Varieties of Origins and Survival in Asian Autocracies: A Multi-Method Analysis

Abstract

The primary purpose of this panel is to examine various paths Asian autocracies had taken before and after the war with four distinctive methods. Considering its diversity, Asia as a whole has huge analytical potential in deepening our understanding of autocracies. For instance, it is a region where a variety of regime types (Monarchy, One-party, Military, Multi-party authoritarian, democracy) exist today and where we can examine legacies of diverse colonizers, including the UK, France, the Netherlands, the United States, Portugal, Spain, and Japan. Against this background, this panel aims to further our insights into causes, mechanisms, and effects of different autocratic types in Asia based on multiple methods. With a comparative historical analysis, the first paper traces potential motivations/causes behind the selection of particular regime type, e.g. one-party dominance, military dictatorship, or monarchy, in 13 Asian countries. Specifically, it focuses on three key critical junctures when the window of opportunity was presented to primary political actors. Considering the colonial legacies of most of Asian autocracies, the second paper focuses on the first constitution of each autocracy and demonstrates the influence of colonizers by applying quantitative text analysis. Using geographical proximity, time period, and colonial history as predictors, the paper explains the degree of text similarity between constitutions in Asian countries. Going beyond a paper including various regime types in one paper, the three other papers aim to have a deeper understanding of two prominent autocratic types—military dictatorship and communist regime—with original datasets. On the one hand, by employing cross-sectional quantitative regression, the third paper analyzes institutionalization and legitimization strategies of long-surviving military dictators in Asia. On the other hand, a Qualitative Comparative Analysis is applied in the fourth paper to tease out necessary and sufficient conditions of successful communist movements. In addition to the quantitative approach deployed in the first half of analysis, both papers conduct theory-driven case studies in the second half to illuminate causes and processes of success in military dictatorships and communist revolutions in Asia. Finally, arguing against the latest works which treat elections, protests, and fee media as channels to reveal public's dissatisfaction in autocratic regimes, the fifth paper applies text analysis to the Chinese internal media system and demonstrates that these channels have been no more than carefully managed tools autocrats utilized to promote regime resilience.