ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between democratic politics and social policy reform in industrial East Asia, specifically, Taiwan and South Korea. Theoretical and empirical debates about the relationship between political democracy and the welfare state are not new. The conventional welfare state literature presupposes that class struggle and power resource mobilization are necessarily mediated through democratic political institutions. Democracy, in this respect, is an assumed pre-requisite to the formation of the modern welfare state (Cutright 1965; Stephens 1979; Korpi 1983; Jackman 1986; Esping-Andersen 1990). More recent scholarship on social policy reform among recently democratizing countries, however, offers a less sanguine viewpoint. In many of these countries, the transition to procedural democracy has failed to produce more substantive democracies, and political equality has not translated into greater socioeconomic equity in nations in Latin America, the former Soviet states, Africa, and parts of Southeast Asia (Weyland 1996; Chalmers et al. 1997; Cook 2007). Among late-developing countries, democracy has had little to no effect on welfare state formation, giving rise to serious tensions concerning the institutional bases of democracy and the resulting quality of democracy as understood by citizens. What does democratization deliver?
