This essay focuses on the subset of semiauthoritarian systems that Beatriz Magaloni calls hegemonic-party autocracies. In such autocracies, a single party or coalition holds power without interruption for several decades under semiauthoritarian conditions while conducting regular multiparty elections. Within this category, the experiences of Mexico and the Republic of China (ROC or Taiwan) from the l980s to 2000 are particularly helpful in illuminating the current political dynamics in Malaysia and its prospects (or lack thereof) for democratization.
About the Author
Joan M. Nelson, scholar in residence at American University’s School of International Service, held the Pok Rafeah Chair in International Studies at the National University of Malaysia’s Institute of Malaysian and International Studies in 2006–2007. She is coeditor (with Jacob Meerman and Abdul Rahman Haji Embong) of Globalization and National Autonomy: The Experience of Malaysia (2008).
People obsess over where Russia’s democracy went wrong. The truth is it did not fail: Russia’s democratic transition never got off the starting blocks.
Emerging from one of the world’s most notorious failed states, Somaliland has become an oasis of relative democratic stability in the troubled Horn of Africa. What does its story teach…