Political Engineering in the Asia-Pacific

Political reform across the Asia-Pacific region, particularly in the years following the Asian economic crisis, has seen the emergence of a distinctive regional model of electoral democracy. This move has been facilitated by deliberate strategies of "political engineering" across a diverse array of Northeast Asian, Southeast Asian, and the Pacific Island electoral democracies. Political engineering focuses on the deliberate design of political institutions to achieve specified outcomes. This essay examines how regimes across the Asia-Pacific region have increasingly attempted to engineer their political systems to encourage more predictable elections, aggregative parties, and stable governments.