Managing Diversity through Institutional Design

Abstract

The idea that political institutions can be deliberately shaped or “engineered” in order to achieve desired political outcomes is hardly new-the authors of the Constitution of the United States, for example, vigorously debated various configurations of rules, constraints, and incentives that might simultaneously disperse political power over a wide range of actors, while at the same time providing sufficient resources to the central government to provide for national defense, promote the general welfare, and ensure domestic tranquility. Engineering, a theory-driven or deductively-based process, assumes that political institutions can be designed a priori and set in place in order to achieve a particular set of desiderata: representation, fairness, stability, or prosperity, to name but a few. The ability of governments to achieve those and other goals is in part a function of the rule structures that shape and are shaped by political action. Institutional performance is particularly critical to democratic governments, since those rules and constraints mediate between the preferences and aspirations of the electorate, on the one hand, and candidates and governments, on the other. Benjamin Reilly’s latest book, Democracy and Diversity: Political Engineering in the Asia-Pacific, is a welcome addition to the small but growing body of literature that applies what has been learned about political engineering in other regional and historical contexts (e.g., Western Europe during the era of mass enfranchisement and rapid industrialization, and Eastern and Central Europe during the breakup of the Soviet bloc) to a region that has seen too little attention paid to actual rules and conduct of political action. Much of the literature on the politics of the region has either focused on structural or cultural variables or has been confined to single-country monographs that have given short shrift to comparative analysis. Furthermore, the comparative democratization literature has so far paid less attention to the Asia-Pacific region than it has to the more extensively studied regions of Eastern and