Lecture 5: Single-Party Regimes in SOUTHEAST ASIA

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Lecture 5 Single-Party Regimes in SOUTHEAST ASIA

• Edmund Malesky, Ph.D., UCSD

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Authoritarian Institutions An Exciting New
Sub-Field in Comparative Politics

• 4 intersecting literatures
• Typology creation (most famously Geddes in 1999).
• Regime durability based on typologies (Geddes,
  Brownlee, Slater)
• Impact of institutions (legislatures/elections)
  in authoritarian regimes.
• Hold executives accountable allowing for longer
  duration (Ghandi and Przeworski)
• Are less prone to civil conflict (Ghandi and
  Vreeland)
• Grow faster (Wright 2008)
• Motivations for elections in authoritarian
  systems.
• Demonstrate regime strength to opposition (Geddes
  2006, Magaloni 2008)
• Hold venal local leaders accountable (Geddes
  2006)
• Opportunity for rent-seeking (Blaydes 2006,
  Lust-Okar (2006).
• Power-sharing arrangments with local notables
  (Boix and Svolik)

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Geddes Predictions based on Historical Data

• Military regimes last 8 years
• Personalistic regimes last 15 years
• Single-Party regimes last 22.7 Years
• In Southeast, Asia

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SEA has been a focal point

• Single-Party Regimes
• Vietnam (1954 (1975)-Present)
• Laos (1975-Present)
• Cambodia (1975-1978 1978-1991)
• Single-Party Dominant Regimes
• Singapore Peoples Action Party (1954-Present)
• Malaysias United Malays National Organization
  (1957-Present)
• Indonesias Golkar (1967-Present)
• Cambodian Peoples Party (1997-Present)
• Philippines Nacionalista Party (1965-1972)
• Thai Rak Thai (2000-2006)

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SEA has been a focal point

• Military
• Thailand (at least once a decade since 1933
  (except the 1980s)
• 1937-1945 (8)
• 1947-1958 (11)
• 1959-1973 (14)
• 1991-1992 (1)
• 2006-2007 (1)
• Burma (1962-Present)
• Personalist Dictator
• Philippines Marcos (1972-1986)
• Suharto? Mahatir? Lee Kwan Yew? Hun Sen?
• Sultunate (Monarchy)
• Brunei (1963 Present)

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Southeast Asia has also been an enigma

• Burma, a military regime, outlasted a large
  number of personalist and single-party regimes.
• Remember, according to Geddes, personalist
  regimes are more resistant to democratization
  than military regimes.
• Triple-Hybrids are the most durable
• But SPDC outlasts Golkar.
• Some clearly authoritarian regimes (Singapore,
  Malaysia, Indonesia (for a time), Vietnam) seem
  to have a high degree of legitimacy according to
  World Values survey (Philippines and Burma are
  the exceptions)

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Descriptions for the peculiar regime so common in
Southeast Asia

• Defective Democracies (Diminished Sub-Types)
• Delegative Democacy (lacking checks and balances)
• Iliberal Democracy (no rule of law)
• Clientelist (weak on programmatic party
  competition)
• The problem with democracy with adjectives is
  that it diminishes our understanding of the
  authoritarian realities within these countries.

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Descriptions for the peculiar regime so common in
Southeast Asia

• Hybrid Regimes
• Semi-Democracy
• Semi-Authoritarian
• Semi-Dictatorship
• Gray Zone
• Genuinely mixed regimes situated in some gray
  zone between authoritarianisms and democracy.

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Descriptions for the peculiar regime so common in
Southeast Asia

• Pseudo-democracy
• Disguised dictatorship
• Competitive Authoritarianism
• the trappings but not the substance
• democracy as deceptions
• representative institutions without
  representative government
• Recognizes these as instances of non-democratic
  government.

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Electoral Authoritarianism

• Focuses on a specific institutional aspect of a
  number of regimes.
• Hold regular elections for the chief executive
  and national assembly.
• Broadly inclusive (universal suffrage)
• Minimally pluralistic (opposition parties are
  allowed to run)
• Minimally competitive (opposition, while denied
  victory is allowed to win and hold seats)
• Minimally open (opposition parties are not
  subject to massive repression)
• Yet, they violate the liberal-democratic
  principles of freedom and fairness so profoundly
  and systematically as to render elections
  instruments of authoritarian rule rather than
  instruments of democracy.
• Electoral contests are subject to state
  manipulation so severe, widespread, and
  systematic that do not qualify as democratic.
• These regimes are neither democratic or
  democratizing, but plainly authoritarian, albeit
  in ways that depart from a traditional
  understanding of authoritarianism.

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Electoral Authoritarianism

• Which regimes in Southeast Asia count? (Why or
  why not?)
• Is electoral authoritarianism synonymous with
  single-party dominant?
• Is Vietnam an electoral authoritarian country??
• Regular elections check
• Universal suffrage check
• Competition check
• No overt repression oops
• Pluralistic - oops
• But Laos, Burma, and Brunei do not meet any of
  these criteria, so is there a spectrum of
  electoral authoritarianism.
• Laos has frequently cancelled elections
• Brunei last held universal elections in 1962
• Burma last held elections in 1990

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Menu of Manipulation

• How do electoral authoritarian regimes manipulate
  elections? (Case 2006)
• Restricting Civil Liberties
• Reserved Positions and Domains
• Exclusion and Fragmentation
• Disenfranchisement
• Vote Buying
• Intimidation
• Electoral Fraud

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Skilled versus Clumsy Manipulation

• Skillful Softened inverse distributions between
  rulers and mass-public maintain tight limits on
  civil liberties gerrymandering.
• Societal grievances remained muted.
• Clumsy Do not do anything to remedy reversing
  fortunes caused by economic change. Rashly
  seizing Prime Ministership (Thailand) Falsifying
  electoral tallies (Philippines) Repudiating
  elections directly (Burma).

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Limitations of Typologies

• The notion of typologies can be limiting for
  generating comparative leverage.
• Typologies allow us to demonstrate a correlation,
  but not the micro-logic to truly understand
  divergent outcomes.
• Within the class of semi-democracy/electoral
  authoritarianism there are qualitative
  differences that could brushed away.
• It would be better to have a continuous measure
  of institutional quality than ran the spectrum
  from highly authoritarian to highly democratic.
• But what dimension should the researcher
  privilege? Democracy is multi-faceted.

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Winning Coalition/Selectorate Theory

• BdM, Morrow, Silverson, and Smith 2003 was hailed
  as breakthrough, because it apparently solved the
  problem of typologies and provided a analytically
  useful continuous measure.
• Notion of selectorate was first employed by Susan
  Shirk (1994) in The Political Logic of Economic
  Reform in China
• BdM et al employed it in their seminal Logic of
  Political Survival
• Book has been hit with a raft of methodological
  complaints, but the logic is compelling.

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The Theory of W/S

• (S)electorate the group of people in a society
  endowed with the ability to choose the leadership
• (W)inning coalition - a sufficiently-sized subset
  of the selectorate whose support endows the
  leadership with political power over the rest of
  the subset and the disenfranchised members of the
  population.
• sufficiently-sized is determined by a countrys
  institutional architecture.

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The W/S Ratio

• When W is small (relative to S), the least costly
  method of buying support from a coalition is
  through private goods (i.e. bribes, preferential
  access to land or government contracting).
• When W is large (relative to S), the cost of
  private goods is prohibitively expensive, and
  rulers are more likely to use public goods
  provision as a means winning acquiescence from
  other political actors.
• The authors test this theory empirically, finding
  that the size of W correlates strongly with a
  range of public goods provision measures,
  including transfers for education, health, and
  infrastructure.
• Loyalty Norm they also find that leaders with
  small W and large S survive longer, because the
  cost of buying off members is minimal.
• As W increases, buying members becomes more
  difficult and it is easy to defect to an
  alternative coalition.

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Accountability AND Inequality IN SINGLE-PARTY
REGIMESA Comparative Analysis of Vietnam and
China

• Regina Abrami, Edmund Malesky, Yu Zheng

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Organization of Todays Talk

• The Puzzle
• Comparative Analysis of Inequality
• Utility of Alternative Explanations
• Transfers and Equalization
• Political Explanations
• Future Implications

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The Puzzle

• Over the past two decades, no two economies have
  grown faster. But while economic inequality has
  been exacerbated in China, it has grown only
  moderately in Vietnam. Why?

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Estimated and Actual Inequality Growth
Gini Coefficient
Kuznets Simulations based on Higgins and
Williamson 2002
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This is true regardless of the measure of
inequality
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Normal explanations of inequality fail to explain
the differences
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Major Political Explanation is Democracy

• Two major strands in the literature.
• Institutional checks on political elites (Muller
  1988, ODonnell 1994, Boix 2003, Bollen and
  Jackman 1985).
• Opportunities for participation by constituents
  who are negatively affected by economic policies
  (Muller 1988, Reuveny and Li 2003, Boix 2003,
  Chan 1997, Hellman 1998).
• Basically, institutional arrangements can
  redistribute political power to the economically
  disadvantaged, ultimately leading to more
  balanced economic initiatives (Lenski 1966,
  Lipset 1959).

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Can Major Indices of Regime Type Explain the
Differences?
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The Proximate Explanation Vietnam Spends More
on Transfers
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Differences in Transfer Regimes
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Differences in Equalization
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Delving Further

• Vietnam has lower inequality than China. This is
  primarily due to transfers and the impact of
  those transfers on equalization.
• But transfers are only the proximate cause. What
  factors have led to greater transfers in Vietnam
  than in China?
• If politics is the science of who gets what,
  when, and why, then we need to do better than
  our blunt indices of regime type.

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The Student is Instructing the Teacher
While Political Science sees no difference
between the two regimes, Chinese journalists have
highlighted many. Including

• Competitive elections in the Central Committee
• Increasing power of the Central Committee
  vis-à-vis the Politburo.
• Public commentary on Party Congress Political
  Report.
• Direct popular elections of National Assembly
• Televised National Assembly query sessions of
  government ministers.
• Decrees stipulating the public declarations of
  officials assets
• The market for Vietnamese land use rights
  certificates.
• On-line chat of Vietnamese officials and
  constituents
• Public participation in the legal drafting
  process, through an on-line portal.

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The Dog that Barked

• Hu Jintao issues an internal CCP document
  criticizing the Vietnam for moving too quickly
  toward inner party democracy.
• Old CCP idealogues are wheeled out to argue
  against the wisdom of pursuing a Vietnam-like
  path.
• Open Magazine declares that discussion of
  Vietnamese reforms has been prohibited by Chinese
  authorities.
• If differences between the two countries are so
  minimal as to be undetectable by comparative
  politics tool kits, why the hard-line response?

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Three Critical Differences between Elite
Institutions in Vietnam and China

• Central Committee is the primary decision-making
  body in Vietnam. In China, it is the smaller
  Politburo.
• This means that larger coalitions need to be
  built for reforms.
• Winning coalition is larger in Vietnam than China
  (BdM et al 2003).
• General Secretary of the Party is far more
  constrained in Vietnamese decision-making than in
  Chinese.
• Both inner-party and government elections are
  more competitive in Vietnam than in China.

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Respective Crises in the Late Eighties Drove
Institutions in Opposite Directions

• In China, Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 led
  to a concentration of decision making among a
  small coterie of leaders in the Politburo and to
  the strengthening of party control over
  government institutions.
• In Vietnam, deaths of key leaders, economic
  crisis, and overstretch in Cambodia led to power
  vacuum and competition among several factions for
  control. These groups worked out a series of
  self-serving compromises, leading to a diffusion
  of power in key governing institutions.

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Institutional Flow Charts
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Evidence for the Importance of the Central
Committee in Vietnam

• The demise of the Politburo Standing Committee
• Rejection (by vote) of a standing General
  Secretary
• The plenums of the CCOM are the location where
  the democracy and intellectualism of the body are
  brought forth in its discussions, decisions, and
  policies. It should not happen again that the
  Central Committee becomes an agency that grasps
  in its entirety (quan triê?t) a master policy
  that has already been decided upon. (Former
  Prime Minister, Vo Van Kiet 2006).
• More frequent meetings and importance of the
  body.
• Special sessions of the Central Committee to
  resolve key political dilemmas.

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Vietnams Political Business Cycle
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Checks on Executive Decision-Making
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Diffusion of Responsibilities in Vietnam in 1992
Constitution

• Secretary General Heads Party Apparatus, which
  sets general guidelines for the running of the
  state. Has appointment powers within the VCP
  Bureaucracy.
• President Appoints ambassadors, signs
  international treaties, can introduce legislation
  in National Assembly, and chairs central military
  commission.
• Prime Minister Executive, legislative, and most
  importantly appointment powers over the
  ministers and provincial Peoples Committee
  Chairmen.
• Roles are reinforced by leaders party rank and
  patronage possibilities.

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Competitiveness of Party Institutions
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Conclusions

• Vietnams institutional architecture is the key
  factor explaining differences in inequality in
  the two regimes.
• The finding has important implications for the
  study of authoritarian systems. We can do better
  than simple typologies.
• While Vietnams institutions have led to lower
  inequality, they also are playing a contributing
  role in Vietnams present difficulties fending
  off macroeconomic crisis.
• Finally, this is not an equilibrium by any means.
  China is aware of its deficiencies and has
  already begun to experiment with changes in
  inner-party democracy as a way of addressing
  them.
• The two most common characters in Hu Jintaos
  speech at the most recent Party Congress were
  inequality and democracy.

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Extra
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National Assembly Elections

• Type of Election
• Direct Elections in Vietnam
• Tiered Indirect Elections in China through local
  Congresses in China
• Nomination
• Self-nomination allowed in Vietnam (236 total
  self-nominees 101 in HCMC alone only 1 was
  elected).
• Candidates per Seat
• China 1.2 for National Peoples Congress
  Elections
• Vietnam ranges from 1.67 to 2 depending on the
  electoral district.
• Rejection
• 12 Nominees of Vietnamese Central Authorities
  were not elected in the 2007 elections.
• All rejections occurred in wealthy provinces