ABSTRACT
Having analysed the various forces that converged to bring about democracy in Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand, I will shift the focus in this chapter to the other side of the coin, namely the forces that have succeeded so far in blocking democratisation in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Using a similar approach, namely the comparative-historical, I will nevertheless organise this study on the theme of legitimacy. By projecting our concern through the conceptual lens of regime legitimacy, I will seek to compare the dynamic relationship between the social challenge of regime legitimacy and the state attempts to manage the challenge. In so doing, I will show that while all the three Southeast Asian societies have been subject to similar structural pressures for democracy, unleashed by capitalist development, failure to democratise can be largely accounted for by more or less successful political manoeuvres by the state that blunted the edge of the impulse for democracy.
