Electoral Governance: Models of democracy in Asia and the Pacific

This chapter presents an overview of electoral governance across the Asia-Pacific region, and highlights the growing importance of regional models of democracy and clusters of political reform in the emerging democracies of Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. It identifies four sub-regional trends—the combination of (semi) presidential government, mixed-member majoritarian electoral systems and nascent two-party politics in the Northeast Asian democracies of Korea, Taiwan and Mongolia; the historical prevalence of dominant-party parliamentarism in the Southeast Asian ‘quasi-democracies’ of Singapore and Malaysia, and in Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand too; a shift towards more complex elections and more fragmented party systems in the Southeast Asian presidential democracies of Indonesia, the Philippines and semi-presidential Timor Leste; and experimentation with a broader range of electoral and party reforms in the politically fragmented parliamentary democracies of the South Pacific. Such sub-regional clustering of institutional choices is a product of many forces, including geopolitics, neighbourhood diffusion and internal political dynamics, with direct implications for policy outcomes.