Introduction to : Political Parties and Democracy: Part II: Asian Parties

Since 1974, the third wave of democratization has engulfed southern Europe and Latin America, swept through Asia, and decimated dictatorship in the Soviet bloc.2 At the beginning of the 1980s, of the twenty-six main political regimes in Asia, only six were more or less democratic: Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and Papua New Guinea. Nine were either military dictatorships, or regimes controlled by a civilian leadership beholden to the military: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines and South Korea. Five were royal autocratic or colonial regimes: Brunei, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal and Hong Kong; and 6 were communist party mobilisation regimes: China, North Korea, Mongolia, Vietnam, Laos and Kampuchea (or Cambodia). In the 1990s, nine of the twenty authoritarian regimes featured on this list had started on the road to democracy: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea and Mongolia