Comparative Perspective: Aurel Croissant Electoral Politics in Southeast and East Asia: A Comparative Perspective * Aurel Croissant Introduction This volume collects empirical studies of elections and electoral politics in seven Asian countries. Unlike many election studies, the chapters were not concerned with explaining who won, when and why. Rather, the studies were concerned with the role that competitive‘democratic’ elections play in various societies in giving citizens influence over policymakers, the causes and dynamics of electoral politics, and the problems of democratic development insofar as they are related to elections and electoral politics. For these reasons all the authors examined elections as instruments of democratic development and analysed the functionality of this instrument. While there is a wide variety of different understandings of democracy – ranging from participatory democracy to minimal democracy in a Schumpeterian sense, with liberal and representative democracy somewhere in between the two poles – this volume is explicitly driven by a normative assumption: democracy, understood here as a form of political order in which the people participate in policy making and have the ultimate say in which policies are adopted(Dahl, 1989), is the best of all political worlds. This basic agreement does not draw any conclusions about the institutional design, the relation between individual and community, the rights and duties of citizens, or the institutional mechanisms through which people exercise their rights. Every society must decide these questions for itself according to its historical, cultural, societal and economic conditions. The debate on‘Confucian democracy’ or‘Asian­style democracy’, for example, is a debate that takes place after one has already accepted the idea of democracy as valid. 1 Only once the basic decision in favour of democracy has been made can the debate on different institutional, normative or ideological modes of democracy start. * The author gratefully acknowledges the valuable assistance and critical comments of Christian Bruder. He is also indebted to Wolfgang Merkel for allowing him to borrow from two research papers written by Merkel and the author. 1. For an overview see Hahm et al., 2000; Foot, 1997; Fox, 1997. 321