Political Participation in Asia

Defining and Deploying Political Space

Eva Hansson, Meredith L. Weiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351622462
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A combination of economic transformation, political transitions and changes in media have substantially, if incrementally, altered the terrain for political participation globally, particularly in Asia, home to several of the most dramatic such shifts over the past two decades.

This book explores political participation in Asia and how democracy and authoritarianism function under neoliberal economic relations. It examines changes that coincide seemingly perversely with a participation explosion: with mass street protests and 'occupations', energetic online contention, movements of students and workers, mobilization for and against democracy and more. Organized thematically in three parts – political participation in a 'post-democratic' context, changes in the scope and character of political space and the policing of that space – this book analyzes economic, regime and media shifts and how they function in tandem and both within and across states.

Closely integrated, comparative and theoretically driven, this book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in the fields of civil society, contentious politics or social movements, democratization, political economy/development, media and communications, political geography, sociology, comparative politics and Asian politics.

Part I

Post-democratic political participation

1Conceptualizing political space and mobilization

Eva Hansson and Meredith L. Weiss

This century has been widely dubbed ‘The Asian Century’ – an era when an ascendant Asia is to be the fulcrum of global commerce, security posturing and political consolidation. Yet launching that century has been a seemingly endless round of public protest: in China, Burma, Hong Kong, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Taiwan, India, Malaysia and more. The eyes of the world have indeed been on this region, but not for the reasons so widely predicted. That recurrent trope of rebellious publics brings to the fore larger questions about where these protests came from and what legacies they leave. Mass street protests and social media storms seize headlines, but underlying these cataclysmic moments are larger changes in public, political space: who claims, expands and defines that space, and how? How, too, do prior moments of protest themselves alter the landscape for future mobilizations: which actors are newly constituted, which discourses gain traction and what strategies emerge?

Political space is not coterminous with the state; it includes both state and non-state arenas for participation. Its scope and quality have ebbed and flowed throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, across types of regime (Hewison 1997, 10–15). During the last ten years, however, we have witnessed both an expansion of political space and intensified attempts at limiting activism within that terrain, as recent quantitative as well as qualitative research on political participation, civil society development and citizenship confirms. Some scholars have suggested that this expansion of political space to include previously or recently absent groups – for instance, rural Thais spurred to participate politically (Chairat 2012; Prinat 2014, 178) – has been driven by changing civic consciousness and rights-oriented political sensitivity among inadequately represented groups (Pattana 2012; Goldman 2005; Pei 2000; Perry 2014). These efforts to claim political space and democratic rights have intensified even as observers have situated the region within a global trend of shrinking space for civil society and democratic regression (for example, CIVICUS 2016). Others interpret this same trend of popular mobilization in more problematic terms and see the evolving ‘street politics’ in particular as ‘inherently unrepresentative’, however many people it engages (Jackson 2014, 208).

Envisioning political space – whether as a metaphor for participation, as a physical place in which engagement happens or in discursive terms – implies that it is delimited by boundaries that define what actors, interests and ideas may gain access, and which are excluded. These boundaries are naturally contested by various actors with sometimes conflicting interests and with varying power resources. Some aim to expand political space; others aim to limit it, or else have that unintended effect.

In this volume we are interested in how social and political actors struggle to carve out space for their activism, directed at the state or striving to affect social norms and institutions. An understanding of how political space is produced and how it changes must therefore include not only an analysis of actors aiming to expand space, but also, and just as importantly, an exploration of how political space is limited or how its boundaries are guarded and policed, and by whom. Explicitly anti-democratic movements in several Asian countries in recent years, for instance, have paradoxically thrived in the same institutional and discursive space as activists struggling to establish or sustain liberalization, including rights to organize, speak publicly, demonstrate, advocate, publicize and assemble. It is not only the state that polices boundaries; forces intent on preventing certain interests, including pro-democratic ones, from sharing political space, emerge from within civil society, as well. At stake are both political opportunity structures, in terms of openings for (or closure to) mobilization, but also the terrain itself: what modes of participation the character of space available recommends or precludes.

We draw on Bourdieu’s conception of the political field as having embedded within it both structural attributes – institutions and actors – and power relations. However, the struggle for power – both symbolic power to define a particular social reality and more instrumental power over public policies and ideas that are able to generate collective mobilization – is especially defining (Swartz 2003, 147). The character of political space, as well as the relative position of actors therein and in the broader class structure, moulds supply of and demand for political ideas. The generation of political options, as well as the situation of boundaries and available meanings, must be considered in context, then, including in light of the state, given its claim to symbolic power (Swartz 2003, 148, 152).

Other scholars likewise inform our reading of political space, including its multi-dimensionality and the extent to which state and non-state actors mutually constitute the arena in which they engage. In the Latin American context, Collier and Collier (1991), for instance, trace discontinuities or critical junctures along the path by which movement politics shaped Latin American political regimes. ‘Fundamental political differences’ in how labour was incorporated (Collier and Collier 1991, 7) – for example, states’ replacing independent unions with state-penetrated ones, versus parties’ mobilizing unions as a convenient electoral base – shaped not only labour contention, but the expansion or narrowing of political space broadly. Valenzuela’s (1989) focus on contests over ‘organizational space’, particularly for and by labour as a critical strategic group in the course of installing or replacing authoritarianism, homes in on this same dialectic. Both these works, as well as others on that region (for instance, Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens 1992), home in on labour movements as being at the forefront of struggles to expand political space and forge alliances, in the process, shaping national politics and political regimes in fundamental ways. In Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile, for example, labour movements and unions spearheaded social protests against dictatorship and for (re-)democratization, and opened up space in the struggle for political participation and rights (Valenzuela 1989, 445).

While research on protest movements in Asia and their role in shaping national politics has been less extensive than that on European, American or Latin American cases, comparisons are revealing. Within Asia, Hewison and Rodan (1994) link the rise and decline of the ideological Left – socialism and communism – to the fate of ‘non-state political space’ during key phases through the 1970s. The role of labour in shaping political space was affected by the way developmental models in Asia precluded formal union formation, reinforced by corresponding differences in institutionalized, restrictive modes of government–civil society interaction (Deyo 2012). Since then, the vector has reversed: with other non-state groups working to expand civil society, the Left now has new space in which to strategize. In other words, an array of organized actors interact within political space and their engagement and struggles for or around forms of power (not necessarily over the state) simultaneously situate that space and colour its timbre and priorities.

Regardless, common parlance and prevailing ways of thinking about power and politics imply a dichotomous relationship between state and civil society, entailing both a degree of autonomy within, and clear-cut boundaries between, the Weberian spheres of political, economic and civil society. Such habits have distracted attention from the way these spheres overlap and produce variations in opportunities for social and political actors to define and deploy political space. These conceptual boundaries are not helpful for an understanding of how and why political space is structured in certain ways in different contexts. The notion of a state-versus-civil society dialectic, however politically useful for activists in their struggle against authoritarian rule, has in particular produced a misleading conception of the nature of repression and delimitation of political space as a purely state affair. In reality, regime institutions and attributes need not be so defining. Contemporary developments in Asia, for instance, clearly suggest the importance of social movements and other civil societal actors in both the policing and delimitation of political space and, consequently, in the reproduction of authoritarian politics.

In this volume, we therefore deem it an empirical question how and by whom political space is produced, reproduced or delimited. We take a different tack from previous research that has, for instance, examined how episodes of contention have formed political regimes by spurring elite responses (Slater 2010). Rather, our interest in this volume is to explore how forms and episodes of mobilization within and across countries in Asia pose and embody both institutional and normative challenges to a topographical map of political space, engaging and transforming varying authorities, ideas and practices. The chapters herein explore that map, using close examination of patterns and incidents to theorize how and when political participation changes, and with what implications. Of course, this one volume could not hope to address the full empirical variety of Asian states. However, our goal is to present a framework and set of ideas, developed through an investigation of states at the poles of usual typograpies – from single-party communist regimes to consolidated democracies, as well as a sampling of states in between – in the hope that other scholars and activists will continue the conversation through an examination of those polities not given their full due here. Toward that end, we begin with some key concepts and dimensions with which to situate and frame the chapters to come. We start by introducing our terminology.

Conceptualizing political space and participation

The term ‘political space’ has come into vogue in recent years, among both policy makers and scholars, for instance, in terms of ways to expand participatory frameworks in authoritarian regimes in the name of ‘good governance’. Our reading extends beyond authority to make, apply, interpret or enforce rules – a notion of collective governance – to a multi-dimensional arena for empowerment at the level of ideas as well as policies or other instrumental objectives, and working with, against, or around fellow citizens as well as the state. As such, political space overlaps state, government and civil society, and is integral to the political regimes writ large defining and defined by relations among these entities. We include in our frame engagement across modes and media, from street protests and rallies, to elections and lobbying, to documentary film and graffiti, to petitions and press conferences.

In policy and academic discussions alike, political space tends to be conceptualized as an at least loosely demarcated realm in which societal actors influence policy decisions or affect the rules by which citizens can participate in politics. In democratic regimes, this space is often presumed ‘independent’: an arena in which unconstrained articulation of ideas and contestation over interests can occur and where state authorities cannot arbitrarily inhibit or repress such activity. Even in democratic regimes, however, this view simplifies and idealizes how political participation works and exaggerates the extent to which rights to participate in formal politics can be substantially guaranteed and utilized.

As Rueschemeyer (2004) has argued, social and economic power resources profoundly affect the way citizens and groups can make use of their rights and voice. Not only do differences in power resources vary among actors and affect their capacity for influence, but political influence itself may be more or less direct, and actors’ claims may target either civil society broadly or a narrower political society. Some distance between the ideal and the reality of political equality seems inevitable, though the extent of that gap varies over time and place. In non-democratic regimes, not just asymmetric power resources, but also repression of independent voices and claims limit the possibilities for marginalized groups’ and individuals’ influence. In authoritarian regimes, states strive to control and manipulate political space to their own advantage. Partly in consequence, social movements and other civil societal actors are likely to find themselves at odds with the political regime sooner or later, even when their initial claims were not transgressive or directed at the government as such. Struggles among social actors with conflicting claims are then likely to verge into struggles over the boundaries of political space and, thus, over the composition of the political regime itself.

Asian authoritarian states have used different measures to limit political space, including co-optation, politicization of the judiciary, legal restrictions, securitization, control of media and censorship and manipulation of ethic and communal politics (Hewison 1999, 232–3). The rising importance of social media for mobilization lends primacy to attempts at controlling and manipulating these forums and communications specifically, to curtail activism. Those efforts alone extend from the juridical – introducing specific internet security laws and policing, to prohibit online discussion of certain themes – to shrewder tactics, such as employing armies of ‘public opinion shapers’ to offer pro-government comments or attack potentially threatening opinions, or more direct repression by arrests and imprisonment of transgressive internet activists.

Yet the rise of social media as a part of political space exemplifies how malleable that space is. When political space expands, it reconfigures the opportunity structure for different forms of activism, movements and organizations by altering the terrain on which struggles for influence and to exercise power happen, vis-à-vis both governments and fellow claimants. Changes in political space are incremental and cumulative, meaning t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• PART I: Post-democratic political participation
• PART II: Expanding and contesting political space
• PART III: The policing of political space
• Index