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Democracy is at a crucial juncture worldwide as an increasing number of democracies are experiencing a loss of democratic quality. This development raises concerns about a deconsolidation of democr...

This article introduces a configurative theory to explain military reactions to nonviolent mass protests in dictatorships. An empirical analysis of three cases of such “dictators endgames” (Burma i...

In the past five years or so, a large number of studies on “the” crisis of democracy have been published and many have been reviewed in the journal Democratization. It is therefore no easy task for...

The last 25 years of the twentieth century saw authoritarian regimes being replaced by democratically elected governments at an astounding rate. The “third wave of democratization”1 started in sout...

(2013). Book Review: The Political Resurgence of the Military in Southeast Asia: Conflict and Leadership. South East Asia Research: Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 697-701.

In recent years Myanmar underwent drastic political changes. While many see these changes as first tentative steps towards democratization, we argue that the current political transformation is not a deliberate process of liberalization, but a survival strategy of the military regime. Using arguments of the ‘new institutionalism’ as a theoretical foundation, this article explores the hypothesis that the high degree of professionalization of the Burmese military creates the incentive to institutionalize power-sharing among the ruling elite. Our empirical analysis finds evidence for both a highly professionalized military and institutions that by securing the military's continuing dominance serve the purpose of institutionalizing military power- sharing. These results imply that further democratization is unlikely as it must be initiated from within the still dominating military itself.

The 2006 coups in Fiji and Thailand—as well as the 2012 incident in Papua New Guinea—have sent timely reminders that military coups remain a threat to vulnerable democracies in South-East Asia and the Pacific. This article explores the interplay between structural factors that can create coup risks, the ‘coup-proofing’ strategies of political leaders and the occurrence of military coups. While the article examines the region as a whole, it pays particular attention to Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Indonesia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. Borrowing from the work of Belkin and Schofer, it argues that the level of coup risk in each country can be assessed by analysing the extent of regime legitimacy, the strength of civil society and the frequency of military coups in the past. By combining this analysis with an evaluation of coup-proofing strategies, the study discusses likely scenarios for the five focus countries as far as the likelihood of coups or, alternatively, the establishment of stable civilian control i...

Authoritarianism research has evolved into one of the fastest growing areas in comparative politics and political economy. However, the newly awakened interest in autocratic regimes goes hand in hand with a lack of systematic research on the results of the political and substantive policy performance of variants of autocratic regimes. In this article we introduce the individual contributions to this special issue and summarize their findings with regard to three core research questions: What are the differences between autocracies and democracies, as well as between different forms of authoritarian regimes, with regard to their outcome performance in selected policy fields? Does policy performance matter for the persistence of authoritarian rule? How can we conceptualize different types of autocratic regimes and do differences in the availability of performance data matter for the results of empirical studies comparing democracies and autocracies or different types of non-democratic regimes?

This analysis of the institutional design and actual performance of constitutional review in five newly democratized nations in East Asia shows that during the last two decades the judiciary has come to play an increasingly important political role in South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia. Constitutional courts in these three countries are more active in counterbalancing executive and legislative power than ever before. This however contrasts with the experiences of Thailand and Mongolia where constitutional courts were unable to fulfill a similar function. The discussion for potential explanations for this cross-national variance in court performance supports the critique in parts of the scholarly literature against purely institutional, cultural and structural explanations. Rather, the degree of political uncertainty and diffusion of political power are critical determinants for understanding why politicians comply with court judgments, or attempt to marginalize justices. In addition, the relations...

It is consensus in the democratization literature that civilian control of the military is a necessary ingredient for democracy and democratic consolidation. However, there is considerable disagreement on what civilian control of the military exactly entails and there is a lack of solid theoretical arguments for how weak or absent civilian control affects democratic governance. Furthermore, a considerable portion of the research literature is captured by the fallacy of coup-ism, ignoring the many other forms in which military officers can constrain the authority of democratically elected political leaders to make political decisions and get them implemented. This article addresses these lacunae by providing a new conceptual framework for the analysis of civil–military relations in emerging democracies. From democracy theory it derives a definition of civilian control as a certain distribution of decision-making power between civilian leaders and military officers. Based on this definition, the authors dev...

This survey aims to analyze the state of intra-party democracy (IPD) in Thailand. IPD is defined as a characteristic of the distribution of decision-making power among members and leaders within a political party along the two principal dimensions of inclusiveness and decentralization. The amount of organizational details that could be used to describe parties' procedures with regard to all aspects of their internal life is placed into three generalizable categories: candidate selection, setting party policies, and coalition formation procedures. In addition, this survey provides some background on the territorial spread, membership developments and funding practices of political parties. The overall finding is that the degree of internal democracy of political parties in Thailand is quite limited. Thai political parties tend to be ‘electoral parties’ with weak organizations, low policy capacity and vague ideologies. The development of political parties since 1997 (and before the 2006 coup) can b...

This article compares democratization under the aegis of the United Nations in Cambodia and East Timor. The analysis points to the inherent contradictions and problems of democratization in post-conflict situations and discusses the difficult issue of timing. It draws four generalized conclusions about democratization through international interim governments in post-conflict societies. First, UN-led interim governments can provide a solution to the problems of civil strife, insecurity, and political instability in disrupted states. Second, democratization through international interim governments in civil-war countries can be successful if the transitional authority is able to maintain a stable ‘hurting balance of power’ and to guarantee the parties' compliance with democratic procedures. Third, international interim regimes like UNTAC are designed on the premise that reconciliation among the domestic parties is possible. If the premise turns out to be inaccurate, the very foundation of the peace process...

In the past couple of years, Thailand's three southernmost provinces have become a hotspot of ethnic insurgency. This article analyzes the insurgency from two perspectives. The first relates to the causes, contours, and involved groups of the conflict. The analysis will show that the roots of radicalism can be traced to several contentious religious, cultural, economic, and political causes such as cultural discrimination, relative economic deprivation, and political alienation. However, the drift toward militancy in the past years is mainly caused by recent shifts in the local and regional political environment of Thailand's deep South. The second perspective relates to the political consequences of the unrest. While it is highly unlikely that extremists will reach their separatist goal, insurgency and counter-insurgency contribute to the erosion of liberal democracy in Thailand. Immediate consequences of (counter)-insurgency such as the erosion of respect for human rights and other political rights and ...

This comparative study of ten nations in Southeast Asia demonstrates how terrorist groups in the region finance their activities and how governments combat terrorism financing. It demonstrates that area countries converge on norm acceptance measured as the spread of the international norms and practices and their transformation into national law. Norm acceptance, however, does not cause adherence and application of norms. Differences in scope, pace, and success of implementation and effectiveness of new rules between countries are related to the preferences and calculations of policymakers; the institutional capacity of political systems to produce policy changes; administrative and law enforcement capacities, and characteristics of the financial systems.

‘Transitology’ and ‘consolidology’ have only rarely emphasized the importance of defining democracy in a normatively and theoretically sophisticated manner. Almost without discussion they accepted the parsimonious definition and elegant but simple concepts of Schumpeter, Dahl and Przeworski. 1 They reduced democracy to the question of free and general electoral competition, vertical accountability and the fact that the most powerful political and social actors played the political game according to democratically institutionalized rules. At least implicitly, democracy was conceived as an elitist electoral democracy. Neither the structural question of prerequisites for democracy 2 nor the conditions for sustainable legitimacy 3 played and could play a relevant role within this minimalist concept of the sustainability of democracy. But not only the external ‘embedding’ of democracy, but also the ‘internal’ embeddedness of the democratic electoral regime was neglected. Rule of law, civil rights and horizontal accountability were excluded from the concept of democracy. Guillermo O’Donnell (1993) 4 was the first to criticize that conceptual flaw of the mainstream of transitology and consolidology. Thirty years after the beginning of the third wave of democratization empirical evidence revealed the theoretical shortcomings of the minimalist ‘electoralists’. It became evident that it is misleading to subsume Denmark, Sweden or France under the same type of regime – an electoral democracy – as Russia, Thailand or Brazil. Political science ran the risk of even falling behind the analytical capacity of daily newspapers in differentiating between different types of democracy. It became clear that the majority of new democracies could not be labelled ‘liberal democracies’. General, competitive and free elections turned out to be insufficient in guaranteeing the rule of law, civil rights and horizontal accountability. Between elections many of the electoral democracies were not government by, of or for the people. It became obvious, again, that democratic elections need the support of complementary partial regimes, such as the rule of law, horizontal accountability and an open public sphere in order to become ‘meaningful’ elections. Democratic theory has once again met up with research on democratization. Since the mid-1990s studies

This article undertakes a systematic inquiry of democratic development in Asia. It shows two main trends of democratization in south, south-east and north-east Asia. First, in most of the democracies the institutionalization of political rights exists side by side with stagnation or decline of the rule of law and civil liberties. Second, the quality of democracy in the different countries is growing further apart. While new democracies in north-east Asia are on the track to democratic consolidation, democracy in south Asia is on the edge or has already fallen victim to authoritarian renewal. In south-east Asia, democratic consolidation is stagnating. The article also provides for a systematic analysis of why and how defective democracies originate. It argues that not a single primary cause but a set of interconnected variables influences the track of democratic development. While ‘Asian values’, the type of colonial rule and ethnic heterogeneity give only weak support for democracy in Asia, socio-economic...

Hardly any other subject in the last quarter of the twentieth century has influenced the research agenda of political science more than the transformation of authoritarian and ‘totalitarian’ political regimes into pluralist democracies. However, to the same extent that the third wave of democratization unfolded, beginning in 1974, which initially encompassed southern Europe and Latin America and then eventually included eastern Europe, Asia and Africa as well, the main focus of democratization studies shifted accordingly. While the ‘transitologists’ of the 1970s and 1980s investigated the conditions and modes of transition from dictatorship to democracy, the ‘consolidologists’ of the 1990s concentrated on inquiring into causes, conditions and models of the consolidation of young democracies. Most recently, the questions of whether democracy is working, how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ a democracy is, and of the conceptual issue of diminished sub-types of democracy (illiberal democracies, defective democracies and so on) have begun to become the new predominant trend in democracy theory and democratization studies. One must admit that a glance back at three decades of the ‘third wave’ indicates that political alternatives to democracy have since lost much of their appeal ‐ not only from an ideological point of view; their empirical relevance seems much diminished. The data offered by quantitative measurement of democracy leave no room for doubt about this. The political map of the world is, more than ever, marked by the presence of democracy. 1 However, some, if not many, new democracies (and some old ones) have very little to offer outside of elections, which liberal theorists of democracy would associate with the notion of a ‘liberal democracy’, a ‘good democracy’, or a ‘quality democracy’. As Thomas Carothers recently stated

This article integrates institutional and rational choice approaches to policy making to explain the emergence of delegative democracy in presidential systems. Delegative democracy, in essence, is a polyarchy which violates the rules and norms that secure the checks on the effective political power of democratically elected presidents at the horizontal level of the relations of the executive, legislature and judiciary. The article argues that delegative democracy is the result of the interaction of two variables: the strength and types of presidents' legislative powers and the configuration of institutional and partisan veto players. Strong, proactive legislative powers and weak veto players permit presidents to establish a delegative democracy; weak, reactive legislative powers and strong veto players hamper the emergence of delegative democracy. This general assumption explains why presidentialism in South Korea and in the Philippines developed in different directions in the 1980s and 1990s. The analysi...

Given Asia-Pacific’s diversity and the large variance of potentially relevant causal factors, the region presents social scientists with a natural laboratory to test competing theories of democratic erosion, decay and revival and to identify new patterns and relationships. This introductory article offers a brief review of the relevant literature and introduces the different categories of analysis that build the analytical framework considered in various forms in the special issue. The article discusses the reasons for the renewed pessimism in democratization and democracy studies and provides a survey of different conceptualizations intended to capture forms of democratic regression and the autocratization concept to which the contributors to this special issue adhere. We discuss how Asia-Pacific experiences fit into the debate about democracy’s deepening global recession and examine assumptions about the causes, catalysts and consequences of democratic regression and resilience in the comparative politics literature. Finally, the remaining twelve articles of this special issue will be introduced.