This is a theoretically and empirically ambitious book. Its author, Andrew MacIntyre, is an accomplished Indonesianist who has set out to synthesize two literatures on political institutions, one emphasizing credible commitments and the other policy decisiveness, and to utilize his new framework to examine recent governmental policy responsiveness and institutional change in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. MacIntyre's scholarship is intelligent, thorough, balanced, and knowledgeable at both the theoretical and empirical levels. His empirical chapters provide explicit comparisons across the four cases, a rare and welcome approach in Southeast Asia studies, where authors tend to specialize in a single country and to avoid cross-national analysis. This approach has the potential of producing new insights for Southeast Asianists and comparativists in general. In this first effort, however, many of the findings and their supporting arguments, at least at the empirical level, seem forced and Procrustean.

In the theoretical literature on political institutions, one prominent school of thought “stresses the importance of institutional arrangements that disperse power, thereby reducing the risk of arbitrary or capricious government action and making possible a stable policy environment in which governments can make policy commitments that are credible into the future” (p. 3). Another body of literature, which MacIntyre labels the decisiveness school, “underscores the way in which political fragmentation is the enemy of adaptable, responsive, and nimble government” (p. 4). To reconcile the contradictory conclusions of the two approaches, he utilizes veto-player analysis. He proposes that we think of the basic distribution of decision-making power in a polity (its “national political architecture”) as a U-curve or “power concentration paradox” in which extreme concentration (a single veto player) and extreme fragmentation (many veto players) are equally problematic for effective governance.

In two substantive chapters that make up the bulk of the book, MacIntyre deploys the power concentration paradox to explore two central puzzles in recent Southeast Asian politics: the differing responses of the Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Philippine governments to the devastating economic crisis that hit the region in the late 1990s; and the varying success of subsequent attempts to reform the national political architecture in each country. In 1997, at the beginning of the economic crisis, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand were all extreme cases, but at opposite ends of the architectural spectrum. Indonesia and Malaysia had only a single veto player (in Indonesia, an individual, President Suharto; in Malaysia, a multiparty alliance, the Barisan Nasional), while Thailand had six (all political parties in Parliament). The Philippines was an intermediate case, with three veto players: the president, House of Representatives, and Senate.

MacIntyre's principal finding is that there is indeed a relationship between national political architecture, on the one hand, and responsiveness to crisis and efforts at institutional reform, on the other. Indonesia and Malaysia responded quickly but erratically to the economic crisis, while Thailand with its many veto players was paralyzed. Of the four cases, the Philippine government's policy was most coherent and consistent. In the subsequent efforts at institutional reform, Indonesia and Thailand moved toward the center of the spectrum by, respectively, adding and subtracting veto players. Malaysian reformers were thwarted by the skillful maneuvering of the Barisan leader, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. In the Philippines, already in the center, there was no major pressure for change.

How persuasive are MacIntyre's arguments? To his credit, he repeatedly reminds the reader that he is only adding the variable of national political architecture to an already rich Southeast Asian and developing world literature, that he has no final answers, and that he intends his study to be the beginning of a new research enterprise that will lead ultimately to more definitive conclusions.

Even with these caveats, however, I am not convinced of the merits of the approach. In too many of his specific arguments, the role claimed for national political architecture seems better explained by other variables. For example, MacIntyre blames Indonesia's single-veto-player polity for the government's inconsistent economic policy responses from mid-1997 to mid-1998. But what is most striking about the Indonesian case is that it had been a single-veto-player polity at least since 1966, when President Sukarno (who arguably was one of three veto players, together with the army and the Communist Party) was overthrown by General Suharto. Moreover, for three decades, Suharto's New Order government was extravagantly (and accurately) praised by foreign governments and business leaders for the quality and consistency of its economic policy!

A better explanation would focus not on the high-level abstraction of the number of veto players in the New Order, but instead on two lower-level variables: the individual versus collective character of the single veto player; and the position in the life cycle of that individual. Suharto the individual made good economic policy decisions at the outset of his presidency, establishing a pattern that continued until near the end. In 1997, however, Suharto was 76 years old, in poor health, a recent widower. Moreover, several of his children stood to lose financially if he adopted the economic policies urged on him by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. These variables also help to explain both policy volatility and the absence of institutional reform in the Malaysian case. Like Suharto, Mahathir is more an individual than a collective veto player; unlike Suharto, in 1997 he was still at the top of his game.

Other examples of MacIntyre's Procrusteanism come readily to mind. The Indonesian shift away from a one-veto-player polity—that is, the 1998–99 democratic transition— was not driven by postcrisis awareness of the high price of an extreme concentration of decision-making power. Instead, it was the product of mass demonstrations against the individual Suharto's economic policy failures and the determination of opposition politicians to end the Suharto dictatorship (after many years of struggle) and to gain a share of power for themselves. Thailand, despite its multiveto player paralysis, came through the crisis more quickly and successfully than MacIntyre seems willing to concede. The Philippines was hit less hard than the other countries, which may explain its greater policy stability. Postcrisis Philippine politics is perhaps better understood as a debate about democracy, not veto players. Outside the cases, but still inside Southeast Asia, Singapore is a shining example of an extremely concentrated single-veto-player polity with stable policy and no movement for institutional reform.

These several criticisms, and the skepticism that underlies them, are not meant to disparage what is in fact a first-class scholarly effort. The Power of Institutions is theoretically innovative. It is also empirically solid, notwithstanding my interpretive challenges. MacIntyre's book substantially advances our understanding of the causes and consequences of political institutions, in Southeast Asia and in the developing world.