Incomplete Democracies in the Asia-Pacific: Evidence from Indonesia, Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand.

• Author: Sirivunnabood, Punchada
• Position: Book review

Incomplete Democracies in the Asia-Pacific: Evidence from Indonesia, Korea, The Philippines, and Thailand. Edited by Giovanna Maria Dora Dore, Jae H. Ku and Karl Jackson. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Hardcover: 281pp.

Incomplete Democracies in the Asia-Pacific emerges from a decade-long project by a team of scholars at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), John Hopkins University. This book is based on a 2011 survey of citizen attitudes and behaviours in four democratic states in Asia: Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines and Thailand. A brief historical glimpse reveals different paths among these four states: Indonesia's nascent post-war democracy was derailed for decades under Soeharto's authoritarian regime; Thailand's tumultuous relationship with democracy has resulted in nineteen coups since 1932; the Republic of Korea equivocated between democracy and authoritarianism until the military was finally eliminated from politics in the late 1980s; and the state with the longest democratic history in Southeast Asia, the Philippines, was ruled by a dictatorship from 1972-86. While each of these four countries attempted to develop democratic government, democratization was not easy for any of them. Why democracies work in some areas, but not in these nations, is a major concentration in this volume.

The main focus of this book's eight chapters is that democracy remains immature. The survey results reveal that positive evaluations of democracy do not necessarily produce greater demand for democratic forms of accountability. Moreover, survey respondents who support democracy also retain positive views of authoritarianism. In other words, although the understanding of participatory politics is high in these four states, many citizens still consider authoritarianism a viable governance model. For example, in Chapter 2 Giovanna Dore reveals that although a large majority of Indonesians express support for democracy, less than 17 per cent can be considered "strong democrats". Moreover, a large proportion of respondents in all four countries expressed satisfaction with authoritarian or dictatorial leaders, including Soeharto in Indonesia and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. This reaffirms that people in these countries still consider authoritarianism a feasible government.

Although this book is a rich thought-provoking volume, how the authors determined political knowledge and democratic attitudes...