Welcome to this podcast by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. It is part of the ’State of Democracy in Southeast Asia’ series, and this is your host, Johanna Son. In this episode, we take a look at the elections lined up in the region. Can democratic mechanisms like elections lead to more authoritarian rule? We step back to look at what this trend says about the quality of the democracies in our midst.
While observers of the state of democracy agree that democracy has been in decline in the recent years, its trajectory in the Southeast Asian region has at least shown mixed results. Elections are still treated as the ultimate yardstick for “democracy” in Southeast Asia.
