Will Malaysia Follow the Path of Taiwan and Mexico?
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.
Technocracy, Trust and Democracy: Evidence on Citizens’ Attitudes from a Natural Experiment in Italy
Abstract During the eurozone crisis, technocratic governments were appointed in several eurozone countries, becoming in the eyes of many the embodiment of the EU's democratic deficit. In spite of the central place that these technocratic governments occupy in the scholarly debate, however, we have remarkably little evidence on Europeans’ attitudes towards technocracy, and technocratic governments are under-studied from an empirical standpoint. We contribute to the very limited empirical literature on this topic by using a novel natural experiment design, in the context of the 2011 Italian crisis that led to the appointment of the Monti technocratic cabinet. We hypothesize that the effect of technocratic appointments on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy is a priori uncertain, and it depends on the balance of a trade-off between reduced input participation and increased output effectiveness. Overall, the results point to citizens’ attitudes towards technocracy being more complex than often assumed in the debate.
Democracy in Malaysia: Discourses and Practices
Nationalism, capitalism and Asian values Muslim politics and the discourse on democracy developmentalism in the 1990s - is a shift from the politics of ethnicism under way? deconstruction - the myths of farmers, wives and (m)others defining democratic discourses - the mainstream Malaysian press limits of democratic administration dilemmas of judicial independence changing character of elections and political parties, NGOs and political participation women and political leadership trade unions - labouring under democracy commercialization, concentration and control - the structure of the Malaysian media and its implications for democracy.