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and transfers Gini coefficient, the redistributive role of democracy appears to be
limited in East Asian democracies except for Japan (Cho and Kwon 2018). What
attracts attention here is that levels of income inequality have risen and/or remained
3
high amid democratic transition or authoritarian persistence across the region.

II

Economic inequality has been a major concern among social scientists for
recent decades (Erikson 2015; Scheve and Stasavage 2017). While there have been
growing scholarly efforts to examine the origins and consequences of economic

inequality in advanced democracies, there has been far less such research in the
context of East Asia (Croissant and Haynes 2014). In view of political
democratization and rising income inequality across much of the region since 1990s,
it becomes even more important to advance our understanding of the connections

between economic inequality and democracy across the region. East Asia provides
a good opportunity to assess the impact of inequality on politics.

As presented in Table 1, (as of 2015) East Asia exhibits variations in regime
type, economic development, income inequality, and quality of governance. First,

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Mongolia, and the Philippines are electoral
democracies while Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, non-democracies. Second,
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are high-income countries while

Indonesia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand, middle-income countries
(more precisely, Malaysia and Thailand are upper middle-income countries, whereas
Indonesia, Mongolia, and the Philippines are lower middle-income countries). Third,
Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are relatively equal societies while Indonesia,
Mongolia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand are unequal societies.

Fourth, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Malaysia perform good
governance in the rule of law and control of corruption while Indonesia, Mongolia,
the Philippines, and Thailand show middling or poor governance.

3 Of the six countries in the region transitioning to electoral democracy during the 1980- เอกสารประกอบการอภิปรายร่วมระหว่างผู้แทนจากต่างประเทศ
2000, Haggard and Kaufman (2012) considered Mongolia to be a democratic transition with high
level of inequality, as measured by Gini coefficient (form the University of Texas Inequality
Project’s dataset); Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand to be democratic transitions with
medium level of inequality; South Korea and Taiwan to be democratic transitions with low level of
inequality. They classified all the countries except Taiwan as democratic transitions with
distributive conflicts between the elites and the masses.