ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses democracy's fate across Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia. As democracy's fate demonstrates amply in Thailand and foreshadows in the Philippines, elites are sooner driven by a quest for narrow ascendancy than cautioned by the risks of breakdown. Democracy was restored in the Philippines in 1986. But having been shaken episodically since, it has been left diminished. Thailand's rapid, but uneven market expansion, driven in large measure by foreign-invested export manufacturing and locally controlled agribusiness, heightened class and spatial disparities. Thaksin's populist programmes and requisite taxation policies, his boundless acquisitiveness, and his harassing journalists in order to quell criticisms of his abuses began to grate on the new middle class, profoundly changing its evaluation of democracy's worth. The Philippines has found political equilibrium, then, in a sustained, but poorly functioning democracy, its weaknesses first made apparent through Estrada's extra-constitutional removal, but afterward made manifest in myriad ways.
