South Korea is a success story in terms of institutional development. Not only did the country build a high-capacity ‘developmental state’ in the early second half of the 20th century but, towards the end of the 20th century, Koreans also witnessed the replacement of autocratic rule by a liberal democratic regime. The sequencing of these development stages seems to support ‘stateness first’ arguments, which claim that succesful democratization requires certain degrees of infrastructural capacity and citizen agreement. And, in fact, the ‘developmental state’ significantly facilitated the survival and rooting of South Korea’s democracy. However, as this chapter show, the process of state-building under autocratic rule left behind institutional legacies that continue to hinder democratic consolidation – in particular an under-institutionalized party system and a weak civil society. More generally, the chapter shows that the state-democracy nexus can be subject to path-dependent effects.

This chapter argues that the democratic transition in Cambodia was a product of external imposition through the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement. The accords authorized the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia in 1992–93 to oversee the democratic transition by organizing multi-party elections and to assist in the drafting of a new liberal democratic constitution. Across the next two decades, Cambodia’s democracy went through a period of electoral authoritarianism and in 2017 plunged into a de facto one-party authoritarianism. These developments derived from Cambodia’s weak state capacity. Cambodia’s entrenched neo-patrimonialism kept the quality of governance low in terms of administrative and extractive capacity but kept coercive capacity against democratic forces strong. As popular demand for deeper democracy and government accountability and responsiveness intensified, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) strengthened the state’s capacity by increasing revenue collection, public service provision and the quality of the bureaucracy. However, this reform is unlikely to lead to democratic deepening due to the CPP’s determination to preserve its interests and its ideational inclination to transform Cambodia into a developmental authoritarian state where economic growth takes precedence over liberal democracy.

The chapter analyses the simultaneous state-building and democratization process in East Asia’s newest sovereign nation-state. Since 2002, East Timor has strived to create a democratic and effective state out of the ashes of colonial rule, armed conflict and foreign occupation. With the assistance of the United Nations (UN), East Timor has thus undergone a process of simultaneous state and democracy building. Despite tremendous challenges, democracy has been surprisingly resilient against a number of severe crises. East Timor thereby represents a highly unusual mix of a fragile stateness but, given the circumstances, a relatively resilient (though, low-quality) democracy. This chapter investigates the reasons for and the implications of this surprising combination. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates that democratization and democracy have contributed to further consolidation of nation-building and statehood in East Timor. At the same time, however, limited stateness is one of the main reasons why democracy remains of low quality.

At the beginning of the democratic era, the state in Taiwan had at least four distinct features that set it apart from the other cases in this volume: a ‘bifurcation’ between a high capacity, high autonomy central government and deeply socially embedded local governments, a fused ‘party-state’ regime, a vibrant but fragmented and shallowly rooted civil society sector and a business community with only limited influence over the central government. These features have together shaped a distinct kind of democratic political regime in Taiwan. On the positive side, Taiwan’s civilian leaders enjoy uncircumscribed authority over all parts of the state, national elections now confer on their winners the fully effective right to rule, elections are well-managed, the party system is highly institutionalized and the full array of political rights are broadly respected. On the less positive side, Taiwan’s civil rights regime continues to suffer from weak legal foundations, and horizontal accountability has been incompletely institutionalized despite the regime’s formal separation of powers. Thus, Taiwan’s highly developed hegemonic party-state appears at best to have had no effect on and, at worst, actively undermined the establishment of a robust rule of law and protections for civil liberties.

The concluding chapter summarizes and synthesizes findings across the different country. This exercise reveals two key points regarding the state-democray nexus. First, stateness is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for democratic consolidation. Not only can newly democratising regimes be subject to path-dependent effects but intervening variables – in particular, the organization of particularistic networks - also play a role. Second, democracy will only have a strengthening effect on stateness if all partial regimes are sufficiently consolidated. That is to say, defective democracies do not produce strong incentives for political elites to invest in state-building. These findings are placed in a comparative perspective with ‘third-wave’ democracies in other parts of the world, which shows that our causal mechanisms travel beyond East Asia.

What is the relationship between well-developed stateness and democracy that continuously collapses or fails to consolidate? This chapter examines this question by scrutinizing the case of Thailand. It argues that a historically entrenched alliance of authoritarian actors, having long guided state-building efforts, guaranteed a high level of state capacity across the country. After 1980, these authoritarian actors asserted themselves behind the guise of a monarch-led ‘parallel state’, which dominated Thailand indirectly and was unwilling to surrender power to democratic actors. When these authoritarian actors felt that their interests were becoming threatened by elected governments, they plotted their overthrow, resulting in a vicious cycle of coups, which prevented high-quality democracy from ever developing. Following democratization in 1992, state capacity remained relatively high compared to other ‘new democracies’ in Southeast Asia. Such a high level of state capacity amidst continuing distrust of elected governments by the monarch-led ‘parallel state’ resulted in the collapse of democracy in 2006 and again in 2014. The case of Thailand shows us that a principal challenge to young democracies is how authoritarian predecessors, with enormous sway over stateness and state capacity, can continue exerting influence ‘from above’, hindering elected governments’ effective power to govern.

This chapter situates our analysis of the Indonesian labor movement within theoretical debates in comparative labor politics and Indonesian politics and presents the broad contours of our answers to the three overarching questions that guide the analysis in the book: Why did Indonesia’s labor movement combine contentious street politics with autonomous electoral engagement, why has the Indonesian labor movement been surprisingly effective in winning pro-labor policies, and why have unions have been less successful in the electoral arena than in the policy arena? In answering these questions, the chapter delineates three phases of the development of Indonesia’s labor movement, and emphasizes the role of authoritarian legacies, changing opportunity structures, organizational learning, the geographic concentration of the labor movement, and comparatively weak cooperation across organizational divides in the electoral arena. The chapter also outlines our research sites and methods, provides background information about the economic and political contexts, describes the union landscape, and concludes with a summary of the book’s chapters.

This chapter examines the first decade of worker mobilization in post-Suharto Indonesia. At the national level, the labor movement experienced stunning success in shaping labor law reform during this period. In the absence of strong ties to political parties, unions created mayhem in the streets to capture the attention of politicians and raise the cost of supporting laws that unions opposed. Since both the executive and the legislature had to approve labor legislation, unions could stop the enactment of antilabor laws by peeling away legislative support. This task was facilitated by government instability and weak presidential control over coalition partners and the fact that the Minister of Manpower was from a labor background in some years. At the local level, by contrast, unions had fewer points of entry and less leverage. Although newly created tripartite wage councils gave workers a voice in wage-setting, executives had the final authority to determine minimum wages increases, and they were relatively immune to pressure from workers until direct elections were phased in between mid-2005 and late 2008.

This chapter explores the question of whether the increased electoral engagement of Indonesia’s unions has fostered the development of a working-class constituency. After explaining the specific challenges of developing such a constituency, we utilize evidence from surveys conducted in working-class communities in four union-dense districts in Bekasi and Tangerang to assess workers’ views on political issues and to analyze their voting behavior in the 2009 and 2014 legislative and presidential races. We find evidence that there is a stable if not growing proportion of workers with politicized collective identities. In legislative races, we argue that these politicized collective identities have not resulted in the formation of a working-class constituency but rather an organizational constituency rooted in the membership of one union, FSPMI. In presidential races, however, we find stronger evidence that union engagement in politics has contributed to the formation of a working-class constituency that crosses organizational divides.

This chapter examines the forces that produced Indonesia’s highly mobilized but politically independent labor movement. It describes the authoritarian legacies that shaped the first phase of its evolution when the labor movement had no choice but to use street politics as its primary weapon in the struggle for more worker-friendly labor policy. In a second phase, new opportunities opened by the decentralization process led unions to experiment with electoral engagement. The focus of these efforts was at the local level where union activists backed executive candidates from many different parties, pragmatically trading their political support for pro-labor measures. In a third phase, unions drew on their past organizational learning and experimentation to extend their electoral engagement to the legislative arena. Reluctant to tie themselves directly to a single party, union strategists chose to place union cadres on legislative tickets of many different political parties. Autonomous electoral participation now complemented street politics as central features of labor’s political strategy.

This chapter examines the Indonesian labor movement’s unusual strategy of running union cadres as legislative candidates with a large number of non-programmatic parties. It begins by assessing parties’ motivations for entering into these partnerships with unions, tracking the evolving strategies of the two parties that engaged most systematically with unions. It then turns its attention to SPN and FSPMI, the two union federations that had the strongest organizational commitment to running legislative candidates in the period between 2004 and 2014. In both cases, the initial decision to engage in the legislative arena was necessarily taken by the central leadership. But, in SPN’s case, the poor showing of its candidates in the 2009 elections created internal friction, and the union quickly backed away from its organizational commitment to electoral politics. By contrast, FSPMI deepened its engagement in the 2014 legislative elections, resulting in the election of two union cadres to local legislative office in Bekasi. Unperturbed by the setbacks it experienced during the first Jokowi presidency, it again refined its institutional strategy for 2019.