authoritarianism southeast asia
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Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2: 1-22
The Architecture of AuthoritarianismSoutheast Asia and the Regeneration of Democratization Theory
Dan Slater
Abstract
What can the study of democratization in Southeast Asia contribute to ourknowledge of democratization more generally? This literature exhibits twonoteworthy strengths. First, Southeast Asianists have been more attentive thanmost general democratization theorists to structural influences on political
regime outcomes: especially the power of authoritarian institutions, such asparty, military, and state apparatuses, in shaping the fate of nondemocraticregimes. Second, rather than introducing completely new hypotheses ordefinitively testing familiar arguments, Southeast Asian regime studiesplay a vital role in elaborating and regenerating hypotheses for furtherconsideration. Deep area knowledge thus serves not only to amass the rawmaterial upon which broader theories are initially built, but also to pinpointinformative anomalies and to assess the causal mechanisms underlying ourleading theories. As scholars of comparative politics increasingly explore theinstitutional architecture of authoritarian regimes, they should find much ofgeneral interest in theoretically informed analyses of specific Southeast Asian
countries.
If recent democratization is, indeed, a global process, then
the terrain of these studies should better reflect that fact.
Moreover, only by expanding the geographical horizons can
we know whether our conceit as social scientiststhat is, our
Dan Slater is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Chicago. This manuscript has benefited from
the comments of Jason Brownlee, Allen Hicken, Erik Kuhonta, Bill Liddle, Gabriella
Montinola, Jan Teorell, Danny Unger, Tuong Vu, and two anonymous reviewers
at Stanford University Press. Thanks also go to Allison Youatt for her meticulous
editorial assistance. A slightly longer, amended version of this article will be published
as a book chapter in Erik Kuhonta, Dan Slater, and Tuong Vu, eds.,Southeast Asia
in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, forthcoming).
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presumption of generalizabilityis well founded.
Valerie Bunce1
Democratization and Divergence: Regions and Regimes inComparative Politics
Southeast Asianists have paid significant attention to democratization, but
leading theorists of democratization have exhibited little interest in Southeast
Asia.2This article argues that Southeast Asia provides extraordinarily fertile
territory for assessing and improving existing theories in comparative politics
about why some authoritarian regimes collapse, while so many others survive.
It also argues that Southeast Asian regime studies have tended to be strongest
precisely where democratization theory has tended to be weakest. Specifically,
the importance of authoritarian institutions, such as party, military, and stateapparatuses, in sustaining nondemocratic rule has long captured more attention
among Southeast Asianists than among democratization theorists.3
Why is Southeast Asia such fertile terrain for developing our theories
on authoritarianism and democratization? Perhaps the most compelling
methodological rationale to take greater account of Southeast Asia is the
regions astonishing variation in regime outcomes: what Kevin Hewison calls
its remarkable range of political forms.4Whereas Samuel Huntingtons
famed Third Wave of democratization has indeed resembled that mighty
metaphor in some regions (i.e., Latin America, Southern Europe, and Eastern
Europe), it has represented nothing more than a faint ripple in others (i.e.,
Central Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East).5This makes it nearly
impossible to know whether domestic, regional, or global factors are primarily
1Valerie Bunce, Rethinking Recent Democratization: Lessons from the Post-CommunistExperience, World Politics 55, no. 2 (2003): 168.
2To my knowledge, the only major theory-building exercises in the study of democratizationthat give serious consideration to Southeast Asian cases are Stephan Haggard and RichardKaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1995), and Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late TwentiethCentury (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Even in these instances, other worldregions receive the lions share of attention.
3Theorists have been more concerned with examining how institutional weakness underminesdemocracies rather than dictatorships. On the role of political parties in preventing democraticcollapse, see Nancy Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and theBreakdown of Democracy(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Thomas Ertman,Democracy and Dictatorship in Interwar Europe Revisited, World Politics50, no. 3 (1998):475-505; and Gregory M. Luebbert,Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy: Social Classesand the Political Origins of Regimes in Interwar Europe (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1991). Samuel Huntingtons Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1968) ostensibly trained his sights on political instability regardless of regimetype, but his concern clearly focused on the many failing democracies of that era.
4Kevin Hewison, Political Space in Southeast Asia: Asian-Style and Other Democracies,Democratization6, no. 1 (1999): 224.
5 Huntington, The Third Wave.
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responsible for producing such region-wide patterns of democratic transition
or authoritarian durability. In a region exhibiting significant variation in
regime outcomes such as Southeast Asia, it is easier (though not entirely
unproblematic) to control for confounding regional and global factors, and to
focus on the divergent domestic factors driving intraregional divergence in
democratization.
By any metric of regime variation, Southeast Asia represents a motley
crew. Two countries in the region can be considered electoral democracies
(Indonesia and the Philippines), while a third (Thailand) has recently seen its
democratic procedures interrupted, almost certainly temporarily, by a military
coup aimed at removing the polarizing figure of Thaksin Shinawatra as prime
minister.6 Four other Southeast Asian countries are unambiguously and
unabashedly authoritarian (Vietnam, Burma, Laos, and Brunei), and another
three present varying mixes of competitive and authoritarian features, whilefalling short of the minimum procedural definition of electoral democracy
(Malaysia, Cambodia, and Singapore).7Democratization in Southeast Asia has
been more than a mere ripple, but less than a full-fledged wave.
This variation provides enormous opportunities for improving regime
theories, via comparative studies of contemporary divergence within Southeast
Asia itself. By contrast, students of the worlds wave and ripple regions
find themselves pressed either to devise cross-regional comparisons, or to
examine earlier historical epochs, when regime outcomes in their region of
interest still differed.8The latter approach entails an unfortunate silence on
the most recent events in global democratization. The former approach
6It is obviously troubling that all three of these countries have seen military forces acting asdecisive arbiters in recent succession crises. Such problems of post-transition politics arebeyond the scope of this essay; but the lingering significance of the Thai, Indonesian, andPhilippine militaries surely underscores the importance of examining the institutions that makeauthoritarianism work and, quite often, keep democracy from working well.
7 Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that regimes fail to meet this minimum democraticstandard when incumbents routinely abuse state resources, deny the opposition adequatemedia coverage, harass opposition candidates and their supporters, and in some casesmanipulate electoral results. While ruling parties in Malaysia, Singapore, and Cambodiamay not be major manipulators of election tallies, they all harass oppositionists in ways thatmake elections intrinsically unfair. See Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, CompetitiveAuthoritarianism: The Origins and Evolution of Hybrid Regimes in the Post-Cold War Era
(New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).8 It is symptomatic that perhaps the four most impressive recent contributions to regime theory
in Latin America examine the First or Second Wave origins of regimes (when outcomes stillvaried) rather than Third Wave transitions (when authoritarianism collapsed everywhere butCuba). See James Mahoney, The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and PoliticalRegimes in Central America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); FernandoLopez-Alves, State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810-1900(Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 2000); Deborah J. Yashar, Demanding Democracy: Reform andReaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala, 1870s-1950s (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1997); and Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: CriticalJunctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America(Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1991).
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conducting research across rather than within regionscomes with the danger
that, in a wide-ranging search for cases that vary in outcomes, researchers will
compare cases that vary too greatly in potential causesas well. As Valerie
Bunce sensibly puts it in her defense of intraregional research designs:
The most illuminating comparisons are those that restrain the universe of
causes while expanding the range of results.9Controlling for all potential
independent variables is tough enough in one world region; doing so in a
cross-regional research design is even more nightmarish.
Yet some regions are more nightmarish for comparative research than
others. Herein lies the biggest obstacle to comparing regime outcomes in
Southeast Asia. While the region exhibits greater variation in outcomes than
regions such as Latin America and the Middle East, it also contains greater
variation in factors that might plausibly cause that variation (i.e., economic
development, colonial legacies, and ethnic and religious distributions). DonaldEmmerson has called Southeast Asia the most recalcitrant region for
students of democratization, in large measure because its contiguous states
are so diverse, despite their proximity, as to make it difficult to generalize
across them.10The opportunities presented by Southeast Asias diversity
in regime outcomes are matched by the obstacles posed by Southeast Asias
diversity in potential causal factors.
Southeast Asianists have tended to display more anxiety about the
regions comparative obstacles than anxiousness to take advantage of
the regions comparative opportunities. Multi-country studies remain the
exception, not the norm. Yet there is a wealth of single-country studies ofSoutheast Asian regimes (and at least a handful of multi-country works) that
have provided intriguing theoretical challenges to what we think we know
about democratization. By broadening...the geography of the conversation11
to include Southeast Asia, we might build democratization theory in fruitful
and surprising new directions.
Generalizing from the Ground Up: Hypothesis Regeneration inSoutheast Asia
There are multiple ways to bring heretofore neglected regions into our
theoretical conversations. Perhaps the most obvious and popular approachin contemporary political science (especially in the United States) is to
conduct global quantitative tests of hypotheses with cross-national datasets.
My purpose here is not to criticize this path to generalization, which has
many merits. Rather, I wish to emphasize the value of an additional route to
9Bunce, Rethinking Recent Democratization, 169.10Donald K. Emmerson, Region and Recalcitrance: Rethinking Democracy through Southeast
Asia, Pacific Review8, no. 2 (1995): 225.11Bunce, Rethinking Recent Democratization, 168.
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generalization: the gradual accumulation of theoretically informed analyses of
specific countries.12
Why should we proceed incrementally when new datasets offer the
promise of testing theories in a single sweep, and on a global scale? The
problem with relying exclusively on this approach is not just the uneven
quality of our datasets, but also the unbalanced empirical foundations of
our theories. Claims to universality notwithstanding, our leading theories of
democratization have overwhelmingly been generated through the intensive
study of European and Latin American cases. Ongoing efforts to conduct
rigorous tests of our existing stock of theories should thus be complemented
by efforts to construct a more complete universe of hypotheses that reflects a
more representative sample of cases. It is simply premature to conclude that
Southeast Asias refusal to conform to theoretical expectations exemplifies
the anomalousness of its democratization experience.13Bringing SoutheastAsias diverse regime experiences into the theory-building process might
well show that the region fits broader causal patterns that have not yet been
identified, due to the selection bias that has afflicted democratization theory in
political science to date.14
This suggests that Southeast Asian studies can make a different kind
of theoretical contribution than political scientists typically emphasize.
Recent methodological discussions have focused on the role of scholarship
in generatingnew hypotheses or testing existing ones, with more status
typically accruing to the latter task. Critics of area-studies scholarship in
political science are right to say that such work rarely if ever tests hypothesesin the sense of confirming or falsifying them in any definitive way. Yet this
is not what most regional specialists set out to do. They tend to engage in
what James Mahoney calls hypothesis elaboration, in which scholars
either (1) introduce new independent variables that work in conjunction with
previously identified ones, (2) extend independent variablesto a new set of
outcomes, or (3) [identify] the scope conditions that govern a hypothesis. This
type of analysis serves as a springboard for the creation of a new hypothesis
12 For a similar argument pitched at a higher level of methodological generality, see DanielZiblatt, Of Course Generalize, but How? Returning to Middle-Range Theory in ComparativePolitics,APSA-CP17, no. 2 (2006): 8-11.
13Emmerson, Region and Recalcitrance, 226, 223.14This suggests that global quantitative tests are not immune from the problems of selection
bias typically ascribed to area-studies research alone. For the classic critique of selection biasin small-N research, see Barbara Geddes, How the Cases You Choose Affect the AnswersYou Get: Selection Bias in Comparative Politics, Political Analysis2 (1990): 131-150. Fora discussion of causal process observations vs. dataset observations that should explodethe misnomer of small-N research for good, see Henry E. Brady, David Collier, and JasonSeawright, Refocusing the Discussion of Methodology, in Rethinking Social Inquiry:Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, ed. Henry E. Brady and David Collier (Lanham, MD:Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
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that yields additional information about causal patterns.15
Hypothesis elaboration is distinct from hypothesis generation and
hypothesis testing, yet equally important. It aims not to have the first word
or the final word in a scholarly conversation, but to intervene in an ongoing
conversation in a way that invites and informs further interventions. While
political scientists often see such an enterprise as properly relegated to a
pretesting phase of the research cycle, hypothesis elaboration can be quite
useful at any stage. Even after causal hypotheses have been subjected to
rigorous quantitative testing, and even when the correlations they uncover
are quite convincing, important questions invariably remain as to the causal
mechanisms through which apparent causes produce outcomes of interest.
Using particular cases in these progressive if not definitive ways serves the
valuable purpose of regenerating hypotheses for further consideration and
assessment. Southeast Asianists emphasis on elaborating (or regenerating)hypotheses rather than testing them is thus not a weakness. It is a proper
response to the democratization literatures excessive reliance on European
and Latin American cases.
Structural Foundations of Authoritarian Consolidation and Collapse
How might Southeast Asia most fruitfully be brought into broader theoretical
conversations on authoritarianism and democratization? For starters, it makes
sense to assume that Southeast Asia would be most likely to inform theory in
those domains where it exhibits the greatest variation. The region can probably
tell us little about the historical origins of democracya primary focus of
studies of Europe and Latin America16because democratic procedures
initially arose more or less simultaneously throughout the region, through
global diffusion, as part and parcel of the decolonization process after World
War II. For much the same reason, Southeast Asia would seem to provide
limited guidance in analyzing the theoretically salient topic of democratic
breakdown. Having been introduced from the outside during the second wave
in the 1940s and 1950s, electoral democracy collapsed throughout Southeast
Asia during the second reverse wave between the mid-1950s and early
1970s.
15James Mahoney, Knowledge Accumulation in Comparative Historical Analysis: The Case ofDemocracy and Authoritarianism, in Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences,ed. James Mahoney and Dietrich Reuschemeyer (New York: Cambridge University Press,2003), 135. Emphasis in original.
16On Europe, see, e.g., Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change:Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1992), and Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship andDemocracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Moore,1966); on Latin America, see the cites in footnote 9.
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Where Southeast Asia potentially has the most to teach us is in the core
theoretical concerns of the third wave, when the regions contemporary
regime variation emerged. How do we explain the fact that some countries
have undergone democratic transitions, while many have not? How can we
explain the sources of authoritarian durability in those regimes that have
avoided democratization?
Southeast Asianists have produced a wide array of works addressing
the phenomena of authoritarian collapse and consolidation. Yet the shared
strength of these diverse studies lies in their careful attention to the structural
forces that influence regime change and stability. In trying to understand
how authoritarian regimes work in particular, it is essential to examineand
Southeast Asianists have been notably diligent in examiningthe supporting
institutions that actually shape their performance, cohesion, and prospects for
survival: (1) states, (2) political parties, and (3) militaries.In short, democratization involves not just individual decisions, but also
organizational collisions. Recognizing this, Southeast Asianists have never
fallen victim to a major mistaken assumption of the leading transitions
paradigm in democratization theory: namely, that the underlying conditions
in transitional countrieswill not be major factors in either the onset or
the outcome of the transition process.17Even the strongest proponent of a
voluntarist approach to democratization in Southeast Asia acknowledges that
one can only adequately apprehend elites behavior after specifying their
institutional or social grounding.18The case for paying careful attention to
authoritarian political structures is even stronger in cases where democratictransitions are nowhere on the horizon, since such structures are clearly
showing signs of staying power.
Southeast Asianists longstanding interest in authoritarian political
structures has now become theoretically timely. Thanks in large measure to
Barbara Geddess agenda-setting work, a research program on authoritarian
durability has recently emerged.19By calling attention to authoritarian
institutions, this burgeoning literature steers a middle path between the
apolitical determinism of the social prerequisites literature and the
ahistorical contingency of the transitology literature.20This focus on
17Thomas Carothers, The End of the Transition Paradigm, Journal of Democracy13, no. 1(2002): 8.
18William Case, Politics in Southeast Asia: Democracy or Less(London: Curzon, 2002), 28.19Barbara Geddes, Authoritarian Breakdown: Empirical Test of a Game Theoretic Argument,
paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta,1999; and What Do We Know about Democratization after Twenty Years? Annual Reviewof Political Science2 (1999): 115-144.
20I am grateful to Bill Liddle for reminding me of the stifling effects of theorists earlyobsession with the social prerequisites of democracy. For the classic statement, see SeymourMartin Lipset, Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and PoliticalLegitimacy,American Political Science Review53, no. 1 (1959): 69-105.
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political institutions underscores the notions that social structure is not
political destiny, and that democratization and authoritarian durability are
much more than the result of random accidents. As regime theorists seek to
thicken their analyses with more attention to the political structures that
influence processes of authoritarian collapse and consolidation, Southeast
Asian studies provide a wealth of examples of how this might be achieved.
The State
The natural place to start our institutional analysis of authoritarianism is
with the statethe institutional apparatus that authoritarian regimes control,
and that their opponents hope to seize. Authoritarian regimes are sharply
differentiated by the extent to which leaders personalize rule, typically
undermining the effectiveness of the state apparatus in the process. In its
most extreme formsultanismpersonalization tends to produce sharpand violent conflict between regime loyalists, whose future depends on the
survival of their patron, and regime opponents, who know that the ruling
clique is too desperate to hold onto power to negotiate a peaceful exit.21
Mark Thompson has applied this model to the Philippines, where
Ferdinand Marcoss personalized rule bore a family resemblance to classic
Latin American and African cases of sultanism.22Thompson shows how the
collapse of the Marcos regime was not simply the result of severe economic
crisis and the contingencies of elite calculations, but also was deeply
influenced by the weakness of the Philippine state. Indeed, the economic crisis
of the mid-1980s that helped destroy the Marcos regime cannot be properly
understood absent an appreciation of Philippine state incapacity. Marcos
had to increase foreign borrowing because government institutions were too
corrupt to be effective revenue collectors, Thompson argues. A stagnant tax
base could not finance the mounting demands on public resources by his inner
circle, whose greed seemed to know no bounds.23If the Marcos regime had
enjoyed access to a more effective state, this analysis suggests, it might have
avoided financial crisis and subsequent democratic transition altogether.
In Thompsons framework, personalization of regime power weakens
the state, which undermines a regimes durability by restricting its access to
revenue for patronage purposes. But as Richard Tanter and William Liddle
have shown, the personalization of power that took place in Indonesia underSuharto had a less pernicious effect on the state than Marcoss sultanism
exhibited in the Philippines. For Tanter, Indonesias access to oil revenues
and foreign aid produced double-edged rather than purely debilitating effects.
21Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: RegimeTransitions in Comparative Perspective(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
22 See the essays, including Thompsons, in Sultanistic Regimes, ed. H.E. Chehabi and Juan J.Linz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
23Mark R. Thompson, The Anti-Marcos Struggle: Personalistic Rule and Democratic Transitionin the Philippines(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 66.
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On the one hand, these revenues had given rise to the hypertrophy of the
state vis--vis other social organizations. Yet Suhartos Leviathan also
appeared to stand upon clay feet, as Tanter concluded that this power is
highly vulnerable, since the stoppage of external rents can severely damage
the government finances.24From this perspective, Suhartos fall in May 1998
was not simply the contingent product of an unforeseeable economic crisis,
but also a regime outcome shaped significantly by historical patterns of state
formation in Suhartos New Order.
Whereas Tanter usefully highlights the role of external revenues in
shoring up sultanistic patronage networks, Liddle more fundamentally
questions the notion that regime personalization and state weakness are
opposite sides of the same coin.25Suharto personally dominated Indonesia as
surely as Marcos dominated the Philippines; yet Suharto ruled through what
Liddle terms a presidential-military-bureaucratic complex, and not simplyan ad hoc array of personal alliances. Even after Suharto began cultivating
a narrower personal clique in the late 1980s, it remained the case that the
bureaucracy pervades society.Its health centers, agricultural extension
services and marketing agencies, religious affairs offices, and requirement of
personal identity cards make it for better and worse a daily reality which most
Indonesians cannot escape.26It thus appears that the lack of stateness under
Marcos cannot be ascribed to regime personalization alone, but must be traced
to deeper patterns of state building in Philippine history.27
The causal significance of Philippine state weakness in the fall of
Marcos is drawn even more sharply in works that directly compare thatcountrys democratic transition with the (later) transition in Indonesia. When
Philippine specialist Vincent Boudreau compares the countrys People
Power movement in 1986 with Indonesias reformasi movement in 1998,
he uncovers a series of important contrasts where most analysts have seen
similarities. Rather than representing sudden and unpredictable shifts in the
sociopolitical terrain, mass anti-regime mobilization in both cases followed
patterns that were entirely in keeping with the larger themes of opposition
24Richard Tanter, Oil, IGGI, and US Hegemony: The Global Preconditions for Indonesian
Rentier-Militarization, in State and Civil Society in Indonesia, ed. Arief Budiman (Clayton,Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 1990), 71, 70.
25William R. Liddle, Soehartos Indonesia: Personal Rule and Political Institutions, PacificAffairs58, no. 1 (1985). I make a similar argument in Malaysia, where the personalization ofpower under Mahathir Mohamad in the 1990s failed to undermine either state or regime. Tothe contrary, Mahathir ironically made use of a highly developed and loyal state apparatusto crush his opponents and personalize power in the first place. See Dan Slater, Iron Cagein an Iron Fist: Authoritarian Institutions and the Personalization of Power in Malaysia,Comparative Politics36, no. 1 (2003): 81-101.
26Liddle, Soehartos Indonesia, 71.27Paul D. Hutchcroft, Colonial Masters, National Politicos, and Provincial Lords: Central
Authority and Local Autonomy in the American Philippines, 1900-1913, Journal of AsianStudies59, no. 2 (2000): 277-306.
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throughout the Suharto and Marcos eras.28
Boudreau expertly shows how these contrasting patterns of opposition
were analytically inseparable from the contrasting authoritarian architecture
of the two regimes29especially differences in state power. Whereas the
Indonesian regime had successfully crushed its mass opponents at the onset
of the New Order, its Philippine counterpart lacked the capacity to do so.
This left Marcos with much more limited options than Suharto enjoyed.
Boudreau hypothesizes that expanding guerrilla and protest organizations, in
combination, forced Marcos into accelerated and amplified cycles of political
liberalization and crackdown that propelled the regime toward its mass-
mobilization-caused demise.30
Suhartos state consistently held a greater power advantage over its
potential challengers, who were more often lawyers than guerrillas. Suharto
thus faced no pressure to gamble with relatively free national elections, asMarcos fatefully did in February 1986. Boudreau shows that this divergence
was not simply a contingent result of elite miscalculation in the Philippines
and elite shrewdness in Indonesia. Rather, it reflected deep structural
differences in the two countries authoritarian regimes. Similarly, there was
far more than contingency at work in the Philippine oppositions success at
seizing political power, whereas Indonesias more scattered opposition only
managed to convince those in power to exercise their authority to move
Suharto aside.31In sum, the institutions of state rule and the legacies of that
states domination over Indonesian society essentially foreclosed the people
power option to the Indonesian protestors.
32
Yet Boudreaus statist model cannot explain how Indonesian protestors
managed to overcome legacies of repression and help stimulate authoritarian
collapse at all. At first blush, this seems to recommend closer attention to the
manifold contingencies of Suhartos fall: i.e., Indonesias severe economic
crisis, the presidents declining health, and the nonrevolutionary character
of Suhartos strongest elite opponents. Alternatively, scholars might try to
undertake an even deeper and more systematic analysis of the structural
factors that shaped Suhartos fall.
Eva-Lotta Hedman adopts this latter approach in her recent comparison
of mass mobilization and democratization in Southeast Asia. She goes
beyond Boudreaus analysis in two important ways. First, she expands thecomparison, adding Thailand and Malaysia to Boudreaus Indonesian and
Philippine cases. By bringing in Malaysia, Hedman gains valuable variation
on the dependent variable of democratization. Second, she is more diligent
28 Vincent Boudreau, Diffusing Democracy? People Power in Indonesia and the Philippines,Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 31, no. 4 (1999): 10.
29 Ibid.30Ibid., 6.31Ibid., 13.32Ibid., 15.
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about expressing the contextual factors that differentiate these four cases in
terms of clear variables. The result is a staunchly structuralist causal account
that provides intriguing comparative implications. Whereas most studies of civil
society privilege voluntarism, agency, and contingency, Hedmans approach
aims to underscore the importance of examining the underlying conditions
and mobilizational processes anticipating such euphoric moments within a
structured comparative analytical framework.33
Hedman locates the source of cross-case divergence in four variables,
which closely parallel the factors emphasized by Boudreau. First, she
highlights salient variation in the nature of regimes, especially the degree
to which they are institutionally prone to internal division and vulnerable
to electoral challenge. Second, Hedman argues for the significance of the
constellation of classes, most notably the extent of upper-class cooptation
accomplished by the ruling regime. Third, Hedman calls attention tothe legacies of the Left, as countries experiencing a history of robust
socialist movements possessed stronger opposition resources for confronting
authoritarian rule from below. And fourth, Hedman highlights the institutions
of religion, particularly the degree to which these institutions enjoyed some
measure of autonomy from state control.
Like Boudreau, Hedman argues that to understand the nature of
opposition to authoritarian rule, one must first understand the nature of the
state in patterning its emergence and evolution. By stating her complex
argument in terms of variables, she presents it in a fashion that speaks directly
to broad theoretical concerns and debates in democratization theory, andthat can be applied to cases outside Southeast Asia. Particularly resonant
is her argument that the states relationship with organized religion shapes
prospects for anti-regime mass mobilizationa causal pattern that comes into
sharper relief when comparing the relative autonomy of Islamic institutions in
Indonesia with their more co-opted and controlled counterparts in Malaysia.
This serves as a hypothesis that can be widely tested, as well as a useful
corrective to Boudreaus portrayal of Indonesian civil society as weakly
organized across the board. In sum, authors such as Thompson, Boudreau,
and Hedman provide powerful empirical evidence that the state plays a central
role in processes of democratic transitiona structural pattern that has been
largely and surprisingly neglected in the transitions paradigm.Theoretical attention to the role of stateness in consolidating democracy
is yet to be matched by attention to the importance of the state in consolidating
dictatorship as well.34But if Southeast Asia specialists appear to be surpassing
33Eva-Lotta Hedman, Contesting State and Civil Society: Southeast Asian Trajectories,Modern Asian Studies35, no. 4 (2001): 922.
34 Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation:Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1996).
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democratization theorists in their attention to the state, theorists are setting a
faster pace in examining other regime institutions that Hedman hints at in her
discussion of salient variations in the nature of regimes, but does not address
systematically: militaries and political parties.
Militaries and Political Parties
In an effort to give the bargaining-centered transitions paradigm a stronger
structural foundation, Barbara Geddes has introduced and tested new
hypotheses regarding the role of authoritarian regimes political institutions
in shaping prospects for regime change. Coding all nondemocratic regimes
as (1) military, (2) single-party, (3) personal, or some hybrid thereof, Geddes
attempts to show that single-party regimes are more resistant to democratic
transitions than personalized regimes, which are more resilient, in turn, than
military regimes.35Her logic is crisply game-theoretic, and her evidence is correlative.
Military regimes are especially brittle because of intrinsic divisions between
political and professional soldiers, whereas ruling parties more effectively
avoid internal splits because politics is the profession of party elites. With no
barracks to retreat to, party leaders hang together and hang onto power for
dear life. Personal regimes generate similarly hard-core support from loyalists
who fear political extinction after a democratic transition.
Geddes finds impressive empirical support for her conclusions in a
sweeping quantitative test confirming the greater durability of single-party
regimes than their personalized and militarized counterparts. Yet if statistical
analysis can indeed help convince us that single-party regimes last longest,
such techniques cannot show us why they last longest. In assessing the
validity of Geddes arguments in Southeast Asia, we must be attentive not
only to the presence or absence of a causal correlation between specific regime
institutions and regime durability, but also to the accuracy of the causal
mechanisms underlying her hypotheses.
On the first question, Southeast Asian evidence strongly supports Geddess
argument regarding the relative robustness of single-party rule in a correlative
sense. From relatively wealthy Malaysia and Singapore to low-income Laos
and Vietnam, ruling party apparatuses have helped authoritarian regimes avoid
democratic transitions by managing elite relationships and quashing massdissent. Meanwhile, the three Southeast Asian countries that have undergone
democratic transitions never developed party institutions that superseded either
the organized power of the military apparatus, or the political authority of the
individual leader. When transitions occurred in Thailand, the Philippines, and
Indonesia, the military was a stronger broker than those regimes respective
ruling parties. Why Burmas military regime has bucked this trend is a puzzle
35Geddes, Authoritarian Breakdown and What Do We Know About Democratization. For acritique and suggested amending of this typology, see Slater, Iron Cage in an Iron Fist.
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from political concerns, Callahan adroitly shows that the Burmese military has
cohered because the political is never allowed to distract attention from the
professional. In short, Burmas ruling generals are war fighters who are not
adept at politics. But they are war fighters, first and foremost.37Pathologically
fearful of any political opponents who might divide the fragile nation-state,
the Burmese military has engaged in a disastrously violent confrontation with
democratic activists rather than coming to the sort of compromise that Geddes
sees as the natural terminus of military rule.
The point is not that the solitary Burmese example definitively falsifies
Geddess arguments about military regimes. Rather, the point is that the
divisiveness or cohesion of military and party institutions is a research
question demanding intense empirical scrutiny, not a matter to be determined
deductively. By climbing inside the belly of the Burmese military beast,
Callahan exemplifies how statistical outliers can serve to keep fascinatingresearch questions on the agenda in comparative politics. Most intriguingly,
Callahan argues that the Burmese militarys cohesionand hence the
military regimes remarkable survivalderives from Burmas abnormally
simultaneous struggle against both domestic insurgents and foreign incursions
during its decolonization process.
Such historical considerations weigh heavily in the finest studies of the
Indonesian military as well. Like Callahans, Harold Crouchs analysis calls
into question Geddess fundamental assertion that military regimes carry
within themselves the seeds of their own disintegration.38If tensions between
political and professional soldiers in Burma were dampened by shared andsimultaneous operational experience against domestic and foreign enemies,
Indonesian soldiers developed significant professional solidarity through
shared traumas during the national revolution of the 1940s, the separatist
rebellions of the 1950s, and the communist upsurge of the 1960s. With its
ideology of dwifungsi, or dual function, the Indonesian military defined
politics as inherent to its professional mission. Seizing power in the mid-1960s
did not suddenly turn the military into a political animal, since it had never
previously regarded itself as an apolitical organization.39The Suharto regime
thus rested on a highly unified and politically ambitious military apparatus
at its onset. The militarys cohesion and shared will to power more closely
resembled Geddess portrayal of ruling parties than ruling militaries.Like Burmas, Indonesias military-led government lasted for decades
but unlike Burmas, it ultimately collapsed in the face of popular upheaval
and elite fragmentation. Geddess framework would attribute the Suharto
regimes impressive durability to its triple hybrid institutional character,
37 Mary P. Callahan, Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 2003), 2.
38Geddes, Authoritarian Breakdown, 5.39Harold Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978),
344.
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as it rested on a combination of military, party, and personal power rather
than on military power alone. But this raises two big questions. First, why
did Indonesias triple hybrid regime prove less durable than Burmas pure
military regime? And second, can we really explain the Suharto regimes
considerable resilience in terms of its relative reliance on civilian party elites
and the presidents personal clique?
Close attention to the dynamics of Indonesian democratization suggests
otherwise. Suhartos personalization of the military had the same sort of
debilitating effects on military cohesion as Marcoss personalization of the
military in the Philippines. Jun Honnas analysis of Indonesian military
politics during the 1990s shows how seriously esprit de corpshad eroded since
the era when Crouch conducted his researcha historical slide paralleling the
one detailed in McCoys longitudinal study of two classes of the Philippine
Military Academy.As in the Philippines, a dictator obsessed with personal power made
loyalty rather than seniority or merit the primary basis for appointments and
promotions, as best witnessed in Suhartos blatant cultivation of his son-
in-law, Prabowo Subianto. The division between military hardliners and
softliners that facilitated Suhartos collapse was not a matter of differences
in ideology or democratic proclivity, Honna shows, but of differences in
how particular factions fared in Suhartos reshuffles. The prevailing military
faction was no more democratically inclined than its opponents, but rather
more desperate to preserve the integrity of the institution and not leave it
vulnerable to the type of political machinations that wreaked such havoc underSoeharto.40
When combined with the Burmese example, the Indonesian experience
with democratic transition suggests further grounds for questioning
the hypothesis that personalization bolsters military rule. Even more
problematically for Geddess framework, the Burma-Indonesia comparison
suggests that the military might have been the primary institutional source
of authoritarian cohesion in both cases, rather than any party apparatus or
personal clique of the leadership. Perhaps both regimes proved so durable
because they were constructed upon the shoulders of military elites who
had been unified by shared operational experiences. And perhaps military-
backed rule collapsed in Indonesia before Burma because Suharto triedharder than Burmas Ne Win to lessen his dependence on the military through
personalizing political power.41
Not only did Suharto build a more personalized regime than Ne Win; he
also devoted far more resources to party building, as captured in Geddess
40 Jun Honna,Military Politics and Democratization in Indonesia(New York: RoutledgeCurzon,2003), 200.
41I make this argument in more depth in Dan Slater, Uprisings, Crackdowns, and Quiescence:Identity Politics and Democratic Protest in Southeast Asia, paper presented at theComparative Politics Workshop, Yale University, October 10, 2006.
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coding of the Suharto regime as a triple hybrid regime. Geddes argues that
these multiple institutional foundations should serve as a source of strength
especially relative regime dependence on a supposedly loyal and cohesive
ruling party, as opposed to a presumably more fractious and apolitical military.
John Sidel calls this argument into question with his detailed examination
of the collapse of the Suharto regime. Sidel clearly agrees with Geddes that
the regime had taken on triple hybrid qualities. While the military was
obviously the major institutional support for the regime upon its establishment
in the mid-1960s, Suharto ultimately elaborated a national political party
(Golkar) to mobilize civilian support, and nurtured a coterie of personal
loyalists to assume top positions in all of Indonesias leading political and
business organizations. But Sidel argues that Suhartos construction of
multiple institutional sources of support proved to be his undoing rather than
his salvation:
.the most important tensions within the regime, it may be
argued, stemmed from the peculiar mix of institutional bases
and personal networks through which Suharto entrenched
himself in power and exerted authority over the more than
thirty years of his rule. In this regard, one key structural
tension within the regime developed between the pattern
of circulation within the Armed Forces and the process of
personal accumulation by the President, between the military
circuitries of his regime and the more civilian networks for hiselectoral and ideological legitimation and his (and his familys)
economic enrichment.42
For our purposes here, the most interesting aspect of this argument relates to
the tensions that arose between the New Orders military and civilian wings
in institutional terms, between the military and Golkar. Suharto accelerated his
party-building efforts in the late 1980s in a concerted effort to gain a civilian
counterweight to military power; but this did not necessarily have beneficial
consequences for his regime. Instead, the elevation of civilians to new
heights of influence in the regime inspired disaffected elements in the militaryto promote oppositional activities against the President.43
As the regime began to look like less of a military regime, and developed
more of a triple hybrid institutional bricolage, it seemingly produced
worsening elite conflict rather than heavier institutional ballast. It is worth
conjecturing, in fact, that Indonesia might never have undergone a democratic
42 John T. Sidel, Macet Total: Logics of Circulation and Accumulation in the Demise ofIndonesias New Order,Indonesia66 (1998): 162. Emphasis in original.
43Ibid., 174.
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transition at all if Suharto had allowed his regime to sustain the purely military
character of its early years. As the Burmese example shows, military regimes
can exhibit astounding resilience, even in the absenceor perhaps because of
the absenceof countervailing powers in a ruling party or loyalist clique.
To be sure, the Indonesian case does not falsify Geddess arguments
regarding either the general durability of triple hybrid regimes or the
fortifying effect of ruling parties, any more than the Burmese case falsifies
her argument that pure military regimes tend to be exceptionally brittle.
Suhartos regime collapsed, but it enjoyed a long run in power before doing
so. Nevertheless, Sidels analysis suggests that far more attention needs to be
paid to the causal mechanisms through which authoritarian regimes endure
or implode. Statistical tests of correlative hypotheses are valuable, but they
should not be seen as the end of the road. They should be treated as one
important stage in the process of theory building, which can be fruitfullyfollowed by critical examination of such hypotheses empirical implications at
close range.
Political Parties and the State
We might best advance this hypothesis elaboration process by turning our
attention back to the political institution that was discussed at length earlier in
this chapter, but which is glaringly absent from Geddess institutional model:
the state. As we have seen, the relative strength of the Indonesian state vis--
vis the Philippine state provides an important clue in understanding Suhartos
greater ability than that of Marcos to withstand pressures for democratization.
This suggests that strong parties might effectively forestall democratization
when they are combined with strong states, but foster authoritarian collapse
whey they are forced to co-exist with strong militaries.
Further evidence in support of the notion that robust party-state
combinationsprovide the strongest institutional bulwark against democratization
is presented in studies of two of Southeast Asias highly consolidated single-
party regimes: Singapore and Vietnam. Quite tellingly, Chan Heng Chees study
of Singapores ruling party finds it impossible to ignore the role of the state,
while Stein Tnnessons study of the Vietnamese state consistently addresses
the role played by the ruling party.
Chan examined the grass-roots organization of Singapores Peoples ActionParty (PAP) in the mid-1970s, seeking sources of institutional robustness
that would explain its stranglehold on power. What she found, to her evident
surprise, was that the PAPs grass-roots presence had atrophied since the
heady days of decolonization in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The party no
longer stresses the importance of socializing the new recruit into party life nor
organizing activities to mobilize its members, Chan reported. It is striking
that practically no political education exists at branch level; and party-building
by the PAP, in terms of recruiting members and inducting them into party
thinking and party life so that they may perpetuate the party commitment, is
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not a priority.44The conventional wisdom that the PAP served as a quasi-
Leninist political machine appeared to be greatly exaggerated.
The key to Singapores exceptional political stability, Chan concluded, was
not the PAPs internal organization and practices, but its firm command over a
highly effective state apparatus. With the assistance of the bureaucracy, she
argued, the PAP has built an image of effectiveness. Credit for Singapores
rapid growth and quasi-welfare state accrued directly to the PAP, as the long
years of partnership between the PAP and the civil servants have undoubtedly
accelerated the fusion of the party and Government identity. Simply put,
Singaporeans had come to view the party as synonymous with the State.45
Tnnesson provides a vivid metaphor for such party-state fusion in
Vietnam, where economic reforms have seemingly forestalled the need for
political reforms. Rather than seeing states and markets as oppositional forces,
Tnnesson views the state as a system of bones, muscles, lungs, nerves,and veins, and the party as the head, employing market forces to take care of
feeding and digestion.46
To keep vital revenues flowing to the party-states coffers after the
catastrophic collapse in Soviet aid, Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP)
leaders had little choice but to welcome foreign direct investment. Despite
certain declarations to the contrary, Tnnesson argues, the Vietnamese
communist leaders endeavored to keep the new business management layer inside
the state.47Joint ventures between foreign corporations and state-owned enterprises
have seized the commanding heights of the Vietnamese economy, often with
the help of sectoral monopolies selectively doled out bywho else?partyleaders. This keeps the VCPs revenue lifeblood flowing, strengthening regime
institutions amid the challenges for regime maintenance presented by rapid
socioeconomic change in a society lacking easily manipulated communal
divisions. While social-structural conditions seemingly make Vietnam a prime
candidate for democratization, institutional factors appear to be pushing in the
opposite direction.
Perhaps the most intriguing evidence in support of the causal linkage
from party-state power to authoritarian durability comes from Kate
Friesons study of Cambodias abortive democratic transition in 1993. This
piece is extraordinarily valuable in methodological terms, because it examines
the only instance when a Southeast Asian single-party regime was defeated atthe ballot boxthus providing much-needed variation in regime outcomes,
via a fascinating snapshot of a ruling party actually losing its uncontested grip.
44Chan Heng Chee, The Dynamics of One Party Dominance: The PAP at the Grass-Roots(Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1976), 131-132.
45Ibid., 224.46Stein Tnnesson, The Layered State in Vietnam, in State Capacity in East Asia: Japan,
Taiwan, China, and Vietnam, ed. Kjeld Erik Brdsgaard and Susan Young (New York:Oxford University Press, 2000), 250.
47Ibid., 247. Emphasis in original.
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In elections bankrolled and monitored by the United Nations, the long-ruling
Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) was outpolled by the royalist Funcinpec, and
forced, for a four-year period, to share power with its rivals.
Why did the CPP lose in the 1993 vote, when no other ruling party in
Southeast Asias post-colonial era has done the same? At one level, this
surprising result was due to the pure contingency of events. The UN had
intervened in Cambodias civil war, and was committed to securing a fair
electoral result, devoting $2 billion to the task of reconstructing Cambodias
war-torn economy and polity. Should this rare defeat of a single-party regime
thus be seen as the result of contingent rather than structural factors?
When one reads Friesons analysis against the backdrop of the studies
we have just examined, one sees that external intervention was not simply a
contingent, unpredictable factor in the regime-change equation. Rather, the
intervention of the UN authority, known as UNTAC, helped to loosen both thecoercive and financial stronghold of the Cambodian statedominated by CPP
apparatchiksover Cambodian voters. With its $2 billion in aid funds, largely
distributed through nongovernmental organizations rather than the Cambodian
bureaucracy, UNTAC was perceived by voters upon its arrival in March 1992
as the richest patron in centuries.48 It was only a mild exaggeration to say
that by the time of the vote, UNTAC was the state.49To be sure, the CPP
still attempted to link party and state power to its electoral benefit, as it rallied
its administrative structures and civil servants, including teachers, soldiers,
and police, to work for the CPP. Those who refused were told they would
lose their jobs.
50
But with state power temporarily fragmented, rather thanmonopolized by the CPP, Cambodian voters enjoyed a moment of relative
immunity from the ruling partys electoral intimidations and inducements.
This victory for Cambodian democracy did not long outlast the UN-
mandated disruption of party-state power, however. The 1993 elections forced
CPP elites to share power in the legislature, but the state apparatus remained
overwhelmingly controlled by pro-CPP elements. The withdrawal of UN
forces left CPP leader Hun Sen with a free hand to overturn his power-sharing
arrangement with Funcinpecwhich he did, unilaterally and violently, in
1997. Cambodias return to authoritarianism cannot therefore be understood
simply as the contingent result of one mans desire for absolute power. Hun
Sen was as power-hungry in 1993 as in 1997; but only when he had regainedhis previous structural advantage, with unencumbered access to combined
party-state power, did he enjoy the institutional capacity to destroy democratic
procedures to his own political benefit.
48Kate G. Frieson, The Cambodian Elections of 1993: A Case of Power to the People? in ThePolitics of Elections in Southeast Asia, ed. R.H. Taylor (New York: Woodrow Wilson Center,1996), 232.
49 Ibid., 233. Thanks to Allen Hicken and Erik Kuhonta for alerting me to the limitations ofUNTACs influence, which were considerable.
50 Ibid., 234.
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In sum, Southeast Asian regime studies have tended to be strongest where
democratization theory has tended to be weakest. They have contributed
thought-provoking analyses of the structural underpinnings of dictatorship
and democratic transitions. As democratization theorists ponder the end of
the transitions paradigm, and increasingly explore the social and institutional
forces that shape regime outcomes, they should think of theoretically minded
Southeast Asianists as worthy traveling partners.
Southeast Asia in Democratization Theory:Hypothesis Regeneration from Here
At their best, studies of democratization and authoritarianism in Southeast
Asia have found ways to study its politics on its own terms, but without
ignoring the universal features to be found there.51
If there is indeed a tensionbetween building general theory and studying a particular region, it can
clearly be a creative one. For Southeast Asianists who see our leading theories
in comparative politics as too Eurocentric, this essay has hopefully lent
confidence that we must not merely consume theories built elsewhere, but also
can aim to produce better theories for consumption by generalists and experts
on other parts of the world alike.
The literature on Southeast Asian democratization and authoritarianism
suggests several areas that are especially ripe with theory-building
opportunities. First and foremost, the preceding discussion has pointed to the
importance of robust party and state institutions in sustaining authoritarian
regimes. This recurring insight in Southeast Asian regime studies finds
echoes in new theoretical work by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way.52Their
assessment of thirty-seven competitive authoritarian regimes in five regions
finds that one of the best predictors of such regimes durability is their
incumbent capacity defined as the combined strength of governing party
and state institutions. It is noteworthy that their collaborative effort involved
generalizing from the ground up, as discussed earlier. The Southeast Asian
cases of Cambodia and Malaysia were incorporated into the theory-building
exercise, rather than simply (and passively) serving to illustrate the validity
of theoretical arguments fully developed elsewhere. It is no coincidence that
such an approach yielded findings that resonate so nicely with findings in theSoutheast Asia literature.
Our understanding of the role of parties and states in durable authoritarian
regimes has thus advanced to a point where global quantitative tests would
be very much in order. Even if such tests reveal a strong positive relationship
51R.H. Taylor, Introduction: Elections and Politics in Southeast Asia, in The Politics ofElections in Southeast Asia, ed. R.H. Taylor, 11.
52Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism, Journal ofDemocracy13, no. 2 (2002): 51-64.
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between powerful party-states and durable dictatorships, however, this
would raise as many questions as it would answer. For instance, the causal
significance of powerful authoritarian institutions begs the question of where
these institutions come from, and whether the circumstances of their origins
might hold clues for their long-term sturdiness or fragility.
On this front, Jason Brownlee and Benjamin Smith have been pace-setters
at regenerating general theories with original and well-informed comparisons
of Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern cases. Brownlee shows the importance
of ruling-party strength for authoritarian durability in Malaysia and Egypt,
contrasted with party weakness and regime wobbliness in the Philippines and
Iran.53He traces this critical variation in party strength to the elite conflicts
that accompanied party formation. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the initial
sidelining of moderate voices in these conflicts ultimately strengthened parties,
while the inclusion of moderates made parties weaker. Brownlees argumenton party formation intriguingly resembles Tuong Vus novel argument on
state formation.54For Vu, the exclusion of moderate figures facilitated state-
led revolutions from above in China and South Korea, while broader founding
coalitions proved incapable of making the state an agent of radical top-down
reform in Vietnam and Indonesia.
These Asia-driven arguments suggest a potentially promising insight for
our general theories of political development:party and state formation might
be amenable to a common analytic framework. It is this insight that drives
Smiths comparison of Indonesia and Iran, as well as my own comparison of
state building and party formation in seven Southeast Asian countries. LikeBrownlee and Vu, Smith largely traces institutional strength to patterns of
conflict surrounding the establishment of new authoritarian regimes.55New
regimes will build strong parties andstrong states when they confront a strong
political opposition amid conditions of resource scarcity (as in Indonesia in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, Smith argues). My own argument sets aside
preexisting resource endowments, focusing squarely on patterns of contentious
politics before authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia were established.56
Where radical mass mobilization penetrated urban areas and exacerbated
communal tensions, as in Malaysia and Singapore (but unlike Thailand and the
Philippines, for example), a wide range of elites acted collectively in support
of more centralized and extractive party and state institutions. In both of our
53Jason Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, forthcoming).
54Tuong Vu, Late Leviathans: State Formation and Postcolonial Transformation in Pacific Asia,(Ph.D. Diss., Department of Political Science, University of California-Berkeley, 2004).
55Benjamin Smith, Hard Times in the Land of Plenty: Oil Booms and Opposition in LateDeveloping States(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming).
56Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics, State-Building, and AuthoritarianDurability in Southeast Asia (Ph.D. Diss., Department of Political Science, EmoryUniversity, 2005).
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works, a big intended payoff of explaining the origins of strong parties and
states is that these institutions provide the best explanation for authoritarian
regime durability over time.
These forthcoming works barely scratch the surface of the wide range
of questions scholars could profitably be asking about the architecture of
authoritarianism. Perhaps the most interesting theoretical angle Southeast
Asianists can take is to rethink and refine the basic distinction between party-
and military-based authoritarian regimes that informs the existing literature.
We might also interrogate whether the formal party and military organizations
underpinning authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia contain the political
attributes they are expected to possess, in general, or whether informal
patterns of politics produce some informative surprises. Under what conditions
will ruling militaries exhibit the kind of cohesion and staying power we have
come to expect of ruling parties? When will ruling parties (or at least somefigures within those parties) see a democratic transition as compatible with
their own political interests? When might a leaders effort to build a stronger
ruling party exacerbate elite conflict rather than dampen it? Are some kinds of
ruling parties better able to survive the introduction of competitive elections
(or a major economic crisis, or the eruption of mass protest, or an increase
in foreign pressure for democratization) than others? How might large-scale
social-structural and ideational forces such as class, development, ethnicity,
religion, regionalism, globalization, and nationalism interact to influence the
functioning of authoritarian institutions?
Clearly no single approach to comparative politics can be expected tomanage these types of questions on its own. Yet the mere existence of such
important and under-theorized questions suggests that we still lack high-
quality hypotheses for many of the topics that matter most in real-world
politics. The study of authoritarianism and democratization will suffer if
political scientists spend too little time using specific cases to help build better
hypotheses, and too much time testing the hypotheses we already have.