Suchergebnisse

Using Przeworski et al.'s paradigmatic work on democracy and development as a touchstone, this review examines East Asia's lessons for comparative politics. It focuses particularly on the challenges that China and South-East Asia present for modernization theory, a foundation stone of political science. In most of the rich world, including north-east Asian cases of modernization such as Korea and Taiwan, economic development and democratization have tended to go hand in hand. In South-East Asia, by contrast, almost none of the expected relationships between democracy and development seems to work. The most striking anomaly of all today is China, which appears to be moving ever further away from democratic reform as it grows richer. This disjuncture between theory and practice is explored, along with other, more positive, East Asian contributions to scholarship on democracy and development.

The South Pacific region features enormous variation in state performance. While Polynesian nations such as Samoa have proved to be relatively successful post-colonial states, Melanesian countries like the Solomon Islands are increasingly categorised as 'weak', 'failing' or 'failed' states. Drawing on a range of comparative studies by economists and political scientists in recent years, this article argues that cross-country variation in ethnic diversity between much of Polynesia and Melanesia is a key factor in explaining differences in state performance across the South Pacific. It shows how different kinds of ethnic structure are associated with specific political and economic outcomes, including variation in political stability, economic development, and internal conflict from country to country. In so doing, it helps explain why some parts of the South Pacific appear to be failing while others are relative success stories - and why this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

East Asia contains three of the world�s youngest semi-presidential democracies: Mongolia, Taiwan, and East Timor. In addition to having a semipresidential constitutional structure, each of these countries also represents a relatively unusual case of democratization: Taiwan is one of East Asia�s famous �tiger� economies and the world�s only Sinitic democracy, but faces an ongoing crisis of nationhood; Mongolia is one of the few unambiguous examples of a successful transition to democracy and a market economy in the postcommunist world; while East Timor is both East Asia�s poorest nation and its newest democracy. As such, each represents an important test case for assessing the effect of semi-presidentialism upon democratic development.

An intense scholarly and public policy debate concerns the optimal design of institutions for new democracies, particularly those facing deep ethnic or cultural cleavages. This paper surveys the main contending models that have been advanced for ethnically diverse democracies - consociationalism, centripetalism and communalism - and examines the key components of each of those models. It then explores some aspects of their application, arguing that there is much more cross-over between the models than is commonly assumed.