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.
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.
Elections as Causes of Democratization: Southeast Asia in Comparative Perspective
Comparative Political Studies, 2019
The theory of democratization by elections holds that elections-even when flawed-can, over time, have an independent causal effect on democratic transitions. Despite the recent growth of this literature, questions remain about the global scope of the argument and its structural preconditions. We show that, in Southeast Asia, elections are almost always the culmination rather than the cause of democratization, and use case materials from seven Southeast Asian countries to illustrate the mechanisms that lead from democratization to elections. Our argument has implications both for Southeast Asian democratization and for existing scholarship from other world regions.
Democracy is the most preferred option of government leadership for many countries around the world since over 50% of today"s global populations are in a democratic world despite living in different levels of democracy. This favoritism also applies to the whole Asia-Pacific region. Many countries in this region in general and in Southeast Asia in particular prefer the democracy-oriented leadership for most of them hold a nationwide universal election or at least a party leadership election within their own government system within a specified periodic time. Nevertheless, the extent of democracy enforcement is inevitably not the same. It is varied from one country to another depending on how democracy is perceived in those countries. In this aspect, the study will comprehensively compare the democratic development process and current democratic situation in four countries, namely Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and South Korea, by trying to figure out the similarities and differences of the present democratic development and democratization in those countries. The study contends that Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar still see the enduring power of the military in the government leadership. The military is the most influential in these countries. As the consequence, this military power and its intervention hamper the democratic process and narrow the space of political and civil liberty to fully exercise their rights in political and civic lives.