Political Engineering in the Asia-pacific

Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, the rapid economic development of Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and other Asia-Pacific countries under restrictive political arrangements led to claims of the superiority of a so-called Asian model of democracy. Touting the strength of Asian culture and values in contrast to the perceived moral turpitude and social decay of the West in general and the United States in particular, proponents of “Asian-style democracy” argued for the virtues of quasidemocratic government that ranked hierarchy and order over individualism and competition. In truth, this was at base a model of nondemocracy—and one that faded quickly from prominence in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis, which laid bare the structural weaknesses of East Asia’s political and economic systems. The political reforms that the region has seen since then have set the stage for the advent of a more genuine “Asian model” of democracy. In something of a grand irony, this model is coming to resemble the AngloAmerican system of majoritarian electoral competition and two-party politics. This movement toward more predictable and consolidated representative government has been eased by strategies of overt political engineering across an increasingly diverse array of electoral democracies in Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific islands. Regimes throughout the region have sought to recraft their political systems in order to encourage elections that are more decisive, parties that more coherently aggregate interests, and governments that are more stable. The number of Asia-Pacific governments chosen through free and competitive elections reached an all-time high in recent years. In a Benjamin Reilly is the director of the Centre for Democratic Institutions and associate professor in the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University. His essay “Electoral Systems for Divided Societies” appeared in the April 2002 issue of the Journal of Democracy.