ABSTRACT

In this chapter Joseph Wong asserts that democratic transitions in Taiwan and South Korea prompted and then facilitated the deepening of the welfare states, an argument he initially made in Healthy Democracies: Welfare Politics in Taiwan and South Korea, published by Cornell University Press in 2004. Focusing on the universalisation of health insurance during the 1990s, Wong explains how the introduction of electoral competition and the alignment of bureaucrats and civil society actors pushed democratising governments in Taiwan and Korea to initiate and sustain social policy reform. Wong then recounts how he has since revised his arguments, and in particular how the broader political economic structures in the East Asian developmental states set the stage for welfare state deepening. The chapter finishes by introducing new social, economic and political pressures on the welfare state, characteristic of not only East Asia’s democratisers, but post-industrial welfare states more generally.