Democratic Resilience in East and Southeast Asia – Potentials, Pathways, Performances

Democracy’s resilience to creeping autocratization is increasingly at the center of both academic and public discourses about the global state of democracy and its future prospects. East and Southeast Asia are of particular importance in this debate. While the region as a whole is still more democratic than 30 years ago, scholars note an alarming trend of erosion of democratic practices, principles, and processes in current Asia. However, the extent of this development varies from country to county and some democracies seem to have been quite resilient against the onset of autocratization. Despite the newly gained prominence of the resilience concept in comparative politics, attempts to actually measure democratic resilience remain rare. Furthermore, we still know little about why political systems resist, recover or bounce-back from shocks and crises, and even less about what explains the causal pathways that link the capacities of a political system to remain or become resilient and the actual extent to which democratic procedures, practices and principles remain resilient or not. This panel aims to bring together early career researchers and senior scholars from Asia and Europe to facilitate and enrich transcultural academic dialogue and help to develop new analytical perspectives, conceptual approaches, and theoretical views in the research on how to understand democratic resilience against autocratization by discussing how different configurations of resilience capacities, i.e., institutions, political parties, civil society, and political community, translate into different degrees of democratic resilience and what the causal pathways that enable democratic actors to stop and even revise democratic recessions before democracy collapses. The panel is organized by the journal Democratization.