Governance and Democracy in the Asia Pacific ─ Political and Civil Society

In the Asia Pacific region, historical legacies and social structures dispose civil and political society to interact in different ways to Western best-practice scenarios which then go on to produce have implications for democracy and governance. These outcomes are derived from conditions that are delicately intertwined and are influenced by, and have influence upon, colonial legacies, religion, ethnic pluralism, the role of the military, the monarchy, bureaucratic capacities, constitutions, party systems, elections, executive-legislative relations, and the judiciaries.

This book examines this complex network of underlying conditions and the relations between them, examining the nature of civil and political society in the Asia-Pacific region as well as the presence, or absence, of good governance and democracy. Divded into three themes - governance and democracy, political society, and civil society - each theme is intended to focus our attention on the kinds of issues it identifies and, in turn, encourage both an analytical and a comparative study between a number of similar countries or cases in the Asia Pacific region.

William Case is Professor and Acting Head of the Department of Asian and International Studies at the City University of Hong Kong.

Stephen McCarthy is Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Business and Asian Studies, Griffith University, Australia.