Democracy and its Discontents in Southeast Asia

This project asks why, in comparison to most other parts of the world constructed as regions, democratization has been so limited in Southeast Asia. Notwithstanding the long-term exposure of many countries in the region to democratic procedures and their attainment of middle-income standings, they operate a variety of resilient authoritarian regimes and unstable or low-quality democracies.In addressing this major puzzle, this project will draw on the insights of modernization theory, institutional analysis, new crisis-based explanations, and other strands of democratization literature. But in recognizing the indeterminacy of each of these genres, we seek to build and test a broader, but tightly coherent model that gives prominence to social structures (understood in terms of ethnic identification and class affiliation), institutions (with a focus on party and electoral systems) and national elites (conceptualized as cohesive or fractious). The project’s guiding hypothesis, then, is that democratization may in varying measure be impeded by ambitious elites who, if they can instrumentalize social cleavages and seize institutional opportunities, issue communalist or populist appeals through which to mobilize social constituencies. In this way, they may constrain democratic change, with cohesive elites either colluding to perpetuate authoritarian controls or to block increases in democratic quality. Alternatively, fractious elites may compete so fiercely that they precipitate democratic breakdown.In striving to provide an in-depth account of contemporary events of key countries in Southeast Asia over the past decade and a half, this project features an innovative case study methodology and rigorous usage of process tracing techniques. But in aiming also to undertake comparative analysis, a first ‘tier’ of three country cases has been selected—Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia—in which hypotheses are proposed and tested over ethnic identification, class affiliation, electoral rules and political parties, elite-level mobilizing, and limited democratization. In cross-checking results, analysis will be extended to a ‘subsidiary’ set of correlative cases—Singapore, the Philippines, and Myanmar. Countries in Southeast Asia whose records feature no meaningful experience with democracy are excluded from this study.