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Variations in Democratic Durability

in Three Southeast Asian Countries

William Case

City University of Hong Kong

Paper for presentation at the European Consortium on Political Research (ECPR) conference, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland, 25-28 August 2011.

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In the practice and analysis of democratic politics, Don Emmerson (1995) is still

right that Southeast Asia is one of the world’s most recalcitrant regions. Among

Southeast Asia’s eleven countries, many of which have crossed income thresholds

beyond which democratic change grows likely, only Indonesia is understood as a

liberal democracy today. Other countries trail away through a spectrum of

authoritarian sub-types, deploying different strategies and tools of repression.

Accordingly, the research agendas of many analysts of politics in the region have

shrunk from questions about democratic change to authoritarian durability (eg.,

Brownlee, 2007; Slater; 2008).

Yet Carl Trocki (1998: 8) is also right that most governments in Southeast Asia, in

recognizing that developmental performance sometimes falters and that

supplementary coercion bears costs, value the “legitimating apparatus” that elections

and opposition activities can provide. Thus, at various junctures and for varying

periods, democratic procedures have been adopted in Thailand, the Philippines,

Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Timor Leste. What is more, even in Cambodia

and Burma today, governments have come to tolerate opposition parties, however

feeble, while in Vietnam, candidates are permitted to stand independently for

legislative elections, even if in patent futility.

To be sure, in many of these country cases, elections do less to advance

democratic change than to deepen authoritarian resilience, therein hastening debates

over what is conceptualized as competitive or electoral authoritarianism (Levitsky and

Way, 2010; Schedler, 2006). Malaysia and Singapore are often held up as exemplars,

their early democratization rooted shallowly in hasty British “tutelage” (Weiner,

1987), then, amid communal upheavals and late-industrializing tensions, compressed

by local elites into hybrid regimes. Cambodia and Burma seek to make similar use of

elections today, though this would involve less their lagging progress than

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convergence, for they plot their trajectory not from any tutelary democracy but instead

from hard authoritarian rule.

However, other major countries in the region, namely, Thailand, the Philippines,

and Indonesia, have displayed more meaningful democratic records, with civil

liberties permitting societal groups freely to organize and communicate, while

competitive elections regularly turn out incumbent governments. Even so,

democracy’s fortunes have fluctuated in Thailand and the Philippines, afflicted

respectively with outright reversals and incremental decline. Only, in Indonesia, then,

has democracy remained on beam. Thus, by limiting analysis to these three country

cases, this paper shows how liberal democracy has been instituted in Southeast Asia.

But more importantly for this study, it examines the routes by which democracy has at

varying pace been swept away or more steadfastly maintained.

Analysis begins by recounting the democratic experiences of Thailand, the

Philippines, and Indonesia. Next, some common institutionalist explanations for

democracy’s varying durability are tested, using a simple methodology of contrary

evidence from Southeast Asia. An alternative framework is then sketched through

which to peer behind institutions to the motivations and strategies of the elites who

operate them, set within a structural context of communal identification and class

affiliation. In brief, at the level of development attained by Thailand, the Philippines,

and Indonesia today, large social groupings of rural or urban poor may grow

responsive to redistributive appeals, making them available for what is increasingly

cast as populist mobilization. Further, where elites defect in order to activate

followings in this way, most effectively by forming an inspiriting political party, they

threaten the prerogatives of traditional elites housed in other state institutions. These

traditional elites then strike back with varying force, producing sharp authoritarian

backlash or more gradual erosion of democratic procedures. But where no elites

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defect, or where those who do find that their populist appeals fall flat, traditional elites

are content to let their new democracy persist. The paper concludes by summarizing

its lessons and suggesting some implications.

Democracy’s record in Southeast Asia

Thailand

Among our three country cases in Southeast Asia, democracy’s prospects would,

by the terms of modernization theory, seem to be brightest in Thailand. Its democracy

was not borne of any late-night machinations by a retreating colonial power, but

grounded instead in local forces of anti-royalism and socialist diffusion during the

1930s, a relatively laissez-faire industrialization that commenced two decades later,

comparatively benign communal relations after the 1960s (save in the southernmost

provinces), and hence, an early appearance of autonomous business elites and an

urban middle class.

In these conditions, even Thailand’s military and bureaucracy, made politically

ascendant by their dismantling the absolutist monarchy that had modernized their

apparatuses, then culturally gilded by their appropriating the royalism that they

partially restored, permitted at least limited electoral and parliamentary activity

beginning in the 1930s. Moreover, after military and bureaucratic elites then so

quarreled over the state positions and patronage that they utterly lost unity, student

groups were able during the mid-1970s to spearhead greater democratic change. A

popularly elected government then rose to power in 1975, marking the first instance

of home-grown, societally-led transition in East Asia.

To be sure, in conditions of early stateness, the generals and top bureaucrats soon

regained enough unity that they were able to disperse, albeit it with much violence,

the student activists and the elected government. Plainly, then, the stateness specified

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by Linz and Stepan (1996: [??]) as essential for democratic functioning is by itself

insufficient, as easily harnessed to authoritarian repression. However, while narrowing

politics, the generals continued to permit comparatively free markets. Further, this not

only encouraged metropolitan business elites, but also unleashed new entrepreneurs in

the provinces who, having gotten their start in supplying U.S. military bases (Pasuk

and Baker, 1995), sought now to make more instrumental use of state power.

Accordingly, during the 1980s, though metropolitan business elites remained aloof

from democratic politics, their provincial counterparts pushed beyond their

small-town mayoral offices and local enterprises to use the electoral avenues that the

military had begun to reopen in order to take seats in the national assembly. And as

these forces operated in parallel with a new urban middle class, the latter oblivious at

this stage to the corrosive effects of empowering rapacious provincial

businessmen-politicians, often charicatured as godfathers (jao pho), pressures to

hasten democratic change mounted. In 1988, then, the prime minister, General Prem

Tinsulanond, yielded to a popularly elected government, ceding more space to

provincial politicians, but also uplifting the middle class.

But three years later, the military again interrupted this progress, mounting a coup

in which metropolitan business elites, vexed by the rise of their upcountry

counterparts, largely acquiesced (Neher 1992 [?]). But by this time, elements of the

urban middle and working classes, as well as the urban poor, had forged a partial

cross-class coalition with which again to confront the military in Bangkok. In addition,

the king had now grown resuscitated enough that he was able to take up a role as

“swingman”1

1 Performing more than the sanctioning role of his counterpart, King Juan Carlos, in the “classic” Spanish transition during the mid-1970s, King Bumiphol mediated deeply to reach a new settlement.

, therein resetting the country’s trajectory on a democratizing course.

During the mid-1990s, then, a multitude of parties regained their form, contesting

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elections, then bargaining over cabinet positions and reallocating ministerial resources.

Further, in 2001 after new constitutional reforms had been put in place, a two-party

system took shape, with the Thai Rak Thai party led by Thaksin Shinawatra

contesting against the venerable Democrats. Thai Rak Thai not only won this election

but, in more institutionalized circumstances, completed a full parliamentary term, then

won re-election in 2005, the first time ever that an elected government in Thailand

had achieved this.

Hence, in Thailand, with democracy enjoying such homegrown impetus and

having gained in apparent stability, the puzzle that must be addressed involves the

recent recurrence of authoritarian reversal. Democracy fell victim to a coup in 2006,

instigating a pattern in which military and military-backed governments have

alternated with popularly elected, but short-lived civilian ones, producing a record of

high-speed oscillation.

The Philippines

In the Philippines, democracy arrived a half-century earlier than in Thailand,

though less through any local incubation than colonial imposition. Soon after the turn

of the 20th century, electoral procedures, a presidential system, and a two-tiered

legislature were introduced by American officials. And notwithstanding their foreign

origins, these institutions gained local vibrancy. A stable two-party system thus

emerged, featuring the Nacionalistas and the Liberals, that remained uninterrupted by

any domineering military or state bureaucracy. Unlike Thailand’s modernizing kings,

American officials invested far less in building a state bureaucracy than electoral

systems and party vehicles (Pye 1985 [?]). However, if then spared penetration by

generals and bureaucrats, the Liberals and Nacionalistas were seized by prominent

families, anchored in the country’s distinctive patterns of large landholdings and sugar

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growing. Hence, through politics that analysts came to disparage as oligarchical

democracy, large landowning families learned that they could readily advance their

class interests. Using electoral processes and a two-party system, they ordered their

clan rivalries, rotating the presidency and sharing out legislative seats in ways that

enabled them to press alternate claims upon the modest amounts of largesse that even

limited stateness could secrete.

At a societal level, however, the Philippines came nonetheless to take on some of

Thailand’s features. In particular, communal relations mostly remained peaceful, both

between indigenous groups and between them collectively and ethnic Chinese.

Accordingly, conflict was safely regionalized as in Thailand, only seriously erupting

in remote parts of Mindanao. Further, after abandoning the import substitution and

disheveled state enterprises that had been fashioned during the 1960s, then exploited

by President Ferdinand Marcos during the country’s martial law period, the

Philippines adopted a more laissez-faire approach to economic expansion. Thus, amid

the country’s relatively benign communal relations, metropolitan business elites,

many of whom traced their lineage to landowning families, gained an autonomous

bourgeois standing. In addition, beneath this bourgeoisie, a small urban middle class

came to shelter in the capital.

But notwithstanding early gains in political development, favorable communal

relations, an autonomous bourgeoisie, and a rising middle class, democracy remained

less firmly underpinned in the Philippines than in Thailand. Late stateness meant that

the presidency, party leadership posts, and most legislative seats were captured by

landowning families or their proxies, greatly magnifying the Thai syndrome wherein

the legislature grew penetrated by provincial businessmen-politicians. Rural

Philippine “caciques” (Anderson, 1988) thus paralleled Thai godfathers. And in these

conditions, though late stateness in the Philippines meant also that try as it might, the

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military could never successfully mount a coup, democracy fell victim nonetheless to

a coup launched by the executive during the early 1970s. Impatient with traditional

elites and frustrated by constitutional limits on his contesting a third term, President

Marcos launched an autogolpe, enabling him to declare martial law and to prolong his

tenure.

During the years that followed, Marcos turned his hand to state-building, most

notably by bolstering the security forces. But in addition, he replaced many traditional

business elites with a new cohort of upstart cronies, bluntly transferring their

concessions and assets. However, in then perpetuating a particularly avaricious

dictatorship, Marcos was even less able than the Thai military had been to forge any

social foundations. Indeed, the business elites who had been eclipsed, the new urban

middle class, and the vast numbers of poor who had migrated to the cities combined

in a partial, though still potent cross-class coalition to oppose him. And as alienated

members of a newly enlarged, but non-hierarchical military stood aside, this coalition

rose up heroically as a seminal people power movement in 1986, ousting Marcos and

returning the country to its democratic pathway.

Thus, in the Philippines, with democracy having been restored through such

resolute social action, the puzzle that must be addressed is why two decades later,

democracy has not been consolidated. In 2006, Freedom House (2006) revised its

rating for the country’s politics from “free” to “partly free.” However, it is not just

that the Philippines is no longer evaluated as democratic. Its particular trajectory of

rollback needs also to be investigated, for there has been no sharp authoritarian

reversal, followed by a pattern of oscillation as in Thailand. Rather, in the Philippines

incremental decline has set in, with the retreat from democratic to authoritarian

politics signposted by the ouster of Joseph Estrada as president in 2001, the evident

electoral cheating by his successor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, in the election of 2005,

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and the striking abasement of civil liberties throughout.

Indonesia

Among the three country cases analyzed in this paper, the prospects for

democracy in Indonesia would seem dimmest. Mirroring the strategies that American

colonial officials adopted in the Philippines, the Dutch passed down little in the way

of democratic tutelage in Indonesia, yet assiduously built up military and bureaucratic

apparatuses. And hence, what parting advice about federalist power-sharing they

dispensed was discounted by the revolutionary violence through which they were

finally dislodged. At the same time, with Indonesia’s military’s standing having been

greatly elevated by this war for independence over that of civilian politicians, it would

soon take control of other state institutions, casting its long shadow over political life.

Nonetheless, after the Dutch had withdrawn, Indonesia remained influenced

enough by Western notions of political development and modernization that it

instituted a democratic regime. Under a semi-presidential arrangement, the president,

Sukarno, operated alongside a prime minister and parliament. In addition, four major

parties took the stage—a first one that was nationalist and secular, a second that was

moderately Communist, and two Islamic vehicles of varying religiosity—with each

gaining a roughly equal measure of popular support and legislative seats. Thus, in

sinking deep roots into the country’s distinctive bedrock of communal identities,

commonly labeled as “aliran”, these party vehicles obtained far better grounding than

the Nacionalistas and the Liberals ever did in the Philippines.

But this early experience in no way helped democracy to persist. Indeed, after

competitive elections were held in 1955, the very strength of Indonesia’s major parties

produced parliamentary immobilism which, in the face of Outer Island rebellions,

encouraged a restive military to cajole Sukarno, an ill-disciplined executive, first to

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impose martial law, then to scrap the constitution and ban parties, an approach that he

blithely labeled “guided democracy.” Further, after the military was riled by the

assassination of six of its top generals in 1965, apparently at the hands of Communist

operatives, it seized full power. In doing this, it took to ethnic cleansing, tinged with

class conflict, across much of Java and Bali. In brief, traditional Muslim landowners

were encouraged to wreak vengeance on “nominal” Muslim peasants who, at the

urging of Indonesia’s Communist Party, had occupied their rice fields. Amid the

slaughter of perhaps a half-million peasants that followed, Sukarno was gradually

overtaken by General Suharto. And after ascending to the presidency in 1968, Suharto

instituted a military government, though one that shaded toward the end of his tenure

into personal dictatorship.

Accordingly, Indonesia would seem to possess far fewer of the democratic assets

that are found in Thailand or even in the Philippines. Opportunities for transition were

limited too by the military which, after seizing power, maintained its hierarchical

ordering, undiminished by the many coups, indeed internal mutinies that have

wracked its counterparts in our other country cases. Indonesia’s military was thus able

to resist electoral competitiveness and legislative functioning far more resolutely. In

addition, the country acquired a vast bureaucracy and array of state enterprises which,

though penetrated by the military, steadily personalized by Suharto, and in

consequence frayed at their administrative and fiscal edges, still boasted dedicated

nodes of managerial and technocratic talent. And in Golkar, finally, Indonesia also

acquired a statist party vehicle which, even if bereft of any convincing “mentality”

specified by Juan Linz (2000), remained able to galvanize voters, though also

exaggerated their numbers through electoral manipulations. What is more, in contrast

to Thailand and the Philippines, Indonesia’s government came during the 1970s to

enjoy a windfall in petroleum revenues, enabling it greatly to strengthen stateness,

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then to fund ambitious strategies of state-led industrialization.

In this context, communal identification remained dispersed at the mass level the

country’s great diversity of ethnic sentiments, helping New Order ideologues realize

their ideal of the “floating mass.” And though clearer divisions prevailed at higher

societal levels among metropolitan business elites, pitting Chinese selected “cukong”

entrepreneurs against favored indigenous “pribumi” tycoons, this class too remained

far more enfeebled than in Thailand and the Philippines, with its segments dependent

respectively on the state for protection and promotion. The small urban middle class

remained similarly disjointed, its Chinese elements in the professions and small

business battered by communal jealousies, while indigenous members clung for their

statuses to public sector employment. What is more, though a substantial working

class appeared, it remained disenfranchised by state controls and foreign investor

demands, the gendering of factory floor duties, and the high replacement rates made

possible by daunting labor surpluses.

Even so, amid economic crisis during the late 1990s, complex communal and

class-based dynamics set in, finally testing state institutions and the authoritarian

regime. As Dan Slater (2010) has shown, Suharto had so personalized state power and

familized local markets that over time he compromised stateness and even economic

fundamentals. Further, Tom Pepinsky (2009) records that as the crisis deepened,

Chinese entrepreneurs who held mobile capital began to flee. At the same time,

indigenous middle class students and the urban poor, in hinting at some structural

coincidence of cross-class motivation, sparked an upsurge of popular protest and

spontaneous rioting. Thus, Suharto’s imagery was transfigured at this juncture from

the “father of development” into a lighting rod for societal grievances. Accordingly,

while it would have been easy to repress the partial class coalitions that had emerged,

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for students and rioters, even when aggregating swiftly, are never enough in

themselves to compel democratic change, key military elites stood aside. Embittered

over Suharto’s having weakened their prerogatives and by Chinese entrepreneurs

having absconded with patronage resources, they left the New Order to collapse.

But even as the authoritarian regime fell, the military remained by far the most

potent institution in the country. The puzzle in Indonesia, then, is why, once the

military was freed of Suharto’s deadening hand, it did not inaugurate a new form of

authoritarian rule through which to reclaim its prerogatives, acquiescing instead in

democratic change. And further, if we attribute the military’s passivity to the pace of

events and its momentary bafflement, why, after regaining its wits, did it not strike

back, instead permitting the new democracy to gain durability?

Institutional analysis

As noted at this paper’s outset, Southeast Asia famously plays host to a great

variety of regimes. It starts at the low end with royal absolutism and military-backed

governments, then ranges through single-party systems and softer forms of

single-party dominance. It then extends further afield, finally embracing the regimes

that are the concern of this paper, those whose politics can usefully be assessed

through democratic lenses: “part-time” democracy in Thailand, perennially at risk of

authoritarian reversal; degraded democracy in the Philippines, subject to incremental

decline, and a liberal democracy in Indonesia today, seemingly gaining in resilience.

The region’s diversity helps us methodologically, its evident immunity to snowballing

making clear the causal supremacy of internal factors within its broad universe of

cases (see Slater, 2008: 56-57). But it also helps us empirically, for within its diversity

we find three key patterns of democratic experience to investigate. Accordingly,

Southeast Asia provides much better data for comparative analysis than do South

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America, Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia, their the trajectories and timing of their

democratic change having been regionally defined and wave-like.

But even if agreeing that Southeast Asia offers an especially rich site in which to

assess regimes, which sets of factors should we address? Over the last several decades

during which democratization has been studied, the analysis of institutions has gained

most favor, with rule-bound arenas seeming predictably to constrain the behaviors of

the elites and social forces who inhabit them. Thus, the regularization that institutions

impose and the statistical techniques that they permit greatly increase the

attractiveness of institutional analysis. In explaining democracy’s performance, then,

much attention is given to the effectiveness of different institutions in ordering

political behaviors.

Institutionalists began with questions of overarching design, addressing the

relative merits of presidential and parliamentary systems (eg., Horowitz 1990; Linz,

1990; Mainwaring 1997). Their general claim has been that presidents who are

independently elected are likely driven to maximize their power, setting them on a

collision course with an equally ambitious legislature. Presidentialism’s intrinsic

features thus threaten democratic continuity. A ready illustration is found in the

Philippines where, despite democracy’s having persisted for more than a

quarter-century after independence, President Marcos launched an executive coup in

1972, largely because Congress would not oblige him in removing the term limits that

prevented his contesting a third time. But do parliamentary systems fare any better in

restraining executives and perpetuating democracy? Institutionalists have argued that

prime ministers are necessarily restrained by the legislature in which they sit and

whose support they require. But in Thailand, we will see that Thaksin Shinawatra’s

record while prime minister demonstrates that a parliamentary system, even in full

democratic bloom, may do little to shield politics from the executive abuses and

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factional retaliation that ignite authoritarian reversals. Thaksin held the National

Assembly in such contempt that though attending its sessions, he rarely agreed to

answer questions (hence encouraging the opposition to bypass ministers in order to

address all questions to him, regardless of their policy content 2

Additionally, in the Philippines, we note that toward the end of her term in office,

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo pressed hard for constitutional change from a

presidential to a parliamentary system. Having committed serious executive abuses

while president, she calculated that she could avoid accountability by starting a new

life as prime minister in a parliamentary arena. The records of Thailand and the

Philippines show us succinctly, then, that neither parliamentary or presidential

systems are inherently better able to contain executive abuses or avoid democratic

breakdown. What is more, for analysts who still suspect that presidential systems

carry greater risks, Indonesia’s recent record is instructive, demonstrating that if

anything, presidentialism better correlates with democratic persistence. In little more

than a decade, executive power has now been peacefully transferred in Indonesia

across four presidents.

). Thaksin’s

power-seeking impulses, then, were in no way quelled by the assembly’s

parliamentary architecture. And in his recklessness, he so antagonized traditional

elites that they responded finally with a military coup, a malady to which Thailand’s

democracy had been thought immune.

Institutionalists extend their analysis beyond overarching designs to finer party

systems. Historically, they have specified a configuration of two major party vehicles

as most effectively aggregating social constituencies and perpetuating political

stability (Blondel, 1968). But in the Philippines, a system run by the Nacionalista and

2 Interview with Chaturon Chaisong, former Thai Rak Thai minister of education, Bangkok, July 8, 2011.

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Liberal parties provided little representation for ordinary citizens. And though these

parties effectively collated elite-level interests and ordered electoral contestation for

decades, they abruptly gave way to the autogolpe mounted by Marcos. In the

Philippines, then, a two-party system did little either to aggregate social

constituencies or, in the end, even to sustain democratic procedures. Indeed, Marcos

had himself switched from one party to the other, with neither any better able than the

presidential system in which they operated to contain his abuses.

In Thailand, Thaksin’s organizational skills and centralizing strategies ordered the

country’s widely dispersed multi-party system into a loose two-party configuration,

delineated by Thai Rak Thai and its allies on one side and the venerable Democrats on

the other. But after Thai Rak Thai won a second election in 2005, the Democrats took

such umbrage over Thaksin’s evident corruption and their own inability to counter his

party’s electoral victories that they boycotted a third contest held a year later,

essentially removing their party from the assembly. Both Thai Rak Thai and the

Democrats had provided much greater organizational presence and representativeness

for their constituents than the Nacionalistas and Liberals ever had in the Philippines.

Yet the two-party system that they composed was no better able to contain executive

abuses. Even less did it order electoral competitiveness in ways that enabled

democracy to persist. However, the trajectories by which authoritarian reversal may

take place under two-party systems are numerous. When it collapsed, democracy did

not fall victim in Thailand to an executive coup, but instead to a military coup, backed

by the traditional elites whom Thaksin had alienated.

By contrast, multiparty systems, though more reliably enhancing

representativeness, are thought commonly by institutionalists to be less efficient in

aggregating social constituents, thereby overloading new democracies with a

cacophony of competing demands. Larry Diamond (ref [?]) adds that under

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presidentialism, a multitude of parties is particularly fraught. And indeed, such

dynamics appeared to be at work in Indonesia during the 1950s-early 1960s, with

Sukarno, a charismatic, yet disconnected president confronting a foursome of

deadlocked parties in parliament, circumstances in which democracy broke down.

Some of the same presidential and party features distinguish Indonesia today, with

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, an often vague and indecisive national leader,

facing half-a-dozen large and mid-sized parties in parliament. Yet despite this

proliferation of vehicles, they had avoided immobilism, instead cooperating closely to

produce grand coalitions, even cartels (Slater, 2004). Thus, much in contrast to its fate

under Sukarno, democracy is unthreatened by the multiparty system that prevails

today.

A less rigidly technical approach to asserting the primal causality of institutional

design and functioning involves the notion of democratic quality, registering along

such dimensions as rule of law, responsiveness, accountability, and representativeness

(O’Donnell et al, 2004). But most analyses of democratic quality are clouded, unable

to distinguish between their soft-edged, often overlapping indices or even to specify

causal directionality and cumulative impact. Aware of these ambiguities, Larry

Diamond (1999: ch. 3) draws a line in the sand, robustly asserting that though difficult

to measure, democracy’s high quality is key to its durability. But in Indonesia, Ed

Aspinall (2010: 32) counters that it is precisely the low quality of which, in giving

elites a long leash, saves it from breakdown. The accommodativeness that derives

from parties so avoiding competitiveness that they collude as a cartel would seem a

case in point. A similar argument has been made by Case (2001) in Thailand, with

Thaksin seen only to abide democratic procedures because elections so reliably

empowered him that he afterwards felt unconstrained by rule of law during his early

years. Yet later in his tenure, the abuses that Thaksin committed, involving innovative

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forms of “policy corruption” (Pasuk and Baker, 2004, p. 171) and the suppression of

journalists who exposed him, handed a weapon to his opponents. Though no less

tempted by corrupt dealings, traditional elites galvanized new middle class followings

by trumpeting the inability of democracy to curb Thaksin’s abuses. And in a logic

paralleling the pretexts, then, that their counterparts have historically seized upon in

Latin America, the military in Thailand declared the urgency of suspending

democracy in order to save it. The logic of democratic quality, then, though less

demanding in its claims about institutions, is no better able to tell us when democracy

will break down or persist.

An alternative framework: social structures and elite relations

So murky are the causal forces seeping from political institutions in Southeast

Asia that some leading analysts of the region have shifted their focus. As they do this,

they do not dismiss institutional arenas—nor the broader regime types in which these

arenas cumulate—insisting that institutions and regimes count for nothing. But

increasingly institutions and regimes are understood primarily as outcomes, their

causality filtering back mildly into the dynamics in which they are forged. In

assessing these dynamics, Slater (2010) and Pepinsky (2009) turn their attention to

socio-political coalitions, composed of elites and social constituencies, that are

episodically transfigured by crises. Rodan and Jayasuriya (2007) write even more

insistently about the hollowness of regimes and the momentousness of social conflict,

unfolding in a context of capitalist accumulation. To be sure, these authors mostly

address the varying durability of authoritarian rule. But their insights about prior

socio-political coalitions are as rightly applied in assessing the resilience of

democratic politics.

At base, Slater and Pepinsky argue that where enough unity prevails between

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elites and where loyalties emanate reliably from their respective social constituencies

the political regime will remain stable, a notion with we can have no quarrel. But in

claiming that “crisis” determines whether elites gain unity or coalitions fragment,

ambiguities so swiftly set in that a tighter framework is plainly needed. Field, Higley,

and Burton (1990: [?]) observed long ago that for elites “disunity is the modal

pattern.” Slater echoes this, contending that elites are habitually fractious, usually

finding the problem of collective action insurmountable. He writes that “strong elite

coalitions are extremely difficult to construct and consolidate at the national level. In

most places and under most circumstances, elite politics is rife with factionalism and

parochialism (Slater, 2010: 10).” Next, Burton and Higley (1987) argue that to

reorganize their relations and gain unity, elites must be catalyzed by crises that so

threaten their statuses that through secret, high-velocity, face-to-face bargaining, they

reach a “settlement.” Slater writes similarly, though with more precision, that it is

when elites are confronted by mass-level demands for redistribution they are impelled

to coalesce, sealing their negotiations in a “protection pact.” He argues also that

newly unified elites seek may seek afterward to institutionalize their coalition by

constructing single dominant parties, citing the PAP (People’s Action Party) in

Singapore and UMNO (United Malays National Organization) in Malaysia as prime

illustrations.

For Pepinsky (2009), in distinct contrast, crises do not reliably unify elites, but

instead risk shattering the coalitions that elites had previously formed. Taking a

political economy approach, he focuses on the “twin” financial and currency crisis

that bedeviled Indonesia during the late 1990s, splitting the coalition along the fault

line between Chinese entrepreneurs who held mobile capital and the military and

indigenous tycoons saddled with fixed assets. As their coalition, always tense, now

ruptured openly, mobile capital fled, leaving the authoritarian regime so underfunded

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that it gave way to democratic change.

Though Slater and Pepinsky are right to shift analysis from institutions to

causally prior socio-political coalitions, they sharply disagree over the origins and

impact of crisis. But it may be that crises cut in multiple directions because causality

really inheres elsewhere. We will see that in Thailand under Thaksin, no crisis borne

of redistributive demands drove elites to seek greater unity. Nor did any crisis borne

of financial and currency collapse drive elites into deeper fractiousness. Indeed, not

only are these claims about impact wrong, they misplace crisis in the sequence of

change. Crises are not visited upon elites. Crises are created by elites, with Thaksin’s

defection disrupting the unity that had prevailed among traditional elites in Thailand

or rather, exacerbating the fractiousness that had long exited, finally destabilizing

their political regime. What is more, while any re-equilibration of elite-level relations

afterward might involve the settlement or pacting that brings accommodation, the

process more usually begins with stark elimination. But this logic, traditional elites in

Thailand tried to regain unity by forcing Thaksin into exile after the coup, then using

the courts to confiscate his assets and to ban his party and top loyalists from political

life. Only years afterward did they seek reconciliation, agreeing to allow Thaksin’s

sister, Yingluck, to win an election in 2011, then to lead a new government. In turn

she agreed to delay her brother’s repatriation from overseas.

This paper is primarily concerned with the conditions in which new democracies

break down or endure. Its central question, then, must be what are the circumstances

in which elites defect? It contends that a better place to begin inquiry than

epiphenomenal crisis is found in social structures. In those Southeast Asian societies

where communal identification is weak and class affiliation is delayed, no political

parties emerge that possess organizational permanence or inspiriting programmatic

coherence. Instead, parties remain the personal and even disposable vehicles of

20

traditional elites housed in other institutions, whether generals, bureaucrats, and old

money magnates in Thailand, or prominent landowning families and connected

tycoons and politicians in the Philippines.

In returning to social structures, we look next to class affiliations. Where

communal identification is weak, rapid, but distorted processes of market expansion

produce new patterns of class affiliation over time. And as resentments over

disparities set in at the mass level, some elites may see new opportunities for gaining

ascendancy by using the electoral procedures that democracy allows. Put simply, they

defect from traditional elites by making redistributive appeals to receptive categories

of the poor. In this way, they forge a new cross-class coalition, increasingly

interpreted in the context of Southeast Asia through an idiom of populist mobilization

(eg., McCargo, 2001; Thompson, 2007; Kosuke and Pasuk, eds., 2009).

Accordingly, it is not any crisis sparked by mass-level demands for redistribution

that so challenge traditional elites that they forge new unity. It is instead elites who, in

recognizing new opportunities in populist mobilization, defect from traditional elites

by initiating redistributive appeals. Thus, in sowing elite-level disunity and arousing

mass-level constituencies, defecting elites produce the crisis that may incur the

authoritarian reversal seen in Thailand, or the incremental decline that has bedeviled

the Philippines.

But finally, it is a commonplace that in societies where communal sentiments are

heartfelt, they impede class loyalties. Hence, they diminish scope commensurately for

populist mobilization. The danger, then, for democracy in cases like these is that

ambitious elites will defect by making communalist appeals, often sparking the crises

that precipitate democracy’s rollback. Singapore during the mid-1960s and Malaysia

during the late-1960s, swept up in democracy’s “second reverse wave” (Huntington,

1992 [?]), stand as exemplars. But we also see that in cases like Indonesia, while

21

communal identification restrains class affiliation, it is not so coherently structured as

to sustain nationwide audiences for ethnic or religious appeals. In these conditions, far

from defecting, elites remain collusive, respecting reserve domains and sharing out

resources in way that may diminish democracy’s quality, but avoid its breakdown.

But whatever the inadequacies of the notion of crisis, Slater and Pepinsky are right

that the answer to whether political regimes persist or endure does not lie in the

institutions of which regimes are made up. Though constitutive institutions, in

systematically delineating incentives, may shape the everyday tactics of elites, they do

not transform more profound motivations. Accordingly, we must peer behind the veil

of institutions to examine social structures and elites relations in order to gauge

patterns of regime continuity and change

Democracy’s fate

Thailand: authoritarian reversal and regime oscillation

Our conceptual problem in Thailand lies in trying to explain how, after more than

a decade-and-a-half of continuity, democracy again broke down in 2006, returning the

country to a base pattern of iterated re-democratization and political closure that

amounts to regime oscillation. The answer begins with the weakness of communal

identification and the lateness of class affiliation in Thailand, ceding such autonomy

to traditional elites that they dominated the early processes of state-building that

yielded military, bureaucratic, and royalist apparatuses. Further, during the 1950s,

they were joined by new metropolitan business elites who, in a milieu cast seminally

by Riggs (1966) as a bureaucratic polity, began to create financial and trading

conglomerates. However, during the mid-1970s, the late 1980s, and the early 1990s,

discrete junctures in which elite-level relations grew strained, new partial cross-class

coalitions emerged which, in convening different combinations of middle-class

22

elements, provincial businessmen-politicians, urban workers, and the poor, gave rise

to popular upsurges and democratic change. Yet traditional elites, in seeking to

reassert their prerogatives, regained enough unity to each time mount an authoritarian

reversal. Even so, with democracy’s most recent interlude lasting a decade-and-a-half,

its breakdown poses a significant riddle.

During this period, though deep class affiliations had been slow to form, they

finally gained traction among elements of the rural poor. Thailand’s uneven economic

expansion, driven in large measure by foreign-invested export manufacturing and

locally controlled agribusiness, had created stark class and spatial disparities.

Accordingly, much of the rural poor, particularly in the country’s north and northeast,

grew available for populist mobilization. Next, with appearance of electoral

opportunity provided by a new democracy, some elites grew tempted to defect.

Specifically, Thaksin Shinawatra, one of the few metropolitan business elites whose

family conglomerate, Shin Corp, remained solvent after the economic crisis of the late

1990s, drew upon his corporate resources and mastery of market survey techniques to

align his Thai Rak Thai vehicle with the rural poor. And though further enriching

himself while in office, he also showed responsiveness to this class element through

populist programs of cheap health care, debt moratoriums, and village-level

development funding (Pasuk and Baker, 2004). Accordingly, at campaign rallies,

political meetings, and in everyday village encounters, one regularly heard citizens

exclaim that Thaksin’s was “the first government ever to do something for us.”3

As he solidified his mass base, Thaksin pushed beyond the country’s party system

to encroach on other institutions of state power. He intervened in the military’s

promotions processes, imposing close relatives in topmost positions of command

3 Personal attendance at campaign events, January-February 2005.

23

(Mutebi, 2003: 108-109). He also reorganized the state bureaucracy, directly

challenging the Interior Ministry by recruiting a new strata of “governor CEOs’.4

Accordingly, traditional elites housed in the state institutions that greatly

antedated Thai Rak Thai drew together in order to resist Thaksin. The military aligned

yet more tightly with royalist offices and old money business interests. Further, in

seeking a social base, the military entered into a new cross-class coalition, tolerating

the increasingly disruptive street actions coordinated by PAD. Indeed, in adorning

themselves in royalist yellow, therein earning their “yellow shirt” sobriquet, middle

class activists abandoned the democracy that they had earlier championed for “new

politics”, demanding that parliament should mostly be appointed by the military and

To

this end, a year after coming to power, Thaksin created the Public Sector

Development Commission (PSCD) through which to oversee the Office of Civil

Affairs Administration, thereby replacing traditional networking and patronage with

ostensibly merit-based appointments. Further, though many business magnates who

had been stunned by the crisis had flocked initially to Thaksin, they now grew

resentful over his hoarding government contracts. What is more, Thaksin’s boundless

acquisitiveness, his costly populist programs, and his truncating civil liberties in order

to quell the media criticisms that resulted began to alienate the urban middle class. In

this context, his sudden tax-free sale of Shin Corp to the Singapore government’s

sovereign wealth fund, Temasek, inflamed the urban middle class that had come to

oppose him, finding coherence as the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) (Ockey,

2007).

4 In contrast to Dan Slater’s characterization of civil servants in Thailand as …. local analyst Kavi Chongkittavorn (2011) writes that

the two million plus strong Thai bureaucrats are considered more stable and conservative than any of their equals in the region. During 2001-2006, they were given a big shake-up due to the reform initiatives from politicians who preferred a businesslike or CEO-style shake-up.

24

bureaucracy (Thitinan, 2008). Thaksin responded in ways that conformed still more

deeply to populist dynamics, seeking to rally his followings by at least obliquely

identifying their class nemesis. In particular, Thaksin referred to General Prem

Tinsulanonda, the former prime minister, now head of the king’s Privy Council as a

“meritorious person outside the constitution” who was trying to oust him, requiring

that Thaksin respond by “protect[ing] democracy with my life” (Bangkok Post, 30

June 2006).

The military retaliated in late 2006, mounting a “good coup” (Connors, 2008).

Soon afterward, the judiciary convicted Thaksin of corruption, forcing him into exile,

then deregistered Thai Rak Thai and banned its top politicians. What is more, though

elections were subsequently held, bringing in incarnations of Thai Rak Thai to power,

the courts disqualified them, intensifying the regime’s oscillation within the

narrowing parameters imposed by warring coalitions. In countering PAD, the rural

poor donned “red shirts”, then formalized their movement as the United Front Against

Dictatorship (UDD). And in defying Slater’s (2009) dictum that social groups only

risk their lives in support of democratic change when energized by communal leaders

like kings and clerics, the red shirts streamed to the capital and took to the barricades

when ordered by their working class organizers. Moreover, as part of this struggle,

many red shirts denounced the king and his concentric rings of noble “amart.” Their

many deaths at the hands of the military afterward thus indicate plainly that though

class affiliations only form slowly, they may, when unimpeded by communal

identification, finally acquire commitment and force. In time, the emotion that in

divided societies fires communalism can in stratified societies energize class

sentiments too, driving activists into harm’s way with near religious fervor.

Seeking to break the cycle, the military induced small parties to defect from the

coalitions operated by Thai Rak Thai’s successors, bringing the Democrats to power.

25

But in mid-2011, the Democrats, in sorely needing legitimation, broke with traditional

elites by calling an election. The Democrats duly lost the contest to Puea Thai, a

vehicle led by Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck. But the Election Commission delayed in

endorsing her, prompting the Red Shirts chairwoman, Thida Thawornseth (2011) to

call upon the movement’s following to “keep your batteries full and get ready for

action.” The commission then relented, bringing a coalition led by Puea Thai to power.

But fears persisted that the “ultra-royalists” would, in the estimation of a former Thai

Rak Thai minister, give the new government “no honeymoon” 5

In summary, in the context of Thailand’s rapid, but distorted market expansion, the

crystallization of class disparities, the consequential, if belated availability of

elements of the rural poor for mobilization, and the scope for such strategies created

by democratic politics, Thaksin Shinawatra defected from the ranks of traditional

elites. He then pitted his cross-class coalition of Thai Rak Thai politicians and the

rural poor against a staunch amalgam of generals, bureaucrats, royalist figures, and

the middle class, the latter having abandoned the provincial entrepreneurs and

workers with whom they had once found common democratizing cause.

, maneuvering

immediately instead to keep key Red Shirt leaders locked away under the country’s

severe lese majeste laws.

In this way, traditional elites in Thailand were challenged by the most robust

populist mobilization in contemporary Southeast Asia. Hence, the crisis that resulted

did not percolate up from the rural poor, but was instigated instead by Thaksin who in

defecting gave voice and organization to redistributive longings. Further, this crisis in

no way spurred elites to overcome collective action problems by huddling together in

defense of their class interests. To the contrary, fractiousness worsened, prompting

5 Interview with Chaturon Chaisong, former Thai Rak Thai minister of education, Bangkok, July 8, 2011.

26

traditional elites to seek re-equilibration by vanquishing Thaksin through authoritarian

reversal. Any recovery of elite, unity, then, would involve no pact of protection, but

instead an epic battle of elimination, with either traditional elites or defectors finally

triumphing. But meanwhile, as Thailand proceeded along a trajectory of lopsided

electoral contests, military interventions, judicial annulments, and mass protests, its

regime vibrated ever more intensively. Accordingly, what stands out in this case is

that despite—or rather because of—the country’s communal peace and level of

development, its democracy broke down utterly and iteratively in the face of warring

cross-class coalitions.

Philippines: democracy’s incremental decline

Our puzzle in the Philippines involves not democracy’s sudden death, but instead

its slow onset of infirmity. Much of this distinctive pattern originates in the timing of

stateness, the categories of traditional elites that emerged, and the kinds of challenges

that the social structure might throw up. Unlike in Thailand, the Philippines had no

modernizing kings at the turn of the last century. Instead, U.S. colonial officials

favored political development over state-building. Thus, the traditional elites who

emerged in the Philippines were not based in the military or bureaucracy. Rather, the

comparatively weak state institutions that emerged were dominated by large

landowning families, their scions posted in politics and big business. Ferdinand

Marcos altered this trajectory during his presidency, mildly strengthening stateness

and imposing new cronies in state enterprises and business monopolies. But after his

ouster, the old order was in many ways reconstituted.

In other ways, though, the Philippine social structure was reminiscent of

Thailand’s, with communal identification remaining weak. Class affiliations sooner

took root, sparking the Hukbalahap rebellion during the 1940s-50s, followed by the

27

guerrilla campaign of the New People’s Army. But large landowners have mostly kept

their grip, forming dynasties or clans (Teehankee, 2007) through which to extend their

family lineages, while practicing clientelism and rough bossism to defend their

fiefdoms. Thus, when the poor grew available for populist mobilization, they did not

appear in the rural areas with nearly the intensity that they would later in Thailand.

Instead, the urban poor in Manila grew most vigorous, greatly limiting their class’s

overall potency. Slater may be right that democratic change must take place in the

locus of the capital city, which even in the Philippines has emerged as the second

home of traditional elites. But the effectiveness of populist mobilization afterward

depends on the hinterland, the base of popular majorities.

Unlike in Thailand, then, where the rural poor affiliated broadly along class lines,

especially in the populous north and northeast, in the Philippines, the rural poor have

remained more fragmented, ensnared in bossist relations and local machines.

Meanwhile, their urban counterparts, though having combined with the middle class

in precipitating the momentous democratic transition that brought down Marcos, have

failed since then to maintain their cross-class coalition. Thus, in their comparatively

limited numbers, the poor have been unable to determine electoral outcomes as they

have in Thailand, therein dampening the temptation of elites to defect by resorting to

populist mobilization.

Even so, one elite who tried, at least half-heartedly, was Joseph Estrada. During a

long movie career, Estrada had honed a tough guy persona tempered by notions of

street justice. And after entering political life, his film imagery and faint redistributive

sentiments helped galvanize audiences enough that he won a plurality in the 1998

presidential election (Case, 1999). But as Joel Rocamora (2009) notes, the urban poor

seemed most to support Estrada because he mocked the bourgeois codes of the

traditional elite, dallying in nightclubs, casinos, and the abodes of his mistresses. Thus,

28

he never acquired real leadership acumen or any interest in strengthening his party

organization, LAMMP. He devised no new health care programs, debt moratoriums,

or village development schemes. Indeed, his commitments to redistribution ranged no

further than a piecemeal giveaway of foodstuffs from the palace’s backdoor.

Accordingly, Estrada never challenged the prerogatives of the traditional elites or

overtaxed the resources of the new middle class on anything like the scale that

Thaksin would in Thailand. Nor beyond his personal late-night comportment, did he

attempt even symbolically to target traditional elites by publicly vilifying them. Much

more given to personal corruption than to any comprehensive redistribution, Estrada

embarrassed traditional elites and the middle class with his policy mismanagement

and ceaseless peccadilloes, rather than filling them with deep-seated class hatreds and

fears.

In these circumstances, traditional elites and the middle class found it enough to

defend their prerogatives by collaborating to remove Estrada from the presidency

rather than more fundamentally to subvert democracy. An initial attempt to impeach

Estrada in Congress failed, for he retained enough allies in upper house to block it

([ref]). But through a dubious ruling by the Supreme Court and the sanction of the

military, unfolding against a backdrop of protests mounted by the middle class in

Manila that was labeled People Power II, Estrada was forced from office, tried for

corruption, and jailed. It is instructive, though, that in the aftermath, Estrada enjoyed

little of the outpouring of popular support while in prison that Thaksin continued to

energize while in exile.

Estrada was succeeded by his vice-president, Gloria Arroyo, who, while avoiding

populist mobilization, contributed in still other ways to democracy’s slow death. After

finishing Estrada’s term, she was obliged to seek her own, holding elections in which

she was widely suspected of colluding with the Election Commission in vote rigging

29

(Hutchcroft, 2008). Further, throughout her tenure, she turned a blind eye to the

bossism which, viciously enforced by private armies and death squads, resulted in the

killings of hundreds of rural activists and journalists. But as democracy was steadily

run down, traditional elites regained much of their unity. Indeed, Estrada was

eventually deemed harmless enough that he was pardoned by Arroyo and brought

back into the fold, enabling him again to contest the presidency, even placing second

in the election of 2010. In addition, the winner in this election was Benigno Aquino Jr.

who, despite the assassination of his father, a traditional elite, at the behest of the

Marcoses, arranged a truce between their once warring families. It is jarring to see

Imelda Marcos, a member of the House of Representatives, consort so easily with

Aquino supporters in Congress. It is striking also to listen to Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

reelected to the Senate, as he discusses his presidential prospects.6

In sum, late stateness in the Philippines permitted large landowning families to

take their place as the country’s traditional elite. And while maintaining their

haciendas, they came also to dominate the frail state institutions that had cropped up.

Thus, with the countryside controlled by traditional elites, the impoverished social

forces who grew receptive to redistributive appeals gathered mainly in the capital. But

after their abandonment by the middle class with which it had earlier coalesced in

driving democratic change, the poor no longer possessed numbers enough that

national leaders grew tempted seriously to respond with populist mobilization. Thus,

even after defecting, Estrada neglected to carry out any substantive redistributive

policies, preferring instead to imbibe state largesse. In this context, traditional elites

found that their prerogatives were far less threatened than were those of their

counterparts would soon be in Thailand. And hence, the crisis that Estrada had created,

6 Attendance at Congressional meetings, House of Representatives complex, August 2010; interview with Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Manila, August ([??]), 2010.

30

in its tepidness, was easily contained, with the traditional elites and middle class

forming a new cross-class coalition with which to eliminate Estrada. But though this

enabled elites to regain their unity, even to the point of later extending a hand to

Estrada, it marked the first step in the new democracy’s incremental decline, though

avoided any full-throttle authoritarian reversal.

Indonesia: democratic durability

Our puzzle in Indonesia lies in democracy’s persistence, despite its seemingly

bleak prospects and its late, almost unnoticed arrival (Aspinall and Mietzner, 2010:

3-4). Slater (2010) has explained why the military’s weakening by Suharto drove it to

abandon the New Order. But not yet addressed is why the military has afterward

respected democratic change, rather than using such formidable institutional strength

as it retains to combine with the bureaucracy in reconvening a military government,

perhaps fronted electorally by Golkar. In addition, why have Indonesia’s metropolitan

business elites, uniquely dependent among our country cases, failed to agitate against

the new democracy that would seem to so disadvantage them in a context of

late-industrialization? And why has the country’s urban middle class which, apart

from students, had long been ambivalent over democracy’s worth, failed to grow so

animated over continuing corruption that, like its counterparts in Thailand and the

Philippines, it has supported traditional elites in the military and courts to roll

democracy back?

For the answer, we begin by investigating populism’s weak appeal, leaving the

rural and urban poor unmobilized and traditional elites and the middle class

unthreatened. On first glimmer, populism might seem readily to find traction.

Stateness came early during the colonial period, then received a great boost during the

New Order, providing an apparatus that among our three country cases intervened

31

most deeply in industrialization. It also houses an array of traditional elites who, amid

the opportunities afforded by electoral politics today, might hive off defectors,

perhaps claiming guidance from Sukarnoist heroics. In addition, no large landowning

families have existed, appearing to leave the rural poor as available for mobilization

as they are in Thailand. And Indonesia, even more than the Philippines, has undergone

rapid, but distorted market expansion, punctuated by fearsome shocks. Indonesia, then,

while appearing to possess the slimmest chances for democratic change, would seem

the most vulnerable also to the populist mobilization that invites democratic rollback.

But populist appeals fail to gain traction in Indonesia’s uniquely

“self-cancelling” social structure, cross-hatched by the communal identities that erode

class loyalties. It has thus provided a benign platform atop which accommodation has

been reached at the national level between traditional elites, housed in state

apparatuses and connected business conglomerates, and new party and legislative

leaders, thrust up by democratization. Communal identification, even as hoary aliran

fade (Liddle and Mujani, 2007), remains far stronger in Indonesia than in Thailand

and the Philippines. But it has also involved such diversity across the country that

apart from such instances as the Jakarta rioting that hastened the New Order’s demise,

it fails to cumulate in any bi-polar faceoff between indigenous groups and

“immigrant” Chinese. Thus, in its diversity of communal identification, Indonesia has

avoided the stark communal “ranking” and ethnic hegemony (Horowitz, 1985) that

characterizes Malaysia, crystallizing in a single-party dominance. But equally, in

maintaining intensity, communal identification has restrained the class affiliation that

summons populist mobilization. To be sure, Masaaki Okamoto (2009) contends that

populism resonates at the sub-national level, where within discrete units of the

country’s cultural mosaic, localities of tight social homogeneity produce coherent

audiences of rural poor. But even here, we are reminded of the murderous encounters

32

that have also regularly taken place between different communities on Java and the

Outer Islands.

Thus, across Indonesia, communal identification remains heartfelt enough that it

dilutes class affiliations in both rural and urban areas. What is more, the industrial

working class has been debilitated by the country’s de-industrialization over the past

decade, dispersing many workers from the urban factory places where they once

regularly mounted “unjuk rasa” to dissociative street-side services and faraway

agriculture. In consequence, Indonesia’s self-cancelling social structure promotes

neither the single-party dominance displayed by Malaysia nor the cross-class

coalescence that hallmarks populism in Thailand and the Philippines.

But the best evidence of populism’s limited reach lies in the strategic choices

made by top politicians. Megawati Sukarnoputri, leader of the People’s Independence

Party of Struggle (PDIP), a vehicle cast typically as secular and nationalist, has often

trumpeted the vague “marhaenist” mentality of redistribution devised by Sukarno, the

charismatic figure to whom her party traces its founding. But after winning the

presidency, she adopted no policies that in any concrete way benefited the rural or

urban poor. Nor after losing office has she tried to reenergize these constituencies by

charting new ones, recognizing the limited effectiveness of such strategies and the

shortages in her own party’s resources.7

During campaigning in Indonesia’s most recent presidential election, Prabowo

Subianto, a former general linked closely to Suharto, formed a new party, Gerindra

(Great Indonesia Movement Party), through which aggressively to launch populist

and protectionist appeals. Further, his initiatives even goaded the incumbent president,

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to respond with a series of modest cash payments to

7 Interview with Eva Kusuma Sundari, PDIP parliamentarian, parliament building, Jakarta, June 16, 2011.

33

families disadvantaged by recent reductions in energy subsidies. However, despite the

funding that Prabowo had amassed and the intensity of his campaigning, his party

won but 4.5 percent of the popular vote and 26 seats in the DPR, deemed by observers

to be a “poor return on his investment.”8

But perhaps the most intriguing case of potential defection and populist

mobilization involves Aburizal Bakrie, president of Suharto’s old party, Golkar

(Functional Groups), and scion of one of Indonesia’s largest business conglomerates,

the Bakrie Group. In seeking to further his presidential ambitions, Bakrie has tried to

overcome the highly negative imagery he has generated through his company’s

rapacious mining activities and the disasters that have resulted by canvassing new

populist schemes. Indeed, in devising a notion of “Ekonomi Rakyat” (People’s

Economy), he has even consulted with Thaksin Shinawatra, a figure whom he is said

to admire. But the provisions of Ekonomi Rakyat remain sketchy. Suspicions remain

widespread too over Bakrie’s willingness to sustain the spending that populist

programs demand, given the profound sense of personal thriftiness with which he is

credited.

And after winning reelection, Yudhoyono

promptly terminated the payments scheme that he had introduced.

Accordingly, no figure like Thaksin or even Estrada has yet appeared on

Indonesia’s political scene, at least at the national level. In recognizing the limited

attractiveness of redistributive appeals, most elites have eschewed the strategies of

populist mobilization that free elections encourage in other settings. Though they

might tactically propose greater welfare during campaigning, competing politicians

have much more consistently espoused reformist, Islamic, and nationalist rhetoric.

But their “true” commitments have been revealed by their behaviors after winning

8 Interview, Tommi Legowo, Coordinator for Forum for Society Concerned about the Indonesian Parliament (FORMAPPI), Jakarta, June 15, 2011).

34

seats in the legislature, there to join party cartels and rainbow coalitions through

which collectively to feed on state largesse (Slater, 2004; Sherlock, 2010; Case,

2011).

Thus, in focusing intently on the dealings that play out in their own political

arenas and along the conduits to bureaucratic agencies and business conglomerates,

elected politicians have never seriously challenged the military’s domains, in

particular, its internal promotions processes and its territorial command structure that

shadows the state bureaucracy across the archipelago. Nor despite great increases in

the military’s budget, have they in name of civilian supremacy, economic efficiencies,

or professionalization taken real steps to bring the military’s vast web of business

enterprises to heel (Beeson, 2008).

In addition, though seeking sometimes to hold the cabinet and bureaucracy more

accountable in the legislature, politicians have sought more generally to extract

budgetary resources and payments, therein forging quiet patterns of cooperation. And

in dealing with connected business conglomerates too, they have mostly shunned

investigations, instead so vigorously trading state contracts and regulatory favors for

“suap” that they have occasionally incurred corruption charges (Robison and Hadiz,

2004 [?]).

But even if their prerogatives were gravely challenged by populist mobilization,

Indonesia’s metropolitan business elites would be unlikely to take part in rolling

democracy back. Unlike at the mass-level, business elites are starkly divided between

indigenous and ethnic Chinese segments, pitting “pribumi” entrepreneurs, often brash,

but deeply dependent on state promotion, against the “cukong”, made cautious by

their practiced stigmatization. Further, in a context in which industrialization was led

by the state and funded by oil revenues, this class’s confidence has been stunted by

the newness and fragility of its status. Outside traditional batik and kretek industries,

35

few business groups in Indonesia possess the kinds of dynastic lineages that are

common in finance, trading, manufacturing, and property development in Thailand

and the Philippines. It is thus difficult to imagine the country’s business elites acting

in concert to fund street protests against a populist leader, as Shin Corp’s business

rivals did in Thailand and as the Makati Business Club did in the Philippines, helping

respectively to depose Thaksin and Estrada.

Indonesia’s small urban middle class is similarly divided, leaving it unavailable

for any cross-class coalition by which to roll back democracy. Middle-class Chinese

remain sequestered in medium-sized businesses and the professions. Middle-class

pribumi are employed disproportionately by the state bureaucracy. Slater argues that

in developing countries the middle classes, more amorphous than elites and distant

from the state, are more difficult to disarm through mind-numbing patronage, leaving

them readier to act on their grievances in pursuit of democratic change. This logic

might as equally apply where democratization has taken place, with middle classes

disillusioned by the corruption that has afterward persisted among elected officials

now as easily helping to roll back democracy—as they have done so zealously in

Thailand by supporting PAD and in the Philippines by clamoring for Estrada’s ouster.

But in Indonesia, the middle class has refrained from political action because, in

contradistinction to Slater’s insight, so much of it does enjoy patronage, principally in

the form of public sector employment. And its ethnic Chinese members mostly avoid

political activity too, stayed by their minority status and legacies of persecution. In

Indonesia, then, with the middle class communally and occupationally divided, it

remains unavailable for cross-class coalitions either in support of democratic change

or authoritarian reversal.

What is more, to the extent that the middle class intimates its political

preferences, it does so in support of democratic continuity. Surveys administered by

36

Asia Barometer ([ref.]) reveal that the middle class, while greatly lamenting

corruption, fully enjoys the vibrant criticism of corrupt politicians that democracy

permits. Much in contrast to the near silence that a humbled middle class was obliged

to maintain under the New Order, its dignity is uplifted today by the most spirited

communication in Southeast Asia. Middle-class bloggers are unintimidated by the

kind of lese majeste laws that benight Thailand. It journalists and activists are

unthreatened by the private armies and death squads that haunt the Philippines. These

sentiments are amplified by Indonesia’s major political parties, with a top official of

the middle-class and Islamist PKS avowing in an interview that whatever

democracy’s ills, “we are strongly against going back to the New Order.”9 A leading

parliamentarian in the PDIP stated more generally that with respect to authoritarian

rule, “nobody wants to go back to that.”10

In summary, the prerogatives of traditional elites in Indonesia, in stark contrast

with Thailand’s experience and in partial variance with the Philippine record, remain

unthreatened by democracy. The country’s uniquely self-cancelling social structure,

its communal identification restraining the class affiliation that has at varying pace

gained steam in our other country cases, negates serious strategies of populist

mobilization. Thus, elites are deterred from defecting not just by the deafness of

social audiences to redistributive appeals, but also by the absence of hated rivals

against whom to mobilize the class-based resentments that populist dynamics

require.

11

9 Interview with Mardani, PKS Secretary, Prosperous Justice Party headquarters, Jakarta, June 16, 2011.

In addition, apart from its student elements, Indonesia’s middle class

remains unavailable for pivotal cross-class coalitions of any persuasion. In these

conditions, traditional elites have calculated that it remains far cheaper to

10 Interview with Eva Kusuma Sundari, PDIP parliamentarian, parliament building, Jakarta, June 16, 2011. 11 Interview with Wahyu Prasetyawan, Senior Researcher, Indonesia Survey Institute, Jakarta, June 22, 2011.

37

accommodate new elites in political parties and the legislature, therein perpetuating

the new democracy, than to mount any authoritarian reversal or even to instigate any

incremental decline.

Conclusions

Analysis began by recounting that in the three Southeast Asian countries with

meaningful democratic experience, their causal attributes do not correlate closely with

democratic durability. In Thailand, a comparatively homogenous social structure,

early stateness, the absence of large landowning families, the formation of an

autonomous bourgeoisie, rapid market expansion, and the appearance of an urban

middle class have cumulated in a uniquely homegrown impetus for democratic

change. Yet Thailand’s democracy has remained part-time, with each stint dissolving

in rude authoritarian reversal, followed by popular upsurges, cumulating in an overall

pattern of high-speed oscillation.

The Philippines, while adopting democratic politics much earlier than Thailand,

did so less out of any local impetus than colonial imposition. In addition, though also

featuring a mostly benign social structure and autonomous bourgeoisie, as well as the

most vigorous middle class and civil society in the region, its progress has been

blighted by late stateness, the dominance of large landowning families, and a

lackluster record of market expansion. Accordingly, among our country cases,

democracy’s trajectory in the Philippines surprises us least, its countervailing features

producing neither authoritarian reversal nor democratic durability, but instead the

steady leakage of quality, perhaps to be followed one day by a lazy swing back to

more openness within a broad set of soft parameters

Indonesia renews our sense of surprise, for on first glimmer its prospects for

democracy would seem weakest. The country’s social structure bristles with

38

communal identification. Its stateness, when assembled, was pressed into service by

the region’s most successful fusion of military government and personal dictatorship,

flecked with single-party dominance, hence encouraging the New Order’s labeling as

“triple hybrid” authoritarianism (Geddes, 1999: [??]). What is more, the absence of

landowning families did little to raise democratizing potential, for smallholders were

distracted by invasive state cooperatives and marketing schemes. Metropolitan

business elites have also been enfeebled, so divided by ethnicity and smothered by oil

revenues that even amid potentially transformative crisis conditions during the late

1990s, the boldest among them simply fled. A puny urban middle class, similarly split,

with its indigenous segment sedated by public sector employment, has in sharp

contrast to the Thai and Philippine cases managed only to discharge student

processions into the streets, a brave, but insufficient contribution to essential

cross-class coalitions. Finally, in the estimation of most analysts, the country’s

broadly Islamic coloration is held further to militate against democratic politics.

Yet, notwithstanding these many impediments, it is in Indonesia that among our

country cases democracy has grown most durable. This disjuncture cannot be

explained by the country’s possession of any superior institutional design. Instead, we

begin with the insight that democracy persists where, after transition takes place, the

prerogatives of traditional elites are best preserved, requiring us to examine the

inter-elite and elite-mass relations that causally precede, though are later refracted

through, fine-grained institutions.

Hence, in Southeast Asia, democracy most predictably endures where the societal

terrain, in its patterns of communal identification and class affiliation, fails to support

cross-class coalitions. Strategies of populist mobilization thus remain inutile,

discouraging elites from defecting in hopes of strengthening their hand over the state

apparatus and world of business in which traditional elites are housed.

39

This pedestrian insight that new democracies fare best where they threaten elites

least encourages additional more stridently counter-intuitive claims. Plural societies

have long been understood as inimical for democracy in developing countries

(Rabushka and Shepsle, 1972). And indeed, when neatly bifurcated, stubbornly

cohesive, and starkly ranked, with one ethnic community gaining hegemony over

another, it may forge a dominant single party through which to enforce authoritarian

rule. But in Indonesia, where communal identities are also heartfelt, yet widely

dispersed at the mass-level, they better support democracy than does even the ethnic

homogeneity that characterizes Thailand and the Philippines. In Indonesia, no one

ethnic community can impose the hegemony that entrenches authoritarianism. No

cross-class coalition can take shape which, in demanding redistribution, breaks down

democracy.

Next, middle classes have long been conceptualized as natural agents of

democratic change. They are viewed as readily entering into at least partial cross-class

coalitions with urban workers and the poor, then surging through the apertures

between divided elites. Thailand in 1973 and 1992 and the Philippines in 1986 pose

exemplary episodes. However, after democratic change takes place, some elites may

defect from their traditional cohort, reaching over the head of the middle class in

order to energize the poor through redistributive appeals. The middle class, vastly

outnumbered by its newfound working class allies, takes fright over this populist

mobilization, encouraging its elements to counter-defect. It thus nuzzles up to

traditional elites in hopes of forging a new kind of cross-class coalition.

The middle class in Thailand, then, in suffering democratizer’s remorse, has

shown new colors, in particular, a monarchial yellow that proclaims new preferences

for authoritarian rule. And even in the Philippines, where the middle class was less

threatened, with its populist, but bumptious president unable to stir the rural poor,

40

abetted democracy’s erosion by participating in his ouster. In Indonesia, by contrast,

the new urban middle class, small and communally divided, did little to advance

democratic change. And though afterward lamenting government corruption, it has

done even less to roll democracy back.

Finally, these claims about helpful plural societies and turncoat middle classes

draw from a framework of communal identification and class affiliation. But as we

seek explication for democracy’s varying durability in the Southeast Asian setting,

questions over our units of analysis arise. Communal identification, in producing a

great diversity of postures that are crudely labeled as homogenous, bi-polar, and

dispersed, needs itself to be explained. Class affiliation, in cumulating only partially

across class lines to produce coalitions, also requires more rigorous analysis. But

whatever the shortcomings of these analytical units, they tell us much more than do

stale accounts of institutional design.

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