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In recent years, there has been a regression of democracy and a growing resistance to Western democratization efforts within the governments of Central Asian states. To uncover the sources of the ineffectiveness of these efforts, Democracy in Central Asia focuses on the discursive aspect of democracy promotion abroad. It examines ideas, beliefs, and perspectives advanced by the US, EU, Russia, and China in the three Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, in addition to perspectives on democratization advocated by the governments of these states. The study illuminates competing presentations of democracy and explores how these competing ideas influence societies subjected to international democratization. Based on extensive fieldwork, survey, and focus group data, the book shows that what has been promoted by the US and EU in Central Asia is culturally unsound, inconsistent, and lacking in credibility for Central Asian societies and states. Democracy promotion policies have neglected important attitudinal changes in the Central Asian population and local understandings of regional and national needs. The book's commitment to the idea of democracy and democracy promotion as open-ended conversations to which political leaders, political theorists, activists, ordinary citizens, and academics can contribute debunks the notions of democratization as a given and as somehow removed from the struggle for power and domination. Moreover, this study shows that there are multiple ways of portraying and defending the idea of democracy and alternative routes to democratization.

The March 2011 disasters exposed the ineffectiveness of Japan’s political leaders, evoking three broad questions. First, why did the Kan cabinet fail to provide effective leadership in response to the disasters and why was a succession of governments unable to guide Japan out of the seemingly interminable economic malaise of the “lost decades”? The fact that Japan’s leaders possess similar powers to those of counterparts in other democratic polities suggests that a dysfunctional cabinet system is the culprit. So why is it that Japan has parliamentary democracy in form but not in practice? This is puzzling given that postwar Japan has been governed under institutional arrangements modeled after Britain’s “Westminster system,” and yet cabinet government has not set root. And, third, what gives Japan’s parliamentary cabinet system its characteristic form and function? This draws attention to the shaping effect and distributional consequences of institutions, as well as the role of critical junctures in creating strategic openings for change. And so, to understand Japan’s cabinet system, it is essential to trace its evolution. This leads backward in time from the recent challenges of “Twisted Diets” and coalition governments to institutional solutions rendered by reformers in the 1990s, the legacies of protracted single-party rule, actions taken by American occupation planners, prewar technocrats, and party leaders, and, ultimately, to a cabal that emerged in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration. The development of the cabinet system can be seen as a proxy for Japan’s experiment with democratic governance in the longue durée.