Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian Democratization

William Case

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317380054
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Southeast Asia, an economically dynamic and strategically vital region, seemed until recently to be transiting to more democratic politics. This progress has suddenly stalled or even gone into reverse, requiring that analysts seriously rethink their expectations and theorizing. The Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian Democratization provides the first book-length account of the reasons for democracy's declining fortunes in the region today. Combining theory and case studies, it is structured in four major sections:

• Stunted Trajectories and Unhelpful Milieus
• Wavering Social Forces
• Uncertain Institutions
• Country cases and democratic guises

This interdisciplinary reference work addresses topics including the impact of belief systems, historical records, regional and global contexts, civil society, ethnicity, women, Islam, and social media. The performance of political institutions is also assessed, and the volume offers a series of in-depth case studies, evaluating the country records of particular democratic, hybrid, and authoritarian regimes from a democratization perspective. Bringing together nearly 30 key international experts in the field, this cutting-edge Handbook offers a comprehensive and fresh investigation into democracy in the region

This timely survey will be essential reading for scholars and students of Democratization and Asian Politics, as well as policymakers concerned with democracy's setbacks in Southeast Asia and the implications for the region's citizens.

Part 1
Stunted trajectories and unhelpful milieus

1
Democracy’s mixed fortunes in Southeast Asia

Torpor, change, and trade-offs

William Case

In his book Authoritarianism in an Age of Democracy, Jason Brownlee (2007) observed that throughout the Third Wave a strand of authoritarian regimes, distinguished by dominant parties, managed to persist. Indeed, this category began to swell as dictators observed that they could best avoid democracy by mimicking its procedures (Carrothers 2002; Diamond 2002; Ottaway 2003; Levitsky and Way 2010; Schedler 2013). Holding multiparty elections atop an uneven playing field, the dominant parties that they formed generally prevailed, gaining some legitimating cover, ordering elite-level relations, energizing constituencies, and exposing opposition refuges. In this context, Larry Diamond lamented in 2008 that, after a run of more than three decades, democracy was suffering from “rollback” and recession. Taking stock, Freedom House (2014) declared in its annual Freedom in the World report that 2013 marked the eighth consecutive year in which civil liberties and political freedoms had contracted globally. Analysts took commensurate flight, with David Art (2012: 351) remarking that the “‘transitology’ paradigm … now has the taste of ashes.” A sudden “switch in scholarly focus” has swept research agendas from questions about democratic change to authoritarian durability.

What need is there, then, for a book about democracy in Southeast Asia today? For a number of reasons, Southeast Asia was never addressed by analysts from a perspective of democratic change in the way that other regions were. Its diversity of regime forms was too great, seemingly immune to the regional “snowballing” (Huntington 1991) and cross-national leverage and linkage (Levitsky and Way 2010) that elsewhere herded countries in democratic directions. Moreover, despite this diversity, few countries in the region seemed to meet many of what were once commonly cast as democracy’s preconditions. For example, though state apparatuses in Southeast Asia might be large, apart from Singapore and to some extent Malaysia (Slater 2010), they have remained ramshackle and disjointed, their writ barely extending in some cases beyond capital cities. Hence, they have lacked the “useable bureaucracy” and often the “hierarchical military” that Linz and Stepan (2011) viewed as preliminary to democracy’s functioning. In these circumstances, rather than firmly applying good governance, states are leeched of their assets by top officials, generals, and connected tycoons.

In addition, most societies in Southeast Asia are deeply fractionalized by ethnolinguistic, religious, and spatial identities. But, while this fissiparousness can sometimes foster procedural Madisonian balance, in Southeast Asia it has more often perpetuated dominant parties and secessionist movements, the latter severely negating the “stateness” that Linz and Stepan (2011) also regarded as fundamental for democracy. To be sure, new urban middle classes have sprung up in the region, usually regarded by modernization theorists as a democratizing force. Yet, while episodically performing the agency role assigned to them, they have more generally been sated by rising living standards and daunted by more vast lower classes (Sinpeng and Arugay, this volume). Further, while they may convene civil society organizations, they often remain ambivalent over democracy’s worth, split along ethnic or religious lines, and estranged from the associational life of workers and peasants (Weiss, this volume).

What is more, the economies of many countries in Southeast Asia are distorted by foreign investment that saps even those that might democratize of the autonomy needed for a locally beneficial provision of public goods and an equitable distribution of surpluses. To be sure, the so-called “ASEAN 5” countries of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and, at least briefly, the Philippines did grow rapidly during the 1990s, incubating new entrepreneurs, uplifting the middle class, and vitalizing ranks of industrial workers. They built potential, then, for new trans-class coalitions that might one day gather in pursuit of democratic change. But meanwhile, where rapid expansion took place during this period, it was abruptly terminated at the end of the decade by fearsome economic shock. Recovery has since been modest, with all of the ASEAN 5 countries save Singapore now “trapped” at lower-middle or middle income levels.

Even so, some countries in Southeast Asia have developed enough that modernization theorists might regard them as poised for democratization. But, as local specialists often counter, the region’s richest countries, Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei, have remained steadfastly authoritarian. Indeed, Diamond (2003) colorfully remarks that Singapore is “the richest authoritarian state in the history of the world.” In contrast, more modestly endowed countries like the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia possess substantial democratic experience. Thus, if anything, high levels of wealth in Southeast Asia, whether generated by sophisticated services, manufacturing, or oil, do as much to prop up authoritarian rule as to democratize politics (Stubbs 2001). The state is plied with resources, enabling it to placate political elites and their business allies with rents, the middle class with career tracks and status, and groups of mass-level supporters with populist programs.

In peering beyond political, structural, and developmental factors to deeper historical legacies, however, do we find any better preconditions for democracy in Southeast Asia? Colonial experience might seem helpful, with the British having imparted what Myron Weiner (1987) regards as democratic “tutelage” in Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei—states that in earlier guises had been their possessions. Moreover, the United States sought throughout its tenure in the Philippines to install political parties and elections (Pye 1985). And though the Dutch did little explicitly to promote democracy in Indonesia, the West provided so persuasive a demonstration effect that during the 1950s the country adopted a parliamentary form of government. However, amid the plural, even “divided” societies that the British formed in their colonies through which to operate extractive economies, the weak bureaucratic apparatus and skewed land holding systems that the Americans perpetuated in the Philippines, and the refusal of the Dutch to provide any serious tutelage in Indonesia, factors favorable to democracy were negated. Thus, in all these cases, newly instituted democracies succumbed to a “reverse wave” during the late 1950s to 1960s that was global in scope (Huntington 1991), yielding military governments, personal dictatorships, single-party dominant systems, or some protean combination of authoritarian subtypes.

But despite this reversal, some electoral procedures survived. Carl Trocki (1998: 8) thus concluded that in “recent decades … democratic forms, including elected legislative bodies and executives, regular elections, political parties, written constitutions, and formal guarantees of political and individual human liberties have become part of the legitimizing apparatus of most Southeast Asian nations.” But democracy failed to find any deeper roots in Southeast Asia, even during its worldwide resurgence during the Third Wave. Indeed, where elections failed to refresh the tenures of incumbent governments, their results were grievously distorted or even blatantly rescinded—as they were in the Philippines in 1986, in Myanmar in 1990, and in Cambodia in 1999.

Of course, in the Philippines, shortly after the election was stolen by President Marcos, politics were famously re-democratized through “people power” (see Thompson 1995). And a military coup that had been mounted in Thailand in 1991 was wound back a year later. Episodes like these raised hopes that the Third Wave had begun finally to lap at Southeast Asia. Yet evidence of gross electoral cheating cropped up again in the Philippines in 2005. And the military mounted yet another coup in Thailand in 2006. The Philippines and Thailand were thus “downgraded” once more by Freedom House to respective ratings of “partly free” and “not free.” These re-evaluations seemed justified also by worsening violations of civil liberties, involving extrajudicial killings of journalists and activists in the Philippines and still more onerous revisions to lèse-majesté laws in Thailand. At this juncture, then, with Southeast Asia bereft of any regimes regarded as fully democratic, Don Emmerson (1995: 226) branded it as the world’s most “recalcitrant region.”

Turning from preconditions to transitional processes, we find the particular route by which re-democratization took place in the Philippines and also in Thailand to be either ambiguous or unhelpful. Most analysts, even when detecting local differences that give rise to nuanced accounts (see Boudreau 2009), regard “people power” in the Philippines, “Black May” in Thailand, and the student processions and Jakarta riots that precipitated Indonesia’s transition in 1998 to be “bottom-up” in their dynamics (Aspinall 2013; but also see Fukuoka, this volume). Labeling this route as “replacement,” Huntington (1991: 276) understood it as the mode of transition which, because of its swift and far-reaching character, was least likely to stabilize. In their classic analysis, O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986: 69) warned further that where such transitions threatened the “inviolable property rights of the bourgeoisie” or the “institutional existence, assets, and hierarchy” of the armed forces, they grew vulnerable to authoritarian “backlash.”

Thus, a great irony appeared when Indonesia, its violent and bottom-up pathway to democracy seemingly so fraught, was reclassified by Freedom House as politically “free” in 2008. This was mostly justified by Indonesia’s legislature having extended direct elections from the presidency to provincial and district-level executive offices, a reform that restored to Southeast Asia at least a single democracy. It also cheered observers on another count, at last delivering a case in which democratic politics seemed compatible with Islamic belief systems. In accounting for democracy’s “unexpected caller” from Indonesia (Case 2000), Donald Horowitz (2013) has recently turned our attention from bottom-up processes of transition to elite-level choices about the timing of elections and institutional reforms. In brief, by holding elections before reforming the constitution, legislators secured their positions, and thus they were motivated to put institutions in place that would perpetuate the democratic functioning by which they had come to power. Hence, through unorthodox sequencing, personal stakes and institutional reforms intersected in ways that Horowitz believes to have been crucial for democracy’s survival in the Indonesia case. However, with legislators afterward colluding in a feverish pursuit of patronage, they fostered no opposition to hold them accountable. It was in this way, then, that despite the bottom-up mode of Indonesia’s transition to democracy, elites avoided threats to their “inviolable interests”. Accordingly, amid the “money politics” that soon flourished (Aspinall, this volume), Horowitz hews to a theme that pervades many of the contributions to this volume: democracy best stabilizes where its quality remains low.

However, even if we accept this logic of a trade-off between its stability and quality, democracy soon came under strain in Indonesia. Evidently adjudging their interests to be insufficiently protected, legislators imposed new controls on civil society organizations in 2013. They also sought repeatedly to weaken the country’s anticorruption agency, a surprisingly toothsome watchdog. And they contemplated abolishing the direct election of local officials, the very reform that had earned their regime’s ranking as “free” (Arifianto 2014). Thus, in its 2014 report— published a year after Horowitz’s book—Freedom House re-evaluated Indonesia as only “partly free,” again leaving Southeast Asia with nary a country case that could be classified as a full democracy. Moreover, when later in the year a new president, Joko Widodo, was elected, the process was marred by the loser’s challenging the outcome through the courts and the legislature. On this count, we note also in passing that macro-level institutions, whether presidential or parliamentary in design, have failed equally to resist erosion (see Hicken and Kuhonta, this volume). In Indonesia, President Yudhoyono neglected during his second term to use his executive power to guard against democracy’s rollback. In the Philippines, further Marcos used his office to break down democracy through an executive coup. And in Thailand, the military has repeatedly mounted coups by which parliamentary systems have been overturned.

Thus, if it is difficult to examine Southeast Asia’s politics through the lenses of democracy’s stabilization, can we make more fruitful assessments about its breakdown? Dan Slater (2010: 12, fn 33) advises that we cannot even do this, for though the region is distinguished by its vaunted diversity, it is still short of a “requisite” variability. With democracy in all cases having collapsed, we have no continuous record of operation in the region against which to compare. Unable to identify any factors across cases, then, that encourage democracy’s survival, whether involving preconditions, transitional pathways, or institutional outcomes, we cannot say which ones are missing in the cases of democracy’s demise.

And yet, it is also hard to write of authoritarian durability in Southeast Asia. Single-party systems persist, of course, in Vietnam and Laos. But despite their originating “fortuitously” in violent conflicts that bind their founders together and discipline successors (Levitsky and Way 2012), the Communist parties in these countries have long since shed their ideological fervor. And as economic performance falters too, they seem obliged to rely more heavily on costly coercion. Less robust forms of authoritarian rule are still more readily corroded by economic adversity. Harried by indebtedness and a plummeting currency, the last personal dictatorship in the region vanished with Marcos in the Philippines nearly three decades ago. Facing economic sanctions and mounting dependence on China, the last military government, in Myanmar, has dispersed amid some form of transition.

To be sure, the single-party dominant systems noted at the outset of this chapter are still practiced in Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia. But elections in these countries have grown increasingly uncertain in their outcomes, with opposition parties recently making great strides in all three cases. In Singapore, Stephan Ortmann (this volume) contends that with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) having won only 60 percent of the popular vote in the last general election, held in 2011, the country’s longtime electoral authoritarian variant of single-party dominance has unraveled into competitive authoritarianism, intimating that defeat of the ruling PAP is now at least imaginable. In Malaysia, the ruling Barisan Nasional (National Front) fared even worse in the last election, held in 2013, winning less than half the popular vote. Hence, the extent to which the Barisan government must rely on severe electoral manipulations in order to retain power has been laid bare, weakening its claims to legitimacy. In this case, then, elections may be shifting in their functionality from “regime-sustaining” to “regime-subverting” roles (Schedler 2002: 29). And hence, in order to inhibit any process of what Staffan Lindberg (2009) labels “democratization by election,” the government leans harder on its pliant judiciary (see Dressel, this volume), charging opposition leaders and activists under the country’s assembly law, its sedition law, the penal code, and various other acts. But a sustained manipulation of elections and a mounting...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• PART 1 Stunted trajectories and unhelpful milieus
• PART 2 Wavering social forces
• PART 3 Uncertain institutions
• PART 4 Country cases and democratic guises
• Index