Department of Public and International Affairs

The significance of Meiji Japan's "Prussian path" to authoritarian modernity has largely been ignored in the social sciences because it contradicts prevailing modernization theory. Meiji Japanese reformers, after carefully examining several Western country's political systems, chose the German model because of its illiberal but modern politics. This argument regarding the authoritarian modernity of Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan contradicts modernization theory which claims that advanced industrialization leads to liberal democracy. Similarly, Meiji Japan's influence on the "developmental states" of East Asia (East and Southeast Asia) has not been given much weight by modernization theories. More recently, Singapore's successful combination of non-democratic rule with advanced capitalism has been dismissed as a (literally) small exception to the general democratizing rule, with even autocratic China expected by modernization theorists to democratize soon given its rapid economic growth over the past generation. This article explores the impact of the Imperial German model of authoritarian modernism on Meiji Japan and, in turn, Japanese influence on political development in East Asia as well as the influence of the "Singapore model" on China. It explores three forms of linkages: social structural, state formational, and ideological.

Two influential explanations of Duterte’s surprising rise and rule are his “penal populist” leadership style and a structural crisis of oligarchic democracy. The populist leadership perspective explains “too little” about the extreme violence of Duterte’s illiberal rule and the vulnerability of the prevailing political order to it. The oligarchic-democracy-in-crisis view, on the other hand, explains “too much” because it is overly generalized and determinist, thus unable to account for what in particular triggered Duterte’s rise despite political stability and economic growth. The article offers a third explanation that integrates a leadership perspective into an oligarchic framework using a “structuration” approach. It focuses on how Duterte’s leadership style enabled him to take advantage of a disjunctive moment in the country’s “liberal reformist” political structure, a distinct subset of oligarchic democracy.

Much has been written about the United States’ two oldest allies in Southeast Asia – the Philippines and Thailand – taking China’s side against the US after both countries abandoned liberal democracy.1 After the May 2014 military coup in Thailand and the election of strongman President Rodrigo R. Duterte in the Philippines in May 2016, the governments in Thailand and the Philippines began distancing themselves from the long-standing patron-client relationship with Washington, which dates back to the beginning of the Cold War in Thailand and to the US colonial period in the Philippines. The US government’s criticism about the (poor) state of democracy and growing human rights violations in both countries angered rulers in Manila and Bangkok, leading them to distance themselves strategically from Washington and turn to China to make up for lost patronage. These changes have often been viewed in zero-sum terms as a failure of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” on the one hand,...

It is a common misunderstanding that the "Asian Values" discourse is about Asia. Originally dubbed "Confucian values," it became "Asian" in order to serve as a causeway connecting the discourses of Singaporean and Malaysian authoritarian leaders in the early 1990s. Not seriously engaging with a storied "Asianisms" debate about common values in the region, it was crudely essentialist. In the face of perceived external and internal challenges, proclaiming democracy as culturally alien proved a useful authoritarian tool. Earlier manifestations of this reactionary culturalism in the region functioned similarly, e.g., "Thai-style democracy." These discourses shaped political agendas, as efforts by democratic oppositionists throughout Southeast Asia to develop a counter narrative of "vernacularized" liberalism demonstrated. Not surprisingly, an Asian Values-style exculpatory discourse has been revived alongside a recent autocratization wave in Southeast Asia. Comparativists interpreting such arguments as a defense of indigenous values and constructivists imagining Asian Values contributing to a Southeast Asian regional identity have inadvertently contributed to legitimizing such authoritarian normative claims.

In this chapter Mark Thompson traces the formation and emergence of the "aircon opposition"elites drawn from big business, the Catholic church hierarchy, traditional politics, and the social democratic movement-who had begun actively to resist Marcos after the Aquino assassination and who played a key role in the overthrow of his government in the EDSA Revolution. He then tracks their fortunes through their unwieldy consolidation under the presidencies of Corazon C. Aquino and Fidel V. Ramos, their gradual dissolution during the presidencies of Joseph E. Estrada and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, their brief resurgence under Benigno S. Aquino, III, and their dislodging under Rodrigo Duterte and the recently elected Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. He argues that the Philippines has come full circle from the "people power" uprising against the Marcos dictatorship to most Filipinos now favoring strongman rule.

‘People power’ figure Fidel Ramos’ presidency was the ‘high point’ of a now lost liberal reformist era in the Philippines. Fidel Ramos was a key figure in the Philippines ‘people power’ uprising that toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos Snr  As president, Ramos was committed to good governance, but Duterte’s drug war and election of Marcos Jnr, this liberal reformist legacy appears lost

... linked to the communist-influenced Hukbalahap rebels — who were unseated in a powerplay by the allies of President Manuel Roxas in ... In this context, Julio Teehankee has adopted the useful term "command votes" — blocks of votes in a candidate's bailiwick (baluarte) that are ...

The overthrow of Slobodan Miloševiae in Serbia's so-called October Revolution four years ago was briefly celebrated by the international press, and it also received extensive attention from scholars. Such accounts focused on why and how the opposition won the September 2000 presidential ballot as well as on the organizing of the ensuing uprising. But the link between the regime's disregard for the election results and the subsequent mass mobilization has not been adequately explained. 1 Of course, most scholars recognize that Miloševiae's electoral defeat and his attempts to manipulate the results contributed mightily to his fall. Yet it has not made clear exactly why this stolen election had such a revolutionary outcome. Elections are considered stolen when a regime hinders an opposition victory through blatant manipulation of the vote count or through the annulment of the electoral results. In Serbia, it was only after such stolen elections had fundamentally transformed the political setting that mass protest became successful; prior to the dramatic changes brought about by the 2000 polls, attempts to organize Miloševiae's overthrow had failed repeatedly. The closest the opposition had previously come to toppling the regime was during the startling antiregime protests that followed the government's annulment of the November 1996 municipal-election results. The importance of developing a theory around stolen elections goes beyond the Serbian case. Scholarly research on electoral or competitive

What in German is commonly referred to as die Wende (the turnaround or change) was one of the most surprising events in the sudden collapse of East European communism in 1989.1 Less than a decade earlier Timothy Garton Ash had asked why the German Democratic Republic (GDR) could be so stable at a time when Polish communists had to declare martial law to suppress Solidarity. He argued that among the East European countries the GDR had the best carrots, that is economic conditions, and the most effective sticks, i.e., secret police. 2 Late into the 1980s the regime was convinced of its "accomplishments" and "could not have been more self-satisfied. ''3 Yet a mass protest movement that arose only in mid-1989 had already put an end to the Honecker government by October 1989, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED)-regime by March 1990, and the GDR itself by October 1990. Despite the tendency of people to claim they "knew it

With the death of Singapore's founding leader Lee Kuan Yew in March 2015 and Chinese president Xi Jingping's ongoing anticorruption campaign, the international and Chinese media have been full of stories about the interest of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership in the "Singapore model" of good governance combined with authoritarian rule. The official Chinese press has noted several "waves of Singapore fever" since China's "Great Reformer" Deng Xiaoping first visited the Southeast Asian city-state in 1978. Beijing's infatuation with Singapore had already been evident during the 2012 once-in-a-decade transfer of power within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in which references to the city-state featured prominently. A Central Party School media organ under Xi Jinping praised Singapore's People's Action Party (PAP) for its "high efficiency, incorruptibility, and vitality" over several decades of one-party rule. Moreover, it has been widely reported that Xi's anticorruption drive is part of the effort to establish a merit-based civil service emulating that of the PAP. According to former Singaporean foreign minister George Yeo, Xi lavishly praised Singapore in a November 2013 meeting, and in his condolence letter to Singaporean president Tony Tan after Lee Kuan Yew's death, Xi called Lee "an old friend of the Chinese people." 1 China remains obsessed with Singapore, which is the only country in the region to achieve advanced economic industrialization without un

This special section deals with China's longstanding fascination with Singapore's development experience that has preoccupied post-Maoist leaders from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping despite the obvious differences between the tiny Southeast Asian city-state and the most populous country on earth. In particular, there is great Chinese interest in Singapore's success in combining effective governance and efficient state capitalism with stable one-party dominant rule. As a consequence, Chinese observers paid much less attention to electoral democracies that were well-governed states with mature economies.

Among contemporary illiberal populist leaders, only Philippine president
Rodrigo Duterte has instigated mass murder under the guise
of a “war on drugs.” Attributed to “penal populism,” it must be
explained why Duterte won the presidency despite limited concerns
about crime, why he organised extra-judicial killings and why
this continued despite domestic and international criticism. As
president, Duterte nationalised the violent populism he had first
developed locally which wooed rather than intimidated voters with
promises to protect “good people” against drug-induced evil. His
appeals resonated given the failures of liberal reformism and with
a proletarian populist alternative undermined. Using nationalism to
respond to global criticism, he put opponents on the defensive.
Breaking with the left, he has not undertaken major socio-economic
reforms and his anti-oligarchy rhetoric benefitted his cronies.
Despite killing tens of thousands and revelations of police corruption,
as a legitimation strategy Duterte’s drug war has successfully
diverted attention from the “death of development” with poverty
levels high despite rapid growth. The Philippine case shows
extreme dichotomisation of “good people” and criminalised
“others” can legitimate mass killings with a populist breakthrough
in a weak state with a poor record of human development.