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Chong-Min Park**

Inequality and Democratic Politics in East Asia 1

I

Since the last decade of the twentieth century, much of East
Asia has experienced two significant changes in politics and economy:
democratic transition and rising income inequality. When “the third wave of
democratization” reached East Asia in the late 1980s (Huntington 1991),
there was only one democracy in the region, Japan. The first third-wave
democracy in the region emerged in the Philippines in 1986 when the people
power revolution overthrew its long-standing dictatorship. Since then, the
Philippines has maintained an electoral democracy except for a brief period of its
breakdown in the late 2000s. South Korea’s democratic transition started with the
adoption of a new constitution and an immediate presidential election in 1987
(Freedom House, various years). Taiwan gradually transitioned to democracy by
first lifting martial law in 1987 and finally holding its first presidential election in
1996. Mongolia made a rapid transition to democracy in 1990 by abolishing one-
party Communist rule and holding the first multiparty parliamentary elections.
Indonesia’s democratic transition began in 1998 by forcing its long-term autocrat to

* For presentation at the 21st KPI Congress on “Bridging the Inequality Gap and Nurturing
Quality of Democracy,” Bangkok, November 1-3, 2019

** Professor, Korea University [email protected]
1 This is drawn largely from my work which appears in Park and Uslaner (2020).