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Abstract Democracy and opposition are supposed to go hand in hand. Opposition did not emerge as automatically as expected after Indonesia democratized, however, because presidents shared power much more widely [...]

Comparative politics has witnessed periodic debates between proponents of contextually sensitive area studies research and others who view such work as unscientific, noncumulative, or of limited relevance for advancing broader [...]

Divided societies have long been seen as terrible terrain for democracy. Yet some countries in South and Southeast Asia have managed to overcome ethnic and religious rifts and establish lasting democracy, as in India, while other countries in these regions have seen such deep divisions underpin durable authoritarianism, as in Malaysia. We trace these differences to divergent definitions of the nation that prevailed in struggles for independence and that continue to provide a political resource in ongoing political struggles. Where the national community was defined as inclusive in both ethnoreligious and popular terms, democracy has proven stronger. Alternatively, where the foundational national bargain was more exclusive with respect to salient identity cleavages and popular classes, authoritarianism has been reinforced. Founding types of nationalism not only help explain regime types in India and Malaysia but in countries across southern Asia, offering novel insight into how to understand ongoing battles to shape the nation and the people's political position within it. In an era of rising nationalist fervor and eroding support for democracy, understanding the conditions under which nationalism either promotes democracy or bolsters authoritarianism is of critical importance to political scientists, activists, and policymakers alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

War can make states, but can it also make regimes? This article brings the growing literatures on authoritarianism and coups into conversation with the older research tradition analyzing the interplay between war and state formation. The authors offer a global empirical test of the argument that regional rebellions are especially likely to give rise to militarized authoritarian regimes. While this argument was initially developed in the context of Southeast Asia, the article deepens the original theory by furnishing a deductively grounded framework embedded in rational actor approaches in the coup and civil–military literatures. In support of the argument, quantitative tests confirm that regional rebellions make political militarization more likely not simply in a single region, but more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dictatorships are every bit as institutionally diverse as democracies, but where does this variation come from? This article argues that different types of internal rebellion influence the emergence of different types of authoritarian regimes. The critical question is whether rebel forces primarily seek to seize state power or to escape it. Regional rebellions seeking to escape the state raise the probability of a military-dominated authoritarian regime, since they are especially likely to unify the military while heightening friction between civilian and military elites. Leftist rebellions seeking to seize the state are more likely to give rise to civilian-dominated dictatorships by inspiring 'joint projects' in which military elites willingly support party-led authoritarian rule. Historical case studies of Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam illustrate the theory, elaborating how different types of violent conflict helped produce different types of dictatorships across the breadth of mainland and island Southeast Asia during the Cold War era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Aristotle to Acemoglu and Robinson, scholars have argued that democracy possesses powerful redistributive impulses, and imperils itself accordingly. We challenge the validity of the redistributive model of democratic breakdown in the postcolonial world—the only cases where democracies have collapsed since World War II—because its assumptions regarding state power are questionable or even inapplicable in postcolonial settings. Our correlative analysis of cross-sectional time series data from 139 countries between 1972 and 2007 indicates that, contrary to the expectations of the redistributive model, redistributive taxation is negatively associated with the incidence of military coups and the likelihood of democratic breakdown. Furthermore, authoritarian takeovers do not appear systematically to result in reduced redistribution from the rich. More fine-grained historical evidence from Southeast Asia—a region where the redistributive model should be especially likely to hold true—further affirms that authoritarian seizures of power are neither inspired by successful redistributive policies nor followed by their reversal. Taken together, these quantitative and qualitative data offer significant support for our central theoretical claim: contemporary democratic breakdowns have political origins in weak states, not economic origins in class conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Authoritarian ruling parties are expected to be exceptionally resistant to democratization. Yet some of the strongest authoritarian parties in the world have not resisted democratization, but have embraced it. This is because their raison d'etre is to continue ruling, not necessarily to remain authoritarian. Democratization requires that ruling parties hold free and fair elections, but not that they lose them. Authoritarian ruling parties can thus be incentivized to concede democratization from a position of exceptional strength as well as extreme weakness. This “conceding-to-thrive” scenario is most likely to unfold when regimes (1) possess substantial antecedent political strengths and resource advantages, (2) suffer ominous setbacks signaling that they have passed their apex of domination, and (3) pursue new legitimation strategies to arrest their incipient decline. We illustrate this heretofore neglected alternative democratization pathway through a comparative-historical analysis of three Asian developmental states where ruling parties have democratized from varying positions of considerable strength: Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia. We then consider the implications of our analysis for three “candidate cases” in developmental Asia where ruling parties have not yet conceded democratization despite being well-positioned to thrive were they to do so: Singapore, Malaysia, and the world's most populous dictatorship, China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way's gracious review demonstrates, Ordering Power and Competitive Authoritarianism share much in common. Yet their two main critiques helpfully underscore how our books are also significantly dissimilar. Their skepticism about my book's generalizability highlights our divergent approaches to generalization, while their claim that revolutionary regimes are as robust as counterrevolutionary regimes reflects our different thinking about cohesion and stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]