Let's become democracy's champions.

Byline: Zahra Niazi

As for many, the terms republic and democracy are either way synonymous with one another. In other words, one can say that a republic is a country having a liberal democratic government given the general perception that a republic is an end product of the voting or the electoral procedures. This perception is a corollary of this widely held notion that the electoral process is the determinant of democracy. The factor mentioned above is unquestionably one of the primary determinants of a meaningful democracy but not a paramount one. Therefore, if one were to ruminate over this argument, a general inference could be drawn that we have quite a few republics scattered throughout the various regional blocs.

Nevertheless, meaningful and real democracies are very few today. And with this, I argue that we have been living in different modes of democratic setups. At times the targets have been the civil liberties, and at other times, the patterns of governance have manifested illiberal propensities.

And as to what a meaningful democracy entails could be described in light of these predominant determining factors namely the guarantee of civil liberties and horizontal accountability, the provision of the rule of law and the eradication of all the various authoritarian tendencies. The latter factor stands to be the most prominent among the various obstacles that keep a state from actually realizing the will of the people since the exercise of popular sovereignty today has become a means towards the establishment of coercive power structures.

A strong case to be made about the context above is the one concerning the state of democratic governments in the Asia-Pacific theatre, particularly in the Southeast Asian region. These regimes, although ostensibly, are democracies but do not manifest the criteria of being democratic in the true sense of the word, notwithstanding the fact that the indicators have been steadily improving. The question then is to what extent has this lacking been a hindrance in the way of achieving economic growth and prosperity. Various studies have suggested that there exists a positive correlation between the level of democracy and economic growth of a state measured in terms of gross domestic product.

However, the case of a few Asian Pacific economies tends to negate this latter claim. Singapore, a parliamentary republic, is often cited as being a classic example of illiberal democracy. However, according to...