• The Southeast Asian review
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.161-196
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• 2018

The major object of this study is to analyze the political development of Myanmar's civilian government on the concept of defective democracy, and to investigate the main actors who delayed or stymied political development and their interrelation. In doing so, this study suggests the tasks required for political development overcoming the current political structure and behavior. The civilian government, which was launched in 2016, failed to achieve positive political development by following the behavior of military authoritarianism in terms of exercise of power and decision making structure. On the perspective of the government, delegative democracy and domain democracy have been strengthening since one person has taken over all political power and hesitate to take horizontal accountability for each power organizations. The military, which is responsible for national defence and security seeks illiberal democracy and exclusive democracy, keeping on an undemocratic constitution by the military and Burman ethnocentrism. The reasons why defective democracy has been occurred are that the lack of a group to run a democratic institutions and the limitation of power structure that fails to adhere to the principle of civilian control to the military due to long-term military rule. Therefore, there is a need for military's come back to barracks and transform the power structure to democratic of the civilian government which is tamed an authoritarian order for the political development in Myanmar. In order to achieve this, this study concludes that setting up a empowered democratic government is required.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.137-162
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• 2007

In democracy basic rights such as political equality and participation through elections have been respected, opportunities of corporation and opposition have been guaranteed, and ability of self-learning and self-correction have been developed. These positive factors give preconditions for the welfare development in the democratic state. Because in this state adults get the suffrage and the open competition for official positions induces political parties use social policies as means to win the election. That is to say, political parties have an incentive to use various social policies to win the election. Democracy, therefore, has affinity with social policy. The affinity between democracy and social policy can be found also in Korea which was democratized in 1987. But, in Korea, the positive relationship between democracy and social policy is very weak due to the problem of constitutional structures. Korean Parliament usually enacts abstract social act and delegates the right to fill concrete contents of the social acts to the executive. Delegation itself has no problem, but excessive delegation is a problem since the executive can overuse its discretion as sacrificing the social rights of the citizen. In addition social consensus could not be achieved in this constitutional structures, which are a obstacle to establishing a political process in the Parliament to promote the welfare development through party competition. Excessive delegation should be reduced, and the Parliament should fill concrete contents of the social acts as exercising its legislative power more. Then a mechanism of welfare development can be launched in Korea.