Challenges to Southeast Asia's democratization processes: a case study on Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand

Abstract

Democratization in Southeast Asia has long been of scholarly interests, particularly following the Third Wave, which saw the democratization of the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia, as well as the political liberalization of Malaysia, Singapore, and Cambodia. However, excitements over democracy were soon overshadowed by creeping doubts over their survivability. By the 2000s, democratization has either decelerated or regressed in some of the region’s most strategic countries, most notably Thailand and the Philippines. As ASEAN is on the verge of liberalization, this poses negative implications to the organization as well. This paper seeks to identify common variables that threaten democratic institutions in Southeast Asia. Scholars of Southeast Asia have proposed numerous variables that threaten the region’s young democracies, ranging from the system of government to geographic attributes. This paper will not attempt to identify a new variable. Rather, it will assess the three dominant approaches in the study of democratic survival in the region – socioeconomic, structural, and ethnic and cultural – in order to identify what common challenges threaten Southeast Asia’s democratic institutions. In order to do so, this paper will also adopt a unique approach to the topic by primarily focusing on the period between 2000 and 2010, which has seen the beginning of the gradual decline of democratic progression in many parts of Southeast Asia. Rather than conduct a region-wide study, it will primarily focus on three of the region’s biggest democracies: Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. By adopting this nuanced approach to the study of democratic survival in Southeast Asia, this paper has uncovered that the biggest factors that contribute to the gradual deceleration or regression of the democratization process were unstable elite relations and a power struggle between members of the elite, at large, and the middle class. The variety of variables that shape this power balance determine the life length and stability of democratic institutions. This paper’s primary contribution to the literature is its unique approach to the study of democratic survival. By focusing on the period between 2000 and 2010, it has managed to find evidence for the structuralist and cultural arguments that actors, political culture, and ethnic conflict shape the democratization process. But it has also managed to disprove the dominant socioeconomic approach that argue that socioeconomic factors pose significant risks to the democratization process in the region. With this primary contribution, this paper also hopes to add on to further discussions on the impact of structural actors of the region’s young democracies on the future of ASEAN as a whole.