Political Diffusion in Southeast Asia
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0192512116629462
The principles of democracy take time to spread to countries that have not had exposure to that form of government. In Southeast Asia, there are some countries that overthrew their former autocracies in favor of a functioning and open democracy, while others have been less successful in implementing and preserving democratic values. This article on party networks in Southeast Asia explores the diffusion of democratic ideas to different Southeast countries through the organization Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats (CALD). The organization was founded in 1993 and increases engagement between different parties in order to promote their ideas. However, the organization has had a different impact on countries based on the participation of the member parties as well as political and economic conditions. CALD engages with other parties by communicating with party heads or directly with party members and citizens from individual countries. This has varying degrees of success among different countries. For example, in the Philippines the organization meets regularly with members of Liberal Party. The Liberal Party sends the same members to CALD events, and these members often do not propagate the ideas to the rest of its party. Furthermore, the members of the Liberal Party often have ties to families in political power, and these ties tend to trump the ideas. While the Liberal Party was able to gain control in 2010, it has not fully implemented the values and policies supported by CALD.
The article on democratic diffusion in Southeast Asia describes a process of diffusion that can be related to the threshold model discussed in our class. While the political circumstances of each country make the model more complex, the different countries can be considered clusters in a network in which a new idea has been introduced and adopted in one cluster. The extent to which the democratic ideas then spread depends on the connectivity between the clusters; clusters with more connections to CALD will be more likely to adopt those values. In the case of the Philippines Liberal Party, CALD did not have enough ties to members of the party to sway them in favor of their ideas. Most LP members had few ties to CALD, and they often had more ties to members within their party or family members with different political inclinations. This means that the threshold was too high for CALD to spread its ideas, and so the LP party did not adopt the ideas into its cluster. This stands in contrast with other countries such as Taiwan. There, the Democratic Progressive Party is in the majority, and the members have stronger ties to CALD, which encourages further involvement with the organization. This allows the DPP to adopt new ideas from CALD more easily, since they have more connections to surpass the threshold. Understanding the network ties between political parties can help organizations like CALD determine how they should approach countries if they wish to promote democratic values in a region that has been historically resistant to political change.