Mechanisms of Durability of Authoritarian Regime Operating in Strong State

• In Event: Authoritarianism in Southeast Asian Politics

Abstract

Why do some authoritarian regimes operating in strong state more durable than others? It is not rare to see autocrats who control strong states still fall. Authoritarian regime of Malaysia has successfully maintained its rule and provoked little societal resistance, while that of South Korea consistently suffered from social unrest. In recent years’ growing body of literature on authoritarian regime, much of the discussion has focused on formal political institutions, such as dominant parties, elections, and legislatures. Though significance of state strength has not been entirely missed in the literature, what has been relatively overlooked is the fact that the state capacity plays significant role in build-up and consolidation of the regime. In the postcolonial setting, most of regime leaders inherited, not construct, state apparatuses, so that a state is a historical foundation for regimes’ staying power, not vice versa. Furthermore, though seemingly having higher level of state capacity, the composition of state strength might be strikingly different from state to state. We still do not have plausible answer for under what mechanisms authoritarian regimes with the highly capable state apparatus still fail to maintain social control. Rather than just asserting the importance of state strength, we need to better define specific mechanisms by which certain types and patterns of state capacity development render authoritarian regime resilience or failure.
By using the cases of Malaysia and South Korea during the height of authoritarianism in both countries, this paper finds the significance of the causal mechanisms that can explain the origins and development of different patterns of bureaucratic institution deployment in explaining aforementioned variations in the regime durability. I find the causes of ways the regimes deploy their bureaucratic organizations from the structural conditions at the onset of the authoritarian regime. Political leaders have to devise governing strategies that take the structural constraints into account. The choice of institutional means and strategic deployment further can facilitate or hamper efficient use of state capacities needed for authoritarian regime durability.
I argue that both structural conditions of resource scarcity and ability of the mass to pose credible threats to the regime at the time of the regime installation significantly shape different patterns for organizing state institutions through the intervening processes of the types and breadth of side payment provisions. While resource/rent scarcity determines the organizational strength of state institutions and the ruling coalition, severity of popular threats determines the breadth and types of side payments distribution. Resource scarcity provides autocrats incentives to build strong institutions and the ruling coalition with economic elites for domestic resource extraction. Severe the popular threats lead autocrats to broaden the side payment provisions to mitigate the threats. This in turn 1) facilitates greater territorial reach that establish broader civil services and 2) foster cooperation within and between bureaucracy to provide side payments to greater extend in efficient way. Initiation of inclusive developmental projects, such as promotion of welfare and education, is deemed to efficient way to deliver broad benefits to popular sector. Though South Korean authoritarian regime shares resource scarcity condition, thus has necessary condition for building strong institutions, lack of popular threats leads to narrow side payments distributions, such as credit allocation to big business. Under such circumstance, the regime invests in highly specialized urban bureaucracy. Such asymmetry in capacity results in bifurcation within bureaucracy despite its overall higher state capacity.
The resultant institutional configurations, whether it be interconnected or bifurcated, respectively, contribute the authoritarian regime durability by affecting both the level of institutional coherence and social penetrations of bureaucracy. Higher level of institutional linkage/coherence lowers the transaction cost of information sharing, thus enhance information flows within organization, which is necessary for efficient social control, as in Malaysia. On the contrary, bifurcated state institutions hamper such enhanced information flow. Broader territorial reach of the state institutions contributes to establish well-connected channels of communication between the bureaucrats and the people, and thus enhances social penetration of the state. Such higher level of social embeddedness of state institutions in Malaysia further reduces the cost of repression through efficient targeting, thus contributes to the regime durability. Highly centralized urban bureaucracy in South Korea lacks ability to penetrate to society, and thus struggles for containing social dissents.

Author

• Eunji Won, Northern Illinois University