Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Case (2006)
Case (2006)
William Case
Today many governments that seek to perpetuate their power operate hybrid
regimes, manipulating institutions yet holding regular elections. In this way,
governments gain some legitimacy for their extended incumbency through the
residual competitiveness that this regime type allows. However, recent studies
show that voters may sometimes grow so activated that they make new use of
this competitiveness, however limited, and turn elections into the means by
which they can finally change the regime and the government that operates it.
This article examines this thesis in Southeast Asia, a region in which hybrid
politics have long been practiced. Its main finding is that while change has
sometimes taken place, voters—participating only as voters—have never been
central.
KEYWORDS: political regimes, authoritarianism, democracy, hybrid politics,
elites, mass publics, civil liberties, elections, voters, transitions, Southeast Asia
I n the aftermath of the Cold War, few cases remain of what Guillermo
O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter once called dictadura—a “hard”
authoritarianism run brusquely by dictators or generals.1 Instead, across
Latin America, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and Central Asia,
many governments that seek perennially to rule have scaled back their
coercion and its costly inefficiencies. They have learned to leaven their
strategies with elections, even reasonably competitive ones, that are
framed in ways that earn some legitimacy but that are in fact meant to
ensure their iterated return to power. Hard authoritarianism has thus
steadily given way to what analysts variously conceptualize as “semi”
or “competitive” authoritarianism, “pseudo” or “illiberal” democracy,
or (more neutrally perhaps) as “hybrid regimes.”2
This spread of hybrid regimes has frustrated democracy promoters,
with the third wave falling short of its full promise. It has also come
under scrutiny from transitions theorists, intrigued by the debut of a
215
216 Southeast Asia’s Hybrid Regimes
In recognizing that hybrid regimes can gain more resilience today than
hard authoritarianism can, we avoid the assumption once implicit in
transitions theory that these regimes are intrinsically unstable, even
poised for democracy.23 However, as John Harbeson observes, correct-
ing “this teleological fallacy [of instability] should not necessarily lead
to an opposite, and perhaps equally false, presumption that [these
regimes are never] subject to replacement or transformation.”24 Thus, in
some cases the equilibrium gained through political hybridity may dis-
solve in the frailties and tensions cited by Ottaway, Levitsky, and Way,
seemingly bolstering the prospects for democratization-by-election.
In shifting attention from persistence to change, we particularly
focus on short-term contingent factors, a causal sequence that may
begin with economies that slip into crisis or stagnation. However, more
than a univariate economic argument must be made, one wherein poli-
tics are changed simply by crisis and societal grievances. As Michael
Bratton and Nicholas van de Walle have demonstrated, economic crises
can cut in a number of ways, one of which may even involve mass
publics redoubling their support for a government’s authoritarian con-
trols in hopes of restarting growth.25 Accordingly, key intervening vari-
ables must be present if declining economies are to bring mass publics
to the boil, perhaps to participate concertedly as voters.
More finely, then, in the Southeast Asia setting, it is when declin-
ing economies are marked by inversely varying fortunes between elites
and mass publics—with elites vigorously preserving their assets while
mass publics are left to confront uncertainties and hardships—that soci-
etal grievances intensify. The high-level patronage that amid the
region’s rapid industrialization had seemed so benign begins now to
grate.26 Further, these discontents may find resonance with deeper per-
ceptions of social injustice. And, as Asian democracy and values ring
increasingly hollow, they may be galvanized too by the availability of
competing mentalities and appeals—not least in the Southeast Asian
setting. Islamism’s promise of greater probity in public life and neolib-
eralism’s insistence on fuller transparency, both of which, though from
William Case 225
different angles, challenge hybrid regimes with calls for good gover-
nance. Finally—and most crucially—where governments react to these
pressures by drawing more deeply, but unskillfully, on the menu of
manipulation charted above, societal grievances may cohere in new
opposition sentiments.
Nonetheless, in Southeast Asia, even where aroused mass publics
have participated concertedly as voters, their behaviors have been nei-
ther necessary nor sufficient to bring about changes in the government
or regime. Governments have too stoutly resisted their ouster by voters,
even when stricken with declining economies, inverse distributions,
and unskillful manipulations. Grasping at the authoritarian strands in
the political hybridity within which they nest, governments have often
tried sooner to revert, sometimes successfully, from the hybrid regimes
through which they are now threatened to hard authoritarianism, what-
ever its costs. Thus, the electoral defeats that have turned out incum-
bent governments in Nicaragua, Albania, Ukraine, and several African
countries—places in which hybrid politics had only recently been
tried—have never occurred in the more practiced milieu of Southeast
Asia.
Yet the region has also been home to some of the third wave’s most
startling democratic transitions. Indeed, perhaps more than anywhere
else, the pathway to change in Southeast Asia has involved what Hunt-
ington once labeled bottom-up “replacement,”27 delivered not by vot-
ing but through street actions, sometimes quite violent. But even this
may be understood in terms of the resilience that hybrid regimes can
attain. Impermeable to the mere bargaining by which hard authoritari-
anism was transformed in the classic cases of Southern Europe and
South America, political hybridity in Southeast Asia has only been
replaced by stark confrontation and force. In these transitions, voters
have sometimes had a part. But only where they have grown so agitated
by the government’s distorting their electoral preferences they have
turned finally to popular upsurge. These contingent sequences are dia-
grammed in Figure 1.
In Southeast Asia, then, though bottom-up replacement articulates
the route by which politics have almost always been democratized, the
role of voters in this process has been secondary or nonexistent. Rather,
where democratic transitions have taken place, they have depended less
on voters than on street protesters, sometimes rioters and looters,
widening the elite-level divisions through which governments and
regimes can be changed. And where this process takes place, it may
yield replacements that, amid the third wave, stand in contrast to bet-
226
While hybrid regimes have become Southeast Asia’s modal type, they
may be tested contingently by declining economies and inverse distribu-
tions between elites and mass publics. And it is on the artfulness with
which governments then draw more deeply on the menu of manipula-
tion—variously assuaging or alienating mass publics—that the fate of
hybrid politics then turns. The case studies presented in this section
reveal the conditions in which hybrid regimes persist or change and,
where change takes place, the extent to which voters have been involved.
ily members and top cronies worked to preserve their corporate stakes,
while the subsidies on staples consumed by mass publics were sharply
reduced, in part at the urging of the International Monetary Fund. And
when student protesters were shot by security forces at Trisakti Uni-
versity, the notorious Jakarta riots erupted, swelling into murderous
attacks on the city’s Chinese community and widespread looting.
Suharto’s erstwhile visage as the “father of development” was thus
rudely peeled back, leaving him to stand as a lightning rod for societal
grievances, popular upsurge, and violence. Seeking to tame protesters
and rioters into voters, he pledged more competitive elections in the
future. But given his long record of utter inflexibility and his rigid
adherence to the framework of his hybrid regime, he failed to gain pub-
lic trust. Civil society organizations, especially student groups, thus
spurned his offer by continuing to mobilize against him, even occupy-
ing the DPR/MPR building. Confronted, then, by the brittleness of his
regime in a context of economic crisis and inverse distributions, he
refrained from Marcos’s last-ditch attempts to impose hard authoritari-
anism. Instead, he transferred executive power to his vice-president,
B. J. Habibie, who, in trying to win popular favor as a reformer, yielded
to democratic transition. Thus, a brief analysis of the Indonesian case
shows clearly that hybrid regimes can be democratized through bot-
tom-up replacement, even as mass publics eschew any concerted par-
ticipation as voters.
* * *
To summarize this section, when economies declined in Singapore and
Malaysia, governments responded with artful manipulations. Most cru-
cially, they maintained tight limits on civil liberties, then deftly reor-
ganized electoral districts. And they worked more deeply also to ease
inverse variations in elite and mass-level fortunes. In these cases, then,
societal grievances never flared into the concerted voter participation
or popular upsurges that can weaken hybrid regimes.
By contrast, in Burma and the Philippines, governments clamped
down hard on civil liberties, yet failed effectively to calibrate electoral
competitiveness. They neglected also to ease inverse distributions. Fur-
ther, in triggering strong electoral challenges, these governments
responded erratically, repudiating results in the first case and so dis-
torting the tally in the second that popular upsurge took place. In this
way, hybrid regimes were changed, albeit in different ways. In Burma,
where the military remained unified, politics tipped back into hard
authoritarianism. In the Philippines, where the military lost unity, poli-
234 Southeast Asia’s Hybrid Regimes
Declining
Economies/ Concerted Hybrid
Inverse Artful Voter Popular Regime
Distributions Manipulations Opposition Upsurge Outcome
Conclusion
But in Southeast Asia, it has been no easy matter for mass publics
to deliver transformative impact as voters, using the electoral apertures
that hybrid regimes offer. Indeed, voters in the region, acting only as
voters, have never been able to turn the tables decisively. Even in those
few cases where voters have swept past authoritarian controls, govern-
ments remain encouraged by the structural grounding they still hold to
dig in their heels, seeking sooner to revert to hard authoritarianism than
to acquiesce in democratic transitions. Thus, while transitions to
democracy have surely taken place in the region, usually through bot-
tom-up replacements, they have been driven not by voters, but instead
more forcibly by protesters. Further, even after transitions have taken
place, the elements of earlier trajectories appear at some level to recon-
stitute themselves, with authoritarian strands restraining the quality of
the new democracies that emerge.
Of course, the lessons drawn about hybrid politics in Southeast
Asia may not apply readily to other parts of the world where voters
have indeed sometimes succeeded in ousting their governments and
democratizing politics. However, it may be that these latter cases are
not so different from those in Southeast Asia, but rather are set apart
mainly in time by the newness of their political hybridity, the inexpert-
ness with which manipulations are carried out, the inaccurate transmis-
sion of structural conditions into political practices, and the precari-
ousness of industrializing performance. Thus, in time, not only may
hybrid regimes grow more pervasive, but they may also gain more
immunity to voters where those regimes spread, further confounding
democracy’s promoters while intriguing the transitions theorists.
Notes