Mark Richard Thompson

City University of Hong Kong | CityU · Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC)

‘People power’ figure Fidel Ramos’ presidency was the ‘high point’ of a now lost liberal reformist era in the Philippines. Ramos was a key figure in the Philippines ‘people power’ uprising that toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos Snr. As president, Ramos was committed to good governance, but with Duterte’s drug war and election of Marcos Jnr, this li...

In this chapter Mark Thompson traces the formation and emergence of the "aircon opposition"-elites drawn from big business, the Catholic church hierarchy, traditional politics, and the social democratic movement-who had begun actively to resist Marcos after the Aquino assassination and who played a key role in the overthrow of his government in the...

It is a common misunderstanding that the "Asian Values" discourse is about Asia. Originally dubbed "Confucian values," it became "Asian" in order to serve as a causeway connecting the discourses of Singaporean and Malaysian authoritarian leaders in the early 1990s. Not seriously engaging with a storied "Asianisms" debate about common values in the...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed enormous governance deficits globally. Several populist strongmen practiced “medical populism” – ignoring scientific advice, proffering denials, and blaming others. More technocratic leaders recognised its severity, implementing strict lockdowns. But some failed to adopt more flexible restrictions once testing impr...

In response to “indigenous” justifications of illiberalism (e.g., “Asian values”) and the cronyism of electoral authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia, some pro-democracy activists constructed a “vernacularised” liberal discourse that framed demands for human rights and “good governance” in religious-communalist terms. This countered charges that...

Among contemporary illiberal populist leaders, only Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has instigated mass murder under the guise of a “war on drugs.” Attributed to “penal populism,” it must be explained why Duterte won the presidency despite limited concerns about crime, why he organised extra-judicial killings and why this continued despite dom...

Two influential explanations of Duterte’s surprising rise and rule are his “penal populist” leadership style and a structural crisis of oligarchic democracy. The populist leadership perspective explains “too little” about the extreme violence of Duterte’s illiberal rule and the vulnerability of the prevailing political order to it. The oligarchic-d...

How do different kinds of democratic backsliding affect opposition pushback? To contribute to the answer, this article compares two divergent cases in the Asia-Pacific – “executive aggrandizement” in the Philippines and a “promissory” military coup in Thailand. An institutional explanation focused on remaining electoral, state institutional, and ci...

In elections held in early 2019, Southeast Asia’s already bleak democratic prospects appeared to darken further. In Thailand polls merely civilianized military-monarchical rule. In Indonesia president Joko Widodo’s reelection came after concessions to hard-line Islamists. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte’s candidates dominated the midt...

This chapter describes the rise of illiberal democracy in the Philippines and how this has been embodied in President Rodrigo Duterte’s ‘right’ populism, with his violent ‘war on drugs’ as its centerpiece. Introducing the concept of illiberal democracy in the Philippines with reference to contemporary Hungary, an explanation is offered as to why an...

The opposition needs a miracle, but the Philippine midterm campaign also points to problems ahead for Duterte

Singapore appears to be a stand-alone case of authoritarian modernity in the post–Cold War world. But Singapore is much less a ‘lonely’ example of authoritarian modernity than it is a continuation of a historical trend in East Asia. This region has been home to the most significant examples of countries with advanced economies, but without liberal...

It would be premature to claim that Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency in the Philippines is in trouble. Despite a temporary drop in his approval ratings last year, three-fourths of Philippine citizens still approve of his performance in office, with his violent drug crackdown considered his ‘top achievement’. Yet while Duterte remains revered in the Phi...

Chinese elites have looked to Singapore as a model throughout much of the reform era, but have failed to understand what made the city-state tick.

This special section deals with China's longstanding fascination with Singapore's development experience that has preoccupied post-Maoist leaders from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping despite the obvious differences between the tiny Southeast Asian city-state and the most populous country on earth. In particular, there is great Chinese interest in Singa...

Singapore exemplifies what China strives for: resilient authoritarianism despite advanced development with good governance and political stability. But lessons Chinese observers draw from the Southeast Asian city-state have been selective, leading to misconceptions. We focus on three key areas in which Chinese observers claim inspiration from the “...

It is far from clear how effective Rodrigo R. Duterte's improvised clean-up of Boracay will be and whether it can be sustained in the long term. But the shutdown played well to his fan base as another demonstration of his iron will to cleanse the country of its social ills. Duterte’s decision to close Boracay is an example of “blunt force” regulati...

In Thailand and the Philippines, seemingly dramatic changes in foreign policy have been triggered by domestic political upheavals – the May 2014 coup d’état in Thailand and the election of a strongman president, Rodrigo R. Duterte, in May 2016 in the Philippines. As both regimes began practising increasingly illiberal politics at home, they seemed...

Controversial ‘strongman’ President Rodrigo Duterte seems to expose the precariousness of democracy, liberal institutions and presidentialism in the Philippines. The structural hazard of presidential systems, according to some, is competing claims to legitimacy between the chief executive and the legislature. But examples from Southeast Asia show i...

Regional patterns have long been crucial to debates about presidentialism starting with the Latin American cases in which presidential systems were seen to have contributed to political instability. This special issue examines four cases of presidentialism in Southeast Asia. Both the ‘first’ wave of the presidentialism literature which focuses on ‘...

Among the neglected cases of presidential systems in Southeast Asia, the Philippines is particularly interesting as the oldest in the region and as a ‘pure’ case of presidentialism which provides seemingly strong evidence for its ‘perilousness’. ‘First wave’ presidentialism theory appears to explain how competing legitimacy claims between a preside...

http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2017/08/07/80706/ After just one year in office, President Rodrigo Duterte has established an illiberal democracy in the Philippines. Because Rodrigo Duterte was elected in May 2016 in free and fair elections with media freedoms still in place, his regime differs from others in the region such as those of Malaysia and S...

http://thediplomat.com/2017/06/dutertes-year-of-sound-and-fury/ Rodrigo R. Duterte, who completes the first year of his six-year term as president on June 30, is notorious for his unorthodox political style. Duterte has quickly moved to replace a liberal, reformist political order in place since the people power uprising three decades ago with an i...

US President Donald Trump’s recent friendly phone conversation with Rodrigo Duterte, during which he invited the Philippine president to the White House, raised questions about his penchant for closeness with strongmen. Trump clearly has a soft spot for the “hard men” of global politics such as Putin, Erdogan, and al-Sissi. Trump’s encouragement of...

Duterte’s early presidency has seen a monomaniacal commitment to his violent drug crackdown during which he has drawn on his deep-seated nationalism to fend off Western criticism. The recent kindnapping/murder of a South Korean businessmen which revealed police corruption forced Dutete to pause the campaign. This will spare dozens of lives daily, m...

Since assuming the presidency, Rodrigo R. Duterte has “stuck to his guns” in carrying out his campaign pledge to launch a violent anti-drug campaign. Duterte’s presidency was preceded by six years of political stability and high growth under the relatively liberal and supposedly reformist administration of President Benigno “Noynoy” S. Aquino, III....

The significance of Meiji Japan’s “Prussian path” to authoritarian modernity has largely been ignored in the social sciences because it contradicts prevailing modernization theory. Meiji Japanese reformers, after carefully examining several Western country’s political systems, chose the German model because of its illiberal but modern politics. Thi...

With a folksy style and tough-guy image,Philippine presidential candidate Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte promised to restore peace and order by any means necessary. Following his surprise victory in the May 2016 elections,Duterte has kept his word,launching the promised anti-drug campaign that saw nearly 1,800 extrajudicial killings within Duterte's firs...

Duterte appeals to those in Philippine society yearning for the reimposition of ‘discipline’ in the spirit of the former dictator Marcos.

In the Philippines and Thailand, two radically different “tales of democracy” are told: an elitist national narrative critiquing electoral “corruption” epitomized by vote buying and a local interpretation of elections in which politicians are judged according to the extent to which they benefit voters’ community and affirm poor people’s self-worth....

Following the death of Singapore’s founding leader Lee Kuan Yew in March 2015, China remains obsessed with Singapore, the only country in the region to achieve advanced economic industrialization without undergoing substantial political liberalization. The key “lesson” that China is trying to learn is how to combine authoritarian rule with “good go...

In the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries poor people’s voting behavior has been subversive of elite interests, causing the upper classes to be skeptical of votes cast by the poor and to “educate” them on the “proper” exercise of suffrage. But voting by the poor can be understood within a “moral economy” framework in which communal int...

After only a little over a half year in power, as of this writing, Rodrigo’s R. Duterte presidency already represents a sea change in Philippine politics. Despite the personal popularity of Benigno “Noynoy” S. Aquino III (who had the highest opinion poll ratings among post-Marcos presidents), Duterte has quickly replaced a “liberal reformist” polit...

In the last three decades, a number of Asian thinkers supportive of, or opposed to, authoritarian rule have developed culture-based theories of democracy that challenge, or buttress, a liberal, “Western” understanding of democratic rule. The most famous expression was the “Asian values” discourse of government-linked intellectuals in Singapore and...

Asia's Unknown Uprisings, Vol. 2: People Power in the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia. By George Katsiaficas. Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2013. 520 pp. $28.95 (paper). - Volume 74 Issue 1 - Mark R. Thompson

In this chapter, the analysis of media politics in several transitional Southeast Asian countries centres on the relationship between the narrative of “good governance” which the media has helped construct and propagate during democratic transitions. An alternative media in the region spearheaded criticisms of authoritarian rule as arbitrary and co...

In political systems with a powerful chief executive, such as in the Philippines, an essential element in the analysis of politics is a clear understanding of the impact of presidential politics. Two analytical theories have tried to understand this phenomenon: (1) a voluntarist, actor-centered, presidential-style approach, and (2) a structuralist,...

Chinese government officials and academics have shown disproportionate interest in the small city-state of Singapore. The Southeast Asian country with a majority ethnic Chinese population has drawn their attention because it is the only country in the world that combines advanced industrial development with stable one-party rule. Singapore not only...

Political dynasties seem to flourish in Asia, whatever the political system. But this is not a relapse into traditional rule. Political dynasties are modern hybrids in which elite political aims are linked to popular norms of charismatic legitimacy. They are found in non-democratic regimes, electoral democracies and democratic movements, providing...

There have been a dozen dynastic female leaders in ten countries in Asia over the last half-century. They were the widows, wives, or daughters of male politicians arrested or killed by political opponents. What distinguishes Philippine presidentas from previous women in power in the region is their revolutionary role. Dynastic politics was a factor...

:The Philippines' first automated elections in May 2010 were generally honest and orderly, surprising pessimistic Filipino and foreigner observers alike. "Noynoy" Aquino easily won the presidential race by focusing on his "reformist" credentials, a strategy that his mother (her death in August 2009 led him to launch his candidacy) had adopted again...

Barrington Moore has argued that Imperial German@y and Meiji Japan both followed a capitalist, authoritarian ‘route to the modern world.’ But these parallels were not coincidental. German developmentalism was consciously imitated by Meiji reformers and this model was later diffused throughout Pacific Asia (East and Southeast Asia). This article exp...

The strong showing in opinion polls by Senator Benigno Simeon "Noynoy" Cojuangco-Aquino III since he entered the Philippine presidential election campaign in the autumn of 2009 suggests that the long dominant "richversus-poor" political narrative has been challenged by renewed appeals for "good governance". While reformism was the major narrative i...

Even almost 20 years later, the debate on the nature of the events of the autumn of 1989 is still in full flow. Although rather the term "Wende" ( Fundamental Change) than "Peaceful Revolution" has pushed through for the fall of the SED dictatorship, it is hardly possible not to use the attribute "revolutionary" for the events : the end of the GDR...

In both countries, mass-based urban campaigns against authoritarianism have degenerated into an assault on democracy.

Noel M. Morada and Teresa S. Encarnacion Tadem. (eds.). Philippine Politics and Governance: An Introduction, 588 pages and Teresa S. Encarnacion Tadem and Noel M. Morada. (eds.). Philippine Politics and Governance: Challenges to Democratization and Development, 303 pages, both published in Quezon City, Philippines by the Department of Political Sci...

There have been a dozen dynastic female leaders in ten countries in Asia over the last half-century. They were the widows, wives, or daughters of male politicians arrested or killed by political opponents. What distinguishes Philippine presidentas from previous women in power in the region is their revolutionary role. Dynastic politics was a factor...

Southeast Asia displays a problematic relationship between elitist calls for “good governance” and democracy. While opposing dictatorships accused of mismanagement and cronyism, regional upper and middle class activists invoked the discourse of “good governance.” Yet elitist-led “civil society” later redirected this discourse against democratically...

A variable affecting the chances of regime exit - weak 'nation-stateness' - has often been overlooked. If a country enjoys no single, exclusive national identity, then democratic transition poses a threat to the survival of the state and the interests connected with it. The Honecker regime was unwilling to exit from communism unlike Polish and Hung...

As a woman and an East German, Angela Merkel beat long political odds to become chancellor of Germany in November 2005. In addition, she overcame her party's poor electoral performance, out-manoeuvring political rivals in negotiations for a ‘grand coalition’. Merkel's rise to power can be divided into three phases. Like many other female political...

Stolen elections are triggering events that overcome barriers to revolutionary action against electoral authoritarian regimes. They mobilize ordinary citizens, strengthen the opposition, and divide the regime. As neo-institutionalist theories of revolution suggest, the relative openness of electoral authoritarianism inhibits mass protest. But when...

Journal of Democracy 15.4 (2004) 159-172 The overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in Serbia's so-called October Revolution four years ago was briefly celebrated by the international press, and it also received extensive attention from scholars. Such accounts focused on why and how the opposition won the September 2000 presidential ballot as well as on t...

The 1997 Asian economic crisis discredited the international discussion about ‘Asian values’ in Pacific Asia, replacing it with a globalised ‘good governance’ discourse. The financial breakdown undermined claims by Asian autocrats that government should be based on authoritarian ‘Asian values’, not ‘Western democracy’. Yet, seven years later, autho...

Despite enormous differences between Asia and Eastern Europe, there are striking similarities between the peaceful, spontaneous, urban-based and cross-class democratic uprisings against unyielding dictatorships that have occurred in the two regions. The book explores the kind of non-democratic regimes that are particularly vulnerable to democratic...

Over the past decade and a half, women have led successful popular uprisings against dictators in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and the Philippines. Moreover, women are currently leading anti-dictatorship struggles in Burma and Malaysia. This is striking given the absence of female leadership of democratic transitions elsewhere in the world, not...

Frauen haben oppositionelle Bewegungen zu euphorisch gefeierten Siegen über Diktatoren in Bangladesch, Indonesien, Pakistan und auf den Philippinen geführt und danach die höchsten Staatsämter übernommen. 1 Die große Sympathie, die Frauen in ihrem Kampf gegen Diktaturen in Asien entgegengebracht wurde, basierte auf ihren verwandtschaftlichen oder eh...

The leaders of the interwar East European states undertook a dual task of political engineering: to build nations and to craft democracies. Freed from the autocratic empires that had controlled most of the region before (and all of it during) the First World War, politicians of the successor states attempted to achieve national self-determination w...

Journal of Democracy 12.4 (2001) 154-165 The discourse contrasting the defects of "Western" individualism and democracy with the virtues of "Asian" communitarianism and good governance, which blossomed during East and Southeast Asia's economic boom, has withered since the financial bust of 1997-98. Economic crisis seems to be a particularly effecti...

Although the massacre at Tiananmen Square in China and the democratic revolutions in Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic started similarly as nonviolent, mass protests against hardline regimes, they appear to have left little in common. Why did events in 1989 in Berlin and Prague not end as in Beijing? Four answers—party legitimacy, s...

Abstract While the „Asian values“ discourse has been discredited internationally, its state at the domestic level is more complex. Where „Asian values“ have been invoked in support of economic development, such as in Indonesia, financial crisis has been an effective form of critique. But in more economically advanced Singapore and Malaysia claims a...

Why, just over ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, have we long stopped speaking of democratic revolutions? For theorists of revolution they bring ‘too little’ social transformation to be considered revolutionary. Transitologists', by contrast, fear ‘too much’ change, thereby endangering democratization through radicalization. Even if it i...

Recent ¢nancial events in the Asia-Paci¢c area have not only brought havoc to political and economic structures but also changed the conditions for ideological discourse in the region. In this article, I explore the future of one of these discourses ^ ‘‘Asian Values,’’ which emphasize family and consensual governance over personal and political ind...

The leaders of the East German uprising were reluctant revolutionaries who refused to seize power from a collapsing regime, instead helping communist reformers survive societal rebellion. However critical these dissidents were of communist rule in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a commitment to anti‐fascism led them to enter into a dialogue w...

Gegenstand der nachfolgenden Ausführungen sollen Rolle und Funktion von Verbänden in den demokratischen Transitions- und Konsolidierungsprozessen der beiden nordostasiatischen „Tigerstaaten“ Taiwan und Südkorea sowie des südostasiatischen Schwellenlandes Philippinen sein1. Verbände sind Institutionen funktional organisierter Interessengruppen, die...

In the late 1990s, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) is a squabbling political sect, looked upon with contempt by conservatives and with considerable embarrassment by progressives. The contributors to the book reviewed here advance the thesis that the decline of Philippine communism is closely linked to the communists' boycott of electio...

Bei den Demokratisierungen der letzten zwanzig Jahre ist deutlich ein „Schneeball-Effekt“ in Südeuropa, Lateinamerika, Osteuropa und Afrika südlich der Sahara wahrzunehmen. Nachdem sich ein Land in einer dieser Regionen demokratisiert hat, sind viele oder sogar alle Nachbarländer diesem Beispiel gefolgt. Mal Diffusion, mal Demonstrations-Effekt, ma...