The state of democracy in Asia & the Pacific

After several years of across-the-board declines, coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic, both five-year and one-year trends now paint a picture of institutional stability across the Asia and the Pacific region. There are notable exceptions in Myanmar and Afghanistan, two states that have seen steep declines across all categories of measurement due to civil war and state collapse. Without those two states, however, the aggregate regional score in three of the four categories (Representation, Rights and Rule of Law) improved by a very small margin from 2021 to 2022.

These changes are small enough that no firm conclusions should be drawn about a potential democratic breakthrough or renewal, and several more years of data collection will be necessary before either continued stability, or possible future improvements, will be clearly observable.

It is also important not to confuse the possible temporary halt in democratic decline with an improvement: most countries in the region continue to score below the global average in Rule of Law, Rights and Representation.

The relative stability can be seen in Figure 5.1, in which states are coded according to the net total of advancing or declining factor scores between 2017 and 2022 (the number of factors with a negative five-year change subtracted from the number of factors with a positive change over the same time period). Most states in the region—23 out of 35—saw a net advance or decline of, at most, only one factor.

Historically high-performing countries like Australia, Japan and South Korea still perform at similar levels across the GSoD Indices. Entrenched authoritarian regimes in Laos (146 in Rights and Representation) and China (134 and 157 in the same categories, respectively) continue to be free of any indications of significant change, despite the outbreak of protests on a historic scale across the latter in late 2022 (HRW 2023). Asia’s democracies—and would-be aspiring democratizers in the region’s more authoritarian states—still face exogenous and endogenous challenges, both towards revitalizing institutions and in preventing further democratic decline.

Representation

Malaysia and Maldives made significant advances in Representation in the last five years; the former as a result of improvements in Credible Elections and Free Political Parties, and the latter Effective Parliament, Credible Elections, Elected Government and Free Political Parties. Malaysia (ranked at 92) rose 17 places in the rankings for Representation on 2021, and Maldives (83) three places. Afghanistan, Cambodia, India and the Philippines saw significant declines in Credible Elections scores over five years, while Malaysia, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Thailand saw advances over the same time span.

Malaysia’s improvement can be credited in part to the convincing defeat of the long-powerful United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) in November 2022 elections, which had clung to power in the face of persistent and wide-ranging corruption allegations (BERSIH 2022; Lee 2022; Wee 2022).

India, which the UN estimates overtook China as the world’s most populous country in April 2023, continues to perform at the mid-range level in Representation, despite a statistically significant five-year decline, as well as similar declines in Credible Elections and Free Political Parties (UN DESA 2023). Concerns were raised about how the ruling party benefited from unequal treatment by Facebook and used hate speech in the 2019 election (Purnell and Horwitz 2020; Safi 2019; Tiwary 2022; Chakrabarty 2023).

The Election Commission of India has sought to regulate and proscribe hate speech, despite lacking the specific statutory authority to do so; instead, it used provisions of the Indian Penal Code and the Representation of People Act (The Scroll 2022). The Supreme Court of India has also repeatedly intervened, including via an April 2023 order mandating all states and union territories to register occurrences of hate speech without waiting for a formal complaint to be filed (Rajagopal 2023). In August 2023, critics and opposition parties argued that proposed changes to the process of nominating members of the Election Commission risked curtailing its independence (Jain 2023; The Wire 2023).

In 2023, questions about the equal treatment of political parties continued, especially around alleged bias in a legal case that has seen the conviction of Rahul Gandhi, senior leader of the Indian National Congress, the main opposition party. Gandhi was sentenced to two years in prison for defamation in March 2023, which could have barred his participation in the 2024 elections. However, the Supreme Court stayed the conviction in August 2023 (Landrin 2023; Mathur 2023; Venkatesan 2023).

Bangladesh saw a significant decline in Elected Government stemming from the lack of improvement since the much-criticized 2018 general elections (The Wire 2018; Siddiqui and Paul 2019; HRW 2018). The next general elections are scheduled to be held in 2024, and tensions, fatal protests and arrests of leading opposition figures began as early as 2022 (see also the case study on Bangladesh) (Hasnat and Mashal 2022).

Political instability in Nepal is reflected in a five-year decline in Effective Parliament. The parliament had been dissolved by the prime minister in 2021, but political deadlock continued after it was reinstated by a court order (Bhattarai 2021). Political coalitions have continued to be unstable since the November 2022 elections, and the government underwent seven cabinet reshuffles within its first four months in power, with analysts indicating that the primary political opposition appeared more interested in replacing the governing coalition partners than providing parliamentary oversight (ANI News 2023; Healy and Moktan 2023).

Rights

A continuing area of worry is Civil Liberties, where India, Maldives, the Philippines and Sri Lanka saw significant declines over five years, as did already low-performing Afghanistan and China. In the global rankings for Rights, India (ranked at 104) dropped 3 places, Maldives (98) 5 places and Sri Lanka (88) 18 places since 2021. By virtue of other countries across the world facing larger declines, the Philippines (90) improved its position in the rankings by one.

The most significant outliers, in terms of the overall pause in democratic decline, were seen in the factors Freedom of Expression, Freedom of the Press, and Freedom of Association and Assembly, which largely continued their downward trend of previous years. Asia and the Pacific’s regional average for Civil Liberties is well below the world’s, and most people in the region live in a country that has seen a significant five-year decline in its Civil Liberties score.

In mid-performing India, declines in Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Association and Assembly were exemplified by Amnesty International closing its doors there in 2020, citing raids on its offices and its trustees’ residences and the eventual freezing of its accounts (Amnesty International n.d.).

In also mid-performing Sri Lanka, the state responded to hundreds of days of mass protests—which forced the president to resign—with the introduction of laws that restrict people’s freedom of association and assembly and a constitutional amendment that has been criticized for retaining the very concentration of power in the executive that it seemingly seeks to contain (HRW 2022b). Sri Lanka’s Centre for Policy Alternatives described it as ‘a failure to understand the underlying public frustration in the system of governance that culminated in mass scale protests across Sri Lanka’ (CPA 2022).

The declines in Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Expression (Figure 5.2) found in the GSoD Indices have taken place during rapid changes in the way media is consumed and shared. Since 2017, Internet penetration in Asia and the Pacific has risen from 48 to 64 per cent, albeit unequally distributed and reflecting pre-existing social inequalities (ITU 2017, 2022; Setiawan, Pape and Beschorner 2022).

The hope in some quarters that digitalization and a levelling of media systems would drive democratic change proved to be misplaced, as newer forms of online and social media became a site of political contestation rather than a technical correction to government censorship and private US and Chinese platform monopolies (Sinpeng 2020; Farrell 2022).

Instead, traditional and social media constitute a constantly changing ‘smooth space’ that regulators, political parties and journalists must negotiate in order to protect the core democratic CI elections (Hubert 2019; Tan 2020).

Gender Equality showed limited changes across the region, with only two significant declines—in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan—over the last five years. Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan remain the highest-performing countries in this factor in the region, with the vast majority of other countries performing at the mid-range.

Afghanistan, Fiji, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar and Taiwan have all experienced statistically significant declines in Social Group Equality over the last five years. Despite a long journey ahead, recent advances for LGBTQIA+ rights in the courts in Japan, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and elsewhere related to same-sex marriage rights, and decriminalizing homosexuality could potentially signal an opening for long-awaited reforms (International IDEA 2023a).

Rule of Law

Rule of Law scores vary widely across Asia and the Pacific, with Oceania and East Asia the highest-performing subregions and Central Asia the lowest. This category is also where the most dramatic changes have taken place over the last five years, as the modest reforms in Uzbekistan (ranked at 114) and the democratic contraction in Kyrgyzstan (117) have led the former to surpass the latter.

Weak parliaments and attacks on media have resulted in more technocratic institutions, such as anti-corruption bureaus and the judiciary, to push back against executive overreach in the region.

In East and South Asia, top courts have delivered landmark rulings expanding rights for women and LGBTQIA+ persons in the absence of parliamentary or governmental action, ranging from removing the requirement of full-sex reassignment surgery for those seeking legal gender recognition in Hong Kong (Lau 2023), to recognizing the social benefits of same-sex couples in South Korea (Yoon 2023) and legalizing abortion regardless of marital status in India (Pandey 2022).

High courts can play a crucial role in protecting free speech. In Pakistan, a colonial-era sedition law criminalizing criticism of the government was struck down in March 2023 (Al Jazeera 2023), and in the Philippines, a tax court cleared Nobel laureate Maria Ressa of four tax evasion charges widely held to be politically motivated. It was hailed as a win for press freedom and the rule of law (OHCHR 2023a).

Participation

With the exception of Central Asia, countries in the region typically score at mid-range or high-performing levels of Participation. The major changes are in Fiji (ranked at 50) and Maldives (93), which have seen significant improvements in Civil Society in the last five years. Taiwan (4) moved up three places in Participation over the past year and remains the highest-ranked country in the region.

Mass public participation in electoral cycles remains the most powerful countervailing force as underlined by the 2022 Malaysian and 2023 Thai elections.

After lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 years and introducing automatic voter registration, the 2022 Malaysian election saw an increased turnout of three million more voters, compared with the previous election cycle in 2018 (Fernandez Gibaja 2022; International IDEA n.d.). In this case the actions of the electorate in largely removing a corruption-troubled party from power worked in complement with the nation’s anti-corruption commission, a fourth-branch institution that had successfully obtained the conviction of former prime minister and UMNO president Najib Razak for corruption, for his role in the 1MDB scandal (Latiff 2023).

Thailand also saw the highest voter turnout in its history (albeit by a small margin) in May 2023 parliamentary elections and a historic win for the Move Forward Party at the expense of both the ruling conservative coalition and traditional opposition Pheu Thai Party (International IDEA 2023b). Although roundly interpreted as a rejection of the continued rule of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who took power in a 2014 coup, Move Forward’s path to gaining power was blocked by the military-appointed Senate. By August 2023, Move Forward leader Pita Limjaroenrat’s leadership bid had failed in the face of Senate opposition, and Pheu Thai was negotiating with political parties allied with the military, in order to build a ruling coalition (Nikkei Asia 2023).

Thailand (118) has witnessed a surge in civic participation, slowly improving its ranking in Participation over the past few years, rising three places between 2021 and 2022. Youth engagement, activism and civic engagement have only intensified since the 2014 coup d’état, with anti-government protests in 2020.

Elsewhere in the region, the December 2022 Fiji election saw the peaceful removal of a long-time prime minister who had also taken power in a coup (see also the case study on Fiji). Uzbekistan (148), similarly to Thailand, has moved up six places in Participation over the past year, partly attributed to the easing of restrictive CSO registration procedures.

While slight openings for civic engagement in both Thailand and Uzbekistan demonstrate much-needed resilience in the face of repressive environments, the continued crackdown on protests and existing legal restrictions on CSOs indicates that more needs to be done to sustain democratic change (Solod 2022; CIVICUS 2022a).

Supranational institutions as countervailing institutions

Low- and middle-income nations in South East Asia and the Pacific are arguably subject to the most external pressure in the region. Despite the efforts of governments to focus international diplomatic relations on questions of development aid and assistance, they increasingly operate in a world interpreted by great powers through the lens of zero-sum and militarized competition (Kaiku 2023; Xiao 2022; Thu 2023; Needham 2022).

Australia, China and the USA are increasingly interested in strengthening and building ties with security forces in a region where military coups are often within living memory (Baldor 2023).

The lingering economic cost of the pandemic continues to put pressure on Asia and the Pacific’s low- and middle-income countries, as the region is likely to experience the most significant long-term economic shock from the Covid-19 pandemic (Kothari and Tawk 2023).[5] These countries are also under continuing pressure from rising European and US interest rates that constrain and limit public policymaking (Arteta, Kamin and Ruch 2023; Iacoviello and Navarro 2018).

According to an April 2023 Asian Development Bank report, 23 countries covered by the GSoD Indices in the region are at high or moderate risk of being unable to manage their external debt in the near future (Table 5.1). A country overburdened with debt also imposes costs on its trading partners, as funds that could have been used to import goods or invest in productive enterprises are instead set aside for debt service. This means that, while creditor nations’ financial sectors benefit in the short term, their real economies suffer and the potential for systemic risk only grows (Pettis 2023).

Domestic institutions as countervailing institutions

Independent media and threats to freedom of the press

Threats to freedom of speech extend beyond chaotic online spaces of proliferating home-grown and foreign disinformation, or social media platform-facilitated intercommunal violence (Brandt et al. 2022; Purnell and Horwitz 2021). In 2022 and 2023, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Kyrgyzstan instituted outright bans on popular independent and opposition media outlets, and a Pakistani court strengthened the country’s blasphemy laws (Imanaliyeva 2023; Masood 2023; OHCHR 2023b; Daily Star 2023). The South Korean government was criticized domestically and internationally for barring a major media outlet from a travelling press pool and for cutting public broadcasting funding amid claims of political bias in its programming as it was seen as having an unfavourable disposition towards the Yoon Suk Yeol administration (CIVICUS 2022b; RSF 2022).

The slow decline in Freedom of the Press is a long-term trend, having regressed to 2001 levels since the regional average’s historical peak in 2012 (Figure 5.3).

If reversals of previous years’ democratic trends are to involve delivering on the social and economic goods that underlie democratic social contracts, many countries in the region face a continuing uphill battle (Stubbs et al. 2023). Debt crises can act as an obstruction to the core CI of regularly scheduled elections, as has been the case in Pakistan and Sri Lanka (see below).

Contrary to the developing status quo of ‘a more narrow and exclusive focus on maximizing the wealth and power of their state’ in international relations, countries in Asia and the Pacific would be better served by strengthening regional cooperation (Helleiner 2023). Regional networks, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), could theoretically act as a stabilizing and democratizing counterweight in a world of enhanced great-power competition—although no such regional coalition has yet risen to the challenge (Damuri 2023); HRW 2022a).

Diverging member state priorities and internal tensions have revealed fractures within regional bodies such as ASEAN and PIF, which has hampered their ability to move from talk to action on pressing issues, such as Myanmar and presenting a unified front on climate change, respectively (Lawson 2022; Council on Foreign Relations 2022).

International economic fetters played a significant role in the 2023 political crisis in Pakistan, whose years of living on the verge of default amplified its vulnerability and hampered its response to 2022’s climate change-fuelled floods (Yap 2023; Runey 2023). The parliament that oversaw the removal of Imran Khan from the premiership in April 2022 proved no better at managing the country’s extremely distressed finances, and the ensuing political crisis spiralled out of all actors’ control by mid-2023 (Burney 2023; Joles 2023).

While these state and private limitations on freedom of expression and the media remain effective, the ability of the press or mass political action to play the role of a CI is likely to be limited. In less democratic regimes, mass media institutions are known to publish corruption investigations that result in the removal of high-ranking officials, but only with the government’s implicit or explicit permission. The top-down liberalizations and purported democratizations in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have included the arrests and prosecution of high-ranking officials on what appear to be genuine cases of corruption and abuse of office, but only when it enhances the stability of those autocratic regimes (RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service 2023; BBC News 2022).

Despite the prevalence of defamation and cybercrime laws used to silence dissent, civic engagement can become a powerful countervailing force in consolidating more inclusive democracies. Collective action has the power to deliver a strong mandate for change, even in repressive circumstances, as in Thailand, where MFP, a progressive party promising monarchy and military reforms, won the most votes in an election that saw a record voter turnout. Election observers noted that the increased participation of civil society and the media led to a more transparent election than in 2019 (ANFREL 2023). Indeed, Thailand’s Civic Engagement score is slightly below the global average and is among the strongest performing in Asia and the Pacific; noteworthy in that it has only increased since the 2014 coup d’état, reflecting the democratic energy that fuelled the 2020–2021 mass demonstrations and calls for monarchy reform. Since 2020, social media has also played a pivotal role in spurring online civic engagement—also believed to have contributed to MFP’s victory (Leesa-Nguansuk 2023).

Anti-corruption commissions and the judiciary

National anti-corruption commissions have proven to be a vital CI for holding political elites accountable.

Australia, whose Absence of Corruption score has not yet recovered from a significant decline in 2013, took the positive step in November 2022 of establishing a federal anti-corruption commission to boost whistleblower protections and investigate public officials for corruption (The Australia Institute n.d.).

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, established in 2009, has solved several high-profile corruption cases over the years and secured the indictment of two former prime ministers in 2022 and 2023 (Strangio 2023; Zhu 2022). Malaysia has seen a corresponding statistically significant increase in Absence of Corruption in the last five years (Figure 5.4).

The work of the Indonesian Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi; KPK) led to the ‘conviction of hundreds of individuals, including the former head of the Constitutional Court, the senior deputy governor of the country’s central bank, leaders of political parties, government ministers, chairs of regulatory agencies and oversight bodies, as well as subnational executive government heads including governors and mayors’ between 2005 and 2019 (Buehler 2019). The KPK’s key successes were made possible due to the support it received from other CIs, including CSOs and a mostly free press (Umam et al. 2020). The KPK’s years of success eventually provoked an elite backlash. Legislation from 2019 substantially weakened the agency and removed much of its independence, and it is unclear when or if it will recover its former efficacy (Mulholland and Sanit 2020).

As with other CIs, efficacy is conditional on a number of factors. Anti-corruption commissions can only be effective CIs when they are backed by political will, an adequate budget, and most importantly, when they are truly independent of the executive (Quah 2017). A co-opted or constrained anti-corruption commission is likely to fall prey to being used as a political leader’s ‘attack dog’, or a ‘paper tiger’ used to head off demands for real anti-corruption reform (Quah 2021; Siddiquee and Zafarullah 2020).

As the rise and fall of Indonesia’s KPK shows, anti-corruption commissions can be part of a well-functioning and complementary set of democratic CIs, such as well-run and open elections and a free and independent media. They are not a replacement for other CIs or a shortcut to sustainable democratization—both Hong Kong and Singapore established rigorous anti-corruption commissions that were never intended to push their countries towards a more democratic path (Meagher 2005).

Across the region, the judiciaries have been core defenders of the rule of law and the expansion of civil liberties, but Rule of Law scores show great variation both within and between subregions (Figure 5.5).

The Supreme Courts of Sri Lanka and Pakistan have similarly been called on to uphold the right to vote in response to executive decisions seeking to postpone local elections in 2023 (Perera 2023; Aamir 2023). Yet, in defiance of the court orders, elections in both cases remain delayed, signalling growing points of contention between the judiciary and the executive, as democracy is held hostage to funding and politics.

Reliance on the judiciary as a CI is not without drawbacks. A too-strong judiciary may unintentionally undermine or destabilize the executive or parliament (Husain 2018). The overreliance on the Pakistani judiciary for democratic progress may have paved the way for Pakistan’s 2023 constitutional crisis by weakening parliament in relation to the military. Dependence on one particular CI can result in a concentration of non-democratic power elsewhere, such as permitting the military to assume more direct power by arguing that it is the only institution capable of providing governance (Ayoob 2022). The top-heavy Pakistani judiciary is also a case study in the ‘judicialization’ of politics, where the resort to judicial decree weakens reliance on elections, the core of any democratic polity (Husain 2018).

Conversely, non-independent and politicized judicial institutions can also be weaponized to restrict fundamental freedoms. In Cambodia and Bangladesh (see also the case study on Bangladesh), crackdowns on opposition groups in the last year have been facilitated by judicial harassment.

While some Asian and Pacific countries have made progress in the Rule of Law and Representation categories, most nations in the region still lag behind the global average. Restrictions on freedom of speech and media censorship remain areas of concern, and external debt and economic constraints further hinder democratic progress. The judiciary and anti-corruption commissions have emerged as key CIs in safeguarding democratic values, although their efficacy rests on factors such as political will and independence. Broadening civic engagement has renewed demands for democratic change, as seen in Thailand’s recent election. Collective efforts will be needed to revitalize key institutions, such as parliaments, to prevent further democratic declines.