Electoral authoritarianism and backlash: Hardening Malaysia, oscillating Thailand

Where new democracies threaten the interests of capital owning and military elites, O'Donnell and Schmitter (1986) argued that they may readily be reversed. This paper, in carrying out a paired comparison of authoritarian reversals in contemporary Malaysia and Thailand, extends this thesis in several ways. It extends the logic of threats to elite-level interests and reversals to electoral authoritarian regimes, the posture in which much of the third wave has reached equilibrium. It examines more deeply the societal grounding and institutional bases that support elite-level statuses. It locates the threats to elite-level interests along dimensions identified in a new literature on democratic quality. It characterizes elite-level relations as cohesive or fractious, enabling us to chart the different modes of reversal that take place, as well as the durability of the authoritarianism that follows. © The Author(s) 2011.