Democracy, hybridity, and accountability in Southeast Asia’s legislatures

Countries across Southeast Asia, irrespective of regime type, feature legislative assemblies today. But the dynamics and impact of these bodies vary greatly-and in ways that challenge some general literature. Fish and Kroenig (2009) argue that in new democracies, a “powerful” legislature can safeguard or increase openness. Legislatures mostly do this by checking the executive, whose abuses have in recent decades overtaken militaries and insurgents as the gravest threat to democratic procedures (Fish 2006). By contrast, under the closed authoritarianism of Vietnam, Malesky et al. (2012) report that when the legislature began to publicize online its negotiations with the executive in Parliament, the Communist Party leadership clamped down, refusing to renew the candidacies of assemblymen whom it perceived to be activist.