Lecture 5: Single-Party Regimes in SOUTHEAST ASIA

1. Lecture 5: Single-Party Regimes in SOUTHEAST ASIA Edmund Malesky, Ph.D., UCSD

2. 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)

3. 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…

4. 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 People’s Action Party (1954-Present) • Malaysia’s United Malays National Organization (1957-Present) • Indonesia’s Golkar (1967-Present) • Cambodian People’s Party (1997-Present) • Philippines Nacionalista Party (1965-1972) • Thai Rak Thai (2000-2006)

5. 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)

6. 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)

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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).

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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 country’s institutional architecture.

17. 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.

18. Accountability AND Inequality IN SINGLE-PARTY REGIMES:A Comparative Analysis of Vietnam and China Regina Abrami, Edmund Malesky, Yu Zheng

19. Organization of Today’s Talk • The Puzzle • Comparative Analysis of Inequality • Utility of Alternative Explanations • Transfers and Equalization • Political Explanations • Future Implications

20. 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?

21. Estimated and Actual Inequality Growth Gini Coefficient Kuznets Simulations based on Higgins and Williamson 2002

22. This is true regardless of the measure of inequality

23. Normal explanations of inequality fail to explain the differences

24. Major Political Explanation is Democracy • Two major strands in the literature. • Institutional checks on political elites (Muller 1988, O’Donnell 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).

25. Can Major Indices of Regime Type Explain the Differences?

26. The Proximate Explanation – Vietnam Spends More on Transfers

27. Differences in Transfer Regimes

28. Differences in Equalization

29. 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.

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

31. 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?

32. 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.

33. 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.

34. Institutional Flow Charts

35. 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 (quántriệt) 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.

37. Vietnam’s Political Business Cycle

38. Checks on Executive Decision-Making

39. 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 People’s Committee Chairmen. • Roles are reinforced by leaders party rank and patronage possibilities.

40. Competitiveness of Party Institutions

41. Conclusions • Vietnam’s 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 Vietnam’s institutions have led to lower inequality, they also are playing a contributing role in Vietnam’s 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 Jintao’s speech at the most recent Party Congress were inequality and democracy.

42. Extra

43. 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 People’s 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