ABSTRACT
As has been pointed out earlier in this book, from the last decades of the twentieth century and up to the beginning of the twenty-fi rst, the seven countries covered in this book fall into two broad groups. One group is composed of the fi ve polities which have become fully liberal-democratic, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia; the other includes the two polities which, in the early years of the twenty-fi rst century, were at most partially democratic and should be referred to as ‘semi-pluralistic’, Malaysia and Singapore. In four of the countries of the fi rst group, the democratisation process occurred in the 1980s; in 1999, Indonesia abandoned many of the structural features of its forty-year-old authoritarian system and the changes seem to be suffi ciently established to suggest that that polity had moved from the second group to the fi rst. Meanwhile, no substantial political change occurred in Malaysia or Singapore.
