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This article explores the extent of authoritarian durability and public opinion towards democracy in Southeast Asia drawing on findings from the Asian Barometer. While Freedom House indicators rank many countries in the region as not free or partially free, a high proportion of citizens within the same countries report that they live in a democracy. Conversely, countries ranked as electoral or liberal democracies have high proportions of citizens who report that they do not live in a democracy. These findings reveal quasi-thermostatic concerns that, when satisfied, open the way for the expression of other concerns. Views about democratic experience reveal differing expectations about democracy among the general public. In general, the results suggest that a high proportion of citizens in Southeast Asia have a rather instrumental view of democracy that is underpinned by perceptions of good governance rather than democratic ideals. Still, while economic growth is considered to be very important, when looking at what matters for a functioning democracy, other measures of good governance such as freedom and equality, trust in government, accountability and responsiveness are considered more important.The widespread protest activity across Indonesia in 1998, which led to the abrupt fall of President Suharto and his corrupt New Order regime, revealed the fragile nature of authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia. Across the border in Malaysia, calls for free and fair elections by the Pakatan Rakyat are symptomatic of a region with growing demands for democracy. But are protests across Southeast Asia representative of broader societal interests there? It is still unclear whether democracy will eventually flourish in a region largely dominated by electoral and competitive authoritarian political systems, which rely on patronage, strong state institutions, control of the media, weak party identification and electoral manipulation.Since the turn of the century, there has been a renewed interest in perceptions of democracy and the durability of authoritarianism (see Brownlee, 2007;Diamond,

Flows of international migration are needed in the Asia-Pacific region to understand the patterns and corresponding effects on demographic, social, and economic change across sending and receiving countries. A major challenge to this understanding is that nearly all of the countries in this region do not gather or produce statistics on flows of international migration. The only information that are widely available represent immigrant population stocks measured at specific points in time—but these represent poor proxies for annual movements. In this paper, we present a methodology for indirectly estimating annual flows of international migration amongst 53 populations in the Asia-Pacific region and four macro world regions from 2000 to 2019 using a generation–distribution framework. The estimates suggest that 27–31 million persons from the Asia-Pacific region have changed their countries of usual residence during each year in the study. Southern Asia is estimated to have had the largest inflows and outflows, whilst intra-regional migration and return migration were highest in Eastern, Southern, and South-Eastern Asia. India, China, and Indonesia were estimated to have had the largest emigration flows and net migration losses. As a first attempt to estimate international migration flows in the Asia-Pacific region, this paper provides a basis for understanding the dynamics and complexity of the large-scale migration occurring in the region.

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In recent years much has been said about how new democracies are backsliding or have regressed since the turn of the century when hope and optimism about the future spread of democracy was widespread. However, ideas that democracy would spread were based on institutional and governance indicators rather than from the perspective of everyday citizens. When we look at public attitudes towards democracy during this period, we can see that such optimism was perhaps misplaced or premature. Drawing on findings from the AsiaBarometer and the World Values Survey, this research finds that public attitudes during this time were not overly convinced by democracy and certainly not yet satisfied with their government's performance in terms of providing basic democratic freedoms and independence.

Leadership change formed the backdrop to the 2010 Australian federal election, with the replacement of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister by Julia Gillard, the country's first female Prime Minister. This article uses the 2010 Australian Election Study to examine patterns of voter defection between the 2007 and 2010 elections. The results show that the predominant influence on defection was how voters rated the leaders. Julia Gillard was popular among female voters and her overall impact on the vote was slightly greater than that of Tony Abbott. Defectors from Labor to the Greens disapproved of Kevin Rudd's dismissal from office. Policy issues were second in importance after leadership, particularly for those moving from the Coalition to Labor, who were concerned about health and unemployment. Overall, the results point to the enduring importance of leaders as the predominant influence on how voters cast their ballot.

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Through an investigation of the idea of the stranger, this article seeks to blend theory with empirical research. It does this in three ways. First, it engages with a social theory of the stranger articulated in the work of Zygmunt Bauman. Second, it examines data from the Australian Election Study surveys between 1996 and 2007 in order to explore attitudinal changes towards groups of immigrants. The findings from this survey suggests that attitudes towards immigrants in general have fluctuated in Australia, despite the negative effects of economic globalization, the growth in neoliberal economic reforms and terrorist attacks in the West. Third, drawing on Bauman's theory of the stranger we provide an interpretation of these fluctuating attitudes through the idea of the hybrid stranger. Finally, we argue that a more nuanced understanding of these attitudes towards immigrants in Australia is possible when a theory of the stranger is informed by a discussion on the constitution of host self, the influence of the media, the role of government policy, and the impact of class and geography.