ABSTRACT
The relationship between democracy and socio-economic equity is an empirically contested one (Haggard and Kaufman 2012; Midlarsky 1997); in some cases, democracy appears to be related to greater equity, while in others it does not. In East Asia, however, the introduction of democracy was instrumental to the development of robust social welfare regimes, despite expectations to the contrary. The conventional wisdom among welfare state theorists during the 1980s and 1990s expected state commitments to social policy to wane. The economic pressures of globalization created the so-called race to the bottom, compelling governments to retrench rather than deepen their social welfare regimes. In Japan, for instance, the idea of the Japanese “welfare society” introduced during the 1990s was in effect a prescription for market-driven, privatized social protection. The Japanese government, which had a generation before implemented universal and redistributive social policies in health, education and old-age income security, was considering scaling back its welfare commitments in the face of new economic pressures globally and at home. In this context, then, the prospects for welfare state formation in late-developing economies such as Taiwan and South Korea, and even later developers such as Thailand and Indonesia, were understandably bleak.
