From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia

by Dan Slater

From Japan after America’s post–World War II occupation to Myanmar in the 2010s, and with Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand in between, incumbent authoritarian regimes in developmental Asia have repeatedly conceded democracy without conceding defeat. They have opened themselves up to freer and fairer electoral competition, not as a way of exiting power and transferring power to their opponents but as a way of shoring up their own power in a democratic game. The defining feature of democracy through strength in developmental Asia has been regime confidence, not regime collapse. Specifically, we see authoritarian regimes embarking on democratic reforms when their historically accumulated strengths give them two distinctive kinds of confidence. The first is victory confidence. This is the expectation among incumbent authoritarian elites that they can fare well, or even continue to dominate outright, in democratic elections. The second is stability confidence. This is their expectation that political stability—and with it, economic development—will persist under democratic conditions.

In democratic developmental Asia, we observe that strong authoritarian parties concede democracy not to concede defeat but to preserve their hold on political power, and potentially consolidate their enduring dominance in democracy. They choose democracy when they are confident that inherited antecedent strengths give them an advantage over the opposition and that stability will ensue.

Referred to as the “ten lost years,” the Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s dictatorship more generally, left China and the CCP in shambles. The party possessed little organizational strength, despite having been in power for nearly three decades. Personalist politics, rather than formal institutions, determined political outcomes. Factional splits and personal enmities shaped internal party politics rather than meaningful policy differences. Political power was vested in individuals as opposed to institutional rules.

THE QUESTION OF democratic prospects over the long term hinges on the questions of political stability and economic development. Wherever democracy cannot contribute to stability, it cannot be expected to last. Wherever democracy cannot be expected to coexist with economic development, it cannot be expected to be introduced in the first place. Democracy may very well be a universal value, in that people everywhere would generally prefer to be governed democratically than autocratically, all else being equal.1 But nowhere in the world is democracy the ultimate value, in the sense that people anywhere can be expected to prioritize democracy over a peaceful and prosperous way of life. Without peace, prosperity, and stability, democracy is fragile, as we have witnessed in recent decades, with more and more of the democratic gains made during the Third Wave in the latter half of the twentieth century giving way to democratic recession in so much of the world.

By examining twelve cases in what we call developmental Asia, we have shown how democracy can both inspire universal aspiration and foment universal trepidation. The aspiration comes from democracy’s promise to contribute to human freedom and flourishing. The trepidation comes from democracy’s intrinsic disruptive potential. By unleashing competitive passions into the public square, it can all too easily deteriorate into gridlock, polarization, and chaos. Nothing about these dueling aspirations and trepidations is uniquely Western or Eastern, however; nothing about them is either modern or ancient. Democracy’s fate in the remainder of the twenty-first century, therefore, hinges on the same factors and forces that have determined its fate in every century until now. Either democracy finds a way to speak to the eternal questions of peace and prosperity, or autocrats will eventually subdue it into silence, and find ample public support for their decisions to do so.

Authoritarian regimes that make genuine collective efforts to promote economic development, improve popular welfare, and build more predictable and durable political institutions should be offered the international community’s conditional encouragement rather than unrelenting pressure. By laying a stronger foundation for eventual stable democratic transition, gradual authoritarian strengthening is generally a preferable outcome to sudden and total authoritarian collapse. International advocates for democracy, in other words, should ironically be on the lookout for long-term democratic prospects in strong authoritarian regimes rather than cultivating and exploiting sources of authoritarian weakness to encourage a potentially disastrous regime collapse. The implication is not that authoritarian regimes must singly pursue economic development before countenancing democratization, however. As we have argued in this book, it is much easier and far more straightforward to democratize preemptively during relatively stable times than it is to continue to build up stronger political institutions and generate an impressive economic track record under perpetual authoritarian conditions.6 We insist that both of these approaches can be viable paths from the dismal equilibrium of weak and personalized authoritarianism to improved political stability and economic development.

A central lesson of this book is that democratization need not emerge from the ashes of a collapsed authoritarian regime. In fact, one interpretation of our analysis is that we are better off growing democracy from the soil of strong existing authoritarian regimes, to avoid the difficult scenario of seeding democracy in the detritus of authoritarian collapse. If democracy is going to spread to the many corners of the world where authoritarian rulers still actively avoid it, it will have to be because those authoritarian rulers come to see democracy as compatible with their own self-interest. Even when teeming crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands bring down a despised dictator, there are virtually always incumbent political elites behind the scenes who wisely welcome a decisive democratizing change. To be ruled by an autocrat always means accepting the existential political uncertainty of living under a government both electorally irremovable and legally unbound and unrestrained.9 Democratization means swapping one set of political risks and uncertainties for another.10 Our point, however, is that democracy is not so risky for either the incumbent regime or society at large when it is pursued from a position of authoritarian strength.