explaining the process of democratization and the characteristics of the democratic polities that have emerged in the region. Furthermore, in terms of normative questions, Compton uses this analysis to critique both sides in the current debate between advocates of democracy and critics who claim that democracy is incompatible with “Asian values.'' Thus, East Asian Democratization should be of interest to a wide variety of scholars concerned with Asian politics or with theories of democratization.

Bin Laden, the Arab “Street,” and the Middle East's Democracy Deficit

Bin Laden speaks in the vivid language of popular Islamic preachers, and builds on a deep and widespread resentment against the West and local ruling elites identified with it. The lack of formal outlets to express opinion on public concerns has created [a] democracy deficit in much of the Arab world, and this makes it easier for terrorists such as bin Laden, asserting that they act in the name of religion, to hijack the Arab street.

Kristina Gaerlan, (ed.) Transitions to Democracy in East and Southeast Asia (Quezon City: Institute for Popular Democracy, 1999), 260 pp.

Kristina Gaerlan, (ed.) Transitions to Democracy in East and Southeast Asia (Quezon City: Institute for Popular Democracy, 1999), 260 pp.

After Beijing: political liberalization and the women's movement in Jordan

La conference des femmes de Beijing en 1995 a attire l'attention du monde entier sur la place des femmes et a essaye de l'inscrire sur l'agenda des gouvernements. L'exemple de la Jordanie est utile pour etudier le mouvement des femmes. Les mouvements de liberalisation politique sont apparus assez recemment dans ce pays (a partir de 1989). Une liberte significative est accordee au niveau de l'expression politique et de la presse, mais la societe civile demeure sous la contrainte des lois de l'epoque pre-liberale. De plus, la Jordanie subit une reforme economique menee par la Banque Mondiale, ce qui a conduit a des mesures d'austerite. L'implication de tous ces facteurs dans le mouvement des femmes est cependant confuse, du fait que les processus de liberalisation politique et economique n'ont pas encore pris toute leur ampleur.

Development and Democratisation in East and Southeast Asia

Development and Democratisation in East and Southeast Asia