ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses citizens' knowledge of Asian democratic and authoritarian regimes in Indonesia, Korea and Thailand, and presents the findings from both existing and new spatial econometric analyses, using data from the Polity IV Project. It investigates the spread of democracy across Asia and other regions around the world. Across Indonesia, Korea and Thailand, the majority of citizens are sure that their own country is a democracy, yet, they seem rather unsure of whether countries in Asia are democratic or non-democratic, with knowledge of democratic political systems being poorer than that of authoritarian ones. On average, only 43 percent of Indonesians understand that Myanmar, North Korea, Singapore and Vietnam are non-democratic political systems. Przeworski et al. reports that the more democratic neighbours a country has the more likely an existing democracy is to survive, and that countries in certain geographical regions are either more democratic or less democratic than purely domestic models of democratization would predict.
