The shift to consensus democracy and limits of institutional design in Asia

Abstract

A ‘majoritarian turn’ identified by scholars of Asian democracy in the 1990s saw the rise of mixed-member majoritarian electoral systems and more centripetal party competition across both Northeast and Southeast Asia. In this paper, we argue that since the 2000s, the institutional pendulum has shifted, with more consensual approaches to democracy appearing to better represent key identity cleavages of gender, ethnicity, and territory—a trend evident not just in East Asia but South Asia as well. This new ‘Asian model’ typically involves increasing the proportional components of existing electoral formulas and grafting gender quotas, multiethnic party lists, and quasi-federal elements onto ostensibly majoritarian state structures. We show that these reforms have, as intended, mostly increased female and ethnic minority representation and decentralized governance structures. At the same time, however, these de jure changes are not associated with de facto political development in terms of greater democratic quality, counter to theoretical expectations. Indeed, democracy has declined across most of Asia at the same time as its democratic institutions have become more consensual.

Keywords:

• Democracy
• elections
• quotas
• electoral systems
• Asia

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Alexandre Coelho, Yoshikuni Ono, and the reviewers and editors of the Pacific Review for their helpful comments. We benefited greatly from excellent research assistance from Hisashi Kadoya, Aoi Yazawa, and Truston Yu. This paper was presented at the V-Dem East Asia Regional Center’s inaugural conference in 2019 and the IPSA World Congress in 2021. Financial support comes from KAKENHI grant number 21K01303, and the Southeast Asia Rules-Based Order Project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Looking at the case of Australia, Lijphart (1999) states that changing to a PR electoral system would be enough to shift the country from majoritarian to consensual democracy.

2 As well as the Freedom House threshold noted earlier, for case selection we consulted the Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (LIED) database created by Skaaning, Gerring, and Bartusevicius (2015). The countries under study were coded as three and higher for at least 10 years between 1990 and 2020 in LIED, denoting that the given country-year had multiparty elections for both legislature and executive branches (although such elections did not necessarily fulfil the competitive election condition, that is, elections were not characterised by uncertain outcomes.) This scope of analysis, which deliberately errs on the side of inclusion, means that both democratic and semi-democratic regimes are included, as long as they held multiparty elections.

3 For example, Nepal's NGOs addressing women's issues operated mainly with funding from international sources. They advocated for the gender quota at the Constituent Assembly deliberations (Falch, 2010).

4 In the case of bicameral legislatures, we calculated ENP for the lower house.

5 Bhutan, Myanmar, and Timor Leste are each located on the 45-degree line because competitive elections started only after the mid-2000s.

6 This is calculated by taking the average minority rights score of parties, weighed by their respective seat shares. We reversed the value to make higher values denote better protection of minority rights.

7 Media reports of the 2014 elections, for instance, reported that 14 Chinese Indonesians were elected as DPR members out of a total of 315 Chinese Indonesian candidates, an increase from the 213 candidates who contested in 2009. See South China Morning Post (2019).

8 It would not surprise if Myanmar follows a similar path now that the generals are back in power in Naypyidaw following the February 2021 coup, in order to give their favoured Union Solidarity and Development Party a chance of forming a power-sharing government with the military, who retain 25% of parliamentary seats.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yuko Kasuya

Yuko Kasuya is a professor at the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Law at Keio University, Japan. Her research focuses on comparative politics of Asia, regime transitions, and democracy measures.

Benjamin Reilly

Benjamin Reilly is professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Western Australia, and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the East West Center in Hawai’i. His work focusses on democracy, political institutions and conflict management.