The Philippines stands out as the first and longest democracy in Southeast Asia. However, except for elections, democracy in the Philippines is a low quality or ‘defective democracy’. In this chapter, we first empirically document the low quality of Philippine democracy. We then advance an argument that explains the pathological condition of Philippine democracy in terms of the fecklessness of its core institutional structures. This institutional weakness can be explained by two significant historical-structural factors: the sequencing of the advent of electoral democracy vis-a-vis the building of the state and the absence of social cleavages in the Philippines. The advent of electoral democracy in the Philippines prior to any effort to build a functioning, autonomous and rationalized bureaucratic state has effectively created favorable conditions for traditional oligarchs to dominate state structures since the American colonial days. The fact that social cleavages never became articulated into the party system has further led to the creation of political parties as clientelistic shells, devoid of any substantive, programmatic agenda that would serve the public good.

This chapter discusses the stateness-democracy linkage in Indonesia’s post-1998 democratization process. While the stateness developed under authoritarianism appeared to erode after 1998, a robust democracy was nevertheless established. This surprising outcome raises the question of what the precise role of stateness and its related capacities was in establishing and maintaining the democratic regime after 1998. Did the capacity developed under Suharto survive the collapse of the authoritarian regime in 1998 and help to create the conditions under which democracy was entrenched, together with its deficiencies? Or did democracy develop new state capacities that allowed the country to consolidate? There is evidence, this chapter argues, that the core of Indonesian state capacity entrenched under Suharto endured during the transition, assisting in the creation of an electoral democracy. Yet, the deals that post-authoritarian rulers had to enter into in order to access that state capacity trapped Indonesia in low-quality democratic rule. There is also evidence that, although low in quality, Indonesia’s democracy strengthened some of the state’s capacities, while it failed to impact others.

Should a well-functioning state be a precondition for democratization? Can democratization nevertheless contribute to state-building? What does the evidence from East Asia say about the so-called “sequencing debate”? This chapter first reviews the debate on the relationship between state-building and democratization, then examines the historical relationship between state-building and democratization in East Asia. The main findings are as follows. First, privileging state-building has both good and bad consequences and does not preclude the possibility of democratization. Second, democratization confers international legitimacy on isolated states and is beneficial as a conflict-solving mechanism, yet often requires costly external intervention and is not guaranteed success. Finally, the historical experience of East Asia up to the present suggests that today’s regimes cannot freely choose between state-building and democratization

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.