The book studies and compares causes, catalysts and consequences of democratic regression and revival in South, Southeast, and Northeast Asia. The Asia-Pacific presents social scientists with a natural laboratory to test competing theories of democratic erosion, decay, and revival and to identify new patterns and relationships. This volume combines conceptual and comparative research with single case studies. Overall, the collection of studies in this volume captures different forms of democratic regression and autocratization, examine how Asia-Pacific experiences fit into debates about democracy’s deepening global recession and what the Asia-Pacific experiences contribute to the understanding of the causes, catalysts, and consequences of democratic regression and resilience in the comparative politics literature. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Democratization.

Democratization since the implosion of the communist bloc displays a mixed balance. While the neo-democracies in Central Eastern European Countries can be seen as largely consolidated, many other processes of democratization in other parts of the world such as Africa, Asia and Latin America got stuck as unconsolidated or became defective democracies, some ‘regressed’ into hybrid regimes or were even turned into autocracies. While transitology dealt with the transition from authoritarian rule, the reverse process, the transition from democratic rule, remained almost completely outside the scholarly attention. This special issue will address the problems of the regression of democracy and aims at closing the gap between research on democracy and democratization on one side and the emergence of authoritarian regimes on the other. The contributions of this volume analyse the different phenomena in which decline of democracy fans out: the loss of quality, which means a silent regression; the backslide into hybrid regimes (hybridization); and the breakdown of democracy.

Comparative analysis of case studies across East Asia provides new insights into the relationship between state building, stateness, and democracy.

Since the mid-2000s, the quality of democracy around the world has been in decline, and Southeast Asia is no exception. This Element analyzes the extent, patterns and drivers of democratic deconsolidation in the three Southeast Asian countries that boast the longest history of electoral democracy in the region: Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. While the exact deconsolidation outcomes differ, all three nations have witnessed similar trends of democratic erosion. In each case, long-standing democratic deficiencies (such as clientelism, politicized security forces and non-democratic enclaves) have persisted; rising wealth inequality has triggered political oligarchization and subsequent populist responses embedded in identity politics; and ambitious middle classes have opted for non-democratic alternatives to safeguard their material advancement. As a result, all three polities have descended from their democratic peaks between the late 1980s and early 2000s, with few signs pointing to a return to previous democratization paths.

This Element offers a way to understand the evolution of authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia. The theoretical framework is based on a set of indicators (judged for their known advantages and mimicry of democratic attributes) as well as a typology (conceptualized as two discreet categories of 'retrograde' and 'sophisticated' authoritarianism). Working with an original dataset, the empirical results reveal vast differences within and across authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia, but also a discernible shift towards sophisticated authoritarianism over time. The Element concludes with a reflection of its contribution and a statement on its generalizability.