Abstract: This book shows how political reformers across the Asia-Pacific region have responded to the reality of their internal diversity by deliberate, innovative, and often highly ambitious forms of political engineering. Harking back to the success of the East Asian ‘Tigers’ and their unorthodox but successful interventions in the economic arena, many democratizing Northeast Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Island states are now seeking to manage political change by far-reaching reforms to their electoral, parliamentary, and party systems. This book is part of the Oxford Studies in Democratization, a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia.

Keywords: political reform, political change, democratization, electoral system, parliamentary system, party system