Party (System) Institutionalization and the Quality of Democracy in Asia

• In Event: Comparative Party Polarization

Abstract

Since the third wave of democratization that brought a series of new democracies to the Asian continent, more than two decades have passed. Although a market economy has taken firm root, at least for members of the APEC and OECD in the region, this might not be enough for their parties and party systems to institutionalize. Moreover, a well-rehearsed litany of complaints has been recited against the countries in the region, raising once again the question, “How important are parties and party systems for the quality of democracy?”
The link between weak party/party system institutionalization and the quality democracy has been examined in a myriad of countries in other regions, such as Eastern Europe (Tóka, 1997), Africa (Kuenzi and Lambright, 2005) and Latin America (e.g. Mainwaring and Scully, 1995). A majority of these studies (Stockton, 2001; Casal Bertoa, 2017), take the form of small-N or single-country case studies and do not test the relationship between party/party system institutionalization and the level of democratic consolidation through sophisticated statistical methods.
Seeking to fill this lacuna in the literature, this article attempts to systematically analyze the effect of weak party/party system institutionalization on the quality of democracy in the understudied region of the world, the Asian continent. For our analysis, we collect an original dataset of party system institutionalization in 21 Asian democracies since 1948 and consolidate it with the V-Dem Dataset for a number of variables measuring the quality of democracy, From our panel analysis for more than seven decades, the main conclusion is that, as in the Goldilocks principle, neither over- nor under-institutionalization can be considered to improve the quality of democracy. All in all, the relationship between these variables proves far from being unidirectional nor linear.

Authors

• Fernando Casal Bertoa, University of Nottingham

• Don S. Lee, University of Nottingham