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South Korea's transition to democracy in 1987 was driven by social movements. The grand democracy coalition included the opposition party and various civic associations, including student groups, labour unions, and religious organisations. Civil society continued to pressure the post-transitional governments to dismantle authoritarian structures and remove undemocratic practices. Political authoritarianism in South Korea in 1961–1987 was inseparable from the developmental state that delivered the country's impressive economic development. Government reform after the democratisation entailed the weakening, if not dismantling, of the developmental state, to make public governance and policymaking more transparent, responsive, and participatory. In this paper we examine government reform in South Korea, focusing on the first ten years following democratisation. The Roh Tae Woo government created the Administrative Reform Committee in 1988, and the Kim Young Sam government launched the Presidential Commission for Administrative Reform in 1993. Although both agencies engaged civilians in the reform process, it was the Ministry of Government Administration and the Ministry of Finance and Economy that dominated the designing and implementing of the reforms, which demonstrates that the introduction and implementation of collaborative governance in South Korea was state led. Comparative implications are drawn from the South Korean case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hun Sen has ruled as Cambodia's prime minister for over three decades, making him one of the world's most durable political leaders. Studies of Cambodia's politics tend to portray him as a powerful strongman. They also explain major bases of his power consolidation such as his use of repression, patron–client network politics, personalised control of the country, electoral and political manipulation and resource exploitation. However, while the leader's investment in it for his political durability has been continuous and ubiquitous in the literature, the legitimation as an important base of Hun Sen's power has been less appreciated. This article addresses this gap. While agreeing that Hun Sen is a strongman, it is argued that he has remained politically vulnerable because the aforementioned bases of power are inadequate in dealing with the challenges his rule faces. Hun Sen's regime has to grapple with constant legitimacy deficits. This article argues that the quest for legitimacy has been effective, contributing to his political survival and this constitutes an important feature of Hun Sen's adaptive authoritarian resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widely recognised as an indispensable element in South Korea's political democratisation, protest suicide has conjured up an image of insurmountable spirit and steely resolve by heroic fighters challenging the powerful authoritarian state. Based on a systematic examination of 125 cases of protest suicide from 1970 to 2015, this article exposes the deficiencies in previous accounts and contends that protest suicide is not a uniform practice but an evolving political form that reflects changes in the broader political environment. Calling into question the conventional account that attributes protest suicide to severe state oppression, the article shows how protest suicide became most prominent in the late 1980s in the context of expanding political space, not in the earlier periods when the political climate was most adverse. The article also traces the gradual change of protest suicide from an aggressive political weapon meant to spur mass protest towards a more defensive act by workers who use death to communicate frustration, weariness and despair as they protest injustice. These findings suggest the need to embrace a more nuanced understanding of protest suicide and reflect on the nature of political democracy in the age of neo-liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments across anti-communist Asia, with US backing or tacit consent, devised institutions and practices for marginalising popular forces. Such internalisation of the Cold War involved measures ranging from violence and ideological mobilisation to disciplinary modes of control. With democratisation, Cold War devices for domestic control could remain entrenched or be rolled back. Examining the relationship between democratic transformation and the unwinding of Cold War practices in Taiwan can shed new light on democratic change in the region. While the Kuomintang regime of the martial law period had abundant resources for suppression, electoral politics was left relatively undisciplined by anti-communist meanings of democracy. The limited elections produced a new group within the political elite, who negotiated for a more open electoral landscape. The rules governing electoral politics in Taiwan today reflect the principles of pluralism and inclusiveness that were at the heart of that elite bargain. As far as control over electoral politics is concerned, and in so far as the electoral sphere's growth is taken as significant, democratisation moved Taiwan out of the shadow of the Cold War's internalisation. Comparison with South Korea clarifies an alternative form of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with unresponsive and intimidating state institutions, citizens often need to rely on brokers to obtain state benefits. This article compares the ways in which brokers help people gain access to public services in two Indian states. Using ethnographic fieldwork in both states, we compare Bihar and Gujarat to argue that the evolution of the informal networks through which citizens gain access to public services constitutes an important dimension of democratisation processes. In both Gujarat and Bihar such brokerage networks have fragmented considerably over the last 40 years, while also becoming less marked by social hierarchies. This change has taken place despite a differing role and strength of political parties in the two states. The fragmentation and levelling of brokerage networks have enabled citizens to put more pressure on state institutions and power holders. This process of "informal democratisation" suggests that the comparative study of brokerage networks constitutes a promising and largely unexplored avenue to interpret the challenges facing governance and local democracy in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-corruption became one of the top priorities in post-Soeharto Indonesia, with democratisation, market liberalisation and institutional anti-corruption frameworks pursued as means to enhance transparency and accountability in public governance. A core component of these efforts was the establishment of a powerful anti-corruption agency, the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK). This article assesses the effectiveness of the KPK, using evidence from two contrasting cases to identify factors that facilitated or impeded its ability to successfully investigate, prosecute and thus contain high-level corruption. The analysis highlights the threats to the KPK posed by resilient networks that were able to reconsolidate and resist anti-corruption efforts in post-Soeharto Indonesia. However, it also identifies countervailing social forces that emerged in the context of democratisation – in particular, an active civil society and a largely free press. While these supportive pressures from civil society could not fully counter the attacks on the KPK, they were able to prevent its marginalisation in the two major cases examined. Overall the KPK's success in addressing high-level corruption is shown to be dependent on the interaction of political dynamics, interests and power relations, with no guarantee that anti-corruption forces will prevail in future cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an accentuation of Indonesian democracy's illiberal characteristics during the course of reformasi. The religious and nativist mobilisation that surrounded the controversial 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial elections was only one manifestation of the sort of pressures leading to such accentuation. This article surveys the impacts of a stronger recent turn towards illiberalism across diverse areas of policy making in Indonesia, including decentralisation, civil–military relations, economic and foreign policy, as well as in the approaches to recognising past abuses of human rights. We find clear variation in its impacts, produced by differing constellations of old and new forces and what is at stake politically and economically in each arena of competition, as well as the salience of coherently expressed public pressure for reform. In particular, where the state and market have failed to address social injustices, more illiberal models have emerged, some under the guise of populist discourses that nonetheless continue to serve predatory elite interests and shift attention away from the inequalities in society. Such developments could be observed all the way to the 2019 presidential contest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the links between communal violence in Poso, Central Sulawesi, at the onset of democratisation in Indonesia and contemporary politico-security dynamics. Poso regained national attention in recent years when East Indonesia Mujahidin jihadis set up a base in the region and declared allegiance to ISIS and joint police-military operations ensued. The article argues that scale and "performance" of the security operations – to weed out a small group of poorly resourced armed men – connects local-national-global dynamics and keeps the threat of terrorism and insecurity at the forefront of public discussion in Indonesia. This has served the interests of those advocating for a greater role for the Indonesian military in domestic affairs through revisions to the Anti-Terrorism Law and for better resourcing for the military. Yet, the evidence suggests there has been little local support for the ideology of the East Indonesia Mujahidin and the risk of widespread engagement or violence is low, especially given that the local discontent which initially drove the conflict has dissipated. Such developments raise questions as to whether Indonesia risks a return to the illiberal past when the military dominated many aspects of civic and political life and in some cases acted with impunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key areas of Indonesian foreign policy have remained largely autonomous of the political struggles associated with democratisation and a subsequent illiberal turn, even as they have changed the way foreign policy is formulated. Indonesia's South China Sea diplomacy has been one such area of autonomy. Although the issue has gained great public salience, as the most prominent foreign policy challenge for the current Joko Widodo administration, the government has maintained a striking continuity in its approach dating to the authoritarian Suharto era. Such continuity persists because the strategic challenge facing Indonesia has endured: throughout Indonesia's modern history, the government has sought to assert the nation's rights to territory and resources against more powerful states. The government's current policy settings have also preserved a status quo that serves a range of Indonesian interests sufficiently well to prevent the emergence of a coherent coalition of interests to push for a new approach, in what is a technical policy area dominated by foreign ministry experts. As such, although the Joko Widodo administration has exhibited greater overt nationalism in its handling of the issue, Indonesia's broader illiberal turn has not been transformative of the government's diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Indonesia, local government is endowed with important policy prerogatives and local politics is key to advance social welfare. The literature on Indonesian local politics has convincingly exposed serious limitations in local democratic practices, and it has questioned the ability of local democracy to promote genuine political change. This work, however, predominantly focuses on elite politics and specific forms of accountability based on patronage and clientelism. In this paper, we study democratic accountability in Indonesia from a different perspective. Drawing from the comparative literature on voting behavior, we hypothesize that Indonesian voters evaluate local politicians for their performance, and that they vote to reward or punish them for what they do in office. The analysis of three original surveys conducted in the cities of Medan, Samarinda and Surabaya offers partial support for this argument. While there is a positive relationship between evaluations of local government performance and support for incumbents, the strength of this link varies substantially across individuals and cities. The results shed new light on voter-politician linkages in Indonesia, suggesting that forms of accountability different from clientelism may emerge in this large and diverse country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar cannot be understood primarily as a spontaneous outburst of religious feeling among the general population. Rather it was a shocking repertoire deployed by a semi-organised social movement with clear political goals, which overlapped with those of Myanmar's military elite. In this article we trace the history of contention that saw key collective actors emerge who staged violent events and then framed them for the public. Elite competitive strategies leading to the 2015 election shaped its rhythm. A new regional player, the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, initiated the violence. When the ruling elite failed to condemn it, a monk-led, apparently popular, chauvinistic movement expanded rapidly throughout Myanmar. Asserting the Rakhine violence as an existential threat to the Burmese nation, a moral panic effectively created a crisis where none existed. The movement then routinised itself into a de facto pro-regime, anti-National League for Democracy, theocratic political party favouring President Thein Sein's re-election. While maintaining broad ties (but not chains of command) to military elites, it enjoyed a degree of autonomy not seen before under military rule. It ultimately failed to influence voter behaviour significantly, but the new salience of anti-Muslim chauvinism portends future conflict in the fledgling democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thailand's civil society has contributed to the country's democratic regression. Underlying this political position are redefined meanings of democracy. This article seeks to shed light on these intriguing positions and processes by exploring the democratic discourses that prevail in Thailand's civil society and their implications. The article does this by using a case study of a network of development actors associated with a public and influential Community Organisation Development Institution (CODI) organisation. It is found that democratic discourses are associated with a preoccupation with the sense of collective identity, defined through civil society's communitarian vision. This preoccupation influenced their political emphasis on promoting "collective virtues." It is argued that these discourses limit the democratic potential of Thailand's civil society in a number of ways. First, they facilitate the building of connections between civil society and conservative elites. Second, the discourses endow civil society with an organisational culture that puts emphasis on promoting the roles of "good people" who are mostly selected by those at the top of the civil society organisations that are hierarchical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thailand's politics from the mid-2000s has seen considerable conflict and contestation, with seven prime ministers, two military coups, and scores of deaths from political violence. This article, as well as introducing the eight articles in the Special Issue, examines various aspects of this tumultuous period and the authoritarian turn in Thai politics. It does this by examining some of the theoretical and conceptual analysis of Thailand's politics and critiquing the basic assumptions underlying the modernisation and hybrid regimes perspectives that have tended to dominate debates on democratisation. While the concepts of bureaucratic polity and network monarchy shed light on important political actors in Thailand, they have not grappled with the persistence of authoritarianism. In theoretical terms, the article suggests that it is necessary to understand historically specific capitalist development as well as the social underpinnings that establish authoritarian trajectories and reinforce the tenacity of authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the disputed election of President Park Geun-hye and her administration’s confrontation of left-nationalist politicians and other social movements during her first year in office. We argue that the Park administration’s policies resonate with contemporary discussions of “post-democratisation,” a process whereby social rights are increasingly subordinated to market logics and state power insulated from popular challenges. Under the conservative governments of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, this process has been animated by a mode of confrontation known in South Korea as “politics by public security.” This politics targets social conflict and political dissent as threats to national security and has involved both illegal interventions by state institutions – such as the 2012 electoral interference by state agencies including the National Intelligence Service – and a cultural politics that affirms but revises the narrative of Korean democratisation by obfuscating the nature of the democracy movement and by attempting to restore the honour of conservative forces associated with former dictatorships. In order to better understand this conjuncture, we explore its origin within a tacit alliance between both former public security prosecutors-cum-conservative politicians and a movement of conservative intellectuals known as the New Right. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For decades Singapore’s ruling elite has sought to legitimate its rule by claiming to be a talented and competent elite that has made Singapore an exception among its neighbours – an exemplar of success and progress in a sea of mediocrity. In this article it is contended that this basis of legitimation has been irreversibly damaged. In essence, it is suggested that the governing People’s Action Party has lost control of the national narrative, and its achievements are increasingly regarded as being “ordinary” by the electorate. The mystique of exceptionalism, which was the basis on which the government was widely presumed to be above the need for close scrutiny and accountability, has collapsed. This collapse has substantially levelled the political playing field, at least in terms of expectations and assumptions. The government can and probably will continue to win elections and rule through its control of the instruments of institutional power, but the genie of scepticism and accountability has been released from its bottle, and it is hard to see how it can be put back in. This fundamentally changes the condition of Singapore politics: the narrative of exceptionalism is dead and the Singapore elite finds itself struggling to cope in a new and critical political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since holding elections in 2010, Myanmar has transitioned from a direct military dictatorship to a formally democratic system and has embarked on a period of rapid economic reform. After two decades of military rule, the pace of change has startled almost everyone and led to a great deal of cautious optimism. To make sense of the transition and assess the case for optimism, this article explores the political economy of Myanmar’s dual transition from state socialism to capitalism and from dictatorship to democracy. It analyses changes within Myanmar society from a critical political economy perspective in order to both situate these developments within broader regional trends and to evaluate the country’s current trajectory. In particular, the emergence of state-mediated capitalism and politico-business complexes in Myanmar’s borderlands are emphasised. These dynamics, which have empowered a narrow oligarchy, are less likely to be undone by the reform process than to fundamentally shape the contours of reform. Consequently, Myanmar’s future may not be unlike those of other Southeast Asian states that have experienced similar developmental trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What is the role of new media in driving political change in China? How do we understand the interaction of rapid increases in connectivity, regime censorship and democratic outcomes? This article seeks to assess the democratic implications of new media in China through the lens of three key and nested criteria derived from general theories of deliberative democracy: information access, rational-critical deliberation and mechanisms of vertical accountability. The key finding is that connectivity expands political opportunity. How this opportunity is exploited is up to users, who often vary widely in their political preferences, values, and norms of behaviour. The results are multiple mechanisms of change taking place simultaneously and the development of a more interactive and pluralistic public sphere. While China obviously still has to develop far more formalised and institutionalised mechanisms for managing state-society relations, political pluralism in the form of online deliberation might be considered a foundational condition for a more interactive and liberalised political order rooted in greater public deliberation and societal feedback. Moderate forms of discourse and societal feedback are tenuous and increasingly exist in a chaotic and diversified online discourse defined equally as much by new methods of authoritarian propaganda and virulent nationalist ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article assesses the role played by Indonesian capitalists in the country's new democratic political system. It takes as its starting point the analysis presented by Richard Robison in his influential 1986 book, Indonesia: The Rise of Capital. Robison saw the authoritarian state as central to capitalist class formation, viewing it as midwife and protector of an emergent business class. Though democratisation was not his primary concern, this analysis made him pessimistic about the prospects of democratic change. Over the intervening years, Indonesia has not only undergone democratisation; its capitalist class has also changed significantly. The article notes elements of continuity in the nature of Indonesian capital (including the continuing weight of politically vulnerable ethnic Chinese business interests) as well as change (including the taking of political office by businesspeople and the strengthening of provincial business). Overall, there is now much greater independence of private capital vis-à-vis the state, even if business-state relations are still characterised by patterns that developed during authoritarian rule, including the clientelist and predatory behaviours that have been the subject of much analysis in post-Suharto Indonesia. A focus on the capitalist class and its enmeshment in state power, in the style pioneered by Robison, thus helps explain continuity between Indonesia's authoritarian past and its new democratic order, especially the continuing ubiquity of corruption and patronage. However, such a focus is less useful in accounting for political change, especially democratisation itself. To explain democratisation we need to broaden our class analytical optic to bring into focus the actions and interests of lower and middle class forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the rise of the migrant workers' movement in Korea and the conditions of their collective actions in the militant tradition of Korean democratisation. It does this with a focus on the causes of militancy and its similarities to and differences from the characteristics of Korean democratisation. This paper argues that some defects of the political system, the role of oppressive government policy, and intervention of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are the combined reason for migrant worker militancy. However, this militant trend faces the challenge of the judicialisation of politics as democratic consolidation has been deepened and the legal order of society is emphasised. Judicialisation requires reconsideration on how to maximise one's interest through legal procedure rather than militant struggle. Such a legal approach, however, again confronts a dilemma in which simply following legal procedure will not generate any change in existing laws. Furthermore, according to various cleavage lines such as labour vs. capital, national vs. non-national, and native vs. foreign cultures, the priority of struggles in migrant workers and support groups has been differentiated into labour rights, political rights, and cultural rights. In this situation, the migrant workers' movement should be sensitive to locate its future agenda considering the needs of migrants as well as the changing context of Korean society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the impact of globalisation on the working class in South Korea. Globalisation in South Korea has been distinctive in that it has taken place during the transition to democracy. While democratisation has empowered workers to organise, globalisation has undermined the strength of the organised workers, segmenting regular workers from contingent workers. The abrupt neo-liberal economic reforms that followed the financial crisis of 1997-98 totally transformed the structure of the labour market, generating massive numbers of contingent workers who are vulnerable to economic insecurity and social risks. Under the system of company unions, the militant economic unionism that developed among unions in big corporations demonstrated its limitations in promoting the interests of contingent workers. As the struggles of contingent workers have expanded, social movement unionism, which unifies labour issues and social issues, has emerged as an alternative to militant economic unionism of unions composed of regular workers. This movement could provide a glimpse of a possible new future for the union movement in other Asian countries that have experienced similar economic and political changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the political economy of economic reform and the ways in which the characteristics of developmental states have been changed in this reform process. It does this with attention to the experience of structural transformation in the manufacturing, information technology and financial sectors in Korea. Using the coalition theory of policy reform, the main finding from these cases is that the relationships among politicians, bureaucrats and interest groups have been altered so that interest groups' power has been strengthened compared to politicians and bureaucrats. Although a crisis is important in promoting economic reform, broader-ranging trends, such as democratisation, globalisation and technological progress, have also been important fundamental forces. Even with change, the reform process in Korea continues to reflect the legacies of the developmental state, with the state still playing an important role in planning, implementing and sustaining economic reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the election of Lee Myung Bak through the terminal crisis of the Roh Moo Hyun government that preceded it. I start with an analysis of the election of Lee Myung Bak and the electoral strategies of the liberal-progressive bloc in the December 2007 election and then move on to detail how these strategies shed light on tensions within Korean progressive politics since the transition to democracy in 1987. These tensions inform what I shall call the “terminal crisis” of Roh's “participatory government.” I argue that this crisis involves a problem of articulation within progressive politics between a politics of reunification and one grounded in egalitarian economic reform, including the lack of an alternative to the different forms of neo-liberalism embraced by both the Roh government and the conservative government of Lee Myung Bak. My hope is that thorough examination of these tensions that have informed the liberal-progressive bloc during the long decade since 1987 can spur reflection on the role of social movements in Korean democratisation and the dilemmas they face in crafting strategies for political and economic reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of accountability enjoys wide and growing appeal, its advocates submitting both normative and functional arguments for institutions limiting discretionary powers of political and economic elites. This development is seen as facilitative of democratisation, especially in post-authoritarian societies. Yet it has gone almost unnoticed that not all authoritarian regimes have dismissed accountability reform and some are adopting reforms in its name. This article contrasts the patterns in Malaysia and Singapore on a specific accountability institution - human rights commissions - offering explanations for why the former has established one and the latter not. It is argued that intra-state conflicts associated with Malaysian capitalism have created pressures and opportunities for accountability reform not matched in Singapore where there is a more cohesive ruling elite. Moreover, the PAP's acute ideological emphasis on meritocracy concedes no space for horizontal political accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of democratic ideas from the late 1980s, along with the development of the democratisation movement, contributed to the quantitative growth of environmental non- governmental organisations (ENGOs) in Indonesia. In addition, the democratisation of formal institutions after the late 1990s facilitated ENGO activities. Importantly, democratisation has also contributed to the qualitative development of ENGOs. Democratic ideas ‘re-framed’ environmental issues, politicising ENGO activities, even before the end of the Suharto regime. Since the late 1990s, democratic ideas have further shifted ENGO strategies to conform more with democratic values and institutions, while stimulating efforts to enhance accountability and representation within ENGOs. It is argued that these developments may enhance the quality of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the dynamics and outcomes of Indonesia's first-ever direct local executive elections in a case study of the gubernatorial election in the Riau Archipelago. Specifically, the essay examines the election process, identifies the major issues before, during and after the elections, and assesses voters' participation. The essay then examines the ways direct local executive elections have affected the dynamics of local politics in the country. Overall, this essay aims to further develop our understanding of political dynamics in the Riau Archipelago and grasp the practical significance of local political change in Indonesia more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]