Abstract: This collection sought to emphasize the role of political parties as agents of collective action and democracy promotion in the Asian region. Political parties are primarily acknowledged to have an essential role in democratic consolidation. However, there is much disagreement in the literature over how to explain party formation and change, how much structure matters, and how much space it gives parties to engage as active agents (Hellmann 2011). Taking on the challenge raised by Bermeo and Yashar (2016) to assess the role of structural and conjunctural factors in the role of political parties in creating democratic institutions beyond Europe, the country cases in this volume adopted a historical institutional approach to investigate the conjunctural moments which opened the political opportunity structure for political parties to "democratize" politics in Asia. Each chapter mapped out path dependencies and examined how the democratization process impacted the level of party institutionalization in each country. Moreover, it identified critical points of potential policy interventions to strengthen parties and increase their level of institutionalization.