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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2 Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2

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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December 2006 15

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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December 2006 17

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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December 2006 19

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.

Authoritarianism Southeast Asia

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