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Amid global concern over democratic backsliding, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are often viewed as exceptions—stable, healthy democracies. Yet illiberal trends have been quietly growing in each country since the early 2010s. South Korea’s martial law crisis in December 2024 shocked the world, and all three East Asian democracies face rising threats to elections, the rule of law, and civil and political rights.
Drawing on extensive multilingual research, Christopher Carothers traces the forces undermining democracy in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. East Asia’s Troubled Democracies identifies the crucial factor fueling challenges in each country: the overcentralization of power in Japan, political polarization in South Korea, and Beijing’s interference in Taiwan. In addition, all three countries have seen rising immigration, changing norms around gender and sexuality, and shifting views of national identity since the 1990s. This rapid sociocultural change has provoked political backlash, straining democratic norms. At the same time, as Carothers shows, historical, institutional, and demographic characteristics shared across these three societies have bolstered democratic resilience.
Compellingly written and rigorously argued, this book provides a nuanced corrective to overly optimistic views of the state of democracy in East Asia and reveals how global trends in democratic erosion are playing out in this critical region.
— Kharis Templeman, coeditor of Electoral Malpractice in Asia: Bending the Rules
Through rich and nuanced comparative research, Carothers diagnoses what ails democracy in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. This ambitious new book addresses a key challenge of our time—democratic backsliding—while also providing readers with the tools for identifying and assessing each country's unique symptoms and their etiology.
— Celeste Arrington, author of From Manners to Rules: Advocating for Legalism in South Korea and Japan
East Asia’s Troubled Democracies is an impressive work of deep and nuanced comparative analysis that should be essential reading not only for regional specialists, but for scholars around the world seeking to understand the sources of contemporary democratic decay and resilience. In exposing the distinctive syndromes of democratic stress in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and the common features of developmental success that have so far contained democratic backsliding in the face of external threat and sociocultural change, Christopher Carothers makes a theoretically significant and empirically rich contribution to the literature on global democracy.
— Larry Diamond, Stanford University
Introduction
1. Incipient Backsliding in East Asia’s Democracies
2. Why East Asia Is Not Fully Backsliding
3. Overcentralized Power and Its Consequences in Japan
4. Political Polarization and Its Consequences in Korea
5. Foreign Interference and Its Consequences in Taiwan
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index