ABSTRACT
Democratization in East Asian demonstrates a clearly geographic pattern. Democracies survive around the East Asian Island Arcs, from Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines to Indonesia, while non-democracies still dominate the Continent and the Indochina Peninsula. This pattern defies existing theories of democratization. The mainstream students of democratization focus on domestic factors. Democracy is most likely to survive in countries with certain levels of socioeconomic development, or certain types of political culture, state institutions, party systems, or historical legacies. Fruitful as this line of theories may be, it is insufficient to explicate why there is such a dividing line between democracy and non-democracy in the east periphery of the Euro-Asia Continent.
