Search

Democracy assistance programs have always been notoriously difficult to measure in terms of outcome, but the need to show their impact (or lack of it) remains critical, even as the Managing for Results era of the 1990s has passed. This paper continues an effort to develop a tool for measuring civil society program impact in the form of an advocacy ladder encompassing democracy’s critical components of participation, accountability and contestation. The ladder is tested in the context of USAID-assisted initiatives in the Philippines and Indonesia, where it demonstrates a capacity both to monitor donor assistance outcomes and to suggest future program initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratization has often gone hand in hand with decentralization, but how do the two processes relate to each other? To answer such questions one needs fine-grained data on decentralization, and these have been hard to come by in South East Asia. This paper provides a careful estimation of the formal authority of regional governments in five Southeast Asian countries - Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand - on an annual basis from 1950 to 2010. We estimate nine dimensions of subnational authority and find wide variation both across countries and across time. We detect a close temporal relationship between democratization and decentralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative scholarship suggests that democracy in ethnically-diverse societies is likely to be fostered by the development of broad-based, aggregative and multi-ethnic political parties, rather than fragmented, personalised or ethnically-based party systems. However surprisingly little attention has been given to how party fragmentation can be addressed or how broad-based parties can be sustained, despite institutional experiments in conflict prone societies including Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Fiji and Papua New Guinea aimed at influencing party system development. Drawing on these various cases, this paper identifies four strategies of political engineering that have been used to promote broad-based, cross-regional or multi-ethnic political parties in new democracies around the world. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1967 the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was created primarily as a security alliance to function as a bulwark against communism. The founding members were Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines. Today ASEAN has grown into a comprehensive regional organization whose functions include not only security issue but also political, social, economic, and cultural matters. In the subsequent years Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar have joined. As a result, the ten-nation ASEAN contains a population of about 500 million. The characteristics of ASEAN as a regional organization are that it is a highly state-centric organization stressing state sovereignty and noninterference in internal affairs of member states. This article, first, briefly explores theoretical framework of regional organizations. Secondly, the examination is made on regional integration in Asia in the area of human rights. Thirdly, an assessment is made on ASEAN region's efforts to create a regional human rights ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Close examination of cross-national data on single-party rule and breakdown reveals no clear pattern of longevity, leaving open the question of whether single parties themselves create any strengthening effect. In this essay, I argue that single-party organizations only strengthen regimes given certain antecedent conditions to their establishment. I develop a dynamic model of single-party regime consolidation to explain the dramatic variation in longevity among these regimes. The strength of the opposition and level of access to rent patronage revenues during consolidation, I argue, structure the choices available to rulers early in the regime consolidation process. A weak opposition and ready access to rent revenues makes a low-cost consolidation possible, but also provides little incentive to build a robust coalition or strong party organization; this trajectory generates weak single-party rule that is likely to collapse under crisis. Conversely, rulers who face a powerful opposition and have little or no access to rent revenues have no choice but to offer potential allies access to policy making and have powerful incentives to build a strong party organization. Regimes such as these, even though their consolidation is more difficult, prove more resilient over the long run. I conduct an initial plausibility test of the argument against paired comparisons of Guinea-Bissau and Tanzania and of Indonesia and the Philippines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to a survey of 178 states' internet accessibility by the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union (ITU), South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan ranked in the top ten, but China, the Philippines, and Indonesia placed outside the top fifty. Despite efforts to reduce this chasm by governments and international organizations, the digital gap between those who have and those don't have continues to widen particularly in Asia. In an attempt to smooth out differentials of the Digital Access Index among Asian nations, the ITU and other international organizations encouraged government-sponsored initiatives to broaden accessibility. Thus the South Korean government, NGOs, and major electronics companies such as Samsung and LG have been supporting the digital have-nots within the region to construct basic IT infrastructures. Two questions arise: why are South Korea's grants centralized around Asia, and do the efforts focus on hardware? A hypothesis to the first question is that the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 made the general public in South Korea realize that Asian countries are closely related in their history, geography, culture, politics, and economy. Moreover, policy makers comprehended that narrowing the digital divide is essential for the sustainable development of South Korea. Secondly, there are two aspects of the contributions of South Korea's Official Development Assistance (ODA.) The material aspect is supporting of infrastructures to increase access for rural or remote areas and human resources development. The South Korean government and companies are helping to build a digital network; NGOs and volunteer ICT experts educate government officers in underdeveloped countries using software, and develop localized content. Many of them share the basic assumption that their efforts will bring to Korea political and economic advantages someday. For example, the ICT Hub that links regional key players and major institutions can be regional influence. The ethical aspect comes from the special experience of the Korean economy. As late as the early 1960s, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world; South Korea was an ODA recipient until 1991. However, in 2005, South Korea became the 11th biggest contributor due to rapid economic development, especially in the information technology field. South Korea's experience, therefore, can be a good lesson for today's developing Asian nations. This argument is supported by documentation from the 1990's, governmental websites, newspapers/periodicals, and journals from Asian communities, and should be compared with prior works including Hans-Dieter Evers (2005) and Robert Hunter Wade (2002). South Korean annual assistance would be analyzed by regional and sectoral priorities before and after 1997. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]