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Electoral Reform in Asia: Institutional Engineering against ‘Money Politics’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2014

OLLI HELLMANN
OLLI HELLMANN*
Affiliation:
University of SussexO.Hellmann@sussex.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article argues that major cases of electoral reform across democracies in Asia in recent years can be explained as institutional measures aimed at curbing corruption and ‘money politics’. More specifically, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand rid themselves of their extreme candidate-centered electoral systems as a means to encourage politicians to invest in ‘clean’ collective party labels, while Indonesia discarded its extremely party-centered electoral system to increase the accountability of individual politicians. The article thus disagrees with scholars who argue that recent electoral reform should be understood as part of a wider project by Asian governments to engineer a majoritarian form of democracy. Instead, the comparative analysis shows that democracies across Asia, in line with global trends in institutional design, have been ‘normalizing’ their electoral systems, moving them closer towards the ideal of electoral ‘efficiency’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Japanese Journal of Political Science , Volume 15 , Issue 2: Quality of Life and Environmentalism in ASEAN , June 2014 , pp. 275 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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