Description

Southeast Asia represents a profound puzzle for students of democracy and democratization. Democracy is weak or absent in the region’s wealthiest states – Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia – but present, to varying degrees, in three of its poorest ones, Indonesia, Timor-Leste and the Philippines. Democracy also appears to be unrelated to human development such as educational levels, literacy, maternal health and other public goods, given the standout performance of quasi-authoritarian Singapore and Malaysia, and the rapid development of Indochina. All of this challenges the key tenets of democratic theory, and indeed modernization theory more generally. In this paper, I present an alternative explanation for the presence or absence of democracy across Southeast Asia that is based not on domestic social or even political factors but rather on international influence, geography and history – in particular, a country’s proximity to and history of relations with the People’s Republic of China.

Benjamin Reilly is Professor of Political Science in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. He is the author of six books and over 70 journal articles and book chapters on issues of democratization, constitutional reform, party politics, electoral system design and conflict management, and has advised governments and international organisations on these subjects. His latest books are a study of democratization and political reform in Asia and the Pacific, Democracy and Diversity: Political Engineering in the Asia-Pacific (Oxford University Press, 2006), and an edited volume, Political Parties in Conflict-Prone Societies (United Nations University Press, 2008). He is currently a Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), in Washington DC.