Different Democratic Trajectories in Four Southeast Asian Countries

This project tests for factors that promote or undermine democratic change and consolidation, using Southeast Asia as a ‘natural laboratory’. Limiting ourselves to regimes that can usefully be examined through democratic lenses, we find ‘stunted’ democracy in Malaysia, ‘intermittent’ democracy in Thailand, ‘degraded’ democracy in the Philippines, and electoral democracy in Indonesia. Theories of neo-modernizationist change, institutional design, and transformative crisis, favored in the comparative democratization literature, fail to explain Southeast Asia's democratic trajectories. Where social divisions provide mobilizing opportunities, ambitious elites, seeking to exploit them, ‘defect’ from broader elite-level configurations. By activating communal sentiments (‘ethnic maximalists’ in Malaysia) or class resentments (‘populists’ in Thailand or the Philippines), defectors antagonize other elites who retaliate by rolling back democracy. Only in Indonesia, where scope for communal and populist mobilization is limited, amounting to a 'self-cancelling' social structure overall, does electoral democracy endure, albeit of limited quality.