The book studies and compares causes, catalysts and consequences of democratic regression and revival in South, Southeast, and Northeast Asia. The Asia-Pacific presents social scientists with a natural laboratory to test competing theories of democratic erosion, decay, and revival and to identify new patterns and relationships. This volume combines conceptual and comparative research with single case studies. Overall, the collection of studies in this volume captures different forms of democratic regression and autocratization, examine how Asia-Pacific experiences fit into debates about democracy’s deepening global recession and what the Asia-Pacific experiences contribute to the understanding of the causes, catalysts, and consequences of democratic regression and resilience in the comparative politics literature. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Democratization.

Democratization since the implosion of the communist bloc displays a mixed balance. While the neo-democracies in Central Eastern European Countries can be seen as largely consolidated, many other processes of democratization in other parts of the world such as Africa, Asia and Latin America got stuck as unconsolidated or became defective democracies, some ‘regressed’ into hybrid regimes or were even turned into autocracies. While transitology dealt with the transition from authoritarian rule, the reverse process, the transition from democratic rule, remained almost completely outside the scholarly attention. This special issue will address the problems of the regression of democracy and aims at closing the gap between research on democracy and democratization on one side and the emergence of authoritarian regimes on the other. The contributions of this volume analyse the different phenomena in which decline of democracy fans out: the loss of quality, which means a silent regression; the backslide into hybrid regimes (hybridization); and the breakdown of democracy.

This book examines the quality of democracies in Asia and determines why current democracies—especially during the so-called “new normal” era following the 2008 financial crisis—have become less stable and less resilient to increasing authoritarianism. Based on the assumption that the concept of democracy consists of three elements—procedure (participation, competition, and distribution of power); effectiveness (representation, accountability, and responsiveness); and performance (social welfare, inequality, and trust)—the contributors to this book determine which elements are responsible for diverging trajectories within the Asian democratic recession. Examining South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Myanmar, and China, the authors employ different research methods—quantitative, comparative, or individual case studies—to explore the conditions under which democratic rules and norms erode over time, and which type of governance is preferred by citizens in this region as an ideal type. The book puts forward the argument that a procedure-oriented concept of democracy is not sufficient for understanding the source of democratic recession and develops a new concept of “new democracy” based on procedure, effectiveness, and performance. It also demonstrates to what extent the experience changes and how the countries respond to these changes. A novel contribution on the state of democracy in Asia written by experts from the region, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of political science, especially comparative politics and international relations, regional study of East and Southeast Asia, sociology, public policy, economics, and social science methods. Also, this book will appeal to think tanks and policy-oriented researchers.

Since the mid-2000s, the quality of democracy around the world has been in decline, and Southeast Asia is no exception. This Element analyzes the extent, patterns and drivers of democratic deconsolidation in the three Southeast Asian countries that boast the longest history of electoral democracy in the region: Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. While the exact deconsolidation outcomes differ, all three nations have witnessed similar trends of democratic erosion. In each case, long-standing democratic deficiencies (such as clientelism, politicized security forces and non-democratic enclaves) have persisted; rising wealth inequality has triggered political oligarchization and subsequent populist responses embedded in identity politics; and ambitious middle classes have opted for non-democratic alternatives to safeguard their material advancement. As a result, all three polities have descended from their democratic peaks between the late 1980s and early 2000s, with few signs pointing to a return to previous democratization paths.

Rapid economic pluralization in East Asia has empowered local and medial groups, and with this change comes the need to rethink usual notions regarding ways in which "democracies" emerge or "citizens" gain more power. Careful examination of current developments in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia show a need for expansion of our understandings of democracy and democratization. This book challenges traditional ways in which political regimes in local as well as national polities are conceived and labeled. It shows from Asian experiences that democracy and its precursors come in more forms than most liberals have yet imagined. In reviewing recent experiences of countries across East Asia, these chapters show that actual democracies and ostensible democratizations there are less like those in the West than the surprisingly consensual and standard political science of democratization suggests. This book first examines the extreme variation of democracy’s meaning in many Asian states that hold contested elections (South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand). Then it focuses on China. It analyzes a range of grassroots forces driving political change in the People’s Republic, and it finds both accelerators and brakes in China’s political reform process. The contributors show that models for China’s political future exist both within and outside the PRC, including in other East Asian states, in localities and sectors that already are pushing the limits of the powerful, but no longer all-powerful, Chinese party-state. With contributions from leading academics in the field, Democratization in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia? will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian politics, comparative politics, and democratization more broadly.

This book explores the volatile and uncertain future of democracies in Asia through typological analysis of the diverse patterns of Asian countries. Detailed analysis and extensive case studies featured throughout this edited volume unveil democracies in the process of being consolidated, such as Taiwan and South Korea; precarious democracies, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines; states that are experiencing setbacks and a retreat from democracy, such as Thailand and Myanmar; and finally, states that are still resisting democracy, including China. Key findings articulate that Asian democracies do not follow existing models or patterns—such as that of Western democracy—but are instead lively, emergent works in progress. Environments in which democracy is practiced in Asia reflect local people’s pluralistic imagination of democracy; hence a comparative thematic approach is adopted. Contributors originate from Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand, each presenting regional insights into the unique challenges and movements of their respective nations, from staging protests in Bangkok to military coup in Myanmar. Opening new dialogue in the study of democracy, The Volatility and Future of Democracies in Asia will appeal to students and scholars of political science, comparative politics, international development, democracy studies, and Asian studies more broadly. .