Southeast Asia political Systems Development: Democracy or Democratization Politics (original) (raw)

The Limits and Potential of Liberal Democratisation in Southeast Asia

Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 2014

This article argues that Southeast Asia is a region where uneven political development presents a theoretical challenge to the study of regime change and continuity in the academic field of comparative politics. Of the 11 political regimes, only Timor-Leste, the Philippines, and Indonesia can now be considered liberally democratic. However, these democracies are far from consolidated. The other eight regimes range from soft dictatorships to electoral authoritarian regimes and illiberal democracies. This article seeks to explain why no single theory adequately explains regime change and continuity in this region. Impediments to democratisation are many – one of which is the fact that traditional and undemocratic institutions remain strong and that transitions to civilian rule remain vulnerable to other powerful state institutions, most notably the armed forces.

Democracy or Alternative Political Systems in Asia

Establishing and maintaining a government that is "of the people, by the people, and for the people" can be a long, contentious, revisable, and sometimes violent process requiring socioeconomic change, mass participation, dissemination of democratic values, elite bargains, and pro-democratic leadership at the highest level. The course is designed to provide both a conceptual understanding of democratic theories and an empirical knowledge of experiences of democratic transition and either consolidation or reversion to authoritarianism in a number of different countries. The course begins by looking at the various models of democracy and the tension between prevailing theories of democratization and the Southeast Asian experience, including the relationship between democracy and development, the processes of democratization, and role of formal democratic institutions. Case studies examining the divergent experiences of Southeast Asian countries will form the middle part of the course. The final third of the course adopts a comparative approach, analyzing Southeast Asian democracy at an institutional and international level.

Political Regimes Cartography of Southeast Asia in Last Decade

Southeast Asia is Asia sub region, consisting of the countries south of China, east of India, and north of Australia. Southeast Asia consists of two major geographic land, the mainland peninsula in which Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. While Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Timor Leste, and Brunei as a part of the island arcs or well known as maritime countries. However, even Southeast Asia geographically divided into two big groups, all countries become one as ASEAN (Except Timor Leste). ASEAN is inter-governmental organization in which all the members agree on one vision and mission even they have a different political regimes and values of system. When we turn out to Southeast Asia political regimes, we could see the fails correspondence between politics and others element (economic, security, social, and culture) within the system. Indeed, politics in Southeast Asia confounds almost all attempts at generalization. It contains an unusual diversity of regime types, ranging from nominally Communist one-party states in Vietnam and Laos, dominant-party autocracies in Cambodia, quasi-democracies in Malaysia and Singapore, a military in Thailand, an absolute monarchy in Brunei, the transitional but still military-dominated case of Myanmar, and finally three cases of multi-party democracy, with varying degrees of effectiveness, in Indonesia, the Philippines and Timor Leste. By this article the authors would like to give an overview of the political values to each country in Southeast Asia, as well as the reason, background, and history behind it. We also tried to analyze each country one by one to proof that the Southeast Asia has their own style of political regimes compare to western style.

SOUTHEAST ASIA'S DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT

CoverStory, 2023

Southeast Asia is a favored region for investments and trade by developed countries seeking to rebound from the pandemic and other economic problems. In terms of its political indicators, however, the region is hobbled by varying levels of democratic deficits. Nikkei Asia observes that Southeast Asia remains "largely a fortress of authoritarianism, with military-based regimes (Thailand and Myanmar), dominant single parties (Vietnam, Singapore and Laos), absolute monarchies (Brunei) and old-fashioned autocrats (Cambodia) dominating the political landscape." For the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, despite "a decent record of relatively competitive and free elections,. .. all three have also seen the emergence of authoritarian populist forces and the continued marginalization of progressive parties." There is no dearth of progressive social movements in Southeast Asia, but their effectiveness has been blunted by state repression and their diminished ability to mobilize the numbers needed to galvanize the region's marginalized peoples into adopting more radical alternatives.

Introduction: The Crisis of Democratic Governance in Southeast Asia

The Crisis of Democratic Governance in Southeast Asia, 2011

The contributors to this edited collection analyze various aspects of democratic governance. The volume is organized into three thematic sections, each of which deals with different aspects of democratic governance in the region. The first section examines political culture, civil society, and democracy. The second part offers comparative analyses of institutional design systems of political representation. The third section centres on aspects of political performance and governance such as human rights performance, security sector governance, and the external as well as internal 'peacefulness' of the political regimes in Southeast Asia. The final chapter connects the insights derived from individual chapters and presents a comparative assessment of political performance and governance in democratic and non-democratic regimes in the region. Furthermore, it provides a comparative analysis of factors that are conducive or obstructive to future democratic change and democratic stability in Southeast Asia.