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The Rise of Sophisticated Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia

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This book offers a way to understand the evolution of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia by scrutinizing its very quality. The theoretical framework is based on a set of indicators (judged for their known advantages and mimicry of democratic attributes) as well as a typology (conceptualized as two discreet categories of “retrograde” and “sophisticated” authoritarianism). Working with an original dataset, the empirical results reveal vast differences within and across authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia, but also a discernible shift towards sophisticated authoritarianism over time. The book concludes with a reflection of its contribution and a statement on its generalizability.

Quality of authoritarian rule by dimension

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Quality of authoritarian rule by regime type

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Quality of authoritarian rule by regime subtype

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Quality of authoritarian rule in Brunei

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Quality of authoritarian rule in Laos

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MORGENBESSER The Rise of Sophisticated Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia

This Element oers a way to understand the evolution of

authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia. The theoretical framework

is based on a set of indicators (judged for their known

advantages and mimicry of democratic attributes) as well

as a typology (conceptualized as two discreet categories of

“retrograde” and “sophisticated” authoritarianism). Working with

an original data set, the empirical results reveal vast dierences

within and across authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia, but

also a discernible shift toward sophisticated authoritarianism

over time. The Element concludes with a reﬂection of its

contribution and a statement on its generalizability.

About the Series

The Elements series Politics and Society

in Southeast Asia includes both country-

speciﬁc and thematic studies on one of

the world’s most dynamic regions. Each

title, written by a leading scholar of that

country or theme, combines a succinct,

comprehensive, up-to-date overview of

debates in the scholarly literature with

original analysis and a clear argument.

Series Editors

Edward Aspinall

Australian National

University

Meredith L. Weiss

University at

Albany, SUNY

Politics and Society

in Southeast Asia

ISSN 2515-2998 (online)

ISSN 2515-298X (print)

The Rise of

Sophisticated

Authoritarianism in

Southeast Asia

Lee Morgenbesser

Cover image: tashechka/Shutterstock

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Elements in Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

edited by

Edward Aspinall

Australian National University

Meredith L. Weiss

University at Albany, SUNY

THERISEOF

SOPHISTICATED

AUTHORITARIANISM

IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Lee Morgenbesser

Griﬃth University

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www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108457231

DOI: 10.1017/9781108630061

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no reproduction of any part may take place without the written

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First published 2020

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ISSN 2515-2998 (online)

ISSN 2515-298X (print)

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The Rise of Sophisticated Authoritarianism

in Southeast Asia

Elements in Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

DOI: 10.1017/9781108630061

First published online: February 2020

Lee Morgenbesser

Griﬃth University

Author for correspondence: Lee Morgenbesser, l.morgenbesser@griﬃth

.edu.au

Abstract: This Element oﬀers a way to understand the evolution of

authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia. The theoretical framework is based

on a set of indicators ( judged for their known advantages and mimicry

of democratic attributes) as well as a typology (conceptualized as two

discreet categories of “retrograde”and “sophisticated”

authoritarianism). Working with an original data set, the empirical

results reveal vast diﬀerences within and across authoritarian regimes

in Southeast Asia, but also a discernible shift toward sophisticated

authoritarianism over time. The Element concludes with a reﬂection of

its contribution and a statement on its generalizability.

Keywords: authoritarianism, Southeast Asia retrograde, sophisticated,

history

ISBNs: 9781108457231 (PB), 9781108630061 (OC)

ISSNs: 2515-2998 (online), 2515-298X (print)

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Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 The Quality of Authoritarian Rule 4

3 Between Retrograde and Sophisticated

Authoritarianism 8

4 Retrograde and Sophisticated Authoritarianism in

Southeast Asia 46

5 Conclusion 67

Bibliography 71

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1 Introduction

Authoritarian rule is in the midst of a transformation. From the advent of a social

credit system in China, enlistment of winning (but loyal) opposition candidates for

elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, utilization of machine-learning

techniques to predict mass protests in Russia, permanent hiring of Western public

relations ﬁrms by the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, deployment of intrusion malware

to monitor opposition actors in Uganda, and the takeover of independent media

outlets by foreign shell companies in Venezuela, many authoritarian regimes around

the world are exhibiting change. “Faced with growing pressures,”Dobson (2012:4)

writes, “the smartest among them neither hardened their regimes into police states

nor closed themselves off from the world; instead, they learned and adapted.”In

similar terms, Puddington (2017) describes how authoritarian regimes have sought

to stop democracy by learning and copying the best practices of democracy. Despite

growing awareness of this seemingly global transformation, fundamental questions

remain about the exact nature of it.

Authoritarian rule has been a mainstay of political life in Southeast Asia.

Since most countries gained independence between the 1940s and 1960s,

a string of personalist dictators, military juntas, royal families, and single parties

have ﬂourished and faltered in the region. In contrast to other regions of the

world, such as Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, Southeast Asia

resisted the historical change wrought by democratization. Underpinned by

a“remarkable range of political forms”(Hewison, 1999: 224), the region has

instead proven to be an ideal –yet relatively underappreciated –testing ground

for theories of authoritarian politics. A distinct body of comparative research

has examined how Southeast Asia’s mix of authoritarian regimes embraced

formal democratic institutions (Case, 2002), proﬁciently used repression

against organized resistance (Boudreau, 2004), and cunningly relied upon

elite protection pacts to maintain power (Slater, 2010). The very familiarity of

authoritarian rule, however, has tended to preclude comparative analysis of its

transformation. The stubborn regularity of ﬂawed elections, wicked certainty of

repression, and ﬁerce continuity of ruling parties, to name but a few of the

enduring characteristics of authoritarian rule in the region, promote ambiguity

about whether that rule has actually changed. This Element therefore addresses

the following question: How has authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia evolved?

The unequivocal answer is that the overarching resilience of authoritarian

rule in Southeast Asia has masked the underlying evolution of it. The most

important change has been the emergence of distinct forms of authoritarianism

within the region over time. In particular, it is now possible to identify the

presence of retrograde and sophisticated authoritarian regimes in Southeast

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Asia. This argument is advanced using two tools of descriptive analysis:

indicators and a typology. Drawing on established and original research,

a theoretical framework comprised of seventy-three indicators is developed to

judge the quality of authoritarian rule in the region. To distinguish between

retrograde and sophisticated behavior, authoritarian regimes are assessed for

how closely they apply the known advantages of authoritarian politics as well as

how closely they mimic the fundamental attributes of democracy. Based on this

set of indicators, a simple typology is utilized to capture the categories of

retrograde and sophisticated authoritarianism. To distinguish the quality of

authoritarian rule at the aggregate level, the performance of authoritarian

regimes is standardized and located on a scale ranging from retrograde (0) to

sophisticated (100). Seeking to afﬁrm the standing of Southeast Asia as

a natural laboratory for comparative analysis, especially on questions probing

the very nature of authoritarian politics, the evolution of authoritarian rule in the

region is traced from 1975 to 2015.

The Element showcases two original empirical ﬁndings about the story of

authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia. The ﬁrst discovery concerns the range of

variation. Rather than being a region deﬁned by uniformity, the analysis indi-

cates the presence of retrograde and sophisticated authoritarianism across cases

(e.g., Brunei vs Singapore) and within them (e.g., Malaysia and Myanmar). The

former distinction underscores how authoritarian regimes display varying

degrees of interest in pursuing innovation; while the latter distinction reveals

how leadership turnover can contribute to either deterioration or improvement

in the quality of authoritarian rule. The second discovery concerns the direction

of change. Notwithstanding the aforementioned across-country and within-

country variation, the analysis shows that every surviving authoritarian regime

has become less retrograde and more sophisticated over time. The slower-

moving case of Laos and the faster-moving case of Vietnam, for example,

have exhibited a greater degree of sophistication with each passing decade.

Taken together, these two empirical ﬁndings highlight how the familiarity of

authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia has tended to obscure its deeper

transformation.

The understanding of authoritarian rule presented in this Element is different

from existing conceptualizations within the ﬁeld of comparative authoritarian-

ism. The “continuous”approach disaggregates political regimes by placing

them on a spectrum ranging from democracy to authoritarianism, which results

in many falling within the gray zone between these two root concepts

(Diamond, 2002;Schedler, 2006;Levitsky and Way, 2010). The “categorical”

approach disaggregates authoritarian regimes according to preselected criteria,

such as their decision-making arrangements (Geddes et al., 2014), exit avenues

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from ofﬁce (Cheibub et al., 2010), and modes of political power maintenance

(Wahman et al., 2013). Despite identifying with the second approach, this

Element makes a few advancements. In particular, it uses a far greater range

of preselected criteria (i.e., indicators) than is customary to distinguish among

authoritarian regimes. The cited categorization schemes mostly focus on the

institutional features of dictatorships, including whether they maintain elec-

tions, legislatures, and parties, while also examining the processes by which

dictators enter and exit ofﬁce. Such features represent a small fraction of the

ways by which authoritarian regimes are measured in the pages to follow.

A more important difference to existing conceptualizations stems from the

focus on the quality of authoritarian rule. In contrast to other categorization

schemes, which only permit comparisons within and between cases, this

Element goes a step further by allowing for a comparison to the ideal of

“sophisticated”authoritarianism. This contribution is made possible by synthe-

sizing insights from existing research areas of comparative authoritarianism,

such as those focused on institutions (Gandhi, 2008), repression (Greitens,

2016), information (Truex, 2016), development (Knutsen and Rasmussen,

2018), and foreign policy (Tansey, 2016a). The classiﬁcation of authoritarian

regimes therefore becomes not just about the identiﬁcation of certain prese-

lected criteria, but why personalist dictators, military juntas, royal families, and

single parties should embrace speciﬁc features and techniques for the sake of

their own survival. The Element, simply stated, offers a normative conceptua-

lization. Seeking to underscore the staying power of authoritarianism, rather

than the moving power of democratization, this unconventional approach is

intended to stand as a contribution to our accumulated knowledge of author-

itarian politics.

To investigate the evolution of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia, this

Element is divided into three sections. The ﬁrst part explains the indicators

and typology that are central to the theoretical framework. The section

includes an explanation of exactly how retrograde and sophisticated behavior

is judged at the indicator and aggregate level. Working through the relevant

features and techniques, the second part demonstrates the prevalence of retro-

grade and sophisticated practices among Southeast Asia’s authoritarian

regimes. The third part tests the theoretical framework against nine country

studies in the region from 1975 to 2015: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos,

Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam. The centerpiece of

the empirical analysis is the Quality of Authoritarianism (QoA) data set,

which captures the speciﬁc indicators of the theoretical framework. Using

a standardized scale ranging from retrograde to sophisticated authoritarian-

ism, this section analyzes both broad patterns (by dimension, regime type,

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regime subtype, and democratization episode) as well as speciﬁcﬁndings (by

country-case). The most important ﬁnding is the overall trend away from

retrograde authoritarianism and toward sophisticated authoritarianism. The

Element concludes by reﬂecting on the contribution of the analysis in con-

ceptual, theoretical, and empirical terms, but also the potential for general-

izing its approach to scrutinize the quality of authoritarianrule in other regions

of the world.

2 The Quality of Authoritarian Rule

This Element is a work of pure description. In spite of the pejorative connota-

tions sometimes attached to this term, which are typically applied to research

that does not seek a causal understanding of the world, the author embraces the

idea that description is a distinctive –and essential –task of political science. In

the view of Gerring (2012a: 109): “We need to know how much democracy

there is in the world, how this quantity –or bundle of attributes –varies from

one country to country, region to region, and through time. This is important

regardless of what causes democracy or what causal effects democracy has.”

The same logic holds true for autocracy. Given its descriptive intention, the

hope is that other scholars might subsequently use the research presented in this

Element to pursue causal arguments. An obvious direction would be to explore

the relationship between the quality of authoritarian rule and whether regimes

perish or survive. The immediate focus here, however, is on analyzing the

evolution of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia and classifying the varying

forms produced as part of this transformation. Among the many tools that may

be employed for this task, this Element relies upon indicators and a typology

(see Gerring, 2012b). Let us examine each in turn.

Indicators

To distinguish between retrograde and sophisticated forms of authoritarianism,

a set of indicators were selected based on a maximal strategy of conceptualiza-

tion. This strategy aims for the inclusion of all nonidiosyncratic characteristics

that deﬁne a concept in its purest form. Moving forward, there are three

immediate questions:

(1) What indicators comprise the theoretical framework?

(2) How do the indicators measure the quality of authoritarian rule?

(3) What counts as retrograde or sophisticated behavior?

The indicators used to capture the quality of authoritarian rule were initially

selected based on their substantive importance to authoritarian politics. The

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very ﬁrst indicator in the QoA data set, for example, addresses whether

a constitution exists under authoritarian rule. This formal institution has been

closely studied by scholars working in the ﬁeld of comparative authoritarianism

for the last two decades. Another portion of indicators was constructed to

account for intuitively important features and techniques. The way some dicta-

tors have hired public relations ﬁrms in Washington, DC, for instance, has been

covered by journalists but not investigated by scholars. The overarching goal

was to present an analytical framework that draws on scholarship from across

the ﬁeld of comparative authoritarianism, while also incorporating insights

from media reports about some of the innovative features or techniques prac-

ticed by authoritarian regimes around the world. The outcome is a total of

seventy-three indicators: thirty capturing hitherto uncoded features or techni-

ques of authoritarian rule, twenty-nine sourced from existing cross-national

time-series data sets on authoritarian politics, and fourteen relying on informa-

tion from national governments or intergovernmental organizations. The corre-

sponding codebook (Morgenbesser, 2020) offers further details on the

indicators that comprise the theoretical framework and explains how the various

scores are derived.

The chosen indicators are designed to measure the quality of authoritarian

rule in any authoritarian regime. A key feature is the use of an ordinal scale –

that is, numbers that both label and order. Take the previous example of

constitutions under authoritarian rule, which relies on data from Law and

Versteeg (2013). Instead of simply coding the absence or presence of this formal

institution among Southeast Asia’s authoritarian regimes, a rating is applied to

the different constitutions in effect. Having no constitution (0) or a weak

constitution (0.33) is classiﬁed as retrograde behavior and having a modest

(0.66) or strong constitution (1) represents sophisticated behavior. This ordering

process is repeated for every indicator contained within the theoretical frame-

work. It is what informs the country-year scores for each authoritarian regime

and what makes the resulting typology possible.

The third question is what counts as retrograde or sophisticated behavior. This

critical judgment is based on two criteria. The ﬁrst criterion implicitly relies on

existing research concerning authoritarian politics. This scholarship has generated

an extensive list of beneﬁts, dividends, or rewards authoritarian regimes can reap

by possessing certain features and practicing certain techniques. The work of

Ginsburg and Simpser (2013:5–10), for example, establishes several positive

effects of having a strong constitution, rather than having no constitution. When

the absence/presence of a speciﬁc feature or technique is known to confer such

advantages, the behavior is coded as sophisticated. The opposite rule also applies.

When the absence/presence of a speciﬁc feature or technique is known to confer

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disadvantages, the behavior is coded as retrograde. The second criterion is the

explicit degree to which the adoption of those features and techniques allows

authoritarian regimes to mimic the fundamental attributes of democracy. The

logic here is that more sophisticated authoritarian rule will involve higher

rates of mimicry to democratic forms (albeit without democratic substance).

The likes of Eritrea, North Korea, and Turkmenistan might rely upon far-

fetched elections, mass organizations, personality cults, universalistic ideol-

ogies, and wholesale repression, but they make little effort to appear anything

other than full dictatorships. Beyond such cases, it is assumed that authoritar-

ian regimes want to appear more like democracies. The attributes used to judge

this behavior are based on a lexical deﬁnition of democracy (see Ta ble 1 ).

To return to the previous example, an authoritarian regime that has a strong

constitution is more sophisticated than an authoritarian regime that has no

constitution, because maintaining this institution allows it to mimic the liberal,

participatory, and egalitarian attributes of democracy. In this way, by combining

an extensive set of additive indicators, it is possible to establish typological

differences in the quality of authoritarian rule.

Typology

The second tool employed to make the argument is a simple typology consisting of

two regime categories: retrograde authoritarianism and sophisticated authoritarian-

ism. The beneﬁts of typologies are that they address complex phenomenon without

oversimplifying, clarify similarities and differences among cases to facilitate

comparisons, provide a comprehensive inventory of all possible kinds of cases,

incorporate interaction effects, and draw attention to the kinds of cases that have

not occurred and perhaps cannot occur (George and Bennett, 2005:233–262). In

accordance with the norms of standard categorical scales, the two categories

created here are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (Bailey, 1994;

Collier et al., 2008). Not only can the form of authoritarian rule be categorized

dichotomously, but all authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia can be categorized

into one of the two categories –retrograde or sophisticated –at any point in time.

Since this Element is concerned with how authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia

has evolved, it is worth underscoring that the typology is mostly employed at the

aggregate level of analysis. An authoritarian regime with a strong constitution is

more sophisticated than an authoritarian regime without a constitution, but this

is merely one indicator for one country-year. The behavior of authoritarian

regimes can alternate between retrograde and sophisticated from one indicator

to the next, but focusing on such micro-level variations offers little insight into

their overall quality or evolution. The more interesting question is how

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authoritarian regimes variously perform over time with respect to all the

indicators. By addressing this question, it becomes possible to account for the

transformation of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia.

The difference between retrograde and sophisticated authoritarianism is at the

core of the theoretical framework advanced here. A fuller discussion of the exact

Table 1 Classiﬁcation of the fundamental attributes of democracy

Electoral Liberal

Principles: Contestation and

competition.

Question: Are government ofﬁces

ﬁlled by free and fair multiparty

elections?

Institutions: Elections, political

parties, competitiveness, and

turnover.

Principles: Limited government, multiple

veto points, horizontal accountability,

individual rights, civil liberties, and

transparency.

Question: Is political power decentralized

and constrained?

Institutions: Multiple, independent and

decentralized, with special focus on the

role of the media, interest groups, the

judiciary, and a written constitution

with explicit guarantees.

Majoritarian

Principles: Majority rule, centra-

lization, and vertical

accountability.

Question: Does the majority (or

plurality) rule?

Institutions: Consolidated and

centralized, with special focus

on the role of political parties.

Participatory

Principle: Government by the people.

Question: Do ordinary citizens participate

in politics?

Institutions: Election law, civil society,

local government, and direct

democracy.

Deliberative

Principle: Government by reason.

Question: Are political decisions

the product of public

deliberation?

Institutions: Media, hearings,

panels, and other deliberative

bodies.

Egalitarian

Principle: Political equality.

Question: Are all citizens equally

empowered?

Institutions: Designed to ensure equal

participation, representation, protec-

tion, and politically relevant resources.

Source: Coppedge et al. (2011: 254)

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distinction between these categories, however, is better left to the second half of the

Element. It is here that the typology is “put to work”via the introduction of

a standardized score (i.e., a combined measure for the indicators). At that point

the quality of authoritarian rule is judged on a scale ranging from retrograde (0) to

sophisticated (100). By standardizing the data this way, it is easier to compare the

quality of authoritarian rule within and across cases in Southeast Asia. The

typological distinction between the two categories is as follows:

•An authoritarian regime is retrograde insofar as it possesses a minority of

indicators and insufﬁciently mimics the fundamental attributes of democracy.

•An authoritarian regime is sophisticated insofar as it possesses a majority of

indicators and sufﬁciently mimics the fundamental attributes of democracy.

The remainder of this Element follows a straightforward path. The next section

elaborates on this introduction by explaining the set of indicators used to capture

the quality of authoritarian rule. Special attention is paid to separating retro-

grade and sophisticated behavior at this indicator level. Section 4 employs the

aforementioned typology to demonstrate the varying quality of authoritarian

rule in Southeast Asia, making a major effort to distinguish retrograde and

sophisticated forms at this aggregate level.

3 Between Retrograde and Sophisticated

Authoritarianism

An imprudent direction from here would be to simply list all the indicators and

explain the inherent differences between retrograde and sophisticated behavior.

Instead, some system of organization is required. In this section, the seventy-

three indicators are grouped into ﬁve dimensions of authoritarian rule: institu-

tional conﬁguration, control system, information apparatus, development

scheme, and international conduct. These dimensions are not causal mechanisms

(or anything close to it). Rather, they are scaffolding for sorting the disparate

features and techniques characteristic of authoritarian rule. Some readers might

disagree with the names of the dimensions, along with how the indicators are

clustered, but any viable method for organizing indicators of this kind requires

some degree of arbitrariness. The task of scrutinizing the quality of authoritarian

rule in Southeast Asia over the course of four decades now begins in earnest.

Institutional Conﬁguration

The ﬁeld of comparative authoritarianism has devoted signiﬁcant attention to the

study of formal institutions in authoritarian regimes. A now common view is that

courts, constitutions, elections, legislatures, and parties are useful for managing

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interrelationships among leaders, political elites, opposition groups, and citizens.

Across Southeast Asia, for instance, scholars have demonstrated how Singapore’s

court system constrains dissent (Rajah, 2012), Myanmar’s constitution preserves

military power (Croissant and Kamerling, 2013), Cambodia’s elections routinize the

distribution of patronage (Noren-Nilsson, 2016), Vietnam’s legislature co-opts

delegates from different geographic areas and functional backgrounds (Malesky

and Schuler, 2010), and Malaysia’s dominant party was an exemplar of coalition

building, policy innovation, and money politics (Gomez, 2016). The substantive

point of this section is not just that authoritarian regimes utilize institutions, but that

the quality of their efforts vary considerably (see Table 2 ). The following section

pieces this arrangement together.

Table 2 Institutional conﬁguration

Indicators Retrograde Sophisticated

Constitution

Constitution type –None ✓

–Weak ✓

–Modest (sham) ✓

–Strong ✓

Executive ofﬁce

Selection mode –Succession ✓

–Election ✓

Term limits –One (no return) ✓

–One (can return) ✓

–Multiple (no return) ✓

–Multiple (can return) ✓

–Unlimited ✓

–None speciﬁed ✓

Term limits change –Executive decree ✓

–Legislative vote ✓

–Judicial ruling ✓

–Plebiscite/referendum ✓

Succession rules –Unregulated ✓

–Designational ✓

–Regulated ✓

Succession outcome –Opposed ✓

–Unafﬁliated ✓

–Loyal ✓

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Not all constitutional arrangements in authoritarian regimes are equal.

Since they differ in terms of their form and effect (Law and Versteeg, 2013:

882–886), it is possible to identify retrograde and sophisticated types. The

former is denoted by no constitution or a weak constitution. Since 1975, the

only authoritarian regime in Southeast Asia to rule without a constitution was

in Cambodia. After taking ofﬁce in January 1979, the Kampuchean People’s

Revolutionary Party exercised uninhibited power –rather than legal author-

ity –until a new constitution was promulgated in June 1981 (Slocomb, 2003:

67–74). The absence of a constitution during this period meant that it was

impossible for the ruling party to mimic the liberal, participatory, and egali-

tarian attributes of democracy –nor did it attempt to do so. During the Cold

Table 2 (cont.)

Indicators Retrograde Sophisticated

Elections

Sanctioned –No ✓

–Yes ✓

Administration –Autonomous ✓

–Controlled ✓

–Ambiguous ✓

Scheduling –Exact periods ✓

–Inexact periods ✓

–No formal schedule ✓

Systemic parties –No ✓

–Yes ✓

Legislature and parties

Selection mode –None ✓

–Appointed ✓

–Elected ✓

Pluralism –Single-party ✓

–Multi-party ✓

Systemic parties –No ✓

–Yes ✓

Cooperative forum –No ✓

–Yes ✓

Advisory congress –No ✓

–Yes ✓

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War, many authoritarian regimes in the region instead ruled via another

retrograde option: weak constitutions. In Indonesia under Suharto, for exam-

ple, the constitution neither promised nor delivered much in terms of human

rights guarantees. In such cases, the advertised content aligns with actual

practice, but the incumbent authoritarian regime makes little effort to mimic

the above attributes of democracy. This retrograde arrangement is currently

observable in Brunei and Laos.

A more sophisticated arrangement is to enact modest (or sham) consti-

tutions. This option incorporates formal assurances of a wide variety of

human rights guarantees, along with a parallel failure to uphold those

guarantees in everyday life. “The constitution needs to look complete and

to ﬁt in the global scripts that deﬁne the basic formal elements,”Ginsburg

and Simpser (2013:7)declare,“but without the risk of costly constraints.”

Across Southeast Asia, Myanmar and Vietnam are the archetypical exam-

ples of sham constitutions being in force today. The most sophisticated

option is to go one step further in terms of what the constitution promises

and delivers. In Singapore, for instance, de jure commitments to uphold

certain political rights and civil liberties exist in conjunction with de facto

enforcement of them (up to a threshold set by the ruling party). This option

allows authoritarian regimes to mimic the liberalism enshrined in the

constitutions of established democracies. In addition to simulating compli-

ance to the demands and expectations of the international community, such

constitutions help leaders coordinate the behavior of political elites, oppo-

sition members, and citizens by deﬁning the boundaries of acceptable

political action. Furthermore, strong constitutions clarify the allocation of

power, provide information to enable credible commitments, and offer

persuasive force in relation to the application of laws (Ginsburg and

Simpser, 2013:1–5). When authoritarian regimes forgo these beneﬁts,

their choices are judged to be of the retrograde kind.

Most authoritarian leaders desire to stay in power as long as politically

possible and the substance of constitutions has an underappreciated effect on

their pursuit of that goal. How the chief executive is formally selected according

to the constitution is thus another important indicator of the quality of author-

itarian rule (Cheibub et al., 2010). The method of selection is judged as retro-

grade when leaders gain power without a direct or indirect mandate from the

electorate, which means that they fail to mimic the electoral and participatory

attributes of democracy. Some notable examples include Hassanal Bolkiah in

Brunei from 1984 onward (a sultan deferential to hereditary succession) as well

as Than Shwe in Myanmar from 1992 to 2011 (a junta chief who forbid

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elections). When leaders gain power through direct election by a popular vote,

authoritarian regimes display sophistication. Although such elections are

invariably ﬂawed from a democratic perspective, they still mimic the electoral

and participatory attributes of democracy. In the Philippines, for example,

Ferdinand Marcos sanctioned a mix of elections, plebiscites, and referenda as

part of his search for legitimacy (Wurfel, 1988:117–122). His strategy revealed

an alertness to the fact that even ﬂawed elections grant leaders a window of

opportunity to collect information, pursue legitimacy, manage political elites,

and sustain neopatrimonial domination (Morgenbesser, 2016a: 19). This list of

potential rewards is symptomatic of how elections provide an arena for strategic

interaction between leaders, elites, opponents, and citizens.

Once a leader is in power, the question arises: how long they can stay? Since

the answer to this question is determined by the constitution, the need to mimic

the liberal attribute of democracy occurs automatically. The quality of author-

itarian rule is therefore determined by the formal requirements written into the

constitution (assuming one exists). Some leaders may inherit a beneﬁcial set of

circumstances, while other leaders will have to try engineer them (see next

paragraph). The retrograde arrangement stipulates that they must relinquish

power after one or two terms and never return. Formal examples include

Cambodia under both the Communist Party of Kampuchea and the

Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party as well as Myanmar under both

the Burma Socialist Programme Party and the State Peace and Development

Council. The sophisticated arrangement is when leaders can rule for an unlim-

ited number of terms. This scenario typically arises when members of the ruling

coalition cannot credibly threaten the leader with a coup or the design of the

political system draws inspiration from the Westminster tradition. In Indonesia

and Singapore, for example, Suharto and Lee Kuan Yew never had to deal with

any constitutional provisions requiring them to hand over power. The presence

or absence of such provisions is important, because any attempt to change

executive term limits opens up a window of vulnerability, whereby the like-

lihood of elite rupture and/or mass protests increases (Taoko and Cowell, 2014).

Between 1975 and 2015, authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia altered term

limits on just three occasions –in the Philippines (1978), Cambodia (1993), and

Myanmar (2009). This low level of activity reveals how many authoritarian

regimes have beneﬁted from the inheritance of extensive or unspeciﬁed term

limits.

Any attempt to change executive term limits in the constitution raises

a substantive question about the optimal mechanism for doing so. An important

precondition is the existing degree of electoral competition, which has been

shown to predict the outcome of attempts to alter term limits (see McKie, 2019).

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Speciﬁcally, electoral trends provide informational cues to political elites about

the costs and beneﬁts of either upholding or repealing term limits, which will

impact their own political survival. On this question, it is easy to make

a statement about the quality of authoritarian rule. The retrograde options

typically include executive decree, legislative vote, or judicial ruling –all

mechanisms lacking a commitment to the electoral and participatory attributes

of democracy. In Cambodia, for instance, the Constituent Assembly tasked with

drafting a new constitution met in secret throughout the latter half of 1993 and

established unlimited terms of ofﬁce for the prime minister (Shawcross, 1994).

This change has since proven to be enormously beneﬁcial to Hun Sen. The

sophisticated option is to hold a plebiscite or referendum on the proposed

change to the constitution. Among many examples around the world, Than

Shwe in Myanmar followed this course of action in May 2008. The key

advantage of this option is that, by mimicking egalitarian and participatory

attributes, it reduces the risk that leaders seeking to extend their tenure will be

ousted by a coup orchestrated by disgruntled members of the ruling coalition or

by a mass protest involving angry citizens.

The issue of leadership succession in authoritarian regimes demands that

aﬁner point be made about how this process is organized. The underlying

distinction is whether there are institutionalized rules in place for determining

if, when, and how a transition will occur. In the view of Frantz and Stein (2016:

940): “Succession procedures not only can reduce uncertainty about who would

rule after the leader’s departure, but also boost regime survival and provide

regime elites with some insurance that under a subsequent leader they will

continue to enjoy the perks of membership in the inner circle.”In the event of

the unexpected or forced departure of the leader, retrograde succession pro-

cesses are unregulated. In Cambodia, for example, Hun Sen brieﬂy ruled with-

out any procedures stipulating how the transfer of power would transpire should

he exit from ofﬁce. This pattern can be contrasted with the two sophisticated

procedures. “Designational”rules stipulate that leaders are chosen from within

the ruling coalition without formal competition, while “regulated”rules stipu-

late that leaders are determined through hereditary succession or competitive

elections (Frantz and Stein, 2016: 944). Such arrangements now cover all

authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia and more closely mimic the electoral

attribute of democracy because the transition process is far more orderly. The

fact that authoritarian regimes with institutionalized succession procedures last

twice as long as those without them underscores the divide between sophisti-

cated and retrograde authoritarianism.

The varying outcomes attributed to leadership succession is useful for further

determining the quality of authoritarian rule. A sign of a retrograde process is

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when the new leader does not come from the same “ruling coalition”as their

predecessor. This term refers to the set of people “who support the government

and, jointly with the dictator, hold enough power to be both necessary and

sufﬁcient for its survival”(Svolik, 2012:5–6). The entry into ofﬁce of Norodom

Ranariddh in Cambodia (1993), for example, is notable for both his declaration

of hostility to the incumbent government and the continuation of authoritarian

rule. Another sign of a retrograde process is when the new leader is unafﬁliated

to the government; meaning that they have not unambiguously stated their

support or opposition prior to assuming ofﬁce. This description captures the

entry into ofﬁce of Ne Win in Myanmar (1962). The sophisticated process is

instead for the new leader to come from the same ruling coalition as the

outgoing leader. This kind of alternation decreases the potential for intra-elite

conﬂicts and, by extension, increases regime durability (see Konrad and Mui,

2017;Sudduth and Bell, 2017). Since 1975, for instance, the ruling parties in

Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam have together performed thirteen leadership

successions based on consensual agreement within the respective ruling coali-

tions. By adeptly managing the expectations and procedures surrounding lea-

dership succession, these authoritarian regimes ameliorate problems of

commitment between the leader and their ruling coalition.

Another indicator for judging the quality of authoritarian rule is the status of

elections. A starting point is whether national direct elections are permitted and

occur periodically, which allows the electoral and participatory attributes of

democracy to be mimicked. Across Southeast Asia, Brunei’s authoritarian

regime is currently the only one that pursues the retrograde strategy of forbid-

ding elections entirely. The sophisticated strategy is to obviously allow repeti-

tive national elections. The beneﬁt they confer for a leader and their ruling

coalition is long-term stability via improved capacities for co-optation and

repression (Knutsen et al., 2017:110–112). If popular elections do occur at

the national level, the next issue concerns the level of competition. One of the

most noticeable changes in authoritarian regimes since the end of the Cold War

has been the shift in many of them from uncompetitive to competitive elections

(see Levitsky and Way, 2010;Gandhi, 2015). The retrograde approach involves

elections devoid of meaningful competition in the form of tangible opposition

parties. In Laos and Vietnam, for example, elections are so controlled that the

outcome has little if anything to do with the electoral and majoritarian attributes

of democracy. The sophisticated approach is to have multiparty elections that

not only mimic these attributes but convince citizens that the outcome is

determined by the “will of the people.”Until recently, Cambodia and

Malaysia were the best examples of how authoritarian regimes can calibrate

electoral manipulation in ways that both improve control and foster credibility.

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The need to hold elections hopefully viewed as credible by citizens and

opposition parties points to an important role for election administration bodies.

Such institutions are charged with administering all aspects of elections, includ-

ing the legal framework, planning, training and education, and voter registration

as well as the voting, vote counting, and veriﬁcation of the results. Across the

universe of authoritarian regimes, clear qualitative differences can be seen in

how such institutions perform as veto points on executive excess (Birch, 2011:

109–132). The retrograde arrangement is for an election administration body to

be completely controlled by the ruling party or (suddenly) completely free to

apply election laws and administrative rules impartially. The ﬁrst scenario

reduces the credibility of the electoral process and undermines the mimicry

effort, while the second scenario raises the prospect of a “stunning”election

outcome and makes the mimicry effort disadvantageous (on this event, see

Huntington, 1991: 174–192). In Malaysia, for example, the incumbent National

Front coalition was spectacularly defeated in the 2018 national election when

the election commission called the result in favor of its opponent. A similar

pattern of events toppled Myanmar’s Union Solidarity and Development Party

in 2015.

The sophisticated arrangement, alternatively, is for an election administration

body to perform an ambiguous function. It has both some autonomy and some

partiality, which makes it difﬁcult for citizens and opposition parties to deter-

mine how exactly it inﬂuences the electoral outcome. In Cambodia, for

instance, Hun Sen has covertly cultivated loyalty from the relevant management

bodies before national elections, rather than overtly demanding ex post support

from them after the fact. This tactic was especially evident during the 1998

election, when the national election commission managed to nullify mass

protests by dismissing opposition complaints and ruling in favor of the

Cambodian People’s Party (see Grainger and Chameau, 1998: 1). Besides

reducing the role election administration bodies can play in promoting demo-

cratization (Pastor, 1999), institutionalizing ambiguity around executive inter-

ference has the effect of fostering a better impression that the process and

outcome are free and fair.

To deal with the short-term instability that arises from ﬂawed elections,

some authoritarian regimes implement a range of risk management mea-

sures. One such measure concerns scheduling (see the data by Wig et al.,

2015). The retrograde arrangement is for elections to occur at ﬁxed inter-

vals, which increases the likelihood of regime breakdown (Nygard, 2020).

Between 1994 and 2005, for example, opposition parties in Cambodia

knew in advance when an election would be held. This arrangement

provided them with time to build grassroots infrastructure, select and

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train candidates, raise funds, and, most problematically for the incumbent

Cambodian People’s Party, form coalitions. Another retrograde arrange-

ment is for elections to occur within a ﬁxed interval, but with the timing

determined by extant political processes. For opposition parties in

Indonesia under Suharto (up until 1990) and the Philippines under

Marcos, for instance, this typically meant elections had to occur a certain

number of days after the statutory end of a legislative term. The sophis-

ticated arrangement, by contrast, is for elections to occur at the will and

timing of the ruling party. In Singapore, for example, the People’s Action

Party can call “snap”elections to take advantage of any set of circum-

stances it perceives as favorable to victory (Morgenbesser, 2016b). When

combined with manipulation and misconduct, the ability to call an election

at any time makes it extremely difﬁcult for opposition actors to win, while

still providing authoritarian regimes with the advantages derived from

mimicking the competitiveness of democratic elections.

An additional indicator used to judge the quality of authoritarian rule is the

deployment of systemic parties, which help minimize the short-term instability

of ﬂawed elections. Systemic parties are formal competing parties that lack

autonomy and independence from the leader and/or ruling party (see Reuter and

Robertson, 2014). During elections, such systemic parties help to siphon off

votes from genuine opposition parties, for example, by positioning themselves

at each end of the ideological spectrum. By deploying them, sophisticated

authoritarian regimes provide the pretense of competition without providing

the substance of competition. Ahead of the 1981 presidential elections in the

Philippines, for example, Ferdinand Marcos was dismayed that all the main

opposition parties decided to boycott his sham poll (Celoza, 1998: 63). To lend

credibility to the election, he forced the moribund Nacionalista Party to put

forward a token candidate in the person of Alejo Santos, who was a retired

general with links to Marcos. The ailing “opposition”leader barely campaigned

and could only muster 8.2 percent of the vote. This technique was also utilized

in Indonesia and Vietnam during the 1970s, but it is not used by authoritarian

regimes in Southeast Asia today.

Legislatures are another indicator of the varying quality of authoritarian rule.

In conjunction with the sanctioning of elections, authoritarian regimes around

the world have increasingly institutionalized legislatures since the end of the

Cold War. The only authoritarian regime in the region to rule without

a legislature for a sustained period of time was the State Law and Order

Restoration Council (later the State Peace and Development Council) in

Myanmar. After the National League for Democracy won the 1990 election,

the ruling junta refused to convene a new parliament until January 2011. A more

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recent example is the National Council for Peace and Order in Thailand, which

quickly dissolved the National Assembly after initiating its May 2014 coup.

Aside from having no legislature, another retrograde strategy is to have

a nonelected legislature chosen on the basis of executive privilege, hereditary

right, or social status. In many absolute monarchies, such as that in Brunei, the

selection of legislators is at the discretion of the emir, king, or sultan. This

arrangement fails to mimic the fundamental attributes of democracy, especially

the principles associated with majoritarianism, participation, and

egalitarianism.

The sophisticated strategy is instead to have a legislature directly or indir-

ectly elected by citizens. By allowing popular participation, such legislatures

make it possible for constituents to believe that their views and needs are

formally represented. This mimicry is indicative of higher quality authoritar-

ian rule. The legislatures in Malaysia and Singapore, to cite two obvious

examples, accrue all the known advantages produced by the use of this formal

institution. The foremost beneﬁt is helping to manage problems of commit-

ment between the leader and the ruling coalition (Woo and Conrad, 2019). By

increasing communication and transparency, legislatures reduce the possibi-

lity of misperception regarding compliance to the power-sharing agreement

and, thus, reduce the need for retaliatory action (Gandhi and Przeworski,

2006;Malesky and Schuler, 2010;Schuler, 2018). In essence, an elected

legislature in authoritarian regimes provide a controlled arena to foster bar-

gaining opportunities among political elites without undue public scrutiny and

under the guise of a legal doctrine.

The degree of pluralism found within the legislature is also important for

judging the quality of authoritarian rule. The general beneﬁt of multiparty

legislatures, which denote sophisticated authoritarianism, is that they provide

opposition parties a formal opportunity to pursue their policy agenda and

thereby mimic the deliberative attribute of democracy. A ruling party may be

ﬁrmly entrenched, but the jurisdiction, protocol, and rules embodied by legis-

latures help regulate the prerogatives of power and provide some space for

opposition views. In Singapore, for example, the legislature includes both

“nominated”and “nonconstituency”members of parliament. According to

Rodan (2009: 441), these provisions are “not intended to harness electoral

politics and opposition parties to authoritarian reproduction, but [are] another

element of the broader project of actively fostering alternatives to such compe-

titive politics based on democratic representation.”The general beneﬁt of the

single-party legislatures found in Laos and Vietnam, by contrast, is that they

house the supermajorities required to control the pace and scope of institutional

change. This capacity is critical for making timely amendments to the

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constitution. The drawback of unilateral legislative control, which denotes

retrograde authoritarianism, is that it fails to duplicate the deliberative and

egalitarian attributes associated with legislatures in democracies.

Another indicator useful for describing the quality of authoritarian rule is the

presence or absence of systemic political parties, which are government-created

or government-aligned parties that operate within the legislature (rather than

just during elections). Despite appearing to perform the role of opposition

parties, they lack autonomy from the incumbent leader, ruling party, or military

junta. In the view of March (2009: 507), the value of utilizing such parties is that

this strategy:

Offers lower-level party cadres alternative career paths and thus limits the

risk of defections from the regime, while co-opting opposition elites into

regime sanctioned activity and marginalizing extra-systemic opposition.

Overall, it bolsters regime stability by reducing (particularly electoral) unpre-

dictability, hard-wiring competitiveness.

In Indonesia, for example, Suharto merged nine existing political parties

into the United Development Party and the Indonesian Democratic Party in

order to reduce electoral competition (Liddle, 1978). In parliament, these

systemic parties acted as a “sparring partner”for GOLKAR and eventually

became preoccupied with factional inﬁghting. The beneﬁt produced by

such systemic parties is that their presence, at least in the eyes of unin-

formed or apathetic citizens, mimics the electoral and egalitarian attributes

of democracy.

Cooperative forums and advisory congresses are the ﬁnal two institu-

tional indicators for assessing the quality of authoritarian rule. They are

designed to represent –or pretend to represent –the public interest in the

event that formal state institutions are deemed ineffective but still necessary

by the ruling party (see Richter, 2009). The former is restricted to business,

labor, and other special interest groups, while the latter is focused on the

inclusion of citizens. Both features of sophisticated authoritarianism have

nevertheless been rare across Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, Ferdinand

Marcos sanctioned the creation of an interim National Assembly via the

1973 constitution, which was supposed to be the institutional bridge from

a presidential to parliamentary form of government (Wurfel, 1988:

127–129). The eventual inclusion in the assembly of agriculture, industry,

and youth representatives was a popular move, but it was stacked almost

exclusively with members of the New Social Movement of United

Nationalists, Liberals and Others, which was the umbrella coalition of

Marcos. Between 1978 and 1984, his wife, Imelda Marcos, occupied

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a powerful seat within the chamber. This kind of auxiliary institution helps

regulate the state–society relationship and offer the appearance of greater

representation to citizens, civil society actors, and opposition groups.

Despite the beneﬁt to authoritarian regimes, especially with respect to

mimicking the deliberative and egalitarian attributes of democracy, very

few of them exist today.

Control System

Authoritarian regimes characteristically seek to maintain control over all per-

ceivable sources of opposition. The pursuit of greater control has traditionally

been the purview of the armed forces, intelligence agencies, mass organizations,

presidential guards, regular police, and secret police that take their orders from

leaders and members of the ruling coalition (Greitens, 2016). However, crude

repression is abnormal by contemporary standards. Since the end of the Cold

War, many authoritarian regimes have learnt to exercise control by using subtler

techniques. The varied ways by which they handle mass protests clearly

demonstrates this reﬁnement. A retrograde response will typically dismiss

calls for greater accountability, competition, or participation, while reverting

to a crackdown to end the protests. A more sophisticated response will see the

leader promise token political reforms to subdue the protests –promises that can

be broken after the crisis is averted. Such contrasting approaches are represen-

tative of the qualitative differences among the control systems of authoritarian

regimes (see Table 3). The following section explains this dimension.

The state of the repression practiced by authoritarian regimes offers an

opportunity to draw out the qualitative differences among them. Repression

itself refers to the “actual or threatened use of physical sanctions against an

individual or organization, within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, for the

purpose of imposing a cost on the target as well as deterring speciﬁc activities”

(Davenport, 2007: 2). The broad use of repression is revealing because it

implies that other techniques of control, such as neglect, normative persuasion,

provision of material beneﬁts, and mobilization of symbolic values are ineffec-

tive at maintaining control. The retrograde approach to coercion thus involves

violating the civil and political rights of large segments of the population, with

leaders placing few limits on how they pursue their ideological, personal, or

political goals (see data provided by Wood and Gibney, 2010). Authoritarian

regimes often target this more visible form of coercion at prominent individuals,

key institutions, or large groups of people, such as those involved in mass

protests. The scale of repression observed in Cambodia under the Communist

Party of Kampuchea, Myanmar under the State Law and Order Restoration

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Table 3 Control system

Indicators Retrograde Sophisticated

State of repression

Political terror scale –High or very high ✓

–Moderate ✓

–Low or very low ✓

Coercion intensity –High ✓

–Low ✓

Opposition actors

Defected from regime ✓

Killed ✓

Arrested/imprisoned ✓

Travel ban ✓

Defamation/libel suit ✓

Regulatory infraction ✓

Co-opted into regime ✓

Citizens

Election manipulation –Imbalanced ✓

–Balanced ✓

Election protest –Yes ✓

–No ✓

Election protest outcome –Repression ✓

–Persuasion ✓

Civil society actors

Operational scope –Forbidden ✓

–Permitted ✓

Interference level –Low ✓

–High ✓

Source of enforcement

Repressive agent –Military ✓

–Police ✓

–Presidential guard ✓

–Youth ✓

–Veterans ✓

–Auxiliary group ✓

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Council, and Vietnam under the Vietnamese Communist Party (immediately

after reuniﬁcation) are prominent examples. The problem with such high-

intensity repression is that, rather than eliminating or reducing dissent, it may

stimulate resistance, civil war, economic calamity, international condemnation,

military defections, and refugee crises.

The sophisticated approach to coercion is to use a secure rule of law. This less

visible form of coercion is typically aimed at individuals or groups of minor

importance. Instead of being imprisoned, tortured, or murdered for their poli-

tical views, these people are confronted with low-intensity coercion in the form

of nonphysical harassment, restrictions on assembly, and surveillance, among

other tactics (see the data of Cingranelli et al., 2014). The advantage of this

sophisticated approach is that it more closely mimics the respect for individual

rights and civil liberties embodied under the liberal attribute of democracy. In

Singapore, for example, the People’s Action Party has a long track record of

successfully calibrating repression depending on the identity of the target and

the severity of the threat (see George, 2007). In Brunei, to cite another example,

the government routinely monitors online communications for subversive con-

tent and surveils suspected dissidents using an informant system. The over-

arching focus is to punish individuals it considers to be acting in a seditious way.

Such low-intensity coercion avoids the need for indiscriminate tactics that run

the risk of spurring a mass-led overthrow or an elite-driven coup.

Holding power requires leaders to carefully manage the behavior of their

ruling coalition. Since political elites represent a source of both security and

insecurity, which is due to the lack of an independent arbiter able to enforce

commitments, the strategic interaction between these actors is often fractious

(Svolik, 2009). The varying quality of authoritarian rule is visible in this

context. A retrograde dynamic exists when the ruling coalition is so fractious

that one or more of its members defect to join an existing opposition party or

create a new party. Some notable examples include Sam Rainsy in Cambodia,

Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia, and Juan Ponce Enrile in the Philippines. The most

extreme outcome is when defecting political elites help oust their former master.

A striking feature of the “colored”revolutions that swept through postcommu-

nist Europe and Eurasia, for example, was that individuals who had once been

part of the ruling party ended up leading opposition parties to victory (see Bunce

and Wolchik, 2011). A similar turn of events transpired with respect to Mahathir

Mohamad in Malaysia. He came out of retirement to not only join the opposi-

tion, but to lead it to victory in the 2018 election against the National Front

government he had previously led. A sophisticated dynamic, by contrast, is

denoted by a lack of elite defections and maintenance of unity within the ruling

coalition. Leaders can foster unity by wielding repression against coalition

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members, which increases the costs of disloyalty and makes it a less attractive

option. The downside of this tactic is that it requires leaders to empower the

individuals overseeing the security apparatus, who may constitute a threat in

themselves (Frantz and Kendall-Taylor, 2014). A leader can also foster loyalty

through co-optation, which entails “encapsulating sectors of the populace into

the regime apparatus through the distribution of perks”(O’Donnell, 1979: 51).

Using this tactic enables leaders to established greater control over the ruling

coalition, inducing its members to behave in ways that they otherwise might not.

The presence of opposition leaders –former members of the ruling coalition

or not –raises larger questions about how authoritarian regimes can best control

them and still mimic democratic attributes. Using repression, the aim for leaders

is to deter any activities that threaten the established political order. The way

some authoritarian regimes undertake this task remains essentially unchanged

since the Cold War era. The most retrograde technique is to simply kill oppo-

nents. This is what happened to Benigno Aquino in the Philippines in 1983 –the

only recorded case of an assassination of a prominent opposition leader among

Southeast Asia’s authoritarian regimes since the mid-1970s. Another technique

is to keep opposition leaders under house arrest or conﬁned to prison on

politically motivated charges. This happened to Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia

from 1999 to 2004 (sodomy), Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar throughout the

1990s and 2000s (mostly never formally charged), and Joshua B. Jeyaretnam in

Singapore in 1986 (misreporting party accounts). A related set of techniques

entails preventing these same individuals from ﬂeeing persecution abroad.

Travel bans have been used sporadically in Cambodia, Malaysia, and

Singapore, while in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi was constantly encouraged

to leave and never return. The problem with these retrograde techniques is that

they break an unnecessary number of international human rights laws, while

simultaneously drawing condemnation from civil society actors, international

organizations, and liberal states. Using such methods thus makes it easier for

opposition actors to draw attention to the illiberal conditions confronting them,

thereby raising the cost of repression.

Authoritarian regimes can draw on a range of sophisticated techniques to

deter the activities of opposition leaders without drawing the ire of civil society

actors, international organizations, and liberal states. An increasingly common

technique is to use defamation or libel laws against opposition leaders. In

Singapore, to cite the best known example, each successive prime minister

has ﬁled a civil suit against an opposition leader, often leading the courts to

award vast sums of compensation (Sim, 2011). Exploiting the legal system this

way allows authoritarian regimes capable of such sophistication to allege that

the real problem is a lack of professionalism or honesty on the part of opposition

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leaders, rather than an illiberal intolerance for dissent on the part of incumbent

leaders. Another technique is for the government to ﬁle some sort of regulatory

infraction against any individual, party, or organization perceived as being

supportive of the opposition. In Singapore, Joshua B. Jeyaretnam was impri-

soned in 1986 for false statements he made about party funds, statements he

made only to avoid having those funds impounded as costs in a defamation

lawsuit (Jeyaretnam, 2003). The ﬁnal technique of sophistication involves co-

opting opposition leaders into the bureaucracy, government, or ruling party.

Some of the beneﬁts of submitting to co-option include the opportunity to

advance a career, inﬂuence policy, receive bribes, and secure business contracts.

The routinized co-option activities of the Cambodian People’s Party toward the

National United Front for an Independent, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia

is a typical example (Morgenbesser, 2019b: 164). In sum, there are various

methods by which authoritarian regimes can control the activities of opposition

leaders without resorting to open repression. All of these methods appeal to

liberal ideas about the sovereignty of law and thus help generate the mimicked

democracy associated with sophisticated authoritarianism.

Beyond opposition leaders, the divergent quality of authoritarian rule can be

seen in the way they try to control citizens. Maintaining control is especially

important during election periods, when stunning outcomes and mass protests

can lead to regime change (see Lucardi, 2019). The retrograde strategy is to deal

with these risks through higher levels of intimidation and lower levels of vote-

buying across most of the election cycle. This imbalance characterizes how

national elections proceed in Laos and Vietnam. The problem with engineering

elections this way is that it makes citizens aggrieved by violations of their

political rights, while simultaneously failing to provide them with a material

incentive to accept the outcome. When citizens perceive elections as not being

credible, they are more likely to participate in mass protests (Beissinger, 2007:

263–264; Bunce and Wolchik, 2010:62–64). Such protests, which have

occurred repeatedly in Cambodia and Malaysia, force leaders to choose

between concessions or crackdown. By contrast, the sophisticated strategy is

characterized by lower levels of intimidation and higher levels of vote buying.

Across Southeast Asia, there have been very few elections in which military

juntas, personalist dictators, or single parties have optimized both of these

techniques in combination (Hafner-Burton et al., 2016). An example is

Cambodia’s 2013 election. By using low intimidation against opposition acti-

vists and high vote-buying in rural villages, the Cambodian People’s Party was

able to solicit greater compliance from citizens (Morgenbesser, 2017). The

attainment of such instrumental acceptance from citizens not only lowers the

short-term risks of elections for authoritarian regimes, it allows them to mimic

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the electoral and majoritarian aspects of democracy. It is important to acknowl-

edge that this balanced outcome tends to be the exception rather than the rule in

Southeast Asia.

Authoritarian regimes also need to control civil society actors. Given the

capacity of these groups to assist democratization by providing organizational

resources, strategies, and leadership (Haggard and Kaufman, 2016), addressing

their operational scope is a critical priority. Using the data of Coppedge et al.

(2019: 275), who measure a robust civil society as one that enjoys autonomy

from the state and in which citizens freely and actively pursue their political and

civic goals, it is possible to discern the quality of authoritarian rule. The retro-

grade approach is thus to ban civil society actors entirely, explicitly violating the

participatory attribute of democracy. The authoritarian regimes in Brunei (since

1984), Laos (throughout the 1970s and 1980s), and Cambodia (up to 1993)

pursued such a strategy. The sophisticated approach, which is not without risk,

is to permit civil society actors to operate with few restraints. Despite mimick-

ing the fundamental attributes of democracy, the downside of this approach is

that they are more empowered to organize and lead mass protest. The most

robust civil society found in Southeast Asia over the last four decades, for

example, was observed in Malaysia in 2008. In offering an explanation for the

unprecedented shift against the ruling Nation Front coalition in the general

election that year, Weiss (2009: 743) writes how civil society activists

Were pivotal in developing and articulating a vision for opposition collabora-

tion over the course of the campaign, serving as candidates themselves and

ratcheting up the excitement and quality of the campaign through protests,

media events, and other activities. Such full-on engagement revisited and

escalated past efforts at presenting a coherent alternative to the BN’s‘control’

model and has paid off by whittling down the incumbent coalition’s

dominance.

The approach witnessed in Malaysia is notable for the fact that it better mimics

the participatory attribute of democracy than the forbid approach, but ultimately

worse for authoritarian regimes because it increases the risk of mass protests

targeted at them. Civil society actors are typically pivotal to such events.

Between these two extremes lie an intermediate, and still sophisticated,

approach. It involves the exertion of ﬁner control over civil society actors by

imposing a range of a priori constraints on their operations. The cross-national

time-series data produced by Christensen and Weinstein (2013), which measures

thirteen subtle interference tactics utilized by authoritarian regimes, provides the

source material for this indicator. A starting point is requiring such actors to

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can be vague and subject to delays (as opposed to well-deﬁned and timely). The

resulting barriers to entry are seen in the examples of Cambodia and Vietnam,

where the ruling parties routinely interfere in the registration of civil society

actors. After registration, authoritarian regimes can impose a range of additional

and usually stringent conditions on civil society groups. These include requiring

them to disclose sources of foreign funding, which if applicable leads to further

scrutiny. A variation involves placing restrictions on nongovernment organiza-

tions that receive funding from external sources known to promote democracy

and human rights. This step allows authoritarian regimes to permit autonomous

activity on development issues, while restricting it on political issues. Another

sophisticated technique is to set “out of bounds”lines for civil society actors that

are registered and foreign-funded. In Singapore, for instance, human rights

advocates are often prevented from engaging in the very activities their groups

are registered to engage in, such as advocating for greater political rights and civil

liberties (see Rodan, 2003). The overarching beneﬁt of such an intermediate

approach is that authoritarian regimes do not have to absorb the legitimacy

costs that would arise from forbidding civil society activity altogether, but neither

do they run the risks entailed by permitting it without restraints.

A subsequent question raised by the preceding analysis is who exactly

enforces control on behalf of personalist dictators, military juntas, royal

families, and single parties? At the outset of this section it was stated that the

armed forces, presidential guard, regular police, and secret police have tradi-

tionally been the control actors of choice in authoritarian regimes. All of these

agencies are organizationally and materially outﬁtted to undertake coercion.

The retrograde approach entails efforts to control opposition leaders, citizens,

and civil society actors using one or more of these institutions. From the

extrajudicial killings under martial law in the Philippines in the 1970s and

1980s, to the use of lèse-majesté laws to stiﬂe dissent in contemporary

Thailand, Southeast Asia’s old and new authoritarian regimes have never

shied away from using state actors for coercive purposes. The problem with

using these traditional security forces to crush dissent, however, is that doing so

makes it difﬁcult for leaders to deny responsibility for infringements of the

political rights and civil liberties of citizens. Not only does this approach

nakedly expose the authoritarian foundation of their rule, but it undermines

their ability to mimic the fundamental attributes of democracy.

The sophisticated approach to enforcing repression is more indirect and more

subtle. Authoritarian regimes of this type still use armed forces, presidential

guards, regular police, and secret police, but only as a last resort. Instead, when

applying repression, sophisticated techniques involve the deployment of youth,

veterans, and similar auxiliary groups that claim autonomy from the state. Using

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such actors provides leaders with more plausible deniability than when the

state’s own security agencies repress opponents (Ong, 2018). The Pagoda

Boys in Cambodia, for instance, is an ostensibly independent creation of the

Cambodian People’s Party, known for intimidating and abusing the perceived

enemies of Hun Sen (Pheap and Henderson, 2013). In Myanmar, the State Peace

and Development Council relied upon a group called the Union Solidarity and

Development Association to administer repression. In May 2003, it attacked

a National League for Democracy motorcade that was transporting Aung San

Suu Kyi in Depayin. The attack left scores of opposition activists dead and, after

escaping with injuries, Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested and imprisoned. Other

notable examples from Southeast Asia include the Civilian Home Defense

Force in the Philippines, Youth Organizations in Indonesia, and the People’s

Volunteer Corps in Malaysia (see Carey et al., 2013). The common character-

istic of these groups is that, although they work toward achieving government

goals, their informal afﬁliation allows the same governments to deny responsi-

bility for their actions. This approach decreases the costs of repression for the

authoritarian regimes willing to invest in their creation and use.

Information Apparatus

For authoritarian regimes to rule effectively, they have to be able to identify

sources of political support, detect opponents, and undermine the self-

organizing potential of society. This requirement points to the need for an

effective information apparatus. All leaders, however, face an information

deﬁcit. Despite their power, they “cannot know whether the population genu-

inely worships them or worships them because they command such worship”

(Wintrobe, 1998: 20). The worst possible outcome of this “dictator’s dilemma”

is that authoritarian regimes underestimate the level of dissatisfaction and, by

extension, overlook the risk of mass protests emerging. This dictator’s dilemma

has traditionally solicited a range of responses from authoritarian regimes.

A common thread has been the use of varied institutions and programs designed

to obtain information on the views held by citizens –electronic surveillance,

informants, mass organizations, opinion polls, referendums, secret police, and

so on. The quality of authoritarian rule can be established in this context (see

Table 4).

A starting point is whether leaders have in place a local (neighbourhood-

level) organization that is designed to collect information on the beliefs, grie-

vances, and preferences of citizens. In Laos, to cite the most obvious example,

the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party has never established an institution

capable of gathering information at the grassroots level (Castella et al., 2011).

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In Myanmar, to cite a different example, the State Law and Order Restoration

Council failed to reestablish a network of neighborhood committees upon

coming to power in 1988 (it eventually did so in 1992). The deﬁciency observed

in both cases is understood here to be a sign of retrograde authoritarianism. The

Table 4 Information apparatus

Indicators Retrograde Sophisticated

Collection, production, and dissemination

Local organization –No ✓

–Yes ✓

Digital center –No ✓

–Yes ✓

Media censorship –Rare ✓

–Direct and routine ✓

–Direct but limited ✓

–Indirect but routine ✓

–Indirect and limited ✓

Internet censorship –High or very high ✓

–Low or very low ✓

Propaganda –Direct and visible ✓

–Indirect and invisible ✓

Orientations, schemes, and techniques

Counterclaims –Prohibited and punished ✓

–Allowed and ignored ✓

–Allowed and degraded ✓

–Noted and reconciled ✓

–Noted but indifferent ✓

–Accepted then rejected ✓

Anti-corruption unit –None ✓

–Not independent ✓

–Nominally independent ✓

GONGOs –No ✓

–Yes ✓

Policy institute –Not independent ✓

–Nominally independent ✓

Election observers –None ✓

–Independent ✓

–Nominally independent ✓

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risk of the resulting information deﬁcit is well established: “The unobservability

of private preferences and revolutionary thresholds,”Kuran (1991: 43) wrote in

relation to the fall of the Soviet Union, “concealed the latent bandwagons in

formation and also made it difﬁcult to appreciate the signiﬁcance of events that

were pushing these into motion.”Given this risk, many authoritarian regimes

attempt to ameliorate the dictator’s dilemma by establishing grassroots organi-

zations for collecting information. Across Southeast Asia, such organizations

come in the form of “local cooperatives”in Brunei, “party working groups”in

Cambodia, and a “Feedback Unit”in Singapore, to name but a few examples.

Besides helping to mimic the deliberative aspect of democracy, these organiza-

tions help ruling parties determine their level of support and contribute to the

depoliticization of social unrest. The appreciation of such beneﬁts is a sign of

sophisticated authoritarianism.

The advent of modern communications technology means authoritarian

regimes must also provide digital answers to the dictator’s dilemma. The

growth of social media platforms encourages many citizens to express their

beliefs, grievances, and preferences online, which has triggered two qualita-

tively different approaches. The retrograde strategy is to stiﬂe participation by

permanently or temporarily prohibiting citizens from expressing their views

via such media. In Thailand, the National Council for Peace and Order

resorted to blocking particular social media applications (e.g., Facebook,

Line) it deemed offensive to the monarchy (Solomon, 2017). In Myanmar,

to cite a more extreme example, the State Peace and Development Council

shut down the Internet as it quashed the Saffron Revolution in 2007. Its goal

was to prevent information, photographs, and videos of the crackdown being

published inside and outside of the country. This heavy-handed approach can

notonlyimposecostsontheeconomy,itcanalsohastenthedisintegrationof

the status quo (see Hassanpour, 2014;West , 2 016 ). By blocking the distribu-

tion of information potentially harmful to their survival, authoritarian regimes

using this strategy endow intrinsically insigniﬁcant views with greater trans-

formative force.

The sophisticated strategy is both less direct and more subtle. Instead of

suppression of the Internet, it involves proactive subversion and co-optation of

it. In addition to putting restrictive legal measures into place to oblige Internet

service providers to remove unwanted online content, authoritarian regimes

relying on sophisticated measures employ TCP/IP content and header ﬁltering,

domain name system tampering, denial-of-service attacks, domain deregistra-

tion, server takedowns, patriotic hacking, web brigades, and targeted surveil-

lance using malware programs (see Hellmeier, 2016). In Cambodia, for

example, Internet service providers and cell phone operators are consistently

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told to “cooperate”in blocking websites that “affect Khmer morality and

tradition and the government”(Miller, 2011: 1). This approach has been

accompanied by the development of a digital center (a “Cyber War Team”)

by the Cambodian government. The group is tasked with monitoring and

diffusing information from websites, social media accounts, and other media

outlets in order to “protect the government’s stance and prestige”(Blomberg

and Naren, 2014: 4). Similar setups are found in Singapore and Vietnam. This

optimal approach strikes a balance of permitting individual expression while

preventing collective action. It allows sophisticated authoritarian regimes to

“gather previously hidden or falsiﬁed information about public grievances, to

increase the transparency of the performance of local ofﬁcials, to bolster

regime legitimacy by shaping discourse, and to enhance the mobilization of

their support base”(Gunitsky, 2015: 42). Authoritarian regimes that mufﬂe

the digital expression of beliefs, grievances, and preferences merely com-

pound the dictator’sdilemma.

Controls on the Internet raise wider questions about the production and

dissemination of information. Authoritarian regimes face a dilemma when under-

taking censorship in the information age: too much censorship may fail to shape

the beliefs and preferences of citizens; too little may fail to prevent citizens from

accessing alternative sources of information (Marquez, 2017: 139). The retro-

grade approach, which was observable in Indonesia under Suharto and now Laos

under the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, entails total domination of all means

of mass communication for the sake of orthodoxy. It involves controlling what is

published by Internet websites, newspapers, radio stations, and television chan-

nels through some combination of intimidation, pressure, surveillance, and legal

measures. The problem with this approach is that it may paradoxically reduce

trust in the pronouncements of leaders and members of the ruling coalition, since

citizens come to assume that anything communicated through public channels is

necessarily self-serving (Marquez, 2017: 138). This situation allows rumor and

gossip to ﬁll the public space, which can in turn decrease trust in government and

erode political support in authoritarian regimes (Huang, 2015). Given the draw-

backs of direct and visible censorship, the sophisticated approach is more indirect

and invisible. The most common techniques include the use of aggregators,

audits, ﬁnes, licensing restrictions, ownership laws, stationary shortages, taxes,

and stealth purchasing of media outlets (see Naim and Bennett, 2015). In

Cambodia, for instance, the Phnom Penh Post was hit with a sizeable tax bill

and then sold to a known associate of Hun Sen, who quickly exercised harsh

editorial guidance over its content (O’Byrne, 2018: 1). This change led not only to

less critical coverage of the government, but also less coverage of politics in

general.

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The importance authoritarian regimes attach to censorship extends to propa-

ganda, which is deﬁned as biased or misleading information designed to

promote a particular point of view (see Childs, 1936;Bernays, 2004).

A retrograde strategy involves the indoctrination of the population with com-

prehensive ideologies that promote self-sacriﬁce in the pursuit of goals favored

by those in power. Such strategies have been pursued in Myanmar under the

Burma Socialist Programme Party and the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos,

where the state targeted crude, heavy-handed, and preposterous propaganda at

citizens. Not only is the persuasiveness of this strategy questionable, but it can

backﬁre and worsen the opinion citizens have of leaders and members of the

ruling coalition (Huang, 2018: 1035). Instead of trying to persuade every citizen

of their infallibility, it is more sophisticated for authoritarian regimes to use

propaganda for far limited purposes. The goal is not to convince, but to confuse.

This strategy requires that more savvy protagonists “spread enough versions of

reality to leave the target audience ﬂailing in moral and even factual relativity,

resigned to the unknowability of the world, and unable to ﬁnd the cognitive

basis for policy action”(Wilson, 2015). A few simple examples reveal this

strategy. In Malaysia, thousands of “cyber-troopers”trawled online news sites

and social media postings for information the United Malays National

Organisation could use to attack the opposition and counter its criticisms

(Yangyue, 2014). In Vietnam, the government deploys an online army of

10,000 “opinion-shapers”to post favorable comments about it, criticize pro-

democracy campaigners, and intimidate civil society actors (Nga Pham, 2013).

Such examples reveal the far more targeted nature of propaganda in sophisti-

cated authoritarian regimes.

The need to sow confusion leads authoritarian regimes to target citizens via

a range of additional techniques. A starting point is the expectations citizens

have about whether leaders will acknowledge and respect counterclaims. This

indicator, which relies on data from Coppedge et al. (2019: 148), captures the

varying extent to which citizens have a voice when important policy changes are

being considered. Such a feature is indicative of the majoritarian and delibera-

tive attributes of democracy. The retrograde method is to punish, ignore or

degrade alternative views. In Myanmar, for instance, the ruling Burma Socialist

Programme Party inadvertently encouraged the 1988 mass protests by ﬂatly

dismissing widespread demands for multiparty democracy on extremely

dubious grounds (see Lintner, 1990: 85). The drawback of this approach is

that it has the potential to stoke mass protests, which can lead to the withdrawal

of elite support in the form of a defection cascade (Hale and Cotton, 2017).

A striking feature of the sophisticated method is it overtly acknowledges

alternative arguments initially, only to covertly dismiss them later. In

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Singapore, the People’s Action Party says it values public submissions on

proposed laws, but the government routinely rejects most counterarguments

via a tightly controlled bureaucratic process (Ho, 2010:70–71). By responding,

at least in form, to the expectations citizens have about government responsive-

ness, sophisticated authoritarian regimes are able to more fully mimic the

majoritarian and deliberative aspects of democracy. The intended effect is to

avoid arousing the distrust of citizens in a way that compels them to take to the

streets.

The potential for mass distrust to lead to mass protests is a particularly acute

concern for authoritarian regimes if it occurs against the backdrop of ofﬁcial

corruption. When citizens perceive leaders, political elites, and bureaucratic

ofﬁcials to be acting dishonestly or fraudulently, a common consequence is

mass protests. The likelihood of this event is also higher during economic crises

(Brancati, 2016:9–11). What can authoritarian regimes do to muddle public

perceptions of ofﬁcial corruption? The retrograde option is to do nothing; mean-

ing no specialized anti-corruption unit exists. The cases of Indonesia under

Suharto and Myanmar under military rule are representative here. An intermedi-

ate option is to establish an anti-corruption unit but house it within the govern-

ment. In Brunei and Singapore, for example, highly effective anti-corruption

bodies are run out of the executive branch. Locating them in the executive

protects the leader from being investigated for alleged crimes, while opening

the possibility of targeting investigations at opponents. The sophisticated option

is to establish a nominally independent anti-corruption unit, which sends a false

signal to citizens that there is a powerful actor working to eliminate petty, grand,

and systemic corruption (see Zhu and Zhang, 2017). Across Southeast Asia, the

Anti-Corruption Unit in Cambodia, Counter-Corruption Organization in Laos,

and Anti-Corruption Commission in Malaysia match this description. The last

body played a prominent investigative role during the 1MDB scandal that

engulfed Prime Minister Najib Razak from 2015 onward, but concluded that no

laws had been broken and closed its inquiry (see Holmes, 2016). Despite such

ﬁndings, the existence of an “independent”anti-corruption unit at least provides

the impression that the rule of law is being applied and wrongdoing will be

punished accordingly.

Another sophisticated technique involves stirring cognitive dissonance

among citizens by deploying government-organized nongovernment organiza-

tions (GONGO), which help mimic the participatory attribute of democracy.

Designed to maintain the outward appearance of independence, such organiza-

tions instead subtly advance government positions on key political issues.

“Unhappy with a civil society that independently monitors and challenges

them,”Cooley (2016: 123) writes of the general phenomenon, “authorities

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have been busy building their own tame simulacrum of it that collaborates with

power rather than criticizing it.”Across Southeast Asia, the Pagoda Boy

Association in Cambodia, Myanmar Maternal and Child Welfare Association,

Vietnam Union of Science and Technology Associations, and Singapore

Environment Council are all examples of this technique in action. The beneﬁts

of these organizations for authoritarian regimes is that they create the impres-

sion civil society actors support government policy; undercut the pronounce-

ments of actual nongovernment organizations promoting democracy and human

rights; and lower public perceptions of censorship. Lacking the sophistication to

deploy government-organized nongovernment organizations, some authoritar-

ian regimes must work harder but less efﬁciently to convince citizens that

“democratic”participation is allowed.

A closely related technique of sophistication is the deployment of public

policy institutes that feign independence but actually work at the behest of the

government. As with government-organized nongovernment organizations,

the goal is to create the impression of nonpartisan expert support for author-

itarian rule. In Vietnam, for example, the Communist Party has long been

backed by a network of foundations, institutes, and think tanks that declare

their autonomy from the state. Such groups include the Central Institute for

Economic Management, Development Strategy Institute, and the National

Institute for Science and Technology Policy and Strategy Studies. All claim

legal and scholarly independence, but they depend upon government funding

(Hashimoto et al., 2005:130–134). By positioning these institutes alongside

actually independent policy institutes, the government has more freedom to

ignore or reject competing views in what is a very rigid political system. Such

institutes offer an effective way for governments to feign responsiveness to

counterarguments without allowing truly autonomous groups to participate in

policymaking. Lacking this capability, retrograde authoritarian regimes must

attempt to implement their agenda in a policy environment lacking a pretense

of liberalism and deliberation.

The ﬁnal indicator of the information apparatus dimension concerns the use

of domestic election observation groups. The retrograde approach, which has

long been practiced in Laos and Singapore, is to disallow domestic election

monitors altogether. A consequence of this strategy is that the Lao People’s

Revolutionary Party and People’s Action Party actually draw attention to their

countries’lack of a nonpartisan judge of electoral integrity. In effect, they

lower citizen expectations about the freedom and fairness of elections and, by

extension, undermine efforts to portray their elections as truly democratic (see

Little, 2015). The sophisticated approach to using domestic election observa-

tion groups takes two different but mutually compatible forms. One tactic is to

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allow fully independent organizations (e.g., nonpartisan monitors derived

from civic associations or other networks). In the Philippines, for example,

the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections ﬁelded 500,000 observers

for the 1986 presidential election (Nevitte and Canton, 1997: 52). The

immediate reward of this tactic is that it better guarantees the electoral

attribute of democracy. The potential risk, however, is that the critical assess-

ments of independent groups can be weaponized against the incumbent leader

or ruling party (as the ousting of Ferdinand Marcos dramatically shows).

Another sophisticated tactic is to use nominally independent organizations.

For Indonesia’s 1997 election, for example, Suharto’s GOLKAR established

the Team for Objective Election Monitoring. This initiative was a direct

response to the formation of the Independent Election Monitoring

Committee by a group of prominent intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, stu-

dents, and leaders of nongovernment organizations (see Human Rights Watch,

1996). A rarity across Southeast Asia, the beneﬁt of these nominally indepen-

dent organizations is that they provide an informational counterweight to fully

independent organizations. The result is a less-risky attempt to mimic demo-

cratic procedure.

Development Scheme

The fourth dimension by which it is possible to measure the quality of author-

itarian rule is development scheme. This dimension captures some of the key

indicators underlying the political economy of authoritarian regimes, including

their varying approaches to managing corruption, stimulating growth, pursuing

clientelism, and providing welfare. The core assumption here is that there are

retrograde and sophisticated approaches to development (see Table 5). The

changes observed in China over the last four decades demonstrate the capacity

of authoritarian regimes to pursue a sophisticated approach: instead of only

serving a small and greedy ruling coalition, the Communist Party learned how

to simultaneously address quality-of-life issues and offer improvements in the

standard of living of citizens (Shue and Thornton, 2017). Alongside its accom-

modation of limited civil liberties and political rights, this “development

scheme”allowed the ruling party to claim that it was more accountable to and

representative of citizens. The following section outlines the features and

techniques of this dimension.

Political corruption is a typical feature of authoritarian regimes. The index

produced by Coppedge et al. (2019: 266), which is utilized here, includes

measures of six distinct types of corruption that cover both different areas and

levels of the polity realm, distinguishing between executive, legislative, and

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Table 5 Development scheme

Indicators Retrograde Sophisticated

Frequency of corruption

Political –Constant ✓

–Often ✓

–Occasional ✓

–Never ✓

Executive –Constant ✓

–Often ✓

–Occasional ✓

–Never ✓

Public sector –Constant ✓

–Often ✓

–Occasional ✓

–Never ✓

Co-optation capacity (measured annually)

Military expenditure –Decrease ✓

–Increase ✓

Tax revenue –Decrease ✓

–Increase ✓

Direct investment –Decrease ✓

–Increase ✓

Foreign aid –Decrease ✓

–Increase ✓

Progress Markers (measured annually)

Gross domestic product –Decrease ✓

–Increase ✓

Inﬂation rate ≤2% –No ✓

–Yes ✓

Unemployment rate –Increase ✓

–Decrease ✓

Education spending –Decrease ✓

–Increase ✓

Health care spending –Decrease ✓

–Increase ✓

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judicial corruption. Some of the problems associated with broad political

corruption include reduced government efﬁciency, decreased access to public

goods, lower rates of economic growth, and lower regime legitimacy. Indeed,

when citizens perceive that they are suffering from the injustice of corruption,

they are more likely to participate in mass protests to correct it (Tucker, 2007;

Stekelenburg and Klandermans, 2013). The retrograde situation is when poli-

tical corruption is sufﬁciently pervasive that people expect it as a part of

everyday life. This state of affairs captures Indonesia under Suharto and the

Philippines under Marcos. The sophisticated situation is when political corrup-

tion is perceived to never or only occasionally occur. One such example was

Cambodia throughout the 1980s; the result was that the former Kampuchean

People’s Revolutionary Party under Heng Samrin was better positioned to avoid

public discontent on corruption than the current Cambodian People’s Party

under Hun Sen. The deﬁning feature of corruption in Cambodia today is its

omnipresence.

The problem of authoritarian power-sharing compels leaders to resort to

repression and co-optation in order to manage the behavior of individuals within

the ruling coalition. A common corollary to the delivery of perks, however, is

executive-level corruption. This subtype of political corruption involves senior

regime leaders and political elites routinely taking bribes, kickbacks, or material

inducements, while also stealing, embezzling, or misappropriating public funds

for personal and family use. The underlying data required to measure executive

corruption is again based on the index provided by Coppedge et al. (2019: 267).

In Malaysia, for example, Mahathir Mohamed was known to use centralized

policy channels and executive resources to disburse the spoils of ofﬁce to

political elites in return for their loyalty during elections (Gomez and Jomo,

1997:4;Slater, 2003: 90). The same level of executive corruption is currently

found in Laos, where there is little horizontal accountability to prevent leaders

and members of the ruling coalition from engaging in it. The risk of maintaining

a system based on bribes, kickbacks, and inducements is not only that it can

breed public discontent, but also that political elites who defect or are purged

from the ruling coalition have greater knowledge of how money is typically

stolen, embezzled, and misappropriated (Hollyer et al., 2018). If they are not

properly controlled, such knowledge empowers them to act as critics, whistle-

blowers, or opposition ﬁgures. The example of Sam Rainsy in Cambodia and

Mahathir Mohamed in Malaysia underscore the hazard so posed to some

authoritarian regimes.

A common accompaniment to corruption at the executive level is corruption

within the public sector, which occurs when a government employee (e.g.,

a bureaucrat, police ofﬁcer, or military ofﬁcial) abuses the power entrusted in

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them for private gain. In exchange for bribes, kickbacks, or other material

inducements, these individuals provide preferential treatment to those able

and willing to pay for it (see Coppedge et al., 2019: 267). The variety of public-

sector corruption is almost limitless under retrograde authoritarianism

(although corruption is certainly not unknown in actual democracies). In

Myanmar, for instance, there is a history of illegal payments to public ofﬁcials

responsible for overseeing investment, leases, licenses, and taxation across

most sectors of the economy (Perry, 2009). In Cambodia, to cite another

example, a customs director who earned a US$750 monthly salary managed

to build the biggest mansion in the country on land estimated to be worth

US$18 million (Ponniah and Sokheng, 2015). Notwithstanding differences of

scale, similar corruption existed in Indonesia under Suharto and the Philippines

under Marcos. The risk of public-sector corruption for retrograde authoritarian

regimes is that it engenders a feeling of injustice in citizens, which can –as the

Indonesian example demonstrates –ultimately prompt mass protests that threa-

ten regime survival.

When authoritarian regimes reduce public-sector corruption, they mitigate

it as a stimulus of unrest. The country best known for minimizing corruption in

Southeast Asia is Singapore. Based on the notion that corrupt behavior is

caused by a combination of incentives and opportunities, the People’s Action

Party minimized or removed the preconditions for it after coming to power in

1959 (see Quah, 2011). The Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau, which is

incorporated within the Prime Minister’sOfﬁce, has deftly and efﬁciently

dealt with some high-proﬁle cases over the last few decades. The resulting

lack of institutionalized corruption nevertheless raises questions about how

successive leaders have secured the loyalty of individuals within the ruling

coalition. In Singapore, the ruling party has tied the delivery of perks –be it

high salaries, bureaucratic appointments, commercial contracts, executive

positions, or military promotions –to loyalty toward it (Bellows, 2009;

Barr, 2014). The key difference to other authoritarian regimes in the region

is that the Singaporean regime has also successfully cultivated an accompany-

ing ideology: meritocracy. This ideology is based on the principle of reward-

ing achievement with positions, higher salary, and recognition. Since the early

1970s, the People’s Action Party has made a concerted effort to embed this

principle into society to validate not only the composition of the political elite,

but the perks its members accrue. By propagating the idea that rewards are

distributed according to attitude, character, talent, and work ethic, the ruling

party has moderated both the grievances of citizens and the career aspirations

of political elites. This version of sophisticated authoritarianism is exceptional

in Southeast Asia.

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The Singapore example indicates that corruption and clientelist distribution

are not the only ways to manage the behavior of individual political elites and

engender the collective loyalty of a ruling coalition. The hazards associated

with executive and public-sector corruption can be avoided by using ofﬁcial

government income and expenditure allocations (Schmotz, 2015: 445–448).

The basic claim here is that annual increases in speciﬁc revenue streams can

improve the capacity of leaders to undertake co-optation targeted at the ofﬁcials

who are the beneﬁciaries. By increasing military expenditure each year, for

example, armed forces ofﬁcers are offered an added incentive to maintain

support for a ruling party. Such a strategy is important in countries with

a history of distrust between the military and government, or where the military

is subordinated to the authority of a lone dictator. Despite personalizing power

long ago, for instance, Hun Sen increased military expenditure every year from

2009 to 2015. A sizeable portion of this extra funding was used to pay the

salaries of some 3,000 generals and, subsequently, the armed forces declared

support for the Cambodian People’s Party (Dara, 2017: 1). Across the rest of

Southeast Asia, however, many authoritarian regimes have been reluctant to

increase military expenditure on an annual basis as a way of co-opting senior

members of the armed forces.

Another indicator used to distinguish the quality of authoritarian rule is tax

revenue. The guiding logic is that governments that increase the amount of

money annually collected provide leaders with greater capacity to co-opt

political elites, business tycoons, and security ofﬁcials than governments that

fail to do so. In the view of Levi (1988: 2): “The greater the revenue of the state,

the more possible it is to extend rule. Revenue enhances the ability of rulers to

elaborate the institutions of the state, to bring more people within the domain of

those institutions, and to increase the number and variety of the collective goods

provided through the state.”Across Southeast Asia, for example, Slater (2010:

34–37) demonstrates how the varying capacity of states to extract revenues

from the domestic economy impacts the durability of their authoritarian

regimes. This mechanism of “infrastructural power”was found to be best

practiced in Malaysia (under the United Malays National Organisation) and

Singapore (under the People’s Action Party). Given the known importance of

tax revenue to the survival of authoritarian regimes, annual increases in the total

amount as a percentage of gross domestic product is a useful marker of

sophisticated performance.

Inﬂows of foreign direct investment offer comparable beneﬁts to authoritar-

ian regimes willing and able to accommodate their inﬂuence in national econo-

mies. Foreign investment has been shown to undergird the stability of

authoritarian regimes by generating more patronage resources for leaders to

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buy the tacit support of potential challengers and alleviate related commitment

problems with political elites (see Bak and Moon, 2016). The quality of

authoritarian rule is thus judged according to whether authoritarian regimes

have a decrease (retrograde) or increase (sophisticated) in the amount of foreign

direct investment received on a year-to-year basis. The data required to measure

this indicator it sourced from the World Bank’s (2019) World Development

Indicators data set. Since 1975, the data clearly show that most authoritarian

regimes in Southeast Asia have notable records of accumulating foreign direct

investment. The best performers have been Cambodia and Vietnam, which

achieved annual improvements across 65–70 percent of the country-years

analyzed here. This accomplishment was followed closely by the authoritarian

regimes in Laos, Malaysia and Singapore. The collective record of states across

Southeast Asia to attract, retain, and expand foreign direct investment has

helped reduce the likelihood of coup attempts and other forms of elite defection

by improving the leader’s overall capacity for co-optation.

Authoritarian regimes can also exploit foreign aid ﬂows. The lack of

horizontal and vertical accountability around the delivery of foreign aid

means leaders can use it for the provision of private goods. Higher amounts

of aid increase the capacity of leaders to co-opt members of the ruling

coalition for the sake of regime stability (see Kono and Montinola, 2009;

Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, 2010). In the words of Ahmed (2012: 149),

“The potential fungibility of foreign aid remittances allows actors, in parti-

cular the government, to engage in certain behavior that would not be

possible in the absence of these funds.”The most egregious –yet still

sophisticated –example from Southeast Asia occurred in the Philippines

under Ferdinand Marcos, who personally oversaw the redirection of millions

of dollars of foreign aid into banks owned by his cronies (Sharman, 2017:

91–94). A similar pattern of behavior was demonstrated by Thein Sein in

Myanmar.

The economic health of countries provides other ways to scrutinize the quality

of authoritarian rule. As well as being markers of economic progress, gross

domestic product growth rate, the rate of inﬂation, and level of unemployment -

all indicators drawn upon here - are relevant because the improved economic

conditions they signify provide authoritarian regimes with a means tosolicit some

degree of compliance, obedience, and/or support from citizens. The most

perceptive leaders do not just allow members of the ruling coalition to hoard

wealth, they also draw a direct link between economic development, citizen

satisfaction, and regime survival (see Dickson, 2016). In the view of Neundorf

et al. (2019:3),

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Inclusionary autocracies tend to redistribute more of their political and

economic resources toward their citizens to create a broad public support

base. In contrast, exclusionary autocracies follow the opposite route and

channel political inﬂuence and economic beneﬁts to a small group of privi-

leged (and, therefore, loyal) individuals who help the leader survive in power.

Across Southeast Asia, higher than world-average economic performance has

been the norm (see World Bank, 2019). In Singapore, for example, unemploy-

ment has averaged 4.0 percent since data became available in 1991. In Vietnam,

per capita income has increased in all but three years since the proclamation of

doi moi (renewal) in 1986. The ruling parties in Cambodia and Laos have

achieved similar success. Even though corruption and clientelism continue to

be severe problems in many countries, the overarching regional story is of

a development scheme that assigns importance to improving standards of living.

By way of comparison, gross national product growth rate, inﬂation, and

unemployment all trended in the wrong direction in the three years prior to

the ousting of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia,

helping to trigger these fatal crises.

An effective development policy offers authoritarian regimes opportunities

to provide public welfare to citizens. The delivery of social policy programs

have been shown to have positive effects on the lifespan of authoritarian

regimes because they lend credibility to the future commitments ruling parties

make to citizens (see Magaloni, 2006;Knutsen and Rasmussen, 2018).

Effectively, some welfare beneﬁts work as mechanisms of co-optation.

Authoritarian regimes can distribute welfare in ways that channel resources

to relevant groups and divert it from groups that they perceive to be irrele-

vant. In Singapore, for instance, the People’s Action Party explicitly linked

the upgrading of Housing and Development Board estates, which housed

approximately 85 percent of citizens, to votes for it in the 1997 election

(Eng and Kong, 1997: 450). The ruling party, in fact, has a long record of

making greater public welfare contingent on political support at the polls (see

Miller, 2015). To judge the quality of authoritarian rule, World Bank data are

used to determine whether authoritarian regimes decreased (retrograde) or

increased (sophisticated) annual spending on education and health care (as

a percentage of gross domestic product). Despite being just two of many

potential indicators of public welfare, they have traditionally been the most

common types of welfare spending in autocracies (Desai et al., 2009:95–96).

The varying importance of public welfare to authoritarian regimes is never-

theless indicative of the contrasting approaches they take to addressing

quality-of-life issues among citizens.

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International Conduct

Scholars have recently begun to pay far more attention to the international

behavior of authoritarian regimes. One trigger for this sudden interest was

Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, which aimed to derail

the candidacy of Hillary Clinton in favor of Donald Trump. The brazenness of

this attack pointed to what some scholars believe to be a wider phenomenon: the

internationalization of authoritarian rule (Diamond et al., 2016). Despite

a burgeoning body of supporting scholarship, the notion that authoritarian

regimes are increasingly trying to roll back democracy has been criticized on

conceptual, theoretical, and empirical grounds (see Tansey, 2016b;Brownlee,

2017;Weyland, 2017). This debate is nevertheless useful for distinguishing the

quality of authoritarian rule because it alludes to the use of retrograde and

sophisticated techniques. The following section therefore outlines the indicators

of this dimension (see Table 6). Approaches used by authoritarian regimes when

engaging internationally are grouped into two categories: defensive techniques

used to protect authoritarian regimes from various international pressures and

offensive techniques used to promote the interests of authoritarian regimes in

the international arena.

The contrasting approaches authoritarian regimes take to international law

offers a starting point for analysis. Particularly relevant are prominent human

rights agreements, including but not limited to the Convention on the

Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), International

Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966), International

Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the Convention against

Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

(1984). Scholars have offered multiple reasons for why authoritarian regimes

participate in legal regimes designed to establish and monitor compliance with

human rights standards. Such reasons include the need to imitate their neigh-

bors (Simmons, 2009), help end civil violence (Simmons and Danner, 2010),

relieve pressure for political change (Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui, 2005),

encourage citizens to treat violations as a defense of their country (Gruffydd-

Jones, 2019), and reap the rewards of compliance without living up to their

legal commitments to actually protect human rights (Hathaway, 2002).

Notwithstanding the individual motives of authoritarian regimes, the lack of

international enforcement mechanisms means the beneﬁts of participation in

human rights agreements typically outweigh the costs of abstention from

them.

Southeast Asia’s authoritarian regimes have made divergent choices

regarding international human rights agreements. The most retrograde

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approach has been taken by Brunei, which is a ratifying party to only the

Convention on the Rights of the Child, Convention on the Elimination of

All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and Convention on Persons

with Disabilities. Substantive abstention from most international agree-

ments reveals a reluctance on the part of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah to

demonstrate a normative belief that international human rights laws

ought to be obeyed. The costs of nonconformity would arguably be higher

if Brunei had greater economic, political, and social linkages to the inter-

national system. A more sophisticated approach is taken by Laos and

Table 6 International conduct

Indicators Retrograde Sophisticated

Defensive techniques

Human rights ratiﬁcation –No ✓

–Yes ✓

UNHRC membership –No ✓

–Yes ✓

UNSC criticism –Yes ✓

–No ✓

Economic sanctions –Yes ✓

–No ✓

UNSC veto –No ✓

–Yes ✓

Offensive techniques

Election observers –None ✓

–Professional ✓

–Shadow ✓

Ruling party alliance –No ✓

–Yes ✓

Public relations ﬁrm –No ✓

–Yes ✓

Think tank –No ✓

–Yes ✓

Overseas radio station –No ✓

–Yes ✓

Overseas television station –No ✓

–Yes ✓

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Cambodia, which are ratifying parties to nine and ten agreements, respec-

tively (a total of twelve agreements comprise the legal framework of the

international human rights regime as of 2015). This pattern of conformity

provides an array of beneﬁts not available to other authoritarian regimes in

Southeast Asia. Over the past several years, for example, the Cambodian

government has repeatedly breached the Convention Relating to the Status

of Refugees (1951) by forcibly extraditing Uighur and Montagnard asylum

seekers back to China and Vietnam. Despite condemnation of this action

by the United Nations, Hun Sen’s government has used its high rate of

ratiﬁcation as a marker of its democratic credentials and as a legal counter-

foil to criticism of its human rights records. Ultimately, the lack of

enforcement mechanisms attached to human rights agreements reduces

the costs of ratifying them for authoritarian regimes.

An added safeguard is for authoritarian regimes to attain and retain

membership on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

Ofﬁcially responsible for promoting and protecting human rights around

the world, this institution has been under sustained assault in recent

years. According to Nathan (2016: 34), China has used its position on

the body to promote the principle of universality, which aims to reduce

the degree to which individual countries are singled out for attention.

This strategy has allowed the Communist Party to blunt criticism of its

human rights record, while collaborating with other authoritarian regimes

to defend common interests. Across Southeast Asia, authoritarian regimes

in Myanmar and Singapore have completely forgone participation on the

council, while Malaysia has been a fairly regular member of it since ﬁrst

joiningin1993(seeUnited Nations, 2018a). This membership provided

the United Malays National Organisation an avenue to deﬂect criticism of

how it has used the Sedition Act (1948) and Internal Security Act (now

repealed and replaced) to curb political rights and civil liberties.

Unsurprisingly, the government also used membership to mimic its appar-

ent respect for the egalitarian and liberal attributes of democracy:

“Throughout its tenure as a HRC member,”Foreign Minister Anifah

Aman (Free Malaysia Today, 2017) previously claimed, “Malaysia played

an active role in the promotion and protection of human rights at the

multilateral level.”Beyond this isolated example of sophisticated author-

itarianism, the remaining authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia have so

far foregone the opportunity to use the UNHRC as a platform to defend

themselves.

Another measure of authoritarian regimes’capacity to defend their beha-

vior –and hence of their sophistication –is whether they are criticized by the

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United Nations Security Council (UNSC). In accordance with its mandate of

maintaining international peace and security, the council has repeatedly made

human rights abuses perpetrated by authoritarian regimes an agenda item (see

United Nations, 2018b). Suharto’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, Hun Sen’s

1997 coup, and Than Shwe’s suppression of the 2007 Saffron Revolution were

all criticized by the Security Council. In addition to offering a signal to

citizens of how their country is negatively perceived internationally, an

ofﬁcial resolution can sometimes be a step toward collective punishment in

the form of armed intervention, sanctions, or referral to the International

Criminal Court.

The ability to avoid the imposition of sanctions is thus treated as another

measure of sophistication. Across Southeast Asia, the authoritarian regimes

previously targeted with economic sanctions by the United States or United

Nations include Cambodia (1975–1979), Indonesia (1991–1997), Thailand

(1992), and Myanmar (1988–2016). Not only does the imposition of sanctions

raise the risk of instability for authoritarian regimes (see Escriba-Folch and

Wright, 2010;Marinov and Nili, 2015), but it demonstrates their failure to have

the Security Council resolution vetoed by one of its permanent ﬁve members. In

the early 1990s, for example, multiple Security Council resolutions regarding

the establishment of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia

were passed without veto.

Aside from adopting defensive techniques to shield themselves from criti-

cism, authoritarian regimes can also use offensive techniques. In the last

decade, for example, China and Russia have devoted increased energy to

undermining international norms, repurposing regional organizations, curtail-

ing human rights, and exploiting democratic institutions. The success these

authoritarian regimes have enjoyed has led to emulation by authoritarian

regimes across Africa, Central Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East

(see Cooley, 2016). In Southeast Asia, the record is far more mixed, which

provides an opportunity to learn about the varying quality of authoritarian

rule.

A very recent innovation of some authoritarian regimes is the use of interna-

tional election observation groups (which are not to be confused with the

domestic election observation groups discussed earlier). Beginning in the late

1980s, the number of elections monitored by intergovernmental organizations,

nongovernmental organizations, and sovereign states increased substantially.

Such monitoring brought increased criticism of the behavior of authoritarian

regimes (Hyde, 2011:9–15; Kelley, 2012:28–34). The contradictory

imperatives of holding clean elections and holding power forced them

into either formal noncompliance with the emerging norm (i.e., by

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forbidding all professional observation teams) or substantive compliance

(i.e., by allowing unfettered professional observation). The new and sophis-

ticated strategy is to engage in mock compliance, which entails outward

appearance of compliance through the use of “shadow”election observation

groups (Debre and Morgenbesser, 2017). In Cambodia, for example, the

ruling party has twice deployed the International Conference of Asian

Political Parties and the Centrist Asia Paciﬁc Democrats International to

validate its highly ﬂawed elections. By encouraging positive evaluations of

their elections, and thus creating an environment steeped in factual relativ-

ity, leaders and ruling parties undermine the justiﬁcation opposition parties

might otherwise have for undertaking protests in the aftermath of the

election. Endorsements by shadow observation groups help sophisticated

authoritarian regimes proclaim their adherence to electoral democracy,

while also offering a useful counterfoil to international criticism. By failing

to employ shadow observation groups, retrograde authoritarian regimes go

without these beneﬁts.

Another sophisticated technique of international conduct involves forming

cooperation pacts with ruling parties in different countries. Such pacts are formal

agreements to provide mutual support for the maintenance of authoritarian rule

(see Burnell, 2017). The ruling United Russia party, for example, has forged

approximately forty agreements with incumbent (and opposition) parties around

the world. In 2015, both the Cambodian People’s Party and Vietnamese

Communist Party signed deals with United Russia. A copy of the conditional

agreements, which was obtained by this author, include commitments to hold

joint consultations, exchange information on current issues, undertake organiza-

tional work, and carry out party building, among other areas of mutual interest.

Despite the secrecy of such deals, they have proven to be a foundation for

extensive and beneﬁcial cooperation. Such cooperation includes diplomatic sup-

port for pariah countries, economic support for insolvent governments, ideologi-

cal support for far-right causes, and political support for fraudulent elections (see

Risse and Babayan, 2015;Tansey, 20 16a ). Given that this technique is still in its

infancy, it is clear Southeast Asia’s ruling parties have an opportunity to gradually

develop a deeper network of party-based alliances.

The low rate of adoption of the previous two techniques does not extend to

the next technique: hiring public relations ﬁrms in Washington, DC. Several

recent reports have noted an increase in the number of authoritarian regimes

around the world that pay these groups millions of dollars to promote a positive

image of their human rights records, speciﬁcally by drafting letters, lobbying

lawmakers, issuing press releases, and monitoring and responding to media

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reports (Quinn, 2015). Apart from Brunei and Laos, every authoritarian regime

in Southeast Asia has used these ﬁrms at one point in time (see the data at United

States Department of Justice, 2019). An early adopter of this technique was

Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. In 1977, he paid Doremus & Company

US$500,000 –approximately US$2 million today –to improve the public

image of his regime in the United States, then dominated by negative views

of his imposition of martial law (Sloan, 1978: 3). During the 1990s, Suharto’s

New Order regime paid millions of dollars to Hill & Knowlton to improve

international opinion of its policies toward East Timor (Dhani et al., 2015: 29).

After the 1997 coup, the Cambodian People’s Party paid several hundred

thousand dollars to Porter Wright Morris & Arthur. The ﬁrm was tasked with

quashing a US Senate resolution that criticized Hun Sen for being the sole

abuser of human rights in Cambodia (Grainger, 1998: 2). Despite outstanding

questions about the effectiveness of hiring public relations ﬁrms, adopting this

technique at least provides authoritarian regimes an opportunity to promote

their image and is a sign of sophistication.

The goal of improving how authoritarian regimes are viewed within the

United States gives rise to another technique of international conduct: the use

of think tanks. Some authoritarian regimes fund such organizations in exchange

for positive analysis of their domestic and international behavior. The Atlantic

Council, which is based in Washington, DC, has accepted large donations from

Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Across Southeast Asia, only a few authoritarian regimes have practiced this

technique. Between 2001 and 2004, the Malaysian government paid Belle

Haven Consultants to enhance its image and build closer ties with policymakers

in the United States. The public relations ﬁrm was cofounded by the president of

the Heritage Foundation, Edwin J. Feulner, who steered the latter toward a pro-

Malaysian outlook. The foundation hosted speeches of visiting dignitaries,

organized research trips, published reports, and manipulated critical commen-

tary (Edsall, 2005). Another example is the Center for Strategic and

International Studies, which has long received donations from Singapore and

Vietnam. In 2014, for instance, the center published a report titled A New Era in

US–Vietnam Relations, which criticized pro-democracy actors and white-

washed the Communist Party’s human rights record. An exposé later found

that the report and many other activities of the organization were directly

ﬁnanced by the Vietnamese government (Rushford, 2017). This affair demon-

strates that, at least in the short term, there are tangible beneﬁts for those

authoritarian regimes sophisticated enough to provide discreet funding to

think tanks in the United States.

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The ﬁnal technique pertinent to distinguishing the quality of authoritarian

rule is the operation of radio and television stations overseas. The most

successful examples are China Radio International (a state-run agency oper-

ating a covert global radio web) and Russia Today (a global television network

funded by the Russian government). Authoritarian regimes use these techni-

ques to expand the reach of censorship and propaganda beyond their borders

(Ioffe, 2010;Qing and Shiffman, 2015). To strengthen their impact, such

outlets have vague ownership and editorial models that provide ambiguity

about their organizational independence, while also mimicking the production

styles and contentious formats employed by major media outlets in democ-

racies (Puddington, 2017:19–20). Apart from Brunei, Cambodia, and the

Philippines, authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia have an established

track record of deploying radio and/or television stations to advance their

external interests. A few notable examples include Lao National Radio (con-

trolled by the People’s Revolutionary Party), Myawaddy TV station (managed

by the Burmese military), Vietnam Television (owned by the Communist

Party of Vietnam), and Voice of Malaysia (overseen by the Ministry of

Communications and Multimedia under the National Front coalition). In

much the same way as other techniques grouped within the international

conduct dimension, deploying radio or television stations overseas has

known low costs and potentially high rewards. The fact that some authoritar-

ian regimes discount this dividend entirely while others exploit it underscores

the differences between retrograde and sophisticated authoritarianism. The

speciﬁc focus of the latter technique is to buttress existing censorship and

propaganda activities, but the broader goal might be to challenge the liberal

international political order.

4 Retrograde and Sophisticated Authoritarianism

in Southeast Asia

The last section introduced the full set of indicators selected to measure the

quality of authoritarian rule in this Element. By combining existing and original

research into a uniﬁed analytical framework, this set of indicators offers a novel

way to understand authoritarian politics. The dividing line between retrograde

and sophisticated authoritarianism was whether a feature or technique was

implicitly known to confer an advantage, beneﬁt, or dividend on authoritarian

regimes and/or whether it explicitly mimicked the fundamental attributes of

democracy. To fully account for the evolution of authoritarian rule in Southeast

Asia, the next section goes a step further. Using a typology, which was intro-

duced in section two, it demonstrates how authoritarian regimes in the region

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perform over time with respect to all the indicators viewed in combination. This

descriptive story is displayed in the form of a scale that classiﬁes authoritarian

regimes into two categories: retrograde authoritarianism and sophisticated

authoritarianism.

The QoA data set is what gives this typological classiﬁcation scheme empiri-

cal tractability. This original data set covers nine countries in Southeast Asia

from 1975 to 2015 (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar,

Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam). Thailand is excluded because of

a distinct lack of regime continuity, whereby there were six alternations between

autocracy and democracy over the four decades under analysis. The authoritar-

ian country-years for the nine cases are sourced from Boix et al. (2013), who

provide a dichotomous measure of democracy for all sovereign countries. In

accordance with the aforementioned theoretical framework, the QoA data set

captures all seventy-three indicators summarized in the preceding text. For

readers seeking further details, the corresponding codebook (Morgenbesser,

2020) details how each indicator is coded, ordered, and sorted into the ﬁve

dimensions described earlier (institutional conﬁguration, control system, infor-

mation apparatus, development scheme, and international conduct). The result

is 22,776 country-year observations.

The typology created to classify retrograde and sophisticated authoritar-

ianism is “put to work”here in two distinct ways. The ﬁrst step is to

convert the aggregate level data from the QoA data set into a standardized

score. This process is achieved via the following equation: the sum of

indicators for each country-year is divided by the number of applicable

indicators, then multiplied by the chosen scale of 100. A simple example

will help illustrate this logic. In 2015, Laos and Vietnam scored 5.4 and

7.9, respectively, out of ﬁfteen indicators for institutional conﬁguration.

This converts to 45.5 and 66.0 points on a scale ranging from retrograde

(0) to sophisticated (100). Standardizing the data this way makes it easy to

assess the quality of authoritarian rule across different regime classiﬁcation

schemes, time periods, and individual cases. The second step is to categor-

ize retrograde and sophisticated authoritarianism as distinct forms. Since

the crucial distinction is whether an authoritarian regime possesses

aminority or majority of indicators, a standardized score of 50 is con-

sidered to be the dividing line. Applied to the previous example, this

would make Laos retrograde and Vietnam sophisticated (for that dimension

in that year). Operationalizing the typology this way means it is possible to

make a straightforward distinction between different forms of authoritarian

rule.

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The overall picture shows signiﬁcant variation within and across authoritar-

ian regimes, but a trend toward greater sophistication over time. This is how the

evolution of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia should be understood.

Broad Patterns

The broad patterns identiﬁed here are pertinent to a range of ongoing debates

within the ﬁelds of comparative democratization and Southeast Asian politics.

The inclusiveness and size of the QoA data set, which works across several

research streams, provides new opportunities for studying authoritarianism in

a region traditionally known for putting up obstacles to such inquiries (Slater,

2008: 57). In as much as this Element is concerned with the staying power of

authoritarianism, rather than the moving power of democratization, the ﬁndings

provide insight into the varying performances of personalist dictators, military

juntas, royal families, and single parties. The set of cases include short-lived and

clearly retrograde authoritarian regimes such as the Communist Party of

Kampuchea (1975–1979), but also long-lasting and noticeably sophisticated

regimes such as that of the Vietnamese Communist Party (1954–). By distin-

guishing authoritarian rule according to its quality, it becomes possible to

identify new forms of variation in a region already abundant with it. At the

same time, it becomes possible to situate the study of Southeast Asia within

larger theoretical debates about the nature of contemporary authoritarian rule.

The ﬁve dimensions created to organize all the indicators are a useful starting

point for analysis. Irrespective of the case-speciﬁcﬁndings, Figure 1 shows that

there is signiﬁcant variation across institutional conﬁguration, control system,

100

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Standardized score

Institutional configuration Control system Information apparatus

Development scheme

International conduct

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 1 Quality of authoritarian rule by dimension

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information apparatus, development scheme, and international conduct.

Despite the wealth of research on the institutional diversity of authoritarian

regimes in Southeast Asia (Case, 1996;Mauzy, 2006;Pepinsky, 2015), for

instance, the ﬁgure shows that the overall level of sophistication on the institu-

tional conﬁguration dimension has only slightly increased since the mid 1970s.

By contrast, there has been a marked trend toward greater sophistication in

information apparatus and international conduct, with scores increasing 33.7

and 15.9 points, respectively, over the period. Higher sophistication in the

information apparatus dimension is partly due to the use of new techniques

for collecting, producing, and disseminating information (especially via the

Internet) and the reliance upon different orientations, schemes, and techniques

(e.g., acknowledging and accepting counterclaims). Higher sophistication in

international conduct is due mainly to the fact that authoritarian regimes have

increasingly used shadow election observation groups and ratiﬁed international

agreements on a variety of human rights issues. Despite these changes, the

degree of similarity between at least three of the dimensions implies that greater

variation might be found within and across Southeast Asia’s authoritarian

regimes.

A second broad trend addresses the standard classiﬁcation of authoritarian

regime types. The most established “continuous”typology, which attempts to

measure their distance from the root concept of democracy, is comprised of

competitive authoritarian regimes (elections with competition), hegemonic

authoritarian regimes (elections without competition), and closed authoritarian

regimes (no elections). The key conceptual challenge here concerns how to

separate competitive and uncompetitive elections, which has produced a variety

of measures (see Magaloni, 2006;Schedler, 2013). An arbitrary yet conven-

tional way of distinguishing competitive and hegemonic regimes is whether the

winning candidate or party receives over 70 percent of the popular vote in

elections (Levitsky and Way, 2002;Howard and Roessler, 2006). Using this

criterion, Figure 2 takes the combined sample of 312 country-years to show the

quality of authoritarian rule organized according to these three regimes types.

The ﬁrst observation is the collective failure of closed authoritarian regimes –

predominantly Brunei, Laos, and Myanmar –to improve the quality of their

rule. This ﬁnding is unsurprising given how many indicators within the frame-

work revolve around elections (a core procedure of democracy offering a range

of advantages to authoritarian regimes sophisticated enough to adopt it).

The second observation is that hegemonic authoritarian regimes, especially

Cambodia and Vietnam, have become more sophisticated over the same time

period. Despite maintaining elections without choice, the standardized score for

hegemonic authoritarian regimes improved 14.5 points to end up nearly on par

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with competitive authoritarian regimes. This trend was no doubt aided by the

positive changes made under Thein Sen’s Union Solidarity and Development

Party between 2011 and 2015. The ﬁnal observation concerns competitive

authoritarian regimes, which were expected to be the most sophisticated per-

formers. The cases of Malaysia (continuously competitive) and Singapore

(intermittently competitive) were largely responsible for this trend.

Another closely related trend concerns authoritarian regime subtypes. This

term is a product of the categorization schemes designed to show the similarities

and differences among authoritarian regimes (rather than measuring the degree

of autocracy and democracy, as with the types discussed in the preceding

paragraph). The most established of the “categorical”approaches disaggregates

authoritarian regimes according to who has discretion over personnel, policy,

and the distribution of rewards (see Geddes et al., 2014). The resulting schema

identiﬁes military, monarchical, personalist, and party regimes (along with

amalgamations of them). Using this typology, Figure 3 takes the existing sample

of 312 country-years to show the quality of authoritarian rule organized accord-

ing to these four regime subtypes. The ﬁrst observation is the low quality of

authoritarian rule attributable to military juntas (e.g., Myanmar) and monarch-

ical families (e.g., Brunei). Overlooking the 2010 transformation of Than

Shwe’s State Peace and Development Council into Thein Sein’s Union

Solidarity and Development Party, it is clear that both subtypes are character-

ized by the persistence of retrograde authoritarianism. The second observation

concerns the scores for the personalist dictatorships of Ferdinand Marcos in the

Philippines (from 1973 onward) and Hun Sen in Cambodia (from 2005 onward

according to Morgenbesser, 2018). Despite holding power in different countries

100

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Standardized score

Competitive authoritarian Hegemonic authoritarian Closed authoritarian

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 2 Quality of authoritarian rule by regime type

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and different historical eras, both practiced a similar form of retrograde author-

itarian rule. A simple comparison of their standardized scores across the same

amount of time shows that Ferdinand Marcos averaged 43.4 points and Hun Sen

averaged 47.0 points. The ﬁnal observation focuses on the steadily increasing

sophistication of party-based regimes, such as those in Laos, Malaysia,

Singapore, and Vietnam. A key insight here is the difference between the

Cold War and post-Cold War eras. From 1975 to 1991, the average standardized

score for party-based regimes in the region was 43.2 points per year. From 1992

to 2015, however, it increased to an average of 52.2 points. Given that the

standardized scores for the other regime subtypes remained mostly static, this

ﬁnding shows single parties had greater propensity and capacity for adaptation

in the post-Cold War era.

At this stage it is worth repeating that the goal of this Element is not to explain

episodes of democratization in Southeast Asia. The focus is on the continuity of

authoritarian rule. Given the democratic transitions witnessed in the Philippines

(1986) and Indonesia (1999), however, it is worth brieﬂy examining these cases.

At the indicator level, the data show many similarities and differences across the

ﬁve dimensions used to sort the features of authoritarian rule in these two cases.

Highly sophisticated institutional conﬁgurations were in operation under

Ferdinand Marcos and Suharto, who averaged 67.7 and 65.5 points over the

course of their respective reigns. This performance is on par with the ruling

parties residing in Singapore and Vietnam (discussed later). Another similarity

can be observed with respect to international conduct, which over time increased

23.6 points in the Philippines and 37.7 points in Indonesia. This shared improve-

ment is explained by a mutual appreciation for membership on the UNHRC,

allowing professional observation groups to observe elections, and hiring public

100

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Standardized score

Military juntas Monarchical families

Personalist dictators Single parties

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 3 Quality of authoritarian rule by regime subtype

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relations ﬁrms based in Washington, DC. The critical difference between the

Philippines and Indonesia is the source of deterioration. Under Ferdinand Marcos,

there was no net improvement in information management between 1975 and

1985 (it was ﬁxed at a retrograde 27.5 points). Under Suharto, the score for

control system steadily declined between 1975 and 1998 (starting at

a sophisticated 66.3 points and ending at a retrograde 46.7 points). This ﬁnding

lends support to the argument that GOLKAR’s“usual techniques of political

control were beginning to falter”by the middle of the 1990s (Aspinall, 2005:

178). The emergence of a less sophisticated and more retrograde control system

foreshadows what subsequently occurred in Malaysia under Najib Razak.

A combined standardized score for the quality of authoritarian rule in the

Philippines and Indonesia is displayed in Figure 4. This aggregate level measure

shows that the rule of Ferdinand Marcos was characterized by a downturn toward

retrograde authoritarianism from 1981, ﬁve years before the eventual collapse of

his regime, while Suharto’s New Order was characterized by neither signiﬁcant

deterioration nor improvement over the ﬁnal two decades it remained in power.

To the extent that failure to pursue sophisticated authoritarianism can be

a precursor for regime change, the examples of the Philippines and Indonesia

offer a cautionary tale for authoritarian regimes elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Individual Cases

The aim of this Element is to explain the evolution of authoritarian rule in

Southeast Asia using a theoretical framework that identiﬁes alternative quali-

tative forms. The preceding section focused on four broad patterns concerning

100

1975

1976

1977

1978

1979

1980

1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

1988

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

Standadized score

Indonesia Philippines

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 4 Quality of authoritarian rule by democratization episode

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the quality of authoritarianism across the region: dimension, regime type,

regime subtype, and democratization episode. What does the framework tell

us about particular countries? In this section, case-speciﬁcﬁndings for Brunei,

Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, and Vietnam are presented.

The absolute monarchy of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah in Brunei is the least studied

authoritarian regime in Southeast Asia, rarely featuring in multicountry studies, let

alone single-country works. This neglect is presumably due to Brunei’ssmall

population size (approximately 450,000), its geographical isolation from similar

regime subtypes (especially in the Middle East), and its vast reserves of crude oil

and natural gas (making it one of the wealthiest countries in the world). The last

condition, in fact, has been shown to prolong the survival of authoritarian regimes

(Ulfelder, 2007;Wright et al., 2015) and the resulting absence of signiﬁcant

political change in Brunei lessens its appeal as a case of interest for scholars.

Nonetheless, the data on the quality of authoritarian rule in Brunei offers a picture

of relative stagnation (see Figure 5). Over the course of three decades, the ﬁgure

below shows that Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah has failed –in relative terms –to

develop a more sophisticated form of authoritarian rule. In relation to information

apparatus, for example, the only innovations were a local organization designed to

collect information about citizens and an anti-corruption body lacking indepen-

dence. A few small improvements have occurred in institutional conﬁguration and

control system, but a lack of political pluralism and small state status provide few

incentives to adopt a more sophisticated form of rule. Ultimately, the retrograde

nature of authoritarianism in Brunei makes it clear that sophistication is not

necessary for regime survival, provided that the regime retains other features and

techniques that can prolong its time in power.

100

1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Standardized score

Institutional configuration Control system

Information apparatus Development scheme

International conduct

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 5 Quality of authoritarian rule in Brunei

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The picture of authoritarian rule practiced in Brunei differs to what is

observed in Cambodia. Here the data captures signiﬁcant alternation between

retrograde and sophisticated authoritarianism (see Figure 6). Between 1975 and

1979, the Communist Party of Kampuchea under Pol Pot offered an extremely

retrograde form of authoritarian rule. The goal of engineering a rapid and

wholesale revolution led to changes that were so extensive that they left behind

“[n]o institutions of any kind –no bureaucracy, no army or police, no schools or

hospitals, no state or private commercial networks, no religious hierarchy, no

legal system”(Gottesman, 2003: x). This low baseline helps explain the shift

toward sophisticated authoritarianism throughout the 1980s, when the timing of

elections, mode of selection for the legislature, and the balance between low-

and high-intensity coercion changed. The intervention of the United Nations

Transitional Authority in Cambodia, although intended to promote democracy,

heralded lasting changes to the quality of authoritarian rule. Such changes

included more sophisticated features of institutional conﬁguration (a new con-

stitution), development scheme (increased revenues streams), and international

conduct (an end to economic sanctions). Similar to Myanmar, the case of

Cambodia reveals that authoritarian regimes that emerge from a period of

intrastate war or geostrategic isolation are capable of broad improvements in

the quality of their rule.

This revelation is offset by the fact that the quality authoritarian rule has

plateaued in Cambodia. Despite the increasing sophistication on the infor-

mation apparatus dimension, the scores for development scheme and insti-

tutional conﬁguration under the current government peaked in 1993 and

2006, respectively. The Cambodian People’s Party under Hun Sen still

100

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Standardized score

Institutional configuration Control system

Information apparatus Development scheme

International conduct

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 6 Quality of authoritarian rule in Cambodia

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manages marginal election year improvements across most dimensions, but

the scores for nonelection years are regressing. The most profound change

has been in the control system dimension. Since the early 2000s, treatment

of opposition leaders and civil society actors has become far more retro-

grade. Not only have travel bans and arbitrary forms of imprisonment

increased, but Hun Sen’s traditional strategy of dividing opposition leaders

through co-optation has become ineffective (Strangio, 2014: 258–261). This

deterioration underscores how certain decision-making arrangements, such

as those associated with personalist dictatorships, can encourage the main-

tenance of retrograde authoritarian rule. The case of Cambodia is therefore

instructive of how authoritarian regimes –like the Philippines –can even-

tually begin to decay.

The trajectory of authoritarian rule in Laos is less about decay and more about

stagnation. In much the same way as in Cambodia, the political system in Laos

exhibits no effective separation between party and state (Stuart-Fox, 1997;Kyaw

Yin Hlaing, 2006). The highly institutionalized Lao People’s Revolutionary Party

rules through the collective power of the central committee, but the effectiveness

of its many resolutions is circumscribed by a weak administrative foundation. In

the post-Cold War era, this disparity has still not stopped the ruling party from

exerting strict control over citizens via repression or pursuing legitimacy through

market-oriented reforms (Creak and Barney, 2018). Despite the similarities that

are often drawn between authoritarian rule in Laos and Vietnam (sometimes

superﬁcially), the evidence presented here is of divergence.

The Lao People’s Revolutionary Party has barely improved the quality of

authoritarian rule over the past four decades (see Figure 7). This stagnation is

100

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Standardized score

Institutional configuration Control system

Information apparatus Development scheme

International conduct

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 7 Quality of authoritarian rule in Laos

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especially the case for the institutional conﬁguration, control system, and

information apparatus dimensions, which all have scores lower than most

other authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia. Between 1975 and 2015, for

example, the ruling party actually abandoned cooperative forums, unlimited

executive terms, and random election scheduling (all indicators of sophistica-

tion in the institutional conﬁguration dimension). Similarly, the only notable

change within the information apparatus dimension was the establishment of

a nominally independent anti-corruption unit. The ruling party also failed to

adopt the more sophisticated methods of collecting, producing, and disseminat-

ing information used elsewhere in the region. Amid noticeable changes to how

contemporary authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia practice censorship and

propaganda (Abbott, 2015: 216–217), the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party is

characterized by a lack of adaptation. Such stagnation raises questions about its

willingness and capacity to learn from the success of ruling parties elsewhere,

especially in neighboring Vietnam. Ultimately, the fact it has neither learnt

uniformly across every dimension nor decayed over time shows that retrograde

authoritarianism is not a precursor to regime collapse.

To analyze and interpret the quality of authoritarian rule in Malaysia, it is

necessary to contextualize its trajectory. In May 2018, the incumbent National

Front coalition –led by the United Malays National Organisation –was

defeated in the general election. After more than six decades in power, it was

ousted by the Alliance of Hope, an opposition coalition led by former Prime

Minister Mahathir Mohamad. What accounts for this dramatic loss? The most

obvious explanatory factors include the revolt against a goods and services tax

imposed by the government, weakening of the party organization apparatus,

credibility of the opposition movement, and the blatant corruption of Prime

Minister Najib Razak. A striking feature of the ousting of the ruling government

in Malaysia, however, was the preceding downturn toward retrograde author-

itarianism (see Figure 8).

The data reveal that the quality of authoritarian rule in Malaysia hit an inﬂec-

tion point shortly after Najib Razak succeeded Abdullah Badawi in 2009. The

severe downturn toward retrograde authoritarianism was clear within the control

system dimension. After the leadership transition, there were increases in high-

intensity coercion, defections from the ruling coalition, imprisonment of opposi-

tion leaders, voter intimidation, and postelection protests relying on repressive

crackdowns to resolve them. Simultaneously, there were decreases in the co-

optation of opposition leaders and vote buying, but also no tangible innovation on

how civil society actors advocating for democracy could be curtailed within the

political system. This retrograde approach to calibrating, organizing, targeting,

and enforcing control was compounded by poorer dimensional performance in

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terms of development scheme (i.e., decreases in tax revenue and education

spending), institutional conﬁguration (i.e., a more controlled election administra-

tion body), and international conduct (i.e., an end to UNHRC membership). The

fact the selection of Najib Razak merely compounded –and perhaps accelerated –

the qualitative degeneration of authoritarian rule in Malaysia is indicative of how

political succession can inadvertently produce regime-level consequences.

The military has long been the dominant political actor in Myanmar. Since

the 1962 coup, it has held both direct power via ruling juntas and indirect power

through civilian-front parties. This capacity for adaptation, which has been

deeply researched by country experts (Steinberg, 2001;Callahan, 2003;

Nakanishi, 2013), helps explain the extraordinary resilience of authoritarian

rule in Myanmar over several decades.

Despite its praetorian underpinning, the quality of authoritarian rule in

Myanmar can be separated into three distinct periods (see Figure 9).

Between 1962 and 1988, Myanmar was ruled by the Revolutionary Council

and then the Burma Socialist Programme Party. Under the dictatorship of Ne

Win, a few changes were made that led to higher scores in information

apparatus and international conduct. However, the former dimension was

mainly characterized by harsh censorship and a lack of government respon-

siveness (Maureen Aung-Thwin, 1989), while the latter dimension was

affected by a foreign policy that slowly morphed from strict nonalignment

into xenophobic isolationism (Liang, 1990). The most seismic event, how-

ever, was the nationwide mass protests that erupted in March 1988. Among the

explanations for the uprising, the relevant data show a substantial decrease in

the control system dimension in the years preceding it. Between 1985 and

100

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Standardized score

Institutional configuration Control system

Information apparatus Development scheme

International conduct

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 8 Quality of authoritarian rule in Malaysia

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1988, scores for this dimension fell an astonishing 18.9 points. The turn

toward retrograde authoritarianism during this period was so severe that the

net decrease is among the worst captured by the QoA data set (alongside

Malaysia from 2010 to 2015). Led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the mass protests

precipitated a political crisis that eventually resulted in the Burma Socialist

Programme Party being ousted by a coup in September 1988.

After taking power, the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council

clung to power. During this period (1988–2010), the military junta implemented

a retrograde set of political and economic strategies under Saw Maung and then

Than Shwe’s leadership. After it failed to transfer governing authority to Aung

San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, it outlawed elections entirely.

This decision meant that the mode of executive selection depended on political

succession within the upper echelons of the military, while the disbanding of the

legislative precluded representative selection. This retrograde arrangement is

reﬂected in Myanmar’s score for institutional conﬁguration, which drops from

47.6 in 1990 to 29.0 in 1991 and remains constant thereafter until 2008. At the

same time, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (later the State Peace

and Development Council) focused on transforming Myanmar’s dysfunctional

centrally planned economy. This new direction was evident in the wide range of

market-friendly reforms initiated in the 1990s, including new foreign invest-

ment laws, trade regulations, ﬁnancial regulations, and privatization programs

(see Mya Than and Tin Than, 1999;Sulistiyanto, 2002). The trend for the

development scheme dimension from 1995 onward captures this brief shift

toward sophistication. Notwithstanding persistent political, executive, and pub-

lic-sector corruption, there were improvements in foreign aid, foreign direct

100

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Standardized score

Institutional configuration Control system

Information apparatus Development scheme

International conduct

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 9 Quality of authoritarian rule in Myanmar

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investment, gross domestic product growth, and unemployment. The fact that

the military junta could exercise both retrograde behavior (in terms of its

institutional conﬁguration) and sophisticated behavior (in terms of its develop-

ment scheme) shows that there was no necessary linkage here between political

and economic liberalism.

The State Peace and Development Council eventually decided to extricate

itself from day-to-day control of government. Doing so required a new constitu-

tion (promulgated in 2008), a new election (held in 2010 and won by the regime-

controlled Union Solidarity and Development Party), and a safety net for the

military (secured through the establishment of reserve domains within the econ-

omy and political system). Upon coming to power, the new government initiated

a raft of administrative, socioeconomic, and political reforms, which were

designed and enacted in a way that did not threaten the praetorian status of the

military (see Cheesman et al., 2012;Maung Aung Myoe, 2014). The “liberal-

ization”strategy implemented during this period, which follows the successful

extrusion experiences of other military regimes (Morgenbesser, 2016a), is cap-

tured in the QoA data set. In 2010, the Union Solidarity and Development Party

under Thein Sein began an all-dimension move toward sophisticated authoritar-

ianism. This improvement was most evident in the information apparatus and

development scheme dimensions, which increased 37.7 points and 34.8 points

over the next ﬁve years. Despite the fact that the ruling party lost the 2015 election

to Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, the preeminent role of

the military in national politics was already secured.

Singapore is a case of sophisticated authoritarianism. After coming to

power in 1959, the People’s Action Party steadily and severely emasculated

the system of parliamentary democracy inherited from Britain. The leadership

of Lee Kuan Yew (1959–1990) involved repression of opposition parties,

restrictions on civil liberties and political rights, imposition of media censor-

ship, and the eradication of judicial independence (see Lydgate, 2003;Gomez,

2006). The leadership of Goh Chok Tong (1990–2004) and Lee Hsien Loong

(2004–)sawminorartiﬁcial changes to the nature of authoritarian rule, which

were generally aimed at making it more consultative and inclusive (see Rajah,

2012;Rodan and Hughes, 2014;Rodan, 2018). Many of the changes reﬂected

a desire on the part of each leader for the political system to more fully mimic

the attributes of democracy, especially liberalism, majoritarianism, and parti-

cipation. The enduring success and durability of authoritarian rule in

Singapore helps explain why it has become a model for authoritarian regimes

around the world.

The data show that the People’s Action Party has not only maintained sophis-

ticated authoritarianism across multiple dimensions, but gradually improved

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lagging dimensions (see Figure 10). This pattern distinguishes it from many other

cases in Southeast Asia, which displayed either wildly inconsistent performance

(e.g., Malaysia) or consistently low performance (e.g., Laos). The government

has recorded minimal corruption for several decades now and Lee Kuan Yew

actually invented the technique of using defamation and libel suits against

opposition leaders (now common practice in the region). The highly sophisticated

nature of authoritarian rule in Singapore is further demonstrated in other ways. On

the institutional conﬁguration and development scheme dimensions, for example,

its country-year scores have never been lower than 63.2 points and 54.5 points,

respectively. The ﬁgure further illustrates how the scores for the control system,

information apparatus, and international conduct dimensions have increased

substantially over the course of four decades, from a combined starting average

of 26.5 points to ﬁnishing average of 58.1 points. Despite the high quality of

authoritarian rule under the People’s Action Party, Singapore’s economic strength

relative to geographical territory and population size raises doubts about whether

other authoritarian regimes can viably replicate such sophistication.

Another standout case of sophisticated authoritarianism is Vietnam. Founded

by Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese Communist Party emerged from a radical

national-liberation struggle as the dominant political entity in the country. The

ruling party has historically cast itself as the ideological and legal force leading

the state and society toward the fulﬁllment of communism and Ho Chi Minh

thought. Following the 1986 proclamation of doi moi (renewal), however,

a sharp contradiction emerged between the theory and practice of communist

rule in Vietnam. To understand this connection today, it is fair to view the state

as a “system of bones, muscles, lungs, nerves, and veins, and the party as the

100

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Standardized score

Institutional configuration Control system

Information apparatus Development scheme

International conduct

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 10 Quality of authoritarian rule in Singapore

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head, employing market forces to take care of feeding and digestion”

(Tonnesson, 2000: 250). The Communist Party’s increasingly tenuous links to

the goals of the national independence era also saw it reorient itself toward

a performance-oriented legitimation strategy, which has tested the “culture of

consensus”that infuses elite politics in Vietnam (Malesky, 2014). The ideolo-

gical foundation, organizational structure, and durability of the ruling party has

nevertheless encouraged frequent comparisons to the Lao People’s

Revolutionary Party (see Gainsborough, 2013;Levitsky and Way, 2013: 14).

The QoA data set, however, reveals stark differences between these two author-

itarian regimes, with the Vietnamese being far more sophisticated.

The quality of authoritarian rule is less evenly distributed in Vietnam than was

observed in Singapore. Despite an overall shift toward sophisticated authoritarian-

ism, this shift is mostly propelled by the control system, information apparatus, and

international conduct dimensions (see Figure 11). The improvement in international

conduct, for instance, is due to the fact the Vietnamese Communist Party has had

economic sanctions lifted, built alliances with other ruling parties, employed

public relations ﬁrms and think tanks in Washington, DC, as well as operated

television and radio stations. This outward-facing strategy resulted in a stunning

improvement of 48.7 points between 1975 and 2015. Elsewhere, the institutional

conﬁguration and development scheme dimensions are themselves less sophisti-

cated than they were historically, but both compare favorably to other authoritarian

regimes in the region. The state of equilibrium observed in Vietnam is indicative of

the lack of contention within hegemonic authoritarian regimes, which are charac-

terized by ruling-party dominance, popular acquiescence, and elite cohesion. The

main source of vulnerability is when ﬁssures emerge within the ediﬁce of

100

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Standardized score

Institutional configuration Control system

Information apparatus Development scheme

International conduct

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 11 Quality of authoritarian rule in Vietnam

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belief –that is, when the appearance of popular support, elite unity, and manip-

ulative strength undergo public erosion (Schedler, 2013: 217). Such vulnerabilities

put a premium on using more sophisticated features and techniques within the

information apparatus to ameliorate the dictator’s dilemma. In contrast to the

“similar”case of Laos, the data suggest that the Vietnamese Communist Party is

attentive to this predicament.

The analysis so far has examined the quality of authoritarian rule in Southeast

Asia in terms of both broad patterns and individual cases. The ﬁndings showed

general variation across dimensions, regime type, regime subtype, and demo-

cratization episode, but also speciﬁc variation among the cases of Brunei,

Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, and Vietnam. The summary

verdict, which is presented now, is that authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia

have become less retrograde and more sophisticated.

The Rise of Sophisticated Authoritarianism

The presence of substantial variation among authoritarian regimes in Southeast

Asia disguises an underlying trend: the rise of sophisticated authoritarianism.

Despite the prominence of retrograde authoritarianism in Cambodia and Laos,

for example, the Cambodian People’s Party and Lao People’s Revolutionary

Party have both exhibited more sophisticated behavior with each passing

decade. Despite the downturn toward retrograde authoritarianism in Malaysia,

the United Malays National Organisation forged a sophisticated authoritarian

regime over an extended period of time. Despite the onset of democracy in the

Philippines and Indonesia, the People’s Action Party in Singapore and

Vietnamese Communist Party have maintained the most sophisticated and

longest-lasting authoritarian regimes in the region. The overarching resilience

of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia has thus masked its underlying evolution.

The transformative nature of authoritarian rule is encapsulated by the rise of

sophisticated authoritarianism. Up until now, the data presented have been limited

to the ﬁve dimensions for each individual case. This section goes a step further.

Figure 12 provides a total standardized score –that is, the sum of indicators for

each country-year divided by all applicable indicators, then multiplied by the

chosen scale of 100. In 1975, at the start of the time period under review, only

Vietnam was classiﬁed as a sophisticated authoritarian regime. Over the next four

decades, the Communist Party increased its score by a further 15.2 points. By

2015, in fact, Malaysia (4.6 points), Myanmar (23.3 points), and Singapore (19.2

points) had all registered improvements sufﬁcient to be classiﬁed as sophisticated

authoritarian regimes. Among the remaining cases of retrograde authoritarianism,

there were still notable improvements between 1975 and 2015: Brunei (5.0

62 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

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points), Cambodia (15.5 points), and Laos (9.8 points). The overall results

demonstrate that authoritarian regimes in the region have increasingly practiced

a form of rule that explicitly adopts the advantageous features and techniques of

authoritarian politics as well as implicitly mimics the fundamental attributes of

democracy.

The collective movement toward sophisticated authoritarianism portrayed in

Figure 12 warrants further analysis. A clear ﬁnding is that sophisticated author-

itarianism –like democracy (see Carothers, 2002)–is not a natural end point on

some linear pathway. The examples of Cambodia under Hun Sen, the United

Malays National Organisation under Najib Razak, and the Burma Socialist

Programme Party under Ne Win testify to this reality. Instead, the quality of

authoritarian rule is susceptible to decay, stagnation, and collapse. Another ﬁnding

is that authoritarian regimes in the region do not improve consistently. Despite the

end results for Myanmar and Vietnam, for example, slumps toward retrograde

authoritarianism can still be lengthy and severe. This ﬁnding even applies to

authoritarian regimes apparently of the same type: the trajectories of the Lao

People’s Revolutionary Party and the Vietnamese Communist Party have no

signiﬁcant resemblance. The quality of authoritarian rule evidently ebbs and ﬂows.

An outstanding question nonetheless is what explains such prominent

decreases and increases in the quality of authoritarian rule. The longitudinal

trajectories for Cambodia, Myanmar, and Vietnam, for instance, demonstrate

uneven change at the aggregate level. The unsurprising –yet hitherto unex-

plored –answer is that individual leaders have a signiﬁcant effect on the

trajectory of authoritarian rule (see Table 7). The “range of scores”column

100

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Standardized score

Brunei (BN) Cambodia (KH) Laos (LA) Malaysia (MY)

Myanmar (MM) Singapore (SG) Vietnam (VN)

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 12 Quality of authoritarian rule by case

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Table 7 Quality of authoritarian rule by leader

Leader

QoA Dataset

Years

Range of

Scores

Average

Score

Change

of Score

Brunei

Hassanal Bolkiah 1985–2015 24.9 to 37.8 32.0 +5.0

Cambodia

Pol Pot 1975–1978 31.4 to 37.0 34.8 +5.6

Heng Samrin 1979–1984 27.2 to 33.5 30.1 –3.6

Hun Sen 1985–2015 28.5 to 50.1 41.6 +15.4

Laos

Kaysone Phomvihane 1975–1992 29.5 to 37.1 31.9 +5.3

Khamtai Siphandon 1993–2005 30.1 to 37.8 35.1 +1.9

Choummaly Sayasone 2006–2015 35.9 to 42.0 39.6 +2.2

Malaysia

Abdul Razak Hussein 1975 N/A 48.9 N/A

Hussein Onn 1976–1980 45.3 to 50.6 48.4 +5.3

Mahathir Mohamad 1981–2003 44.6 to 63.5 52.5 +11.9

Abdullah Badawi 2004–2008 52.4 to 60.9 58.0 –7.5

Najib Razak 2009–2015 53.5 to 67.4 61.9 –12.9

Myanmar

Ne Win 1975–1988 29.5 to 40.7 33.8 –3.2

Saw Maung 1989–1991 25.3 to 29.2 27.9 +3.9

Than Shwe 1992–2010 27.1 to 35.1 32.3 +7.1

Thein Sein 2011–2015 42.3 to 56.1 50.1 +13.8

Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew 1975–1990 38.9 to 50.4 44.9 +7.4

Goh Chok Tong 1991–2004 51.5 to 63.0 56.9 +7.7

Lee Hsien Loong 2005–2015 59.2 to 73.2 64.0 +2.2

Vietnam

Le Duan 1975–1986 45.4 to 51.0 49.0 +0.2

Nguyen Van Linh 1987–1991 47.9 to 51.6 49.8 –2.1

Do Muoi 1992–1997 47.1 to 55.9 52.0 –3.4

Le Kha Phieu 1998–2001 52.1 to 58.8 55.8 +6.2

64 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

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below demonstrates how some leaders, such as Choummaly Sayasone and Than

Shwe, were never close to achieving the onset of sophisticated authoritarianism.

An obvious barrier is that both inherited very retrograde authoritarian regimes

upon coming to power (a combined average score of 36.4 points). This mis-

fortune is markedly different to the likes of Abdullah Badawi and Nong Duc

Manh, both of whom took ofﬁce in very sophisticated authoritarian regimes.

The “average score”column shows the varying performance of leaders across

their years in ofﬁce. With the exceptions of Heng Samrin, Hussein Onn, and

Saw Maung, all other leaders oversaw a higher-quality form of authoritarian

rule than their predecessors. This shared achievement is obviously assisted by

the continuous quality of some features (e.g., a formal constitution), which lend

cumulative sophistication to authoritarian regimes unless deliberately nulliﬁed

by leaders and their ruling coalitions. The ﬁnal and most telling column

analyzes the overall change in the standardized score between when the leader

entered and exited ofﬁce. Across Southeast Asia, the data show that six leaders

oversaw a downturn toward retrograde authoritarianism and eighteen headed an

upswing toward sophisticated authoritarianism. Some of the worst performers

were Heng Samrin (dropped from a low start) and Najib Razak (deteriorated

from a high start); while a few of the best performers were Nguyen Phu Trong

(progressed from a high start) and Mahathir Mohamad (improved from a low

start). Individual leaders can clearly have a major impact on the quality of

authoritarian rule, helping to explain ebbs and ﬂows toward and away from

sophisticated authoritarianism over time.

Another way to examine the trend toward sophisticated authoritarianism

is by historical period. The data are displayed in Figure 13.Duringthe

Cold War era (1975–1991), for example, the mean score across the seven

cases was 39.2 points on the standardized scale of retrograde to sophisti-

cated authoritarianism. In the post-Cold War era (1992–2005), when all

Table 7 (cont.)

Leader

QoA Dataset

Years

Range of

Scores

Average

Score

Change

of Score

Nong Duc Manh 2002–2010 53.9 to 61.3 57.4 +3.8

Nguyen Phu Trong 2011–2015 52.2 to 67.2 62.1 +13.9

Note: Since leaders enter and exit ofﬁce on speciﬁc days (rather than per year), the

selected QoA data set years are based on whether they did so in the ﬁrst or second half of

the year. All leader and years in ofﬁce data is sourced from Goemans et al. (2009), but

those who served less than a year have been excluded here.

65The Rise of Sophisticated Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia

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authoritarian regimes but Indonesia proved to be resilient to democratiza-

tion, the score increased to 44.2 points. During this period, only Myanmar

under Than Shwe recorded a decrease in the quality of authoritarian rule.

The ﬁnal historical era (2006–2015) saw the combined average increase

further to 49.5 points, but the trend is being pulled by the authoritarian

regimes ruling Malaysia and Singapore. This last period is commonly

identiﬁed as the starting point of a global democratic recession (see

Diamond, 2015). A spate of news articles have also warned that the

same reversal is afﬂicting Southeast Asia –a region never known for its

high level of democracy (Emmerson, 1995). Many hypotheses have been

put forward to explain this trend, such as the dysfunction of consolidated

democracies, ineffectiveness of democracy promotion, and rise of populist

leaders. This Element was originally motivated by a very different idea:

perhaps authoritarian regimes were simply becoming “smarter”in the way

they rule and therefore more resistant to democratization. Despite ﬁnding

evidence in support of this hypothesis, it is not causally tested here. It is

nevertheless clear that all surviving authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia

have learnt over time to be less retrograde and more sophisticated.

This Element began by suggesting that the stubborn familiarity of author-

itarian rule in Southeast Asia promoted ambiguity about whether that rule had

actually changed. Against the backdrop of a seemingly global transformation,

it argued that different forms of authoritarianism have emerged within the

region and over time: retrograde and sophisticated types. A ﬁnal demonstra-

tion of this transformation is offered by Figure 14. Using the period

1975–2015, this ﬁgure creates a region-year standardized score by combining

100

Brunei Laos Myanmar Cambodia Vietnam Malaysia Singapore

Standardized score

1975–1991 1992–2005

–

2006–2015

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 13 Quality of authoritarian rule by time period

66 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

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the country-year scores for all continuing authoritarian regimes (i.e., Brunei,

Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, and Vietnam). The ﬁgure

shows the presence of retrograde authoritarian rule from 1975 to 2011 and the

existence of sophisticated authoritarian rule from 2012 to 2015. Despite the

signiﬁcant across-country and within-country variation highlighted in the

preceding analysis, it is evident that authoritarian rule has evolved over time

and in a clear direction. The implication is that Southeast Asia’s“motley

crew”of authoritarian regimes (Slater, 2008: 56) have increasingly reaped

more of the known beneﬁts, dividends, or rewards of authoritarian politics and

more fully mimicked the fundamental attributes of democracy. This discovery

warrants attention from citizens, civil society actors, opposition parties, and

sovereign states invested in the preservation and growth of democracy.

Ultimately, sophisticated authoritarianism now predominates in Southeast Asia.

5 Conclusion

This Element offers a way to understand the evolution of authoritarian rule in

Southeast Asia by scrutinizing its quality. The theoretical framework assesses

authoritarian regimes for how closely they heed the known advantages and

disadvantages of authoritarian politics as well as how closely they mimic the

fundamental attributes of democracy. This benchmark was subsequently used to

produce standardized scores for the various countries, and to rank them using

a typology with two discrete categories: retrograde and sophisticated author-

itarianism. By amalgamating existing and original research, the Element stu-

died in a uniﬁed way many previously disparate features and presently diverse

techniques of contemporary authoritarian rule. The empirical results reveal the

100

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

Standardized score

Sophisticated Retrograde

Figure 14 Quality of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia

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presence of both retrograde and sophisticated authoritarian regimes within

Southeast Asia, but also a discernible shift toward the sophisticated form of

authoritarian rule across the region. The remainder of the conclusion under-

scores the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical contribution of the Element,

before addressing the generalizability of this approach to understanding author-

itarian rule beyond Southeast Asia.

The conceptual contribution of this Element stems from the idea that there

are qualitative differences among authoritarian regimes, including those typi-

cally classiﬁed as belonging to the same categories. A key insight from the

preceding pages, for instance, is that the hegemonic regime types found in

Laos and Vietnam or the single-party regime subtypes found in Malaysia and

Singapore exhibit signiﬁcant behavioral variation. Until now, scholars have

lacked a conceptual apparatus capable of synthesizing the vast array of

indicators that might allow a comparison of regime quality. The simplicity

of the typology utilized nevertheless belies the volume of disparate scholar-

ship contained within the framework, which is now reconciled under an

alternative categorization scheme. The scheduling of elections, for example,

can now be examined in conjunction with the extent of political corruption or

improvements in development outcomes. The intensity of coercion, to cite

another example, can now be analyzed alongside efforts to avoid criticism

from the United Nations Security Council. The intended contribution is thus

a conceptual framework parsimonious enough to provide an aggregate-level

understanding of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia, but which does not

ignore the indicator-level complexity and diversity of speciﬁc authoritarian

regimes.

The theoretical contribution of this Element mainly rests on questions revol-

ving around regime adaptation and the resulting quality of authoritarian rule.

A general weakness of the ﬁeld of comparative authoritarianism is that it has

been transﬁxed by the relationship between readily observable institutional

structures and the survival of authoritarian regimes. In the view of Pepinsky

(2014: 650–651):

Authoritarian regimes do many things besides grow/stagnate and survive/

collapse. They decide to murder their subjects or not; to favor certain ethnic

groups or not; to integrate with the global economy in various ways; to

mobilize, ignore or ‘reeducate’their citizens; to respond to domestic chal-

lenges with repression, concessions or both; to insulate their bureaucracies

from executive interference or not; to delegate various ruling functions to

security forces, mercenaries or criminal syndicates, or subnational political

units; and to structure economies in various ways that might support their

rule.

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A key contribution of this Element is its focus on an altogether unexamined

outcome: retrograde or sophisticated authoritarianism. This approach offers

a novel way to understand authoritarian politics cross-nationally and long-

itudinally, but also a foundation for future research. One obvious further ques-

tion concerns the causal relationship between the changing quality of

authoritarian rule and the diverse trajectories of authoritarian regimes. The

original data presented on the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos offered

support for the notion that a prolonged downturn toward retrograde authoritar-

ianism can be a precursor to regime change. The trajectory of Malaysia under

Najib Razak lent further support to this tentative ﬁnding. Another key theore-

tical contribution of the Element is its strong emphasis on the noninstitutional

features and techniques of authoritarian regimes. A plethora of questions never-

theless persist: Are systemic parties common and widespread in authoritarian

regimes around the world? What is the effect of overseas television stations,

shadow election observation groups, and think tanks on the image of author-

itarian regimes? How exactly do nominally independent digital troll armies,

public policy institutes, and government-operated nongovernment organiza-

tions contribute to misinformation in authoritarian regimes? The fact such

questions remain unanswered is indicative of how scholars have yet to focus

upon many of the more innovative techniques adopted by authoritarian regimes

and formulate a set of testable propositions about how they contribute to

different political outcomes.

The empirical contribution of this Element is the result of a painstaking effort

to provide an original account of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia. Given the

general lack of cross-national time-series data on many of the subtle techniques

used by leaders to hold power, the QoA data set offers a step forward in the

comparative study of authoritarian rule. The data reveal numerous intriguing

ﬁndings. Despite claims that libel suits are a new technique of silencing political

opponents (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018: 83), it was revealed that Singapore’s Lee

Kuan Yew began utilizing this technique nearly four decades ago. Despite

growing awareness of how authoritarian regimes are permanently employing

public relations ﬁrms based in Washington, DC (Cooley et al., 2018:46–48), the

data show that the ruling parties in Indonesia and Malaysia were engaged in this

practice from the early 1970s. Such ﬁndings point to the need for extensive data

collection on the origin, frequency, and scope of the many techniques used by

authoritarian regimes today. Using the corresponding codebook, which includes

coding rules for all seventy-three indicators, it is now possible to collect data on

the quality of authoritarian rule in other regions of the world. Doing so will

demand not only detailed case expertise, but also the ability to recognize

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regional and global patterns of behavior. This Element presents the QoA data set

as a starting point for the development of a wider data collection effort.

This push to discern the quality of authoritarian rule in a wider empirical

setting naturally raises the question of whether the theoretical framework

developed here is generalizable beyond Southeast Asia. Given Southeast

Asia’s extraordinary cultural, political, and social diversity, there is an auto-

matic imperative for scholars working on authoritarianism in the region to pitch

their research “more comparatively, engage theory more explicitly, and deline-

ate causal ﬁndings more precisely”(Kuhonta et al., 2008: 328). In addition to an

existing body of scholarship cutting across several research streams, the new

framework for understanding authoritarian rule offered by this Element is based

on real-world observations outside of Southeast Asia. The deployment of

systemic parties during elections is the norm in Russia; mobilization of aux-

iliary groups as agents of repression is adeptly practiced in China; creation of a

digital center to collect information online is informed by the operation in

Uganda; importance of revenue streams and development progress is derived

from the widely lauded improvements seen in Rwanda; and the employment of

shadow election observation groups is now customary in Venezuela. Such

examples are demonstrative of a growing awareness among scholars about the

evolving nature of authoritarian rule. The most common and simplest view is

that authoritarian regimes are “learning”how to “better”hold power, but more

precise details about the exact path and full extent of that phenomenon remain

unknown. By scrutinizing the quality of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia,

this Element has provided some early answers to these questions of global

concern.

70 Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

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Acknowledgment

This Element might be short in length, but it has been years in the making. The

author therefore wishes to thank Edward Aspinall, William Dobson, Daniela

Donno, Diego Fossati, Erica Frantz, Kai He, Ferran Martinez i Coma, Duncan

McDonnell, Michael Miller, Thomas Pepinsky, Darin Self, Jason Sharman,

Christopher Walker, Meredith Weiss, Annika Werner, and Joseph Wright for

all their help and support. In addition, the author is grateful for the feedback he

received at various conferences and seminars along the way, including those

hosted by the American Political Science Association (August 2017); National

Endowment for Democracy (August 2017); Southeast Asia Research Centre,

City University of Hong Kong (January 2018); Asia Research Centre, Murdoch

University (March 2018); Asian Studies Association of Australia (July 2018);

and the Germany Institute of Global and Area Studies (September 2018).

Finally, the author is proud to dedicate this Element to his daughter, whose

style of authoritarian rule is always sophisticated.

The author acknowledges the support provided by the Australian Research

Council (grant DE180100371).

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Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

Edward Aspinall

Australian National University

Edward Aspinall is a professor of politics at the Coral Bell School of Asia-PaciﬁcAﬀairs,

Australian National University. A specialist of Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, much of

his research has focused on democratisation, ethnic politics and civil society in Indonesia

and, most recently, clientelism across Southeast Asia.

Meredith L. Weiss

University at Albany, SUNY

Meredith L. Weiss is Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her

research addresses political mobilization and contention, the politics of identity and

development, and electoral politics in Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Malaysia and

Singapore.

About the series

The Elements series Politics and Society in Southeast Asia includes both country-speciﬁc

and thematic studies on one of the world’s most dynamic regions. Each title, written

by a leading scholar of that country or theme, combines a succinct, comprehensive,

up-to-date overview of debates in the scholarly literature with original analysis

and a clear argument.

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Politics and Society in Southeast Asia

Elements in the Series

Indonesia: Twenty Years after Democracy

Jamie Davidson

Civil–Military Relations in Southeast Asia

Aurel Croissant

Singapore: Identity, Brand, Power

Kenneth Paul Tan

Ritual and Region: The Invention of ASEAN

Mathew Davies

Populism in Southeast Asia

Paul Kenny

Cambodia: Return to Authoritarianism

Kheang Un

Vietnam: A Pathway from State Socialism

Thaveeporn Vasavakul

Independent Timor-Leste: Regime, Economy and Identity

Douglas Kammen

Media and Power in Southeast Asia

Cherian George and Gayathry Venkiteswaran

The Rise of Sophisticated Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia

Lee Morgenbesser

A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/ESEA

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Espacio y poder. Una propuesta de decodificación de las relaciones entre poder y espacio desde el corpus teórico de Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault y Michael Mann.

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2025

RESUMEN El pensamiento de Henri Lefebvre debe ser considerado un referente obligado para el análisis de la evolución de la geografía humana de los siglos XX y XXI. Su teoría espacial desafió las perspectivas tradicionales y permitió la introducción de planteamientos referidos al poder, a la acción de los grupos de poder y a la dinámica del Capitalismo. Postulamos que pueden relacionarse la ontología y la epistemología lefebvriana con el problema del poder y con las perspectivas genéricas de Michel Foucault y Michael Mann. Nos propusimos analizar la espacialidad del poder desde diversos puntos de vista, destacando su carácter relacional y performativo. Incorporamos reflexiones acerca de formas sociales y espaciales, como hilos conductores para el análisis de las diversas organizaciones espaciales que cada época histórica fue competente para producir. Abordaremos los aportes de Henri Lefebvre, considerando que los problemas relacionados con el ejercicio del poder expresan la existencia de fuerzas, no las ocasiona. En segundo lugar, reflexionaremos acerca del problema del poder desde una perspectiva relacional, por sus atributos espaciales y espacializantes, por los que las relacionalidades socio-espaciales se materializan en construcciones sociohistóricas que denominamos medio. Tercero, anali-zaremos las formas sociales y espaciales; por último, planteamos algunas conclusiones. ABSTRACT Henri Lefebvre’s thought must be considered an obligatory reference for the analysis of the evolution of human geography in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His spatial theory challenged traditional perspectives and allowed the introduction of approaches referring to power, to the action of power groups, to the dynamics of Capitalism. We postulate that Lefebvrian ontology and epistemology can be related to the problem of power and to the generic perspectives of Michel Foucault and Michael Mann. We set out to analyze the spatiality of power from various points of view, highlighting its relational and performative character. We incorporated reflections on social and spatial forms, as guid-ing threads for the analysis of the diverse spatial organizations that each historical epoch was competent to produce. We will address Henri Lefevre’s contributions, considering that the problems related to the exercise of power express the existence of forces, not cause them. Secondly, we will reflect on the problem of power from a relational perspec-tive, because of its spatial and spatializing attributes, whereby socio-spatial relationalities materialize in socio-historical constructions that we call milieu. Third, we will analyze the social and spatial forms; finally, we will draw some conclusions.

Whose democratization matters? Understanding the effects of regime change on normative changes in ASEAN

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2024

Zhiqiang Sun

This article aims to elucidate the varying effects of democratization in ASEAN members on the normative changes in the core principles of the “ASEAN Way.” Utilizing a regional-centric approach that emphasizes ASEAN members’ agency, the article posits that two critical variables shape the changing trajectory of ASEAN norms: ASEAN members' democratic performances and their regional status. While an ASEAN member’s democratic performance influences its willingness to advocate for normative changes, its regional status is also crucial in determining its capability to implement changes by navigating the divergent interests among ASEAN members. Only the ASEAN member with a high-quality democratic performance at home and recognized regional leadership can effectively bring about normative changes to ASEAN norms. Otherwise, either the domestic democratic deficit or a lack of leadership status will hinder the ASEAN members’ efforts to promote normative changes. Using the process-tracing method, the article empirically focuses on the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia for comparative case studies. The findings reveal that the Philippines’ poor democratic performance since the democratic restoration in 1986 has hindered its motivation to push for normative changes in ASEAN, rendering the Philippines a reluctant promoter. Although Thailand has made notable achievements in democratic consolidation since the downfall of junta rule in 1992, its lack of regional leadership has greatly limited its capability to reconcile the divergent interests among ASEAN members, resulting in the failure of its “flexible engagement” initiative. Conversely, Indonesia, with a high-quality democratic performance at home and bolstered by its regional leadership status, successfully brought significant changes to ASEAN norms by facilitating the ASEAN Charter signed in 2007.

"Their lives don't matter to politicians": The necropolitical ecology of Thailand's dangerous and unequal roads

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2024
POLIT GEOGR

Thailand is consistently ranked as having the worst road safety record in Asia, and one of the worst globally. Most deaths are of the rural poor, a function of necropolitical ecology. A primary factor is the materiality and design of the road system, built to increase mobility rather than improve safety, and lacking a hierarchical structure. Highways are poorly integrated into both rural areas and Thai cities, and ignore the needs of motorcycle drivers, who comprise most road users and victims. Traffic regulations are not enforced by poorly paid police officers, without adequate resources or ability to enforce traffic fines, and who engage in corrupt practices. This is compounded by inadequate driving education. These factors are complicated and caused by Thailand's fragmented and weak governance. A plethora of agencies do not cooperate and have overlapping mandates. No lead agency has been given sufficient power to improve governance of the system. The public blame drivers rather than the state. Political leadership, in favour of quick results, has attached little importance to this issue and consequently devoted insufficient resources to address it, an inaction, ignorance and urban bias that have contributed to unnecessarily high levels of rural injuries and mortality.

Unpacking Authoritarian Environmental Governance: Gauging Authoritarian Elaboration in China and Beyond

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2023

John Zinda

Debates about whether authoritarian or democratic environmental governance have the capacity to weather the present crises tend to gloss over variation across and within regimes. Authoritarian environmental governance plays out in diverse ways; comparing across contexts can help us understand its varying outcomes. Drawing on James C. Scott’s characterization of authoritarian high modernism, I identify four dimensions along which projects of authoritarian environmental governance vary: from maximizing to optimizing desired outputs, from thin to thicker simplifications, from rigidity to constrained flexibility, and from direct coercion to cultivating compliance. Together, they comprise a phenomenon we might call authoritarian elaboration, departing from the rigidity and simplification Scott describes. I review evidence from a variety of environmental projects in China to demonstrate how authoritarian elaboration occurs in practice. Examining the reasons behind what we might call harder and softer approaches to environmental governance, as well as their impacts on people and environments, I propose hypotheses on variation in governance practices and suggest approaches to studying them.

The decline of democracy in the narrative of government political communication

Conference Paper

Jan 2024

The Evolution of Authoritarianism and Contentious Action in Russia

Book

May 2024

Bogdan Mamaev

This Element examines the evolution of authoritarianism in Russia from 2011 to 2023, focusing on its impact on contentious action. It argues that the primary determinant of contention, at both federal and regional levels, is authoritarian innovation characterized by reactive and proactive repression. Drawing on Russian legislation, reports from human rights organizations, media coverage, and a novel dataset of contentious events created from user-generated reports on Twitter using computational techniques, the Element contributes to the understanding of contentious politics in authoritarian regimes, underscoring the role of authoritarianism and its innovative responses in shaping contentious action.

Narrative and Framing of a Pandemic: Public Health Communication in the Vietnamese Public Sphere

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2024

Valuing women’s empowerment: tracking funding in Southeast Asia

Article

Nov 2023

Myanmar’s Menu of Electoral Manipulation: Self- and External Legitimation after the 2021 Coup

Article

May 2023
CRIT ASIAN STUD

Michael Lidauer

Voting behaviour under doubts of ballot secrecy: reinforcing dominant party rule

Article

Apr 2023

Ballot secrecy is a cornerstone of electoral democracy, since its real or perceived absence can make voters reluctant to express their true preferences. Through survey data from Singapore, we show that doubts over ballot secrecy can alter voting behaviour even when the vote is secret and there are no individually-targeted punishments or incentives; specifically, they lead a small subset of Singaporean voters to support the dominant party, despite a preference for the opposition. We also examine individual-level correlates of doubting ballot secrecy: a tendency towards belief in conspiracies and distrust of the mass media are the strongest predictors. Finally, a counterfactual exercise demonstrates the sensitivity of election outcomes to marginal vote swings; it suggests that doubting ballot secrecy can secure the dominant party a small number of additional parliamentary seats, thereby buttressing dominant party rule without requiring any concerted action or overtly repressive measures.

Political Public Relations in Indonesia: A History of Propaganda and Democracy 23

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2022

Rendro Dhani

How Do Inclusionary and Exclusionary Autocracies Affect Ordinary People?

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2020

We propose a distinction between inclusionary and exclusionary autocratic ruling strategies and develop novel theoretical propositions on the legacy that these strategies leave on citizens' political attitudes once the autocratic regime broke down. Using data of 1.3 million survey respondents from 71 countries and Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort models we estimate between and within cohort differences in citizens' democratic support. We find that inclusionary regimes-with wider redistribution of socioeconomic and political benefits-leave a stronger anti-democratic legacy than exclusionary regimes on the political attitudes of their citizens. Similarly, citizens who were part of the winning group in an autocracy are more critical with democracy compared to citizens who were part of discriminated groups. This paper contributes to our understanding about how autocracies affect the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens.

Strength in Expectation: Elections, Economic Performance, and Authoritarian Breakdown

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2019

Adrian Lucardi

How do elections and the economy affect authoritarian survival? Distinguishing among (a) nonelection periods in autocracies that do not hold competitive elections, (b) election periods in autocracies that hold regular elections, and (c) nonelection periods in such autocracies, I argue that bad economic performance makes authoritarian regimes especially likely to break down in election years, but the anticipation of competitive elections should dissuade citizens and elites from engaging in antiregime behavior in nonelection periods, bolstering short-term survival. Thus, compared to regimes that do not hold competitive elections, electoral autocracies should be more vulnerable to bad economic performance in election periods but more resilient to it in nonelection years. A study of 258 authoritarian regimes between 1948 and 2011 confirms these expectations. I also find that the effect is driven by competitive elections for the executive office, and elections-related breakdowns are more likely to result in democratization. © 2019 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma: Why Election Monitoring Became an International Norm

Book

Full-text available

Jan 2011

Susan D. Hyde

Why did election monitoring become an international norm? Why do pseudo-democrats-undemocratic leaders who present themselves as democratic-invite international observers, even when they are likely to be caught manipulating elections? Is election observation an effective tool of democracy promotion, or is it simply a way to legitimize electoral autocracies? In The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma, Susan D. Hyde explains international election monitoring with a new theory of international norm formation. Hyde argues that election observation was initiated by states seeking international support. International benefits tied to democracy give some governments an incentive to signal their commitment to democratization without having to give up power. Invitations to nonpartisan foreigners to monitor elections, and avoiding their criticism, became a widely recognized and imitated signal of a government's purported commitment to democratic elections. Hyde draws on cross-national data on the global spread of election observation between 1960 and 2006, detailed descriptions of the characteristics of countries that do and do not invite observers, and evidence of three ways that election monitoring is costly to pseudo-democrats: micro-level experimental tests from elections in Armenia and Indonesia showing that observers can deter election-day fraud and otherwise improve the quality of elections; illustrative cases demonstrating that international benefits are contingent on democracy in countries like Haiti, Peru, Togo, and Zimbabwe; and qualitative evidence documenting the escalating game of strategic manipulation among pseudo-democrats, international monitors, and pro-democracy forces.

Burma's Foreign Relations: Neutralism in Theory and Practice

Book

Jan 1990

Chi Shad Liang

The first comprehensive study of its kind, this volume presents a systematic analysis of Burma's foreign relations in theory and in practice since the country's independence in 1948. The author chronicles the development of Burma's foreign policy and examines the factors or circumstances that influenced the adoption of neutralism as the cornerstone of the country's foreign policy. Special attention is paid to Burma's relations with major countries both within and outside Asia in order to demonstrate the differences between the stated theory and the actual practice of neutralism. An indispensable reference for students of Southeast Asian studies, Burma's Foreign Relations will also be essential reading for researchers, policymakers, and historians interested in Burma's government and politics since World War II and the impact of neutralism on the country's economic development. The author begins with a general survey of Burma's historical background and modern-political developments in order to help the reader understand the roots of Burma's foreign policy. He then traces the record of Burma's foreign relations from 1948 to the present. Individual chapters explore Burma's relations with most countries in the world by geographical divisions, as well as with international and regional organizations. Diplomatic events are presented in chronological sequence throughout. Liang concludes that while the neutralist policy has preserved Burma's independence, it has turned a country with extraordinary economic potential into one of the least developed nations in the world. He calls for a new foreign policy that will open the country up for positive diplomatic relations with other countries while still adhering to neutralism.

Making Autocracy Work: Representation and Responsiveness in Modern China

Book

Oct 2016

Rory Truex

Can meaningful representation emerge in an authoritarian setting? If so, how, when, and why? Making Autocracy Work identifies the trade-offs associated with representation in authoritarian environments and then tests the theory through a detailed inquiry into the dynamics of China's National People's Congress (NPC, the country's highest formal government institution). Rory Truex argues that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engineering a system of 'representation within bounds' in the NPC, encouraging deputies to reflect the needs of their constituents, but only for non-sensitive issues. This allows the regime to address citizen grievances while avoiding incendiary political activism. Data on NPC deputy backgrounds and behaviors is used to explore the nature of representation and incentives in this constrained system. The book challenges existing conceptions of representation, authoritarianism, and the future of the Chinese state. Consultative institutions like the NPC are key to making autocracy work.

Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites, and Regime Change

Book

Aug 2016

The Ruling Elite of Singapore: Networks of Power and Influence

Book

Jan 2014

Michael Barr

Presidential Term Limit Contravention: Abolish, Extend, Fail, or Respect?

Article

Mar 2019
COMP POLIT STUD

Kristin McKie

Since presidential term limits were (re)adopted by many states during the third wave of democratization, 221 presidents across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia have reached the end of their term(s) in office. Of these, 30% have attempted to contravene term limits, resulting in either full abolition, one-term extensions, or failure. What explains these divergent trajectories? I argue that trends in electoral competition over time best predict term limit outcomes, with noncompetitive elections permitting full abolition, less competitive elections allowing for one-term extensions, and competitive elections leading to failed bids. This is because electoral trends provide informational cues to the president’s co-partisan legislators and constitutional court judges (the actors who ultimately rule on constitutional term limit amendments) about the cost/benefit analysis that voting to uphold or repeal term limits would have on their own political survival. These findings suggest a linkage between political uncertainty and constitutional stability more generally.

The Differential Effects of “Democratic” Institutions on Dissent in Dictatorships

Article

Jan 2019

Why do some dictatorships face dissent while others do not? In this article, we argue that nominally democratic institutions created to co-opt the dictatorial opposition have different effects on the likelihood of elite and collective dissent. By providing concessions through the creation of parties and legislatures, dictators reduce the probability of elite mobilization (via a coup) against the regime. For everyday citizens, the creation of nominally democratic institutions has the opposite effect, increasing citizen grievances and helping citizens overcome the collective action problem associated with dissent. We find empirical support for our expectations: nominally democratic institutions are negatively associated with the likelihood of coups and positively associated with the likelihood of collective dissent. Our findings suggest that the creation of “democratic” institutions may sometimes threaten dictatorial rule rather than insulate it. © 2019 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

The Rise of Sophisticated Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia

Abstract and Figures

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