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ASEAN Beat|Politics|Southeast Asia

The countrys political upheaval reinforces the continued importance of paying attention to structural dynamics and the more contingent and contested nature of outcomes in domestic politics.

This week, Malaysias troubled transition was on full display again with an unprecedented one-day parliamentary session that put off a no-confidence vote and left the countrys politics in flux.

While these developments are notable for their own sake, it is also worth reflecting on a broader question that has lingered in recent months amid all this: what Malaysias troubled transition says and does not say about the state of democracy in the region.

As I have observed before, though Southeast Asia is often subject to country- or event-focused accounts about whether democracy is rising or declining, the region has in fact long been home to a hybrid of regime types and varying societal pressures beyond the state, which makes it even more difficult to extrapolate from perceived litmus tests. A case in point is Myanmars opening in 2011 and the victory of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2015 elections, which was initially met with international euphoria, but quickly gave way to disappointment as governance challenges were exposed beyond that litmus test and below the state level. Meanwhile, beyond that single case, democracy in the region has seen a much more mixed and murkier outlook than the dramatic rise and falls often portrayed with the initial progress seen in Myanmars transition existing alongside other stories such as the suppression of the Cambodian opposition, worries about democratic rollback and decline in the Philippines, Thailand, and even Indonesia, and the endurance of one-party communist governments in mainland Southeast Asia.

Perceptions with respect to Malaysias experience with democracy also reinforce this point. Viewed more superficially, over the past few decades, the country has been through a series of dramatic pendulum swings from dashed hopes of reform during the Reformasi period to kleptocracy under the government of Najib Razak; and, more recently, from the shock election victory Pakatan Harapan (PH) recorded in the May 2018 elections to the dramatic collapse of the coalition and hope for a New Malaysia this February. But that superficial treatment belies a more complex reality: that enduring structural challenges to democratization that scholars have long pointed to such as the personalization of politics and politicization of institutions have remained and that small margins or sudden developments be it Mahathir Mohamads surprise return to politics or the narrow, contested majority the current Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin was able to secure can quickly reverse perceived gains or losses.

Seen from this perspective, Malaysias troubled transition represents just the latest case in point where these broader realities are once again manifesting. Analogous to the case of Myanmar, expectations that a single election could help power reform and democratization have unsurprisingly proven to be unrealistic. Variables such as the personalization of politics and the dominance of UMNO have been at play in several senses, be it in the continued rivalry between Mahathir and Anwar, which had complicated any handover of power following PHs victory, or the demonstration of UMNOs staying power in fluid party politics through a mix of realignment, factionalization and absorption. And, once again, contrary to notions of a dramatic swing or clear trend, prospects for democratization or even reform now hang by a thread, with the Perikatan Nasional commanding a razor-thin and contested majority, which could easily be reversed once again in the coming months.

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While the story of Malaysias troubled transition is still playing out, what, then, does this say (and, equally if not more importantly, not say) about democracy and Southeast Asia? For one, Malaysias experience should reinforce caution about too hastily attributing a change in one country to a diverse region as a whole, particularly given how fragile gains can be and how quickly they can be reversed. For another, the continued influence of structural dynamics should serve as an important reminder that they will continue to be powerful shapers of politics, even though agency whether in the form of the influence of individual leaders or the actions they take or do not take also obviously matters greatly. And the narrow margins also point to the importance of paying attention to the intricacies of domestic politics down to the role of individual members of parliament or the powers of the monarchy.

The lessons Malaysias troubled transition offers may not seem that grand or groundbreaking. But sticking to the basics including recognizing the enduring realities and narrow margins at play and paying close attention to short and long-term state-society dynamics as well as unexpected developments that could be just around the corner and reverse previously perceived linear trajectories may also be exactly the right lessons to learn from one of the more remarkable recent cases in the evolution of regime dynamics in Southeast Asia.

Link:
What Does Malaysia's Troubled Transition Mean for Democracy in Southeast Asia? - The Diplomat

Neoliberal, authoritarian and fundamentalist politics haveall been consolidated in response to the pandemic to further attack the rights of womxn, migrants, informal workers, people of colour, indigenous communities, trans and gender non-conforming persons, among many others. Yet at the same time, we are witnessing widespread and deep community organizing and solidarity initiatives flourishing, led by womxn. When the system fails, people show up.

This webinar will explore feminist analyses of the crisis and the way the pandemic intersects with patriarchy, corporate power and a global division of labour that is both gendered and racialised. It will askhow the rise and collision of fascisms, fundamentalisms and capitalism has limited and predetermined our understanding and practices of democracy and governance. And whether it could also provide a window of opportunity to re-organize and shift power on an unprecedented scale. Whatcan we learn from the feminist practices and measures that are already being deployed to build radical democratic systems that genuinely care for the environment and our collective well-being?

Register to receive more details.

4pm CET, 27 May 2020

(French and Spanish interpretation will be available)

Panellists

This webinar is co-organised by Transnational Institute and AWID, and co-sponsored by Focus on the Global South, AIDC and DAWN.

More here:
Feminist Realities: Transforming Democracy in Times of Crisis - Transnational Institute

Dear Editor,

In a letter published in both SN and KN on May 20, 2020, authored by David Hinds, he accused the western powers to have openly chosen a side in the current standoff- they have taken the PPPs side. He graciously cites me as an authority for his supposition.Speaking on a Globespan24/7programme, on Monday, May 18, Anil Nandlall boasted that the PPP has all the Diplomatic Community, including CARICOM, on its side,he, poignantly, wrote.

While I am humbled by the reference, I am impelled to posit that Mr. Hinds yanked that singular assertion of mine from a one-hour live-streamed discourse, without any reference, whatsoever, to the conversational context in which it was proffered, but situates it, conveniently, in support of a hypothesis which he narrates. In the result, he attributes to my statement, a purport which I never intended.

In that discussion, immediately prior to the statement to which Hinds made reference, I said words to the effect:this is not a fight of the PPP or a fight for the PPP. This is a fight for democracy, a fight for righteousness, a fight for the rule of law, a fight for the future of Guyana. In this fight, all of the Opposition parties, every major local organization, including, the private sector, the religious organizations, the labour movement, the diplomatic community and the governments that they represent, CARICOM, the Commonwealth and the OAS, are all on the same side.

So Mr. Hinds, when I said subsequently on the programme that.they are all on the side with (not on) the PPP, it is the aforesaid to which I was referring.

In the circumstances, to hijack that lone contention of mine from the conversational cradle in which it was birthed to aid your postulation that the western powers are in collusion with the PPP, is as misconceived as the postulation itself.

Mr Hinds, at the risk of being presumptuous, perhaps a more beneficial use of your academic energy would be to analytically examine how and why, in the current electoral impasse, all of the local and international forces engaged, including, the political parties, are currently aligned one one side and only the APNU+AFC , in solitude, is on the other side.

Yours faithfully,

Mohabir Anil Nandlall

Attorney-at- law

See the article here:
A fight for democracy and the rule of law - Stabroek News

Justice Abdul Quddhose of the Madras High Court on Thursday expressed concern over the decay in every sphere of democracy, including the media, for quite a number of years and impressed upon the need for media houses to introspect. After quashing many criminal defamation cases lodged by the State government against media houses, the judge said he, as an ordinary citizen of the country, would like to remind the media of the great role it had to play in nation-building by acting as a watchdog.

Our national motto is Satyameva Jayate which means truth alone triumphs. We respect the national anthem, flag and emblem but we sometimes forget to respect the motto which is equally important for the survival of our democracy.

He added, I am confident all media houses will take this humble request from an ordinary citizen in the right spirit and carry it forward in the best interest of this great nation.

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Dear reader,

We have been keeping you up-to-date with information on the developments in India and the world that have a bearing on our health and wellbeing, our lives and livelihoods, during these difficult times. To enable wide dissemination of news that is in public interest, we have increased the number of articles that can be read free, and extended free trial periods. However, we have a request for those who can afford to subscribe: please do. As we fight disinformation and misinformation, and keep apace with the happenings, we need to commit greater resources to news gathering operations. We promise to deliver quality journalism that stays away from vested interest and political propaganda.

View original post here:
Every sphere of democracy, including media, is decaying, says HC judge - The Hindu

The Covid-19 pandemic is unfolding at a time when democracy is in decline. According to data compiled by Freedom House (2020), democracy has been in a recession for over a decade, and more countries have lost rather than gained civil and political rights each year.

A key concern is that Covid-19 will turn the democratic recession into a depression, with authoritarianism sweeping across the globe like a pandemic. As the New York Times puts it, China and some of its acolytes are pointing to Beijings success in coming to grips with the coronavirus pandemic as a strong case for authoritarian rule (Schmemann 2020). Even the World Health Organization (WHO) has called its forceful lockdown perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment in history. This raises the question: Is China is an exception, or have autocratic regimes in general been able to take more stringent policy measures to restrain people from moving around and spreading the virus? And if so, have they been more effective?

To explore these questions, we examine the institutional and cultural underpinnings of governments responses to the Covid-19 pandemic (Frey et al. 2020). To measure the strictness of the policies introduced to fight the pandemic across countries, we use the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT), which provides information on several measures, including school and workplace closings, travel restrictions, bans on public gatherings, and stay-at-home requirements. To capture the effectiveness of these responses in reducing travel and movement in order to curb the spread of the virus, we employ Googles COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports.

Figure 1 shows that travel fell in a number of selected countries as more stringent policy measures were introduced. However, the figure also shows that there is large dispersion in cross-country mobility, even for similar levels of policy stringency.

Figure 1 Lockdown measures and cross-country reduction in mobility

Sources: OxCGRT; Googles COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports

To be sure, it is possible that political divisions and strong business interests make it harder to introduce stringent lockdowns in democracies. To test this, we employ the democracy index of Freedom House (2020). We find that more autocratic regimes have indeed introduced stricter lockdowns and have relied more on privacy-intrusive measures like contract tracing. However, our regression analysis also suggests that when democracies employ the same mobility restrictions as autocratic regimes, they experience steeper declines in mobility. This result also holds when we add a host of controls, like state capacity, GDP per capita, latitude experience with past epidemics, as well as country and time fixed effects. Using a complementary measure on political and civil rights, we similarly find that greater freedom is associated with greater reductions in movement and travel (Frey et al. 2020).

Though these correlations cannot be interpreted as causal, they provide suggestive evidence that while autocratic regimes tend to introduce stricter lockdowns, they are less effective in reducing travel. Indeed, while Chinas strict lockdown has received most media attention, other East Asian countries have arguably mounted a more effective response to Covid-19.

Another theory is that some cultures are more obedient than others, prompting people to better follow more stringent lockdown measures. While societies differ on many cultural dimensions, cross-cultural psychologists view the individualism-collectivism distinction as the main divider (Heine 2007, Henrich et al. 2010, Schulz et al. 2019).

Scholars have shown that individualism has a dynamic advantage leading to a higher economic growth rate by giving social status rewards to non-conformism and innovation (Gorodnichenko and Roland 2011). In particular, individualistic cultures, like those of the US Sweden, or the UK, are more innovative and take out more patents (Gorodnichenko and Roland 2017).

The flipside of an individualistic culture, which encourages experimentation and innovation, is that it can make collective action, such as a coordinated response to a pandemic, more difficult. This is because people in more individualistic societies tend to pursue their own interest rather than the collective good. Collectivism, on the other hand, which emphasises group loyalty, conformity and obedience towards ones superiors, makes collective action easier (Gorodnichenko and Roland 2015).

To measure the variation in individualism-collectivism across countries, we employ Hofstedes (2001) widely used scale which integrates questions about goals, achievement-orientation, and family ties. In addition, we construct an index on attitudes towards obedience based on data from the World Value Survey (WVS). Our regression analysis shows that similar levels of policy stringency reduced mobility less in individualistic cultures, and more in obedient ones. Figure 2 presents the result graphically. It suggests that collectivist countries have mounted a more coordinated response to Covid-19 in terms of reducing movement and travel. We also find that movement related to non-essential activities, like going to parks, exhibits a particularly sharp mobility declines (Frey et al. 2020).

Figure 2 Individualism, obedience and the reduction in mobility

Note: Each dot in the charts represent, for each country, the change in mobility index that is not explained by the policy stringency index. The obedience index is the first component of a Principal Component Analysis based on World Value Survey (WVS) data.Sources: Authors own calculations based on Hofstede (2001); WVS; OxCGRT; Googles COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports.

Democracy has been in recession for over a decade (Diamond 2019) and many fear that Covid-19 will accelerate this trend. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte has seized even greater power and threatened martial law-style enforcement of a monthlong lockdown. And on 30 March 2020, the Hungarian Parliament passed the Coronavirus Act, which grants Viktor Orbns government unprecedented emergency powers for an indefinite period of time.

Judging by how autocratic regimes have responded to the crisis, however, we do not expect that the democratic recession will accelerate. First, the lack of transparency in autocratic regimes has been an undisputable drawback in fighting the pandemic. In Turkmenistan, people have been arrested solely for discussing the outbreak in public and medical doctors are banned from diagnosing Covid-19. And while China successfully mobilised a strong national response once President Xi Jinping gave green light, the initial lack of transparency delayed decisive measures to curb the virus before it spread across China and globally (Ang 2020). Second, our research suggests that even though autocracies have introduced more stringent lockdowns, democracies have been more effective in reducing travel and the movement of people in their countries. Thus, while autocrats often seek to capitalize on perceived threats, their handling of the pandemic on these dimensions seems unlikely to look appealing to the outside world.

China is not just an autocratic regime; it also has a strong state (Fukuyama 2011) and a highly collectivist culture (Talhem et al. 2014). But the same is true of democratic countries like South Korea and Taiwan. Building on a large literature, we find that a countrys capacity to enforce its mobility restrictions, as well as its culture, are more relevant variables in explaining how countries have fared during the pandemic. Following in the footsteps of cross-cultural psychologists, we show that collectivist societies have been more successful in managing the outbreak. Our findings speak to the intuition that a collectivist culture, which rewards conformity and group loyalty, and obedience towards ones superiors, makes collective action easier (Gorodnichenko and Roland 2015; Schulz et al. 2019). In East Asian countries, which are highly collectivist on Hofstedes (2001) scale, the habit of mask-wearing to protect fellow citizens markedly contrasts with Western attitudes.

However, while collectivist societies are well placed to deal with epidemics that require collective action, collectivist cultures have historically experienced slower economic growth (Gorodnichenko and Roland 2011), less dynamism and innovation (Gorodnichenko and Roland 2017), and tend to focus on incremental innovation rather than radical breakthroughs (Chua et al. 2019).

Fighting Covid-19 will require coordination to curb the spread of the virus, but also innovation in order to find treatments and vaccines. Pandemics are global by definition and hence a global response that leverages the innovative capacity of individualist countries, and the coordination and production capabilities of collectivist ones, will be needed.

Chua, R Y, K G Huang and M Jin (2019), Mapping cultural tightness and its links to innovation, urbanization, and happiness across 31 provinces in China, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(14): 6720-6725.

Freedom House (2020), Democracy Index.

Frey, C B, G Presidente, C Chen (2020), Democracy, Culture, and Contagion: Political Regimes and Countries Responsiveness to Covid-19,Covid Economics 18.

Gorodnichenko, Y and G Roland (2011), Which dimensions of culture matter for long-run growth?, American Economic Review 101(3): 492-98.

Gorodnichenko, Yand G Roland (2015), Culture, institutions and democratization, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No w21117.

Gorodnichenko, Y and G Roland (2017), Culture, institutions, and the wealth of nations, Review of Economics and Statistics 99(3): 402-416.

Hale, T, S Webster, A Petherick, T Phillips and B Kira (2020), Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, Blavatnik School of Government.

Heine, S (2007), Cultural Psychology, New York: Norton.

Henrich, J, S J Heine and A Norenzayan (2010), The weirdest people in the world?, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33(2-3): 61-83.

Hofstede, G (2001), Culture's consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations, London: Sage Publications.

Nisbett, R E, K Peng, I Choi and A Norenzayan (2001), Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition, Psychological Review 108(2): 291.

Schmemann, S (2020), The Virus Comes for Democracy Strongmen think they know the cure for Covid-19. Are they right?, New York Times, April 2.

Schulz, J F, D Bahrami-Rad, J P Beauchamp and J Henrich (2019), The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation, Science 366(6466).

Talhelm, T, X Zhang, S Oishi, C Shimin, D Duan, X Lan and S Kitayama (2014), Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice versus wheat agriculture, Science 344(6184): 603-608.

Read the rest here:
Covid-19 and the future of democracy | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal - voxeu.org