Party System Institutionalization in Asia

I am leading this project with Fernando Casal Bertoa. This project covers a diagnosis of party politics and its consequences for the consolidation of democracy in Asia.

Through a comparative analysis of the party system institutionalization process in 21 Asian democracies, including East, Southeast, South Asia, and Middle East, from 1948 to 2017, this project not only produces new knowledge about the conditions in which party system institutionalization occurs, but also makes broader implications for policy-makers to understand what is the best institutional framework that fosters party system institutionalization and facilitates improvement regarding the consolidation of democracy. This project has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust.

1. Old Factors, New Determinants, and Electoral Volatility in Asian Democracies since 1948 (under review)

Electoral stability has been viewed as an essential condition for the healthy functioning of representative democracy. However, there is little agreement in the literature about what causes the stability of the electorate in general nor much attention paid to that of the Asian electorates in particular. We test for established factors examined in other regions but also propose historical legacies, uniquely testable in Asia, as new determinants. Through a statistical analysis of more than 150 elections in 19 post-WWII Asian democracies, we show that only some of the findings from other regions apply to Asia. We also find that certain types of authoritarian (military or personalist) and colonial (non-British) legacies have a detrimental impact on the stabilization of the electorate. Yet, the evidence from our analysis that such effects of historical legacies, particularly authoritarian interludes, can be attenuated and cease to be significant with sufficient maturation of democracy has important implications for political reform practice.

2. Party System Institutionalization and Its Consequences in Asia, 1948-2017 - 2019 PSA paper

Party system institutionalization has been recently considered to be an important condition for the survival and accountability of democracy. In Asia, party system institutionalization has been a key feature for explaining the current formation of political systems differing across countries. However, little is known about the way in which varying degrees of party system institutionalization affect the process of government formation in general, and the chief executive's choice of government ministers, in particular. By analyzing 21 Asian democracies since 1948, we find that, facing more institutionalized party systems, chief executives are more likely to choose their copartisan members and less likely to select nonpartisans in cabinets. Our research on institutionalized party systems has important implications: A more standardized and structured inter-party competition not only helps voters to choose elites in the electoral arena but also helps chief executives to choose elites in the governmental arena.