Flirting with Democracy: Citizens’ Regime Preferences in Southeast Asia

• In Event: Democracy and Autocracy in Southeast Asia: Challenges and Innovations

Abstract

Contemporary Southeast Asia has been the site of an extraordinary number of democratic openings and authoritarian crackdowns. In recent history, Myanmar hosted multiparty elections (2011) after extended military rule, saw its incumbent party of power lose elections to a historic rival (2015), and witnessed its military end the democratic experiment in Myanmar after its proxies lost a second election to that historic rival (2021). In Cambodia, the incumbent CPP ended decades of tolerance for viable electoral opponents by having its most competitive opponent legally dissolved and creating an electoral arena in which it could win every seat (2018) or almost every seat (2023). Thailand's recent history is dotted with coups (2014), and military-approved governments not directly related to electoral returns have been formed after the two most recent elections (2019, 2023). Building on previous single-country work, this paper takes advantage of the insights made possible by the Asia Barometer to investigate whether the same factors drive citizens’ regime preferences across these three Southeast Asian cases and if these preferences correlate with variation in regime over time.

Author

• Jeremy Martin Ladd, Cornell University