Stalled Democratization: The Case of Myanmar’s Military-Led Regime Transition

• In Event: Compromising Democracy: Agents of Democratic Regression in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Why do democratic transitions stall? Despite a robust literature on why and when authoritarian regimes transition to democracy, there exist limited insights into when and why democratic transitions begin but never complete or consolidate. Dictators are most likely to democratize when so weak that conceding is the only option or when strong enough to maintain electoral power in a democratic system; otherwise, dictators have little incentives to democratize at all. However, a third outcome exists, which is undertheorized in the literature: stalled democratization or “hybridization,” in which a transition to democracy stalls at an electoral autocracy or hybrid regime indefinitely. I argue that Myanmar is a case of regime hybridization. While the military junta held free and fair elections in 2015 that ushered the democratic opposition the National League for Democracy (NLD) to power in 2015 with a clear mandate for change, the NLD has made no progress on key democratic reforms and uses similar repressive tactics against dissent as authoritarian incumbents. This paper argues that such a stalled transition is the most likely outcome when the outgoing regime was a military regime and the party closely linked to the military is electorally weak. Existing theory argues that authoritarian regimes opt to democratize only when the incumbent party is electorally strong, but this paper theorizes that military regimes with weak parties may elect to democratize because they have the option to retreat to the barracks and the coercive capacity to institutionalize “reserve domains” into the new political system that protect their core interests. However, without a strong political party representing military interests, the military is unlikely to agree to removing reserve domains, leading to a stalled transition as opposed to a consolidated democracy. Evidence from elite interviews, content analysis of military propaganda, and military actions to prevent constitutional change in Myanmar illustrate this theory.

Author

• Megan Ryan, University of Michigan