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"Slater, Dan"
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Ordering power : contentious politics and authoritarian leviathans in Southeast Asia
\"Like the postcolonial world more generally, Southeast Asia exhibits tremendous variation in state capacity and authoritarian durability. Ordering Power draws on theoretical insights dating back to Thomas Hobbes to develop a unified framework for explaining both of these political outcomes. States are especially strong and dictatorships especially durable when they have their origins in \"protection pacts\": broad elite coalitions unified by shared support for heightened state power and tightened authoritarian controls as bulwarks against especially threatening and challenging types of contentious politics. These coalitions provide the elite collective action underpinning strong states, robust ruling parties, cohesive militaries, and durable authoritarian regimes - all at the same time. Comparative-historical analysis of seven Southeast Asian countries (Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Vietnam, and Thailand) reveals that subtly divergent patterns of contentious politics after World War II provide the best explanation for the dramatic divergence in Southeast Asia's contemporary states and regimes\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
PARTY CARTELIZATION, INDONESIAN-STYLE: PRESIDENTIAL POWER-SHARING AND THE CONTINGENCY OF DEMOCRATIC OPPOSITION
Democracy and opposition are supposed to go hand in hand. Opposition did not emerge as automatically as expected after Indonesia democratized, however, because presidents shared power much more widely than expected. The result has been what I call party cartelization, Indonesian-style. This differs significantly from canonical cases of party cartelization in Europe. Yet it exhibits the same troubling outcome for democratic accountability: the stunted development of a clearly identifiable party opposition. Since the advent of direct presidential elections in 2004, Indonesian democratic competition has unsurprisingly assumed somewhat more of a government vs. opposition cast. But this shift has arisen more from contingent failures of elite bargaining than from any decisive change in the power-sharing game. So long as Indonesia's presidents consider it strategically advantageous to share power with any party that declares its support, opposition will remain difficult to identify and vulnerable to being extinguished entirely in the world's largest emerging democracy.
Journal Article
The Strength to Concede: Ruling Parties and Democratization in Developmental Asia
Authoritarian ruling parties are expected to be exceptionally resistant to democratization. Yet some of the strongest authoritarian parties in the world have not resisted democratization, but have embraced it. This is because their raison d'etre is to continue ruling, not necessarily to remain authoritarian. Democratization requires that ruling parties hold free and fair elections, but not that they lose them. Authoritarian ruling parties can thus be incentivized to concede democratization from a position of exceptional strength as well as extreme weakness. This “conceding-to-thrive” scenario is most likely to unfold when regimes (1) possess substantial antecedent political strengths and resource advantages, (2) suffer ominous setbacks signaling that they have passed their apex of domination, and (3) pursue new legitimation strategies to arrest their incipient decline. We illustrate this heretofore neglected alternative democratization pathway through a comparative-historical analysis of three Asian developmental states where ruling parties have democratized from varying positions of considerable strength: Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia. We then consider the implications of our analysis for three “candidate cases” in developmental Asia where ruling parties have not yet conceded democratization despite being well-positioned to thrive were they to do so: Singapore, Malaysia, and the world's most populous dictatorship, China.
Journal Article
Polarization Without Poles
The Philippines’ long democratic experience has been remarkably free of deeply politicized cleavages. Roman Catholicism as a hegemonic religion prevents religious polarization, ethnic identity fragmentation limits ethnic polarization, and weak parties forestall ideological or class polarization. Nevertheless, the country suffered a crisis of polarization during the short-lived Estrada presidency (1998–2001) and that of his successor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (2001–2010). The severe conflict was a product of power maneuvers by anti-Estrada forces, followed by anti-Arroyo actors returning the favor, given her gross abuses of power. Echoing Machiavelli’s famous distinction, the conflict pitted Estrada’s popoli (the many) against Arroyo’s oligarchic grandi (the few). This Machiavellian conflict ended with an oligarchic reassertion of Madisonian democratic rule through the electoral victory of Benigno Simeon Aquino III in 2010. We conclude the article by considering whether the populist challenge of current president Rodrigo Duterte (2016-) might spark a similarly destabilizing conflict in the years to come.
Journal Article
What Indonesian Democracy Can Teach the World
Indonesia's democracy is among the world's most important both to understand and to defend. The world's largest Muslim country has proven that democracy can emerge and endure in surprising ways and in a surprising place, with intriguing lessons for democratic emergence and endurance elsewhere. Yet democracy is regressing and endangered in Indonesia, in line with distressing global trends. This not only threatens the country's 275 million citizens with the loss of their hard-fought freedoms. It threatens to deprive global democratic actors and activists of a successful example of the most plausible path to democracy in an age of democratic retrenchment: authoritarian-led democratization.
Journal Article
GE14: Malaysia's modernisation tsunami
Democratisation scholars hate modernisation theory as much as anybody. From a modernisation perspective, so-called 'developing countries' are on some sort of uniform track towards a liberal and democratic future, as if some imagined unity called 'the West' had already laid it down for them.
Journal Article
Dark days for democracy in Southeast Asia
Not since World War II has liberal democracy seemed so deeply endangered in so many places at once. For the first time in threequarters of a century, illiberalism and chauvinism have stolen the march, virtually all over the globe, on their liberal and cosmopolitan rivals.
Journal Article
Indonesia's High-Stakes Handover
The man who has spent the past three decades doing more than anyone to deny Indonesians the right to elect their leaders has now been elected Indonesia's leader. Riding the coattails and benefiting from the brazen interventions of Joko Widodo, the wildly popular outgoing president, Prabowo Subianto has completed his quarter-century-long political rehabilitation from Indonesia's most notorious human-rights abuser to the world's third-largest democracy's commander-in-chief. The murky circumstances of Prabowo's electoral landslide, combined with the likely prospect that he will rule effectively unopposed, seem certain to accelerate recent processes of democratic erosion in the world's largest Muslim-majority country.
Journal Article
Systemic Vulnerability and the Origins of Developmental States: Northeast and Southeast Asia in Comparative Perspective
Scholars of development have learned a great deal about what economic
institutions do, but much less about the origins of such arrangements.
This article introduces and assesses a new political explanation for the
origins of “developmental states”—organizational
complexes in which expert and coherent bureaucratic agencies collaborate
with organized private sectors to spur national economic transformation.
Conventional wisdom holds that developmental states in South Korea,
Taiwan, and Singapore result from “state autonomy,” especially
from popular pressures. We argue that these states' impressive
capacities actually emerged from the challenges of delivering side
payments to restive popular sectors under conditions of extreme
geopolitical insecurity and severe resource constraints. Such an
interactive condition of “systemic vulnerability” never
confronted ruling elites in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, or
Thailand—allowing them to uphold political coalitions, and hence to
retain power, with much less ambitious state-building efforts.Authors listed alphabetically. We are grateful
to the following for helpful comments: Cliff Carrubba, Eric Hershberg,
Dave Kang, Stephan Haggard, Linda Lim, Greg Noble, Kristen Nordhaug, John
Ravenhill, Eric Reinhardt, Dani Reiter, Tom Remington, Michael Ross, Randy
Strahan, Judith Tendler, and two anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to
David Waldner, whose book inspired this article and who graciously
provided important insights.
Journal Article