Does building state capacity lead to democracy? In the decades following World War II, the consensus among scholars and policymakers alike seemed to be yes. In the heyday of modernization theory, the link between development and democratization suggested that strong state capacity was key to democracy, either its onset or survival. Much of U.S. foreign policy during this time was guided by this belief, as it invested in state-building projects around the developing world in the name of building a new liberal order.

We know how this story unfolds. As many Third Wave democracies born out of such interventionist efforts show serious signs of defectiveness, the sequentialist argument of state first, democracy second has begun to shine less brightly. In Stateness and Democracy in East Asia, Aurel Croissant and Olli Hellmann bring together a group of scholars to reassess the relationship between stateness and democracy in the very region that was widely seen as the success case for sequencers. The edited volume includes in-depth case studies that cover the universe of the seven Third Wave democracies in East Asia: South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and East Timor. Each country chapter is worth reading on its own, but taken together, a nuanced picture emerges of how informal particularistic networks complicate the state-democracy nexus.

For all the strengths of the case study method, its weakness is the uniqueness trap, where each case appears too specific to offer any generalizable insight. The edited volume expertly avoids this by adopting a common analytical framework throughout the country chapters. “Stateness” is broken down into the state’s coercive, administrative, and social embeddedness capacities (pp. 7-8), which builds on Michael Mann’s typology of state power (“The Autonomous Power of the State,” European Journal of Sociology 25[2], 1984). Likewise, “democracy” is seen as comprised by the partial regimes of electoral regime, political rights, civil liberties, horizontal accountability, and effective power to govern (pp. 10-11), building on Wolfgang Merkel’s concept of embedded democracy (“Embedded and Defective Democracies,” Democratization 11[5], 2004). The disaggregation of these concepts allows the book to move beyond a strawman-style rejection of the sequentialist argument. Instead, through detailed process-tracing of each country case, the chapters show how path-dependent legacies of authoritarian state-building strengthen certain aspects of democracy while weakening others.

The book’s key claim is that “stateness is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for democratic consolidation” (p. 258). Strong state capacity is a double-edged sword for new democracies. A well-developed administrative bureaucracy, when deeply embedded in society, can stabilize the early days of democratic transition, as the Kuomintang’s institutional legacy did for election management and party development in Taiwan (Chapter 4). But when a strong state remains largely disconnected from society, as was the case in South Korea’s authoritarian developmental state or Thailand’s monarchical state, it becomes an attractive object of capture for particularistic networks (p. 6). These are political factions both internal and external to the state apparatus that are committed to political power rather than democracy. The result is hyper-personalistic parties and a militant civil society in South Korea (Chapter 3), which impede democratic deepening, and an unstable democracy in Thailand that remains in the grasp of the “parallel state” controlled by the monarchy-military alliance (Chapter 5).

If states do not always make democracy, can democracy make states? The reverse of the sequentialist argument, dubbed the “nexian” approach in the book, finds limited support in East Asia. As chapters on the Philippines and Indonesia show (Chapters 7 and 8), when the introduction of democratic elections is not buttressed by parallel development in horizontal accountability or favorable socio-economic conditions, democracies get stuck in a “predatory state” trap (p. 258). Popular elections merely serve as routinized pathways to power for particularistic networks that then use that power not to invest in the state, but to weaponize it for their own interests. This is best exemplified by the widespread human rights violations under Duterte’s popularly elected incumbency in the Philippines. Hence, minimalist electoral democracies, which describes many Third Wave cases, rank high in electoral institutionalization but suffer from weakening civil liberties, a pattern recently characterized as “democratic decoupling” (Dan Slater and Iza Ding, “Democratic Decoupling,” Democratization 28[1], 2021).

For scholars of comparative democratization, the book is left wanting on prescriptive takeaways. For how well the book dismantles the sequentialist approach and nuances the state-democracy nexus, it falls short of offering a clear alternative framework. The distribution of particularistic networks emerges as a key variable, but what does it represent? Should we see it as a moderator to the sequentialist argument or as a return to a more dynamic, agency-based model of democratic transition (see Dankwart Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy,” Comparative Politics 2[3], 1970), away from statist accounts? Crucially, why were some modern states in East Asia able to co-opt such networks into the political apparatus, whereas in others, such networks remained divorced from the state and eventually became a liability?

The answer seems to lie not so much in weak or strong state capacity, but as several contributors in the book suggest, path-dependent legacies from why the modern state was developed in the first place. In many Third Wave cases, modern states were inherited from colonial predecessors. Colonizers were motivated by a variety of reasons: some were there purely for resource extraction, some for imperial conquest and the creation of national subjects, and others a mix of both.

Different colonial goals led to fundamentally different strategies of state-building. Some colonial states needed to be deeply embedded in society to monitor and re-socialize the population, whereas others focused on top-down extractive capacity with little social embedding. After independence, these state structures interacted with domestic factions competing for power to shape state capacity as it features in both the sequentialist and nexian approaches. Certain inheritances and domestic cleavages were more favorable to the rise of particularistic factions in that process. Colonial legacy, by defining the relevant players and rules for contestation in the state-democracy nexus, emerges as an integral part of the path-dependence story. But it remains curiously in the background in the book’s theoretical discussions.

Explicitly theorizing why post-colonial states vary in their vulnerability to particularistic networks can better dialogue the democratic lessons from East Asia with other regions. For instance, the book shares strong theoretical kinship with Sebastián Mazzuca and Gerardo Munck’s A Middle-Quality Institutional Trap (2021), which examines why the state-democracy nexus in Latin America became trapped in a suboptimal equilibrium. Although focused on different regions, both books see the current deficiencies of many Third Wave democracies as cyclical in nature and rooted in structural conditions at the onset of or even predating democratization. At a time when democracy’s prospects appear tenuous and surrounded by alarmist narratives of breakdown, Stateness and Democracy in East Asia contributes to the important research agenda of explicating what path-dependent state legacies hinder, but also help, successful democratic consolidation.