Stateness and Democracy in East Asia

The relationship between stateness and democracy has attracted a great deal of attention in comparative politics. This is not only related to the historical turn in democratization studies" (Cappocia and Ziblatt, 2010) but also to the improved availability and quality of data with regard to the measurement of democracy and stateness. A similar trend has taken place in the political economy and development economics literature, where, in the late 1980s, the call to "bring back the state in" (Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol, 1985) heralded the development of a variety of new research agendas. While political economists have been intensively researching the role of the state in Asia's industrialization and development processes since the 1980s, democratization research on East Asia has so far largely ignored the "state-democracy nexus" (M ²ller and Skaaning, 2014). In contrast to the prevalence of economic, cultural and class-based approaches, stateness-related explanations for democracy in the region areexceedingly rare.1"--