The Public Sector and Asian Democracies:.x000d.The Political Economy of Globalization.

From recent political economy studies, it is reasonable to predict that democracies do a better job than nondemocracies of protecting the welfare of their own people in the era of globalization..x000d.Is this the case in Asia? Are Asian democracies, facing global market competition, working as other Western European democracies in the area of social welfare policies? This paper starts from skepticism about Asian democracies. There are good reasons to suspect the progress and prospects of democracies in Asia. First, the quality of democracies is relatively low. It is likely that, political institutions of Asian democracies are not effective enough as those of Western European democracies to obstruct the influence of privileged groups. Second, Asian democracies are ‘blue.’ Throughout much of the post-war period, mainly conservative rightist parties have dominated Asian politics without any significantly powerful leftist parties. .x000d.This paper investigates the mediating impact of democracy on the size of the public sector of Asian governments in the era of globalization. I explore these issues through an analysis of changes of government expenditures in a time-series cross-sectional analysis in thirteen Asian countries from 1970 to 2000. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]