Stateness and Democracy in East Asia

Aurel Croissant · Olli Hellmann

may 2020 · Cambridge University Press

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Democratization and state building are fundamental political processes, yet scholars cannot agree on which process should be prioritized in order to put countries on a positive path of institutional development. Where much of the existing literature on the state-democracy nexus focuses on quantitative cross-national data, this volume offers a theoretically grounded regional analysis built around in-depth qualitative case studies. The chapters examine cases of successful democratic consolidation (South Korea, Taiwan), defective democracy (Philippines, Indonesia, East Timor), and autocratic reversal (Cambodia, Thailand). The book's evidence challenges the dominant 'state first, democracy later' argument, demonstrating instead that stateness is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for democratic consolidation. The authors not only show that democratization can become trapped in path-dependent processes, but also that the system-level organization of informal networks plays a key role in shaping the outcome of democratic transitions.

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Aurel Croissant is Professor of Political Science at Heidelberg University. His research focuses on comparative democratization, comparative authoritarianism, civil-military relations, and Asian politics. He also serves as the co-editor of the journal Democratization. Recent publications include Civil-Military Relations in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2018), Comparative Politics of Southeast Asia (Springer, 2018), and Civil-Military Relations: Control and Effectiveness across Regimes (co-edited with Tom Bruneau, Lynne Rienner, 2019).

Olli Hellmann is Senior Lecturer in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa/New Zealand. He specializes in the comparative analysis of political institutions with a special focus on Northeast and Southeast Asia. Recent relevant publications include a co-edited special issue of International Political Science Review (with Aurel Croissant), examining the link between state capacity and autocratic regime resilience, and an article in Crime, Law and Social Change that addresses the historical origins of different corruption types.