The Danger of Democratic Backsliding in East Asia
The Danger of Democratic Backsliding in East Asia
Journal: The Journal of Democracy. The Journal of Democracy is the world’s leading publication on the theory and practice of democracy. Since its first appearance in 1990, it has engaged both activists and intellectuals in critical discussions of the problems of and prospects for democracy around the world. Today, the Journal is at the center of debate on the major social, political, and cultural challenges that confront emerging and established democracies alike. More on the Journal can be found here.
Date of Publication: July 2026
Author: Christopher Carothers. Carothers is an associated scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Contemporary China and the author of East Asia’s Troubled Democracies: How Illiberal Trends Are Reshaping Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (2026). More on Carothers can be found here.
The article can be downloaded from here, and a PDF of the article can be found here.
Photo by Stéphan Valentin on Unsplash.
Abstract: This essay opens with President Yoon Suk Yeol’s stunning six-hour declaration of martial law in South Korea in December 2024 to challenge a comforting assumption: that East Asia's leading democracies—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—have weathered the global wave of backsliding unscathed. Often ranked alongside Europe's consolidated democracies, the three are better understood, the author argues, as "incipient backsliders" exhibiting norm violations that have quietly grown since the early 2010s. Yoon's self-coup, though swiftly crushed, exposed how even a wealthy, democratically committed society remains vulnerable. The deeper threat is polarization, which in South Korea is both the main driver of democratic decay and the chief obstacle to repairing it; Taiwan's fate, meanwhile, hinges on deterring Beijing and on whether the KMT will defend democratic rules under which it increasingly struggles to win. Backsliding demands firmer institutional safeguards and bipartisan resistance to power grabs, the author concludes, before the incipient becomes entrenched.
Why ISSE Is Including This Article
This article broadens the study of democratic erosion beyond formal states of emergency to examine how constitutional governance can weaken through gradual norm violations, institutional manipulation, and persistent political polarization. It illustrates both the resilience of democratic institutions in resisting an acute abuse of emergency power and the slower processes through which democratic safeguards can erode over time. Its comparative analysis of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan demonstrates that the pathways to democratic backsliding differ across jurisdictions, yet each can produce forms of embedded exceptionality that become normalized within ordinary governance. For ISSE, the article reinforces the importance of monitoring not only dramatic constitutional crises, but also the incremental institutional changes that may ultimately make extraordinary exercises of power more likely.
