In a region where comparisons tend to be constrained by linguistic diversity and distinct historical legacies, the study of political science in Southeast Asia has long been defined by rich and descriptive case studies. It is difficult to pursue simultaneously in-depth and rigorously systematic comparative analysis within a region where few countries share official or nationally common languages, colonial heritages, economic development levels, and regime antecedents or outcomes. Dan Slater's Ordering Power represents an impressive venture in this regard, comparing the impact of contentious politics on elite collective action and authoritarian durability in seven Southeast Asian states. Slater's book should serve as a baseline model to which future political scientists of Southeast Asia should aspire. It is a rigorous and comparative study, in qualitative content and approach to systematic puzzle-driven inquiry, that emphasizes both the comparability of Southeast Asian states in a broader cross-regional context and the distinctive features of within-region variation that shed new light on old questions, suggesting what the rest of comparative politics might be able to learn from Southeast Asia's experiences.
Ordering Power seeks an answer to the question of why some authoritarians are successful at creating powerful, cohesive, and sustainable ruling coalitions and others are not. The answer lies in understanding the historical antecedents that enable outbreaks of contentious politics to produce elite collective action and the establishment of durable authoritarian regimes. In the absence of endemic and unmanageable societal conflicts that have communal and urban implications, “protection pacts” will not form and the authoritarian regimes established among fragmented elites will be susceptible to overturn due to their low state capacity, lack of military cohesion, and weak parties. In Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Singapore represent the “domination” pathway to strong authoritarian durability; Thailand, the Philippines, and South Vietnam represent the “fragmentation” pathway to weak authoritarian durability; and Burma and Indonesia represent the “militarization” pathway in which authoritarian durability under a protection pact starts off strong but whose support and cohesion can erode over time in the absence of a continued threat to the pact. Distinct from many theories in comparative politics of how and why authoritarian regimes fall, which often look to external rationales such as debt crises, the overarching theory here is to explain how and why regimes endure based on the road states took to arrive at those regimes in the first place.
One of the great strengths of Ordering Power is how Slater provides alternative explanations for why the Southeast Asian cases, as individual types of states and as a group with many different outcomes, do not fit many expectations in the comparative politics theoretical mold. His approach in part one does not simply debunk existing theory on state structure, power-holding, and authoritarian durability by pointing out that existing theories do not “work” in his set of cases. He takes the necessary next step of explaining how and why certain Southeast Asian cases refute existing logics, delving into what causal mechanisms produce these unexpected outcomes. As a result, one of the highlights of reading Slater's book is the priority placed on comparability of the causal processes at work across the cases. Rather than structure the argument via individual case chapters that make the countries the primary focus, the empirical chapters in parts two and three serve as a continuation of an argument-based approach centered on mechanisms and processes. For example, in chapter 7 Slater argues that divergence in authoritarian regime durability in response to the Asian financial crisis and revived opposition in Indonesia and Malaysia resulted from their ability to institutionalize regime power in previous decades. In Indonesia, Suharto's increasingly perilous grip on power stemmed from an excessive (and exclusive) reliance on patronage rather than institutionalized channels of control. In the midst of the 1997 crisis, with the New Order regime scapegoating communal elites and failing to prevent elite and military fragmentation, it was easier to abandon ship and join or tacitly support the wide-scale anti-regime protests that led to democratic transition. In contrast, through decades of institutionalized economic and communal elite control, Malaysian authorities were more capable of employing targeted coercion and sheltering elites in the private sector from the effects of the 1997 crisis. As a result, Anwar Ibrahim's failed opposition faced an impenetrably united regime. Part four extends Slater's theoretical framework to his secondary regional cases and introduces possibilities for exporting the framework to authoritarian regimes in other world regions.
A limitation of the book is that it does not speak to how the theory might explain the evolution of weak or “semi-”democracies. Take, for example, the Indian case under the Indian National Congress through much of the 1960–90 period, in which incentive structures of co-optation among elites resulted in one-party domination for decades despite the presence of what are often characterized as competitive majoritarian elections. Is this domination by a single party under the electoral “competitiveness” in India distinct from the domination by a single party under authoritarianism, such as that by the UMNO in Malaysia? Did Japan under the Liberal Democratic Party from 1955 to 1993 follow a similar “protection pact” logic or is something different at work in durable uncompetitive democracies compared to durable authoritarian ones? While Slater makes it clear that the focus of his theory is to understand authoritarian durability, it seems as though his “protection pact” framework could extend an explanation to when and why some democratic regimes (start to) resemble authoritarian ones.
However, this is a minor point that should not detract from, and actually highlights, the wide range of theoretical contributions and potential applications of the book. Beyond its most useful understanding of variation in trajectories of state institutional variation in Southeast Asia, Ordering Power provides students and scholars of Southeast Asia and comparative politics with an illustrative example of how to marry rigorous, systematic political analysis with detailed historical analysis in cross-national comparison.
