Why Southeast Asia is a region with many elections but little democratisation.

Democracy in Southeast Asia is on the defensive.

A recent map of “Freedom in the World in 2016,” from Freedom House, illustrates the point starkly.

Based on their current rankings, Freedom House counts no Southeast Asian country as “Free.” It is possible to quibble with individual country evaluations, and there are other rankings of political rights and civil liberties to consult, but they all point to the same basic conclusion.

Southeast Asia’s democratic deficit is an important challenge to an influential new literature in political science on the democratising power of elections.

This idea, most carefully evaluated in a 2009 volume, holds that repetitive elections are not just a defining feature of democracy, they can also be an independent cause of authoritarian breakdown and democratic change.

This theory of “democratisation by elections” is particularly attractive to policymakers and activists because it implies that even deeply flawed multi-party and multi-candidate elections overseen by authoritarian regimes can have democratising effects.

For scholars of democratisation, it calls attention to the numerous ways that electoral authoritarian regimes attempt to manage political contestation and opposition mobilisation, with sometimes mixed results.

Please click here to read the full “Elections without democracy in Southeast Asia” article in the New Mandala by Griffith Asia Institute Research Fellow Dr Lee Morgenbesser and Dr Thomas Pepinsky, Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Associate Director of the Modern Indonesia Project, Cornell University.