In his book, Erik Kuhonta advances an institutional theory of equitable development. He argues that an institutionalized party helps to promote social and human development by privileging public over private interests and by promoting programmatic politics rather than clientelistic exchange. A party is fully institutionalized when it is autonomous, coherent, and organizationally complex, but is rooted in society in a way that enables it to address the needs of the poor (pp. 23–24). To test his argument, Kuhonta draws on evidence from two sets of paired comparisons. The primary comparison is of Malaysia and Thailand, and in a separate chapter, he extends the argument by comparing the Philippines and Vietnam.