Wolfgang Sachsenröder - Political Party Systems and Democratic Development in East and Southeast Asia: Volume II: East Asia

Wolfgang Sachsenrder

Baogang He

Tomohito Shinoda

Yong-Ho Kim

Jiann-Jong Guo, Shih-Hsin Huang and Min-Hsiu Chiang

Throughout the ongoing democratization process in the region, the attention of political observers and the media has mainly been directed to the existing parliamentary institutions and procedures. However, not too much attention has been given to the internal development of political parties and their structures, nor to their changing roles in the developing democracies of East and Southeast Asia. This is hardly surprising, since organizational structures within many parties seem at least to be fragile, if not completely volatile. Capricious changes of positions, leaders or even large numbers of the membership, changing alliances through mergers, splits and newly emerging parties in all manner of unlikely coalitions between the strangest bedfellows give confusing signals to voters and observers alike. This may partly explain why party leaders and office bearers, who are more prominent and sometimes form the more stable elements of party life, have usually enjoyed the limelight, whereas party machineries are taken for granted and remain to a certain extent, obscure. This situation seems to suggest that charismatic, authoritative or even authoritarian leaders play a more important role than party structures in maintaining political stability and continuity. At the end of an era of nation building, after a long colonial period, the generation of founding fathers of the calibre of Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, Mahathir in Malaysia or Suharto in Indonesia is still more visible than the organizations they created to maintain their power. The media and leading politicians attribute this, to a certain extent, to Asian traditions or values. It may therefore be timely and worthwhile to examine this theory further and see whether it can be supported in an empirical analysis of the facts of party politics. It is one of the aims of this book to provide more insight, facts and arguments for a better understanding of the role of political parties in Asian politics.